Thousands gathered at London’s Excel to hear Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella deliver a keynote presentation for the company’s AI Tour.
Those who made it to the start, given the length of the queue to go through security and get a visitor’s badge, heard from Nadella on the artificial intelligence (AI) opportunity that is available in Microsoft productivity tools and its technology stack. In particular, he spoke about the opportunity to harness information in Microsoft 365 to build powerful knowledge apps and applications that work alongside humans in agentic AI workflows.
Nadella discussed the power of an AI agent that acts as a data scientist, using Agent Mode in Excel and PowerPoint to find insights. Referring to how the adoption of Excel macros in the early 1990s lowered the entry point for software development, he said: “Excel is a great example of what happened with software development. Now, people who are using Excel can generate code using a single prompt.” This prompt is able to work with sophisticated models in Excel, creating an AI-generated artefact. In effect, a user can chat with Excel to generate new functionality.
He believes these artefacts require “precision augmentation”, where people have the ability to understand them. Rather than purely looking at AI’s ability to create, he stressed the importance of ensuring that anyone who receives the AI-generated artefact understands how it works, which makes it more explainable and allows people to see where they fit in a particular workflow.
Nadella positioned the data held in Microsoft 365 as a key foundation of agentic AI, providing a representation of “your people”, from their relationships to other people inside the organisation, to their work artefacts, projects, files, calendars and communications.
“This is massive information, and to have what is essentially a stateful system with AI reasoning that can then translate all of that information into what we describe as Work IQ can bootstrap any agent you build.”
Nadella also discussed Microsoft Fabric, which is used to ingest data in Excel spreadsheets, Power BI dashboards and the rest of Microsoft 365, and then expose this information to enterprise AI agents.
He then spoke about Microsoft Foundry, the company’s cloud-native platform for building agentic AI systems. “Once you have data, the next thing is a classic middle-tier application platform. Microsoft Foundry comes with frameworks for you to build agents or multi-agent systems, guardrails for AI safety and all of the run-time services that are required to build full production-ready AI systems,” he said. Microsoft Foundry also supports 11,000 AI models, according to Nadella.
One area in which AI agents are seeing momentum is code generation. According to Nadella, by having access to numerous models and enterprise data, developers are able to start building AI agents and creating agentic AI workflows. He urged developers to look at how to boost productivity in enterprise tools, such as Microsoft 365. “Where we want to start is in our own everyday use of information for knowledge worker tools,” he said.
Beyond simple agentic AI apps developed in Agent Builder, which are analogous to software development in Excel, he said IT teams are building powerful applications grounded in knowledge using AI models.