Microsoft’s gotten single‑use plastic in its packaging down to 0.07%. You see it right away opening a Surface box — no shrink wrap, no plastic shell, just a clean paperboard setup. But that didn’t happen overnight. It took years of rethinking how things are made and shipped, all tied to a bigger push to cut waste and ditch plastic altogether.

The real challenge in AI right now isn’t capability — it’s control. As companies deploy more autonomous agents to handle real business processes, businesses must build governance, monitoring and security layers. To scale this, they need two things: first, intelligence grounded in their own data, and second, trust — with security, governance and monitoring — so AI can deliver results. As AI becomes part of everyday work, success will come down to how well it’s integrated and managed.

After the tragic Christchurch earthquake, New Zealand built a geotechnical database to help engineers get complex information on the ground beneath their building sites. Now that data is accessible via the Microsoft Azure-powered digital twin platform BEYON and its AI assistant, enabling engineers to make faster, better decisions.

AI is becoming a part of the future of education, for both kids in the classroom and at an administrative, system-wide level. The conversation is no longer “if” but “how” as institutions consider what that shift means for students, educators and institutions. In the 2025 AI in Education Report, Microsoft conducted numerous studies and surveys and collaborated with academic institutions and organizations. Read on for the four key takeaways.

Global luxury brand Chow Tai Fook is working to bring their business into the AI era. The company has engineered an end-to-end, enterprise-grade intelligence system that goes beyond chatbots — strengthening its digital foundation, supporting retail staff and delivering a more personalized omnichannel experience.

Health New Zealand’s Hauora Māori team customized Microsoft 365 Copilot into “BroPilot,” an AI tool grounded in Māori values. The tool now helps teams simplify complex work, reduce workload and improve outputs. It also strengthens culturally informed care and provides a scalable model for inclusive, values-driven AI adoption across the organization.

New Zealand’s largest business must operate at a global level – and that can get complex. Fonterra, a dairy co-operative owned by thousands of farming families, serves customers in more than 100 countries and processes around 22 billion liters of milk solids each season. So even small improvements in quality, consistency, sustainability and productivity can add up. AI has been increasingly practical for cutting through that complexity. Read more about Fonterra’s six-year partnership with Microsoft and how the business is embedding AI in core operations.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence uncovered a cyber campaign by the North Korean threat actor Sapphire Sleet that relies on social engineering rather than software vulnerabilities. Cyber attackers pretending to be a legitimate software update tricked users into manually running malicious files that allowed them to steal passwords, cryptocurrency assets and personal data – all while avoiding built-in security checks. Read the full analysis for more on how it happened and tech companies worked together to solve it.

Stellantis and Microsoft Corp. on Thursday announced a five‑year strategic collaboration aimed at accelerating Stellantis’ digital transformation through the co‑development of advanced AI, cybersecurity and engineering capabilities.

Building on a longstanding alliance, this collaboration will bring together Stellantis’ automotive engineering expertise, multibrand scale and global operations with Microsoft’s cloud, AI and security capabilities to accelerate stronger, more agile, more connected digital processes across its ecosystem.

As the expansion of renewable energy accelerates across Europe, solar developers face a dual responsibility: delivering clean energy at scale while protecting local ecosystems. For Urbasolar, the solar division of Axpo Group, biodiversity protection is an integral part of how projects are designed, assessed and approved.

To support this, Urbasolar has developed an internal AI‑powered chatbot that helps project teams and environmental experts better understand, document and protect biodiversity across its solar power plants.

For startups, the real challenge isn’t building software. It’s turning momentum into a business that can grow – especially as teams stay lean and expectations rise. But AI has changed the calculus. What began as tools that helped developers code is evolving into systems that can carry work across repositories, cloud infrastructure and long‑running processes, all with far less manual coordination.

For founders and technical leaders, this isn’t just a productivity shift. It’s a structural one. Read more about this shift and how to build systems that can scale while staying secure.

At Hannover Messe 2026, companies like ABB, Krones and TK Elevator are showing what Frontier industrial organizations look like in practice: AI grounded in trust. Using Microsoft’s cloud and AI platforms, they’re turning real-time data into smarter operations, while keeping people in control and governance built in from the start. 

Microsoft has been awarded the 2026 Franz Edelman Award, one of the most prestigious honors in operations research and analytics, for its breakthrough in large-scale optimization and generative AI for the cloud.

In the past, when something broke digital security, responders would look for what broke and patch it so it wouldn’t happen again. But AI works differently: The same prompt can produce different results and problems aren’t tied to a single line of code. The damage can spread incredibly fast – at machine speed. While core response skills still matter, AI introduces new risks and demands faster action and new expertise. Find out which security practices remain effective in the age of AI and which require fresh preparation.

In one of the most promising yet complex frontiers of science – quantum computing – Europe is making targeted investments that are beginning to produce real capability. Just north of Copenhagen, Microsoft opened a new state-of-the-art Quantum Lab in Lyngby, now the company’s largest quantum site globally and a key part of Microsoft’s long-term commitment to Europe’s quantum future. Read more about how the region is building on scientific talent and innovation.

You know that stressful moment before meeting with your manager — the one where you’re scrolling through emails, flipping through Teams threads and trying to remember just what on earth you’ve been working on this week?

Now, Microsoft 365 Copilot can handle the scramble for you and get all your updates in order before your next one-on-one with this all-encompassing prompt.

Financial markets are beginning to shift to always‑on digital infrastructure that can handle ownership, transfers and compliance in real time. This transition, driven by digital assets, means the infrastructure on the back end has to change too. To do that, firms need secure, cloud-based infrastructure that both works across different institutions and meets regulatory requirements. Microsoft, through Azure and its partnership with DTCC, is set to help build that next generation of the systems that power financial markets.

Today, Microsoft released a new image generation model designed to make high‑quality images faster and cheaper than the company’s MAI-Image-2. MAI‑Image‑2‑Efficient is for high-volume, everyday work while MAI-Image-2 is for super detailed, final images.

The new model is available now in Microsoft Foundry and MAI Playground, with wider rollout underway.

From pharmacies to hospitals, healthcare systems around the world are using AI to ease the burden on overstretched staff and help speed up diagnosis, while keeping patient care front and center.

In the workplace, outcomes rarely hinge on a single decision or team. Patterns that cut across roles, functions and time – unseen while the work is happening – shape end results. By the time these patterns show up in metrics, the opportunity to shape them has already passed.  

But now, AI can track patterns no single person or team could’ve seen on their own. In a new blog, Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s CMO of AI at Work, writes that AI can illuminate the hidden patterns behind decisions, bottlenecks and outcomes, revealing why effort doesn’t always translate into impact.

As his prompts grew longer, so did their impact. LTM chief information officer Rajesh Kumar explains how working with Microsoft 365 Copilot has shifted from quick task‑help to true collaboration.

For decades, quantum computing has sounded like a dazzling breakthrough that was always just out of reach — along with its promise of tackling problems like chemical reactions, new materials and complex systems in ways classical computers can’t. That’s starting to change, and with it comes a whole new vocabulary you’ll likely hear more often, from qubits to superposition and entanglement. Here are 10 key terms broken down in plain language to help you join the quantum conversation.

Ten years after co-creating Marcel, an innovative AI platform, Microsoft and Publicis Groupe announce the expansion of their strategic partnership to build a full-stack marketing solution that unifies legacy systems, AI agents and identity-based data to accelerate marketing outcomes in the era of agentic AI.

It’s always a good time to tidy up some of your digital clutter and make sure you’re staying on the proverbial ball.

Now you can do this regularly by using AI to compile weekly or monthly reflections that you can schedule to automatically run for you. Learn how in the latest version of The Prompt.

Ravi Vedula’s childhood memoir of the colorful, chaotic Hyderabad of the 1980s and 1990s delivers more than vivid descriptions of local cricket heroes or an era of shared televisions. “Hyderabad Days,” recently released by 8080 Books, pays homage to resiliency, community and values.

For many people, using AI starts with a workaround: switching into a second language. That’s because English dominates online text, which is what most AI systems are trained on. As these tools become a go‑to way to get help with everyday tasks, that quiet barrier matters more than most of us realize. Microsoft researchers and partners are working to build systems that understand more languages, accents and forms of local knowledge, so AI works the way people actually communicate — not just the way the internet happens to be written today.

Microsoft is investing $10 billion in Japan from 2026 through 2029. The investment will be built around three pillars: technology, trust and talent. Microsoft will work with Japanese partners to expand AI infrastructure, deepen private cybersecurity partnerships and train more than 1 million workers across the country’s important industries. Read more about the announcement and how it maps to Japan’s growth and economic security priorities.

Microsoft announced three new large language models are now available on the company’s AI platforms. Starting today on both Microsoft Foundry and MAI Playground, developers have access to MAI-Transcribe-1, a transcription model across 25 languages; MAI-Voice-1, which handles natural, expressive speech generation; and MAI-Image-2, the company’s most capable image model yet. Read more about how they work.

Microsoft is on track to spend $5.5 billion to power Singapore’s AI future before the end of 2029, the company announced Wednesday. The funding will largely go to cloud and AI infrastructure, as well as ongoing operations in the country. Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith also announced the expansion of Microsoft Elevate programs in Singapore to provide AI tools and skills to tertiary students, teachers and nonprofits with responsible AI to uplift all communities in the AI era.

The ever-increasing capabilities of AI have everyone wondering what it means for their career. LinkedIn’s Chief Economic Opportunity Officer Aneesh Raman joins the Worklab podcast to explore why curiosity, adaptability and action matter now more than ever. Drawing from his new book, “Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI” — cowritten with LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky — Raman makes the case that careers aren’t being automated away. They’re being reshaped for the AI era, by the people willing to move first.