Many agents, one team: Scaling modernization on Azure

We’re excited to share our groundbreaking agentic end-to-end modernization solution, seamlessly integrating IT and developers into one cohesive workflow.

Introducing scalable modernization agents designed for optimal control.

When you’re watching a live event, like the Olympics or any major sporting occasion, you don’t often think about the intricate coordination behind the scenes. You simply enjoy the show. Meanwhile, dedicated teams are working tirelessly to synchronise cameras, replays, data, and commentary in real-time. When everything functions smoothly, the complexity fades away.

I liken this to AI agents. Each one tracks a unique signal, adding vital pieces to the overall picture. Telemetry indicates what’s happening, dependencies highlight how systems interconnect, and risks are identified as progress unfolds. With this setup, humans maintain control, making crucial decisions on actions and validating outcomes.

This approach is crucial since modernization presents one of the largest opportunities in the AI age. A recent survey by Forrester, the Q1 2026 Cloud and AI Application Modernization Survey, reveals that 91% of IT leaders regard application modernization as essential for facilitating AI advancements within their organisations.¹ However, numerous companies still contend with complex legacy systems and unconnected tools, requiring extensive manual planning just to determine what should be modernised. IT and developers often operate parallel to one another without a shared vision of the entire system. AI transforms this landscape, enabling teams to analyse environments, prioritise workloads, and hasten modernization.

Today, we’re taking significant strides to assist businesses in embracing new AI capabilities that yield real benefits. We’re launching the first agentic end-to-end modernization solution, creating a unified workflow for IT and developers. With enhanced features available through Azure Copilot and GitHub Copilot, we’re integrating AI across these platforms to facilitate quicker, insight-driven decisions, transforming modernization efforts from mere analysis to actionable outcomes—swiftly and on a larger scale.

AI agents enable this progress by working simultaneously across various stages such as discovery, assessment, planning, migration, and code transformation. They automate tasks like dependency mapping, create actionable plans, and assist execution within the tools that teams already rely on. What was once laborious, manual, and disjointed now becomes a streamlined, consistent process as teams modernise applications, infrastructure, data, and code.

Unified System, Unified Team

Introducing our latest addition to the team, the Azure Copilot migration agent, now in public preview. This new agent aids organisations in shedding technical debt by embedding AI throughout the discovery, assessment, planning, and deployment stages, significantly cutting down on modernization timelines. It’s capable of handling your most vital servers, virtual machines, applications, and databases, transforming migration from a one-off task into an ongoing modernization journey.

Utilising existing knowledge about their environments, the agent provides early insights into a company’s inventory of servers, databases, applications, and their interdependencies. It clarifies how everything works, assesses costs, and identifies what should be modernised. What previously required months of planning can now be accomplished in mere minutes through dialogue with the agent and a data-driven strategy.

By minimising tedious tasks, bridging skill gaps, and aligning IT and development teams through connected workflows, the Azure Copilot migration agent can accelerate the transition to Azure, making it smoother and more reliable.

GitHub Copilot’s modernization features further enhance your team’s capabilities with agents that convert legacy applications into cloud- and AI-ready solutions. These agents operate directly within the developers’ workspace, enabling them to gather assessments, create tailored modernization plans for each application, make upgrades, and deploy seamlessly to Azure—all while keeping developers firmly in the driver’s seat.

Today, we’re unveiling its latest capability, the modernization agent, which is now in public preview. This agent allows for a broader scope of modernization, functioning as an orchestrator that can execute multiple code assessments concurrently, develop bespoke modernization plans, and automate framework and runtime upgrades. This is a significant advancement in how application owners, architects, and developers can collectively revamp a wide range of applications while maintaining the necessary customisation for each.

In a genuinely collaborative, multi-agent setting, the modernization agent takes charge—application owners and architects set the course, specialised agents handle execution, and developers stay informed to guide and validate.

Many organisations have already found success leveraging GitHub Copilot capabilities, enabling them to modernise applications in hours, not months, with automated upgrades for .NET and Java. For a recent client, the total effort for modernization was reduced by 70%.² Now, with the connection to the Azure Copilot migration agent and its built-in integration within developer environments, GitHub Copilot modernization can facilitate comprehensive transformations of applications, ensuring consistent high-quality outcomes and control throughout the process.

Collaborating for Success

Traditionally, decisions about infrastructure—covering aspects like landing zones, networking, and governance—were made without insight into actual application requirements. Developers modernised code without clarity on how it would perform, scale, or be governed in the new environment. This often led to mismatches that appeared late in the process, resulting in costly fixes.

With Azure Copilot and GitHub Copilot working in tandem, this disconnect is eliminated. The agents facilitate a connection between developer-level code insights and the broader cloud migration and modernization plans. GitHub Copilot’s modernization functionalities assess application code to generate comprehensive code assessment reports, while Azure Copilot’s migration agent consumes these reports to highlight code-level issues, warnings, and insights. This synergy allows Azure Copilot to incorporate real code analysis when evaluating readiness and recommending suitable Azure targets, ultimately linking developer-driven modernization efforts with the cloud and infrastructure planning carried out by migration teams. The result is AI-guided migration and modernization strategies featuring intelligent workload prioritisation, cost transparency, and automated recommendations for implementation phases.

The Importance of Your Database in Modernization

Modernising applications is just one piece of the puzzle. Your database plays a crucial role because your AI strategy hinges on a robust data strategy. When data is siloed or trapped within outdated infrastructure, even the most advanced agentic workflows can reach their limits.

Transitioning to Azure managed database services prepares your database for AI, offloading the operational burdens of infrastructure management onto a platform designed for this task. These fully managed services reduce overhead, enhance resilience, and allow teams to focus on creating intelligent applications. Consequently, you establish a data foundation capable of scaling with demand while meeting security standards and adapting to AI workloads.

Once your data estate is modernised on Azure, the goal becomes a unified data platform—where all databases, analytics, and AI coexist as a coherent entity. With AI features natively incorporated into Azure databases, organisations can develop cloud-native AI applications utilising semantic search, memory integration, and advanced model invocation. These features are grounded in Azure’s data layer, ensuring models operate using the most up-to-date and trusted signals generated by your business.

Empowering Customers Through Azure Modernisation

Our agents are facilitating greater possibilities. We’re transitioning away from sporadic use of agentic tools toward consistent and repeatable agentic execution. This shift underscores the importance of pairing agentic tools with structured delivery models, empowering organisations to confidently scale modernization across teams and environments.

Ahold Delhaize, one of the largest food retail providers globally, shared its journey of modernising its application and data estate on Azure to enhance AI-driven business outcomes. By employing agentic tools throughout migration and modernization processes, they reduced complexity, enhanced collaboration across teams, and quickened delivery.

By leveraging agents throughout discovery, assessment, and execution, Ahold Delhaize shifted from fragmented modernization initiatives to a more continuous, intelligent process—one that instilled confidence in both planning and execution.

Customer experiences like this all point toward a common insight: the future of modernization is agentic, interconnected, and driven by human expertise.

Cloud Accelerate Factory: Realising Agentic Modernization at Scale

While agentic tools are pushing boundaries, outcomes can be truly transformative when innovation is combined with execution. The Cloud Accelerate Factory, a feature of Azure Accelerate, aids organisations in operationalising modernization through zero-cost, hands-on delivery from specialised Microsoft experts.

As Microsoft’s premier modernisation delivery engine, Cloud Accelerate Factory partners with customers and allies from discovery to production, applying a structured approach to scaling modernization efforts across applications, infrastructure, and data—often achieving results in days rather than months.

Coupled with agentic capabilities like Azure Copilot and GitHub Copilot, the Cloud Accelerate Factory empowers organisations to modernise with confidence and speed, converting plans into measurable advancements across key workloads, including .NET, Java, and SQL.

Be Part of the Microsoft Azure Summit

Prepare for an engaging agenda at this year’s Microsoft Azure Summit: Migrate and Modernise with Agentic AI. This live event on March 12, 2026, (Asia and Europe) and April 23, 2026, (Americas) includes interactive sessions led by Microsoft engineers, compelling customer stories, and live demonstrations of the latest innovations featured in this blog. Learn directly from organisations that have successfully utilised the newest agentic tools and capabilities to migrate and modernise on Azure, witnessing how these developments can create tangible benefits for your business.

This year’s summit showcases a fantastic range of topics aimed at helping you shape the future of cloud and AI.

• Keynote: Migrate and modernise using agentic AI
• Regional session (customised): AI-ready modernisation tailored to your needs
• Breakout: Enhance and simplify planning, migration, and operations with AI agents
• Breakout: Reimagine application and database modernization with agentic tools

¹Forrester’s Q1 2026 Cloud and AI Application Modernization Survey [E-66670] Base: 223 Global leaders in charge of their organisation’s cloud and AI strategy

²Accelerate migration and modernization with agentic AI, Amanda Silver, September 23, 2025