When Microsoft first introduced Copilot, it was as a helpful companion -- an AI assistant that could summarize meetings, draft emails and clean up documents. Critics derided it as a glorified version of Clippy, the primitive assistant Microsoft introduced in the 1990s.
And in fairness, there wasn't a whole lot of difference between the two at first. Both functioned as an assistant waiting for prompts and responding with output. Copilot's response was just a bit more polished.
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Posted by Andy Patrizio on 06/03/20260 comments
Microsoft Copilot Studio has very quickly evolved from a low-code conversational agent builder into a full agent platform for enterprise automation. The most recent changes to the AI chatbot are structural rather than cosmetic, as the bot now emphasizes LLM-driven orchestration, reusable tools and autonomous and event-driven execution.
In practice, that means developers are moving away from large topic trees and explicit dialog routing toward agents that can plan, select tools, retrieve knowledge and execute multistep tasks with tighter policy controls and better observability.
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Posted by Andy Patrizio on 05/28/20260 comments
Microsoft may be tapping the brakes on its AI efforts surrounding windows, but it's full speed ahead for an AI-driven Microsoft 365 product. May 1 will see the release of a new version of the office productivity suite with AI from stem to stern and a new license plan.
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Posted by Andy Patrizio on 04/22/20260 comments
Some time back, I noted that the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI was starting to fray, which could lead to Microsoft embracing other large language models for its AI offerings.
Well, you hardly needed to be Nostradamus to see this coming. Microsoft has indeed ended its exclusive offering of ChatGPT and added new services. At the end of March, Microsoft introduced new features in Copilot to allow users to utilize multiple AI models simultaneously within the same workflow.
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Posted by Andy Patrizio on 04/08/20260 comments
- Microsoft is pausing parts of its "AI everywhere" strategy to address long-standing Windows 11 performance and reliability problems.
- User backlash over bloated UI elements, broken updates, and hardware requirements like TPM 2.0 has pressured the company to rethink its roadmap.
- Controversial AI features such as Recall are being reworked into opt-in tools amid privacy and security concerns.
User complaints about the sorry state of Windows 11 have finally gotten through to the company because it is pausing future projects, including many AI initiatives, while it attempts to get its arms around the mess that the operating system has become.
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Posted by Andy Patrizio on 02/26/20260 comments
Microsoft has introduced a broad set of agentic AI solutions aimed at bringing intelligent automation to every corner of the retail enterprise, from merchandising and marketing to store operations and fulfillment.
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Posted by Andy Patrizio on 02/18/20260 comments
A recent report from The Information documenting how Microsoft's internal AI efforts are doing, and it's not a pretty picture. According to the article (paywalled), Microsoft salespeople are cutting forecasts and reducing sales goals for its Azure AI products across the board.
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Posted by Andy Patrizio on 01/09/20260 comments
Microsoft has published the first and what appears to be a series of videos called "Windows 2030 Vision," where the company lays out its vision for the future of Windows over the next four years, and if these hints are any indication, Windows is going to undergo a radical change.
The first episode features David Weston, Microsoft's corporate vice president of enterprise & security, so his monologue is heavily tilted towards security options in Windows.
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Posted by Andy Patrizio on 01/05/20260 comments
We may now know why Microsoft tapped the brakes on datacenter construction earlier this year. It's not that it can't get equipment, it can't get power.
Speaking on the All Things AI podcast, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made a stunning admission: he has the GPU hardware in his hands, he just can't get any power to run them.
"Quite frankly, the biggest issue we are now having is not a compute glut, but it's power and it's sort of the ability to get the builds done fast enough close to power," he told the show's hosts. "So if you can't do that, you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can't plug in. In fact, that is my problem today. It's not a supply issue of chips. It's actually the fact that I don't have warm shells to plug into."
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Posted by Andy Patrizio on 12/02/20250 comments
News broke early October that Microsoft was experiencing shortages of datacenter capacity to meet ever-increasing demand. The story, broken by Bloomberg (paywalled), went into the how and why, and I'm going to elaborate on the events surrounding it.
The news is that Microsoft is experiencing a datacenter crunch in capacity nationwide. It is experiencing shortages of both physical space and servers in setting up facilities or expanding existing ones. New subscriptions for Azure cloud services are restricted in some key geographic locations, including Northern Virginia and Texas, through the first half of next year.
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Posted by Andy Patrizio on 11/03/20250 comments
Microsoft is planning to reinvent Outlook from the ground up with, you guessed it, AI. Work on the redesign has not yet begun, but Microsoft is determined to reinvent its email client to compete in the "AI era," while supporting the reliability that enterprise users expect of it.
According to an internal memo obtained by The Verge and written by Gaurav Sareen, Microsoft's new corporate vice president of global experiences and platform, Sareen is planning on a fundamental redesign to Outlook rather than an incremental update.
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Posted by Andy Patrizio on 10/28/20250 comments
Microsoft and OpenAI had an exclusive relationship for OpenAI to provide Chat GPT services through Microsoft Bing and Office 365. However, the relationship soured almost immediately. ChatGPT 5 launched a few months ago and was buggy and unreliable. Plus, OpenAI temporarily disabled access to ChatGPT 4, which worked. This broke applications that were using ChatGPT calls.
At the same time, OpenAI was going behind Microsoft's back to make direct deals with enterprise customers rather than let Microsoft do the selling. This is especially true as pertains to OpenAI cozying up to Oracle, a major competitor of Microsoft's. The most recent example was a $300 billion deal to provide generative AI services to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This helped boost the perception of OCI from also-ran to genuine competitor to Microsoft Azure.
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Posted by Andy Patrizio on 09/26/20250 comments
Microsoft has unveiled Project Ire, a cutting-edge artificial intelligence system designed to autonomously detect and analyze malware. This prototype, announced in early August 2025, aims to redefine how software threats are identified and mitigated in real time.
The whole project is documented in a lengthy blog post by the Microsoft engineering team behind the project. "Our goal is to scale the system’s speed and accuracy so that it can correctly classify files from any source, even on first encounter. Ultimately, our vision is to detect novel malware directly in memory, at scale," the team wrote.
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Posted by Andy Patrizio on 08/15/20250 comments
By now you have undoubtedly seen reports of friction between the Microsoft and OpenAI camps. What had been a very lucrative and beneficial partnership seems to be slowly imploding, and while both sides are being diplomatically quiet, the signs of trouble are there. So how does it all end? Let's review.
The alliance between Microsoft and OpenAI, creator of the ChatGPT service, dates back to 2019 when Microsoft invested $1B in OpenAI to provide exclusive supercomputing functions to the Azure service. The alliance was furthered in January 2023 with a $10 billion investment on Microsoft's part into OpenAI.
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Posted by Andy Patrizio on 07/11/20250 comments
For as long as there have been Web sites, there have been search boxes to dig through the contents. Those search boxes tend to be hit or miss when it comes to accuracy, and they only have two methods of sorting: by date and by relevance.
Microsoft is aiming to make the search process more natural with the introduction of NLWeb, or natural language Web. NLWeb enables Web sites to easily add a conversational interface to the site, essentially turning a Web site into an AI app where users can search for content using natural language rather than keywords.
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Posted by Andy Patrizio on 06/23/20250 comments
Microsoft tapped the brakes and people hit the panic button. There's no reason to.
When news broke in April then Microsoft was planning on "slowing or pausing" some of its datacenter construction, including a $1 billion project in Ohio and a $3.3 billion project in Wisconsin, people try to read all sorts of doom and gloom into the news.
Like so many news items, the devil is in the details and it is nuanced. The one thing it is not is a sign that the demand for artificial intelligence technology is slowing.
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Posted by Andy Patrizio on 05/30/20250 comments
The next wave of AI is upon us in the form of agentive AI. Whereas the first wave, generative AI, was about creating content, agentive AI is about automation of repetitive tasks to free up people to do other things.
AI agents are comprehensive software applications that can receive input, perceive their environment, reason in response to actions and data, and act autonomously to achieve those goals. They leverage artificial intelligence techniques, including machine learning, natural language processing and reasoning algorithms, to perform a wide range of tasks with minimal human intervention.
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Posted by Andy Patrizio on 05/08/20250 comments
AI gained mass mindset through the advent of ChatGPT and generative AI, but that is only one form of AI available. Agentive AI is another potent form of AI that people are just now beginning to understand.
Agentive AI, or AI agents, provides a new way for systems to autonomously carry out tasks, make decisions and interact with their environments. It's unlike traditional AI, which often requires human input or intervention. Instead, Agentive AI operates independently and autonomously to handle complex operations, offering businesses and users the ability to automate processes and solve problems without human input or oversight.
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Posted by Andy Patrizio on 04/08/20250 comments
Welcome to Generation AI, a new blog post focusing on Microsoft's generative AI efforts and what they mean for enterprise IT. Helming this effort is seasoned tech reporter Andy Patrizo, who brings his years of expertise and insight to the expanding world of AI.
Thanks for joining us for the inaugural Generation AI blog post. I'll be digging deep into the world of generative AI, with a focus on Microsoft's efforts, to distill what you need to do when integrating these tools and services in your enterprises. For the first post, I thought it would be beneficial to start with a primer – a "cheat sheet," if you will – on the many different components of Microsoft's latest entry: Copilot Chat.
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Posted by Andy Patrizio on 03/19/20250 comments