Microsoft wishes to create an open agentic web: these are the initial steps of its plan

Microsoft has inaugurated its developer conference, Microsoft Build 2025, focusing on artificial intelligence, specifically on AI agents. The company asserts that the future involves developing an open agency network in which AI agents can make decisions and execute tasks autonomously on behalf of users and organizations.

AI agents are systems with the ability to perceive and understand their environment so they can process information, make decisions, and act autonomously to complete tasks previously assigned by the user. Microsoft’s objective is to have these agents operate in individual, organizational, team, and business contexts, all within an open network that allows these systems to interact with different websites and applications to perform their tasks.

This is how Microsoft is building the foundations to achieve an open agency network

“At Microsoft Build, we are demonstrating the steps we are taking to realize this vision through our platforms, products, and infrastructures. We are offering new models and programming agents to the developers; introducing enterprise agents; transforming our platforms such as Azure AI Foundry, GitHub, and Windows into the best places to create; adopting open protocols; and accelerating scientific discoveries with AI. All of this is for developers and organizations to focus on materializing the next big revolution,” is explained in a statement released by the company.

With the goal of moving towards this future ideal, Microsoft is advocating for shared infrastructures and open protocols.

Among these measures, it is significant that Microsoft provides extensive compatibility with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) protocol, a standard that facilitates secure interaction between AI agents and applications, on platforms such as GitHub, Copilot Studio, Dynamics 365, Azure AI Foundry, Semantic Kernel, and Windows 11.

Additionally, Microsoft and GitHub have joined the MCP Steering Committee to help promote widespread adoption of the open protocol. In addition to this, they have announced two new contributions to the MCP ecosystem: “an updated authorization specification, which allows individuals to use their existing trusted sign-in methods to give agents and LLM-powered applications access to data and services like personal storage drives or subscription services; and the design of an MCP server registry service, which allows anyone to deploy public or private, updated, and centralized repositories for MCP server entries.”

On another note, Microsoft has introduced NLWeb, an open project that would function as the HTML of the agency network. NLWeb allows websites to offer conversational interfaces linked to AI models of their choice and to their own data, facilitating semantic and direct interaction with the content. “Every NLWeb endpoint is also an MCP server, so websites can make their content easily discoverable and accessible to AI agents if they wish.”

Other news from Microsoft in the field of AI

In addition, the tech giant also presented numerous innovations during the first day of the Microsoft Build 2025 event. Here are some of the most notable:

• New GitHub Copilot programming agent and updates in GitHub Models
• Introduction of Windows AI Foundry
• Models of Azure AI Foundry and new tools for model evaluation
• Introduction of Microsoft 365 Copilot Tuning and multi-agent orchestration
• Microsoft Entra Agent ID in preview version
• Introduction of Microsoft 365 Copilot Tuning and multi-agent orchestration
• Launch of Microsoft Discovery
• Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini available through the Azure AI Foundry platform

Photo: Microsoft