Surprising no one, Microsoft Build is all about Copilot and AI

After unveiling new Surface products and Copilot + PC devices powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips on Monday, Microsoft kicked off its Build conference in Seattle on Tuesday.

Build 2024 is all about AI with a focus squarely on developers, but the feel is a little more exciting than a typical AI event, given Monday’s announcements. The new Surfaces and Copilot + PCs are capable of running AI models locally thanks to Qualcomm’s Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU), putting the AI announcements at Build in a new light.

Highlights include Microsoft Fabric, which helps developers leverage data moving within or between computer systems, to build intelligent apps through capabilities like Real-Time Intelligence. Microsoft pointed to racing team Dener Motorsport as an example — Dener uses Fabric to power real-time analytics to help performance in and maintain their vehicles.

There’s also a push to incorporate multimodal capabilities and new frontier models in Azure AI, including OpenAI’s new GPT-4o for text, image and audio processing.

Copilot

Microsoft announced several improvements coming to Copilot as well, building on what the company revealed on Monday. There’s a new ‘Team Copilot’ that can act as a personal AI assistant on collaborative platforms like Teams, Loop, Planner and more. Team Copilot can facilitate meetings, manage agendas, track time and take notes. It can also help surface information in chats, track action items and more.

Team Copilot sounds similar to Google’s AI Teammate announced at I/O, though notably it was just a demo.

There’s also Copilot Studio to help developers build copilots tailored to specific needs and Copilot extensions enabling plugins and connections to expand Copilot functionality.

We also learned more about Windows Copilot Runtime, which Microsoft describes as a “reimagining [of] the entire system, from top to bottom.” Microsoft says it represents the end-to-end Windows ecosystem including apps, AI frameworks, silicon and more. It also has the Copilot Library, a set of APIs powered by over 40 on-device models that ship with Windows.

Copilot Runtime powers new experiences like the Recall and Cocreator features Microsoft announced yesterday. But it’s also open to developers to build new experiences on Windows, so it’ll be interesting to see what developers do with this new tech.

Microsoft announced a preview of WebNN as well, which will enable web apps to utilize the NPU to power fast, local AI experiences.

Additionally, Microsoft announced a partnership with Meta on ‘Volumetric Apps’ to bring Windows apps to Quest and 3D space.