Key Highlights from Microsoft Build 2025: Azure Innovations Unveiled

We’ve curated the top 25 groundbreaking announcements made during Microsoft Build 2025, focusing on advancements within Azure—covering Azure AI Foundry, Azure infrastructure, Azure app platforms, Azure databases, Microsoft Fabric, and our GitHub ecosystem.

This year’s Microsoft Build felt distinct as we gathered to navigate the next evolution: how developers will foster an agentic web. The palpable sense of rapid technological advancement highlighted the importance of community and idea exchange. In moments of swift change, it is open collaboration that fuels innovation.

A prime exemplar of this collaboration is OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which shines as a symbol of Microsoft’s innovative spirit. Boasting over 500 million active users weekly, ChatGPT is one of the swiftest-growing applications in history, powered entirely by Azure products and services. This partnership exemplifies the potential that lies in harnessing the complete capabilities of the Azure platform. As Jay Parikh, EVP of CoreAI, remarked in his keynote, “as builders, our most precious resource is time.” Time is essential for our clients and their operational needs. Together, we aim to leverage AI to transform business processes and drive groundbreaking innovation, enabling all Azure users to accomplish even more.

Comprehensive Capabilities for Building Multi-Agent Systems

If you missed any of the sessions, you can catch up on those you loved by rewatching them.

Stay Informed with Our Summary of the Top Announcements

In the following sections, we present a summary of the top 25 announcements in Azure’s ecosystem, ensuring you stay updated—encompassing Azure AI Foundry, Azure infrastructure, Azure application services, Azure databases, Microsoft Fabric, and our GitHub family. It’s remarkable to witness how AI is broadening the horizons of Azure, and to contemplate the potential of the cloud ahead.

Essential Announcements to Note:

• The GitHub Copilot has evolved from a mere assistant to a full-fledged team member, capable of performing tasks such as code reviews, writing tests, fixing bugs, and executing comprehensive specifications.
• An Azure Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Agent ensures developers are relieved from the burden of constant monitoring, dealing with incidents in real-time and troubleshooting autonomously.
• New additions to Azure AI Foundry Models feature Grok 3 from xAI, Flux Pro 1.1 by Black Forest Labs, and Sora on Azure OpenAI, enriched by contributions from Hugging Face.
• Microsoft Discovery was introduced, presenting an innovative enterprise social platform designed to accelerate research and development for scientists by employing specialised agents and graph-based knowledge.
• An AI-enhanced data centre became the first to deploy the interconnected NVIDIA Grace Blackwell system, marking a watershed moment in AI training and processing.
• Azure Cosmos DB (NoSQL) has been integrated into Microsoft Fabric, alongside Azure AI Foundry, facilitating the efficient handling of unstructured and semi-structured data, which is vital for AI applications.
• Public preview of SQL Server 2025, aimed securely at AI applications, has transformed into a vector database.
• A model router within Azure AI Foundry enables developers to efficiently select optimal Azure OpenAI models for various prompts, enhancing quality while minimising costs.
• The Azure AI Foundry Agent Service has become widely available, assisting companies such as JM Family, Fujitsu, and YoungWilliams in automating complex business processes.
• The Multi-Agent Orchestration feature debuted in Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, offering interconnected agents and workflows that support the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and beyond.
• The Digital Twin Builder is now available in preview within Microsoft Fabric, empowering enterprises to create, manage, and visualise digital representations of physical and logical entities effortlessly, with little to no coding.
• GitHub Copilot assists in modernising applications with capabilities to refresh, upgrade, and assess Java and .NET apps, as well as upcoming support for mainframe migration.
• Through Azure AI Search, agentic retrieval has been made possible, employing sophisticated techniques to enhance answer relevance to complex, multi-part questions by approximately 40% in initial evaluations.
• The PostgreSQL extension for VS Code has been revamped with GitHub Copilot integrated, streamlining workflows and enhancing productivity through AI-driven assistance.
• Deepened collaboration between Azure and SAP resulted in the launch of the SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) and SAP Databricks on Azure, enabling developers to innovate on foundational business data in SAP applications.
• Foundry Observability has entered public preview, providing developers with comprehensive monitoring, built-in metrics, and detailed logging of agents’ reasoning and tool usage.
• A new Copilot-driven conversational interface in Power BI enables users to engage with their data using natural language across various inputs, semantic models, and data agents.
• The Microsoft Entra Agent ID now offers unique, first-class identities for every agent crafted with Azure AI Foundry or Microsoft Copilot Studio, simplifying enterprise-grade identity management.
• Data agents within Microsoft Fabric operate as virtual business analysts, ready to be integrated into Copilot Studio and deployed across Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Foundry Local is a new runtime for Windows and Mac, allowing developers to create applications that function offline, secure sensitive data locally, and cut bandwidth expenses.
• Two novel offerings, Global Training and Developer Tier, have been introduced for Azure OpenAI in Azure AI Foundry, making the fine-tuning and evaluation of OpenAI models more accessible and cost-effective on a global scale.
• Azure Native Integrations provide developers seamless access to software services directly through the Azure portal, SDK, and CLI, including Arise AI, LambdaTest HyperExecute, Mistral, MongoDB Atlas, and Neon.
• The new Microsoft App Modernization Guidance packages decades of enterprise knowledge and technical patterns to assist companies in analysing and prioritising their modernization efforts.
• Expanded data center capacity and fresh data residency options have been optimised for AI, spanning over 70 regions worldwide — surpassing any other cloud provider.
• Project Amelie was introduced as a new autonomous agent from Azure AI Foundry Labs in collaboration with Microsoft Research, capable of constructing complete machine learning pipelines from a single prompt.

Stay Updated with Azure

The innovations emerging from Azure are continuously inspiring—be it groundbreaking research, essential public services, or inventive customer experiences. Numerous examples from tech teams at the UK Met Office, Stanford Medicine, AISIN, Carvana, and the NFL illustrate how developers are progressing toward a future controlled by agentic technology. Your creativity, feedback, and trust are fundamental in shaping Azure’s journey, and we are genuinely grateful to be part of yours.

We encourage you to revisit the day 1 ‘opening’ keynote, the day 2 ‘unpack the tech’ keynote, and stream key sessions from the available catalogue. Join the Microsoft developer community and continue to enhance your skills through Microsoft Learn.

Memorable Moments from the Conference

To conclude, here are just a few highlights that encapsulate the vibrant energy of Seattle during this year’s Microsoft Build.