Microsoft is laying the groundwork for a future where AI “agents” from different companies can work seamlessly together—and remember past interactions more effectively.
Ahead of its annual Build developer conference in Seattle on May 19, Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott shared the company’s vision during a briefing at its Redmond, Washington headquarters. The focus: encouraging the tech industry to adopt shared standards that allow AI systems—known as agents—to cooperate across platforms.
These agents are AI tools designed to carry out specific tasks autonomously, such as fixing software bugs or generating code. Microsoft believes their potential will expand significantly if different systems can communicate and collaborate more easily.
One key step in that direction is support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source standard initially introduced by Anthropic, a company backed by Google. Scott described MCP as a promising foundation for what he calls the “agentic web”—a network of intelligent agents that could grow in much the same way the World Wide Web did with the rise of hypertext protocols in the 1990s.
“It means your imagination can shape what the agentic web becomes—not just a few companies that happened to get there first,” Scott said.
Another major challenge Microsoft is tackling: memory. Right now, most AI agents operate in short-term, transactional ways, often forgetting previous user interactions. To change that, Microsoft is exploring structured retrieval augmentation—a method where the AI saves compact summaries of each part of a conversation, creating a kind of mental map of the dialogue.
Scott compared it to how human memory works: “You don’t brute-force recall everything in your brain every time you solve a problem. You use structure.”
However, building AI with better memory comes at a high cost—it demands far more computing power. Even so, Microsoft sees this investment as crucial for creating agents that can deliver more intelligent, context-aware assistance over time.
As the Build conference approaches, developers and analysts are watching closely to see how Microsoft will continue to shape the future of AI development.
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