Microsoft teases new era of AI-driven devices at annual developer conference
Microsoft Unveils AI Initiatives and Devices at Build Conference
By Stephen Nellis and Jeffrey Dastin
SAN FRANCISCO, June 2 (Reuters) - Microsoft on Tuesday announced a sweeping slate of AI initiatives, from autonomous workplace assistants and gadgets to Nvidia-powered PCs and a new in-house reasoning model, in a push to move beyond apps and remake computing around AI.
At its annual software developer conference, Microsoft Build in San Francisco, executives showcased a broader shift in company strategy, as it pushes to replace the traditional model of navigating software with one in which AI agents carry out complex tasks autonomously. By pairing those agents with new devices, powerful PCs and its own models, Microsoft is trying to control more of the end-to-end AI system — called a stack — and lock in enterprise customers, as competition from rivals OpenAI and Anthropic intensifies.
New AI-Powered Devices and Prototypes
Microsoft showed off a new computer called the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box loaded with an Nvidia chip. CEO Satya Nadella said the computer was a "dream machine" and he was on the wait list to buy it.
Executives also revealed Project Solara, a family of prototypes that includes devices the size of a smart speaker or keycard badge, based on chips from Qualcomm and MediaTek.
AI Agents and Cloud Integration
These devices have screens and microphones, but instead of running a traditional operating system and apps like a smartphone, they will host AI agents that talk to cloud-computing systems to carry out specific tasks, such as documenting a medical visit with a nurse.
"Whenever these new platforms come, you get to rewrite even the rules of how new platforms operate," Nadella said during a keynote address. "That's what we're trying to get done with Project Solara, so that you, as developers and enterprises, have the flexibility to imagine the form factors that you want and have your agents be ubiquitous."
Competition and Strategy in the AI Space
Microsoft is competing against rivals to sell cloud-based AI tools for coding and other tasks, while also trying to nudge customers toward running AI technologies on the laptop and desktop computers running its Windows operating systems.
NVIDIA-Powered 'Dream Machine'
Surface RTX Spark Dev Box and AI Performance
Nvidia has said computers fitted with its new RTX Spark PC chip will bring AI directly to PCs. The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box follows a laptop that Microsoft introduced with Nvidia this week, and Microsoft executives showed it running an AI model with 120 billion parameters — a rough measure of a model's complexity — that most PCs would not be able to load.
Market Position and Adoption Challenges
The new wave of PCs is priced to compete with Apple's premium offerings, but analysts said it may take time for businesses to adopt the new machines.
OpenClaw Integration and Security
Microsoft also said it was developing tools to help Windows run OpenClaw, open-source software that can direct groups of AI agents to carry out everyday tasks for users.
The goal is to make OpenClaw — which has gained popularity in China and helped rival Apple sell Mac computers — safe for businesses to use on computers with sensitive corporate data. On stage during a demo, executives showed how a corporate IT department could prevent users from inadvertently deleting all the files on their desktops.
"You can totally run OpenClaw inside your company now," Peter Steinberger, the software engineer who created OpenClaw, said on stage.
New Agents and AI Models
Scout Agent and Copilot Enhancements
Microsoft said it would introduce a new AI agent called Scout within its Copilot software that can carry out tasks such as gathering emails or messages that require decisions by the user to move forward.
Advancements in Superintelligence and Reasoning Models
Microsoft also provided an update from its AI unit focused on "superintelligence." Aiming to catch up to Anthropic and OpenAI, the unit released what it called the most efficient transcription AI model of any cloud hyperscaler and an image model to vie with Google's.
MAI Thinking-1, its first reasoning model, matched the performance of Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6, launched this year, Microsoft said. Anthropic last week announced Opus 4.8.
The models underscore Microsoft's efforts to build frontier AI independent of the lab it has long backed, OpenAI.
Healthcare AI and Mayo Clinic Partnership
One effort distinguishing Microsoft AI's work is its focus on medical diagnostics, announced late last year. It has now reached a deal with the Mayo Clinic to build frontier healthcare AI, drawing on Microsoft's reasoning and compute capabilities and Mayo Clinic's clinical expertise and data.
Improving Patient Outcomes with AI
In a joint interview, Suleyman and Mayo Clinic CEO Gianrico Farrugia said the partnership emerged from meetings between Farrugia and Nadella. The goal is to improve patient outcomes with AI that acts as a team member and gets "to a diagnosis faster and better," Farrugia said.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis and Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman, Rod Nickel, Matthew Lewis and Cynthia Osterman)
