Get all the news from Build, Microsoft’s annual developer conference in San Francisco this week. You’ll find details from the keynote, photos, video and more on our Build 2026 news site, with more updates throughout the day.

Microsoft unveils Majorana 2, its newest quantum chip built with the help of agentic AI specifically designed for research and development. Its qubits are 1,000x more reliable than the first generation, with a mean qubit lifetime of 20 seconds and instances lasting as long as one minute. These improvements have shortened Microsoft’s original timeline to produce a commercially valuable quantum computer by half, to 2029. With the Microsoft Discovery platform generally available today, other scientists and engineers can now tap into the same agentic AI expertise to speed their own breakthroughs.

Microsoft Build is the company’s annual developer conference, featuring the latest announcements that impact the people who build and create. This year’s event takes place June 2-3 in San Francisco.
 
To keep track of all the news, Microsoft Build Live will provide real-time coverage as new products and critical updates are announced. Join writers Christina Warren and Nick Brady beginning at 9:30 a.m. PT Tuesday as they explore what’s new, what’s been updated and why it matters for developers and customers.

Copper is critical to energy and digital infrastructure but accessing it is harder than ever, so BHP is using Microsoft Discovery to hunt for new solutions and transform the way it innovates.

Since Microsoft announced Copilot Health back in March, thousands of people have been using it to link their health records, understand lab results and go into appointments with greater clarity and confidence. Now, after thorough safety testing and evaluation, Copilot Health moves into preview. Starting today, Copilot users in the U.S. aged 18+ with a Microsoft 365 Personal, Family or Premium subscription can try Copilot Health in preview. Find out what you’ll find if you try it and how to sign up.

More than 30% of the United States working-age population is using AI, an increase of three percentage points from the end of 2025. In a new Microsoft report that offers an in-depth look at AI adoption across the U.S., researchers found there’s an uneven pattern of AI adoption across the country. Urban areas use AI at about double the rate than that of rural America. Read more details including a state and county-level review of AI adoption.

Microsoft has announced the latest installment of the ever-popular Call of Duty game franchise will drop this fall. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 will launch on Oct. 23, 2026, and will be available on XBOX Series X|S, PlayStation 5, PC and Nintendo Switch 2. For more details on the storyline and what cities the game will feature, check out the XBOX Wire.

It’s almost time for Microsoft Build, the company’s big annual developer’s conference taking place this year in San Francisco. Join us virtually at 9:30 a.m. PT on Tues., June 2, to follow our live blog and learn more about Microsoft’s latest updates in AI‑powered tools and platforms for developers and beyond. Then stay tuned for more news, photos, videos and other updates throughout the day.

At Slovenian insurance giant Triglav, dozens of digital mentors empower employees to find ways to use Copilot and Copilot agents to make their work lives more rewarding; Copilot takes on the mundane tasks, leaving the global company’s thousands of employees to focus on human-centric work. As Klemen Ramoveš, chief digital officer, puts it, “We still believe that people are the key,” he says. “It’s ‘Copilot’— it’s not a pilot, so we need to have a lot of pilots on board.”

It’s nothing scientific, but you can turn your handwriting into a fun little window to your personality. With just a Copilot prompt and writing sample, get basically a horoscope for the way you write your grocery list.

As new U.S. protections take effect, Microsoft is expanding its response to non-consensual intimate imagery, including AI-generated content. The company is rolling out simplified reporting tools, broadened detection through image “fingerprints,” and extended enforcement across services. Microsoft is also working with global partners to advocate for stronger laws to help curb the spread of AI-made fake intimate images spread without consent and to respond more quickly to people impacted. 

Microsoft is introducing MAI-Image-2.5, its most advanced image model and the latest in the MAI-Image series. The system more closely follows instructions and renders text more reliably. It also makes sharper and more coherent visuals across styles. Things like scene structure, lighting and spatial relationships are all improved with this update, meaning simple prompts can turn into even more polished images.

Microsoft South Africa and the Youth Employment Service (YES) are expanding a program to train young people in digital skills, addressing persistent unemployment. Recently honored with a Tech Impact Award in Cape Town, the initiative is widening access to tailored learning in artificial intelligence and computer science, helping participants progress from basic knowledge to advanced expertise. The idea is that training will move more young people from learning in an educational setting into pathways to work.

AI is at an inflection point. As the pace of innovation accelerates, builders need more than tools: they need an operating layer that can bring together development, deployment, governance and security. In a new post, Jay Parikh, executive vice president of CoreAI at Microsoft, explains why India is uniquely well-positioned for this moment.

Microsoft Research AI Frontiers is releasing MagenticLite, an experimental agent built for small models. The next step after Magentic‑UI, MagenticLite brings browser and local file workflows into one place. It’s designed to run efficiently on users’ machines and handle a wide range of tasks, and is based on the idea that agent capability comes from how tools are orchestrated and used, not just what the model knows.

Microsoft is announcing a new Bing search that is powered by AI. Bing Image Search automatically labels and organizes images into clear categories and generates short summaries that explain each group. The added context helps users understand what they’re seeing and decide what to search for next. Read more on how it works and how to opt in.

Microsoft is opening a new storefront for its gaming worlds. The XBOX Game Studios Shop will sell clothing and collectibles tied to franchises like Halo, Forza and Fable, starting with a small lineup and expanding over time. New items will arrive alongside major game releases, as feedback shapes the experience. The store joins existing brand shops, offering fans another way to carry a piece of those worlds beyond the screen.

There’s a growing gap between what AI can do and how companies actually use it, and it’s causing frustration in the business world. But the friction slowing things down may be necessary: the systems that manage data, permissions and workflows are what let AI scale. As Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer of AI at Work, writes in a new post, progress won’t come from experimentation alone. It will come from structural work that eventually makes the once shiny and new technology fade into the background.

Microsoft is open-sourcing two tools that are part of a broader movement toward engineering-native AI safety. Microsoft RAMPART is a test framework that makes it easy to turn red-team findings and AI incidents into lasting coverage, and Clarity is a structured sounding board that helps teams figure out whether they are building the right thing before they write a single line of code.

Both RAMPART and Clarity are available today as open source projects from Microsoft.

Just using AI isn’t necessarily going to transform business. Across industries, leaders are moving beyond experimentation and chatbots to confront a deeper challenge: reshaping work in a way that is truly transformative in the AI era. In a recent interview, Bryan Goode, corporate vice president of Business Applications and Agents at Microsoft, reveals the thought process behind his leadership decisions that are guiding his organization through the seismic shift.

Microsoft has filed a legal case against Fox Tempest, an alleged cybercrime service that makes malware look legitimate. Microsoft seized infrastructure, disrupted operations, and linked the service to major ransomware groups. The move targets a growing “as-a-service” model that helps attackers scale, thus aiming to raise costs for cybercriminals and reduce the success of global cyberattacks.

XBOX is changing the way it looks for community feedback. The gaming brand launched XBOX Player Voice this week, a new place to collect gamer feedback and make it more visible. Players can submit ideas, track when they’re reviewed and follow updates. Not every suggestion will lead to changes, but XBOX says greater visibility will help close the gap between feedback and results.

Ask AI to show “someone at work,” and the results reveal who gets left out — and why that matters. As AI rapidly becomes part of daily life, communities often missing from the tech tools, including people living with disabilities, are helping change how AI systems see them, how those systems are evaluated and who controls the data behind them.

Start with a pain point your colleagues are already feeling. This is what Regis Aged Care CIO Imtiaz Bhayat advises, after rolling out a popular AI assistant that helps staff spend more time with residents in Regis care homes across Australia. Read more of his tips on how to bring people along on your AI journey.

AI agents are quietly transforming daily work at Dos Pinos, a large Costa Rican dairy cooperative. With about 6,000 employees, Dos Pinos is scaling Copilot-built agents across the business, deploying roughly 80 so far for tasks, like catching packaging errors, automating reporting or legal drafting. It’s all part of a push to embed AI into daily work at scale. Dos Pinos’ creative lead, for instance, built an “AI inspector” in Microsoft Copilot Studio to compare packaging labels against technical sheets and flag regulatory discrepancies before files ship, helping drive errors toward nearly zero and easing team stress.

Everything Suarve, an Australian nonprofit, has won accolades for turning young lives around by arming at-risk youth with construction as well as life skills. As the nonprofit grows, it’s turning to Microsoft technology to handle paperwork from managing referrals to securing funding. The end result, says founder Joseph Te Puni-Fromont, is “we have more time to go put back into the young people.”

One of the world’s oldest and most regulated banks is using AI to reshape how its work gets done. BNY is training thousands of employees to design AI solutions and create governance pipelines so its people can be freed up to do higher-value work. Using Microsoft tools and infrastructure, the bank is reworking its org chart and betting that AI will expand, not replace, human potential.

Edge now brings Copilot directly into the browser on desktop and, for the first time, mobile. Microsoft announced new capabilities today, including reasoning across multiple open tabs, more relevant answers shaped by browsing history and past chats, and hands-free use with Voice and Vision. A redesigned new tab page and Journeys are now widely available, while Copilot Mode is retired as these features are now built into Edge.

AI isn’t just changing how people work — it’s changing what their work is. In a conversation on Microsoft’s WorkLab podcast, Katy George, a vice president for workforce transformation, says companies falter when they treat AI as a simple rollout. Real change, she says, comes from redesigning work itself — unlocking new capabilities, reshaping roles and requiring workers to continuously adapt as their roles evolve.

AI is modernizing the world’s most complex industries, from factory floors to building materials to geotechnical data, by capturing, scaling and democratizing expert knowledge. Examples from Japan, Mexico, New Zealand and Saudi Arabia illustrate the creative ways AI is transforming high-skill workflows in manufacturing and industrial companies.