Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft (MS), is delivering a keynote speech at the annual developer event MS Build 2025 held in Seattle, Washington, on the 19th (local time). /Courtesy of Microsoft

"The era of Open Agentic Web has begun."

Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Microsoft (MS), said this during the keynote speech at the annual developer event 'MS Build 2025,' held on the 19th in Seattle, Washington. He explained that an internet environment is being established in which artificial intelligence agents (AI Agents) operate across businesses, beyond individuals, organizations, and teams.

Nadella emphasized that the AI strategy in the era of Open Agentic Web is 'openness.' Since 2019, MS has invested a total of $13 billion (about 18 trillion won) in OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, establishing a business partnership. The announcement stated that it will introduce 'Grok3,' developed by Elon Musk's xAI, which is currently involved in legal disputes regarding profit-making activities with OpenAI, into its cloud service 'Azure.' By incorporating models such as Meta's 'Llama,' French startup 'Mistral,' and Germany's 'Black Forest Labs' into its AI ecosystem, the total number of AI models available to Azure customers has surpassed 1,900.

Additionally, MS will implement AI agent communication protocols, such as Google's 'A2A' (agent to agent) and Anthropic's 'MCP' (model context protocol), across its services. Nadella noted, "Now is the time of transition to a platform that establishes a large-scale Open Agentic Web," adding that future development will be focused on creating an open platform that organically connects numerous agents, moving away from a structure vertically integrated with a few apps.

MS advocated 'developer innovation' as the value that its AI ecosystem can provide as it transitions to an open model. Nadella stated, "Significant innovations, comparable to those in cloud or mobile technology, are being carried out through AI," and indicated that it will offer the greatest opportunities to developers. He further emphasized the importance of various AI model usage, asserting that "AI can serve as a kind of 'virtual team member' that writes code, participates in meetings, and resolves problems independently."

Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft (MS, left), and Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla. /Screen capture from MS Build

The introduction of Grok3 to Azure is considered a symbolic change in MS's AI openness strategy. Musk also participated in the event via a pre-recorded video. He stated, "Our AI model seeks truth with minimal errors," adding that "the next-generation AI model Grok 3.5 is designed to minimize errors by utilizing the laws of physics."

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, an essential partner in MS's AI initiatives, also participated in the event via video link, introducing the recently released AI coding agent Codex. He remarked, "I thought there would someday be an era where AI agents code, but it's already become a reality," mentioning that "AI agents are now able to handle far more tasks than before. This represents the largest turning point in programming methods I have witnessed so far."

MS also unveiled enhanced new services enabled by the construction of an open AI ecosystem. These include ▲ 'Azure AI Foundry' to support AI model selection and tuning ▲ 'Copilot Studio' to generate AI agents with minimal coding ▲ 'GitHub Copilot Agent,' which allows the use of AI functionalities throughout the development process, emphasizing that "this can enhance developer capabilities."

In particular, GitHub Copilot has introduced asynchronous coding agent features. With the addition of prompt management and lightweight evaluation (LightEval), as well as enterprise control capabilities, an environment has been established to experiment with various AI models.

MS also introduced platforms capable of advancing new drug development through AI agents, such as 'MS Discovery,' and a new project, 'NLWeb,' aimed at expanding the Open Agentic Web ecosystem. NLWeb is a tool that can convert websites or application programming interfaces (APIs) into agentic apps. MS indicated, "We expect it can play a role similar to HTML in the agentic web," asserting that operators can connect desired AI models and their own data to create interactive interfaces.