The Microsoft Build keynote just wrapped up, and as usual the keynote was a two-hour parade of announcements. Some of it was developer infrastructure that won’t touch your day-to-day. But a good chunk of it is directly relevant if you’re using Copilot or building agents in the Microsoft ecosystem.
So let me break down the stuff that matters – and what I actually think about it.
Web IQ: Finally, Web Grounding That Doesn’t Stink
If you’ve ever used web grounding in a Copilot agent and gotten back garbage results, congratulations – you’ve experienced the Bing keyword search problem.
Here’s what was happening: when your agent needed to search the web, it would generate a set of keywords and throw them at the Bing search API. That’s how Bing has always worked. Keyword-based. Traditional. And honestly, not a great fit for how AI agents actually think and ask questions. Get the keywords slightly wrong, and the search results come back completely off-base.
Web IQ is Microsoft’s answer to that problem – and it’s a much bigger deal than just swapping out the search API.
This is a ground-up re-architecture of how search works for AI systems. It’s not just semantic search bolted on top of Bing. It’s a full AI-native grounding layer that includes an intelligence layer doing its own reasoning about how to search – what kind of queries to run, how deep to go, when to stop. It’s pulling in web pages, news, images, and videos. And it’s built for the kind of repeated, multi-step retrieval that agentic workflows actually require.
The numbers Microsoft published are notable: sub-165ms p95 latency, nearly 2.5x faster than alternatives in their testing, and better grounding satisfaction scores (they call it GDSAT – basically whether the search result actually answered what you needed, not just whether it was technically relevant).
Right now Web IQ is in private preview. There’s a sign-up link at aka.ms/WebIQ if you want to get in early.
My take: I’d expect the regular web grounding toggle in agent builders to eventually just become Web IQ under the hood. The old Bing search API approach will probably stick around for a while and then quietly disappear. If you’re building agents that rely on web grounding today, keep an eye on this one.
🔒 Sponsored by Afi — Smarter Cloud Backup & Recovery
Cloud platforms like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Azure, AWS, and Kubernetes are powerful — but they don’t always protect your data the way you think. Accidental deletions, ransomware, and compliance gaps can still cause serious disruptions.
That’s why I’ve partnered with Afi, a modern backup and recovery solution built for today’s multi-cloud environments. Afi offers full-fidelity restores, encrypted full-text search, version history, and even self-service recovery — so users can get their data back without waiting on IT.
Its AI-powered ransomware detection automatically triggers backups before damage is done, giving you peace of mind and keeping your business running smoothly.
Over 10,000 organizations trust Afi to protect their cloud data.
Learn more at afi.ai.
Microsoft IQ: One Tool to Rule Them All
This one is simpler to explain, though “wrapper around wrappers” is basically what it is.
Right now, if you’re building an agent that needs to access organizational data, you’re picking and choosing between Work IQ (for emails, meetings, chats), Fabric IQ (for data and analytics), and Foundry IQ (for Azure AI search). You add whichever IQ layers your agent needs and wire them together.
Microsoft IQ is a single unified tool that wraps all of those. One connection, and your agent gets access to the full range of organizational data sources.
Practically speaking, this should clean up a lot of the complexity in agent configuration. Instead of reasoning about which IQ layer covers which data source, you just add Microsoft IQ and let it figure out the routing. At least, that’s the idea – we’ll see how it plays out in practice.
Not a lot of detail released on this one yet, but the direction makes sense.
The New Copilot UI: It’s Here, and Here’s Why It’s Actually Good
If you’ve opened Copilot in the last week or two, you’ve probably already seen this. The interface got a significant redesign and Microsoft has now officially announced it.
The headline feature for most people is going to be the prompt box. It now expands upward as you type, so you can actually see your entire prompt before you send it. Sounds small, but if you’ve ever been trying to write a multi-paragraph prompt in a tiny single-line text field, you know how big a deal this is.
Beyond that, Microsoft says the app loads more than twice as fast (50%+ reduction in load time in their testing), and response times for complex prompts have improved by about 10%. They’re also reporting a 27% increase in Copilot usage in Word, 33% in Excel, 43% in PowerPoint, and 30% in Outlook since rolling out the new in-app experience. Whether that’s the UI or just better AI – probably both.
The bigger signal here is what Microsoft said about this being a “unifying application” for all Copilot experiences. That’s not throwaway marketing language. They’re building toward a single front-door for everything Copilot – chat, agents, automation – and this redesign is the foundation for that. Which brings us to the most interesting announcement of the whole keynote.
Autopilots and Microsoft Scout: The Always-On Agent Is Here
This is the one I’ve been waiting for, and Microsoft Build 2026 is where it landed.
Autopilots are a new category of agent – always-on, autonomous, operating with their own identity, taking action on your behalf without needing to be prompted every time. They stay running in the background, watch for events, and react to them. Think of it less like a chatbot and more like a digital coworker that never clocks out.
And Microsoft already built their first one. It’s called Microsoft Scout.
Scout is built on OpenClaw – Microsoft’s enterprise implementation of the open-source agent framework. If you’ve heard stories about OpenClaw going rogue and deleting files, take a breath. Microsoft has wrapped this thing in serious enterprise guardrails. We’re talking Entra identity for every agent action (so everything is attributable), Intune policy requirements before you can even turn it on, Microsoft Purview data protection enforcement, and scoped credentials that get redacted from logs. This is not “download and run.” There’s a real admin setup process before any of this touches your environment.
What does Scout actually do? Right now it’s focused on coordination work – scheduling meetings across time zones, flagging what needs your attention, blocking time on your calendar for upcoming deliverables, spotting stalled decisions before they become blockers. Over time it’s supposed to get smarter about your patterns through Work IQ, learning how you work and what actually matters to you.
Scout also comes with the Microsoft Execution Container – essentially a micro-VM environment where the agent’s processes run in isolation, monitored by security tooling, so it can’t interfere with other systems or do something destructive on your machines.
Availability right now: Private preview, requires Frontier enrollment, Intune policy configuration, and an opt-in attestation. Users with a GitHub Copilot license can then download and install it. Full setup instructions are at learn.microsoft.com/microsoft-scout.
My honest take: Scout is a real preview of where this is all going. The Autopilot framework is what makes it interesting to builders – Microsoft has essentially announced that you’ll be able to create your own autopilot agents with their own name, personality, skills, connectors, and MCP servers. The interface will probably look a lot like agent builder. Getting them to run well will be the hard part, same as it always is with agents. Good instructions matter. Clear scope matters. But this is a big deal.
Agent 365 SDK: Now Generally Available
Shorter one to end on. The Agent 365 SDK has hit general availability.
The main use case here is bringing agents from other platforms – Google Cloud, Amazon Bedrock, wherever your organization is building – into the Microsoft 365 environment so they can be monitored and governed through Agent 365. If you’ve got agents living outside the Microsoft stack that you still need visibility into, this is how you do it.
Not the flashiest announcement from Build, but GA means it’s production-ready. If you’ve been waiting to start building on it, now’s a reasonable time to dig in.
A Lot More Is Coming
The keynote is never the whole picture. There’s typically a long tail of announcements that come out through the rest of the week – blog posts, deep dives, session recordings. I’ll have a full roundup in the Insights Newsletter once the dust settles. Subscribe here if you want that delivered to your inbox.
And if you want to skip the “build it from scratch” phase and work with Copilot agents that are already production-ready – tested, refined, and ready to deploy in your environment – that’s exactly what I’ve put together in The Agent Collection. It’s a curated set of agents I’ve built and maintain, covering the scenarios I see organizations actually need. If something from Build caught your attention and you want to see what a polished version looks like in practice, start there.
