Microsoft yesterday rolled into the UK’s portion of its world AI Tour, bringing CEO Satya Nadella and a full day of workshops and reside demos to London.
At first look, issues regarded promising: 1000’s of individuals packed the venue, creating queues that stretched for a whole lot of meters earlier than the doorways even opened. It was a transparent signal that the urge for food for AI amongst enterprise leaders stays intense.
And why wouldn’t it? Simply days earlier than the London cease, Microsoft AI head Mustafa Suleyman made headlines by predicting that AI shall be able to automating a broad vary of white-collar jobs inside 12 to 18 months. With speak like that, many have been wanting to see what’s coming subsequent.
Central to that future, the convention instructed, is AI brokers.
“While you work with brokers, it’s us working with an infinite set of minds,”
Nadella informed the viewers throughout his keynote, capturing each the ambition and scale of what the corporate is constructing.
It was no shock, then, that AI brokers dominated the day’s agenda. Microsoft used the occasion to show that it has infrastructure at each layer of the stack. The keynote featured two intervals devoted solely to reside demos, underscoring how decided the corporate is to maneuver the dialog from idea to tangible functionality.
Nadella’s Imaginative and prescient: Microsoft 365 because the Ecosystem For Agentic AI
A recurring theme in Nadella’s keynote was the untapped worth sitting inside Microsoft 365. He argued that this knowledge, spanning emails, recordsdata, calendars, relationships, and communications, represents a deep organizational data base that may energy the subsequent era of AI purposes. The imaginative and prescient is one the place AI brokers don’t simply reply to prompts however draw on an actual understanding of how a enterprise really operates.
As an instance how accessible that future could possibly be, Nadella pointed to Agent Mode in Excel, a brand new functionality that lets customers work together with their knowledge via pure language as an alternative of complicated formulation or technical instructions.
He drew a deliberate parallel to the adoption of Excel macros within the early Nineties, which lowered the bar for software program growth and put actual analytical energy within the palms of non-developers.
“Excel is a good instance of what occurred with software program growth,”
he mentioned. “Now, individuals who use Excel can generate code with a single immediate.”
To deliver this infrastructure imaginative and prescient to life, Nadella highlighted the broader Microsoft suite of instruments. Working with Microsoft Cloth, a course of will be designed to ingest and set up knowledge from throughout the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and make it obtainable for enterprise AI brokers to make use of of their duties.
Above Cloth sits Microsoft Foundry, the corporate’s cloud-native platform for constructing and deploying agentic AI methods. Foundry gives the event frameworks, security guardrails, and runtime companies wanted to take an agent from prototype to full manufacturing, and it at the moment helps greater than 11,000 AI fashions. Collectively, Cloth and Foundry type the infrastructure spine of Microsoft’s agent technique.
Sturdy Indicators, however Adoption Nonetheless Has Room to Develop
The vitality at ExCeL was plain. Conversations UC Right now had on the bottom confirmed what the keynote made plain: AI brokers at the moment are Microsoft’s central product focus.
The corporate is betting that brokers would be the mechanism via which AI shifts from being attention-grabbing to being indispensable. It’s marshalling its total product portfolio, from Cloth to Foundry to Microsoft 365, to make that case.
However the packed halls additionally raised a good query: Was this a case of preaching to the transformed? Attendees at an occasion like this are already engaged with Microsoft’s ecosystem and inquisitive about its route. The harder problem lies in getting the broader enterprise market to maneuver from curiosity to dedicated deployment, and that’s one Microsoft remains to be working to crack.
Studies since early 2026 recommend that Copilot uptake throughout the broader industrial base has been slower than the corporate’s public optimism implies. Microsoft’s Q2 FY2026 earnings reported 15 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats, a 160% year-over-year improve and a determine the corporate rightly celebrated. But in opposition to a industrial base of round 450 million Microsoft 365 seats globally, that represents roughly 3.3% penetration.
That could be precisely why the AI Tour exists. The mixture of a high-profile, multi-city roadshow, reside demonstrations of real-world use instances, and daring predictions from Suleyman in regards to the near-term capabilities of AI brokers is a part of a coordinated effort to shift that dial. Seeing brokers in motion, somewhat than studying about them in a product announcement, can transfer the needle in methods advertising alone can not.
The Agent Period Is Microsoft’s Greatest Wager
Step again from the product bulletins and demos, and a transparent strategic image emerges from the London cease. Microsoft is not positioning AI as an add-on to its productiveness suite; it’s recasting your complete Microsoft 365 stack because the foundational intelligence layer for a brand new era of AI brokers.
Nadella’s framing of brokers as “an infinite set of minds” is greater than a sound chew. It alerts that Microsoft sees the agent paradigm as a step-change in productiveness, corresponding to how the PC or spreadsheet remodeled working life in earlier many years.
The infrastructure it has assembled (Cloth for knowledge, Foundry for constructing, and Microsoft 365 because the data layer) offers the corporate a reputable end-to-end story. For enterprise patrons already invested within the Microsoft ecosystem, the on-ramp to agentic AI is designed to really feel pure somewhat than disruptive.
Wanting forward, the actual take a look at for Microsoft is whether or not occasions just like the AI Tour (and provocative predictions from Suleyman in regards to the tempo of change) can speed up the journey from that 3.3% Copilot penetration determine to one thing resembling mainstream adoption. The imaginative and prescient is compelling, the infrastructure is in place, and the momentum is actual. The query for 2026 is whether or not Microsoft can translate an engaged convention viewers into a very remodeled enterprise market.
