Imagine an office worker clicking on a phishing link at 2:13 a.m. As the IT team sleeps, an AI agent detects unusual login behavior and disables the compromised account. Then, it checks to see if malware spread to any other devices or accounts, opens a ticket, sends an alert to the security team and drafts an incident summary.

This is the beauty of AI agents, and getting started is easier than it sounds. This guide walks through the key steps for creating a basic agent, so you can go from idea to working prototype without writing any code.

Leaders across industries are finding that AI’s biggest impact isn’t about doing work faster; it’s about helping people do more meaningful work. In conversations at Microsoft AI Tours around the world, leaders from organizations including The Salvation Army and Teach for America described a shift from AI experiments to everyday use, with employees using the technology to solve problems, learn new skills and bring ideas to life, while keeping human judgment and expertise at the center.

A lot of organizations have found promising uses for AI. The harder challenge is turning those wins into lasting progress. Drawing on interviews with 70 business and IT leaders, the new AI Strategy Roadmap helps leaders assess readiness, address roadblocks and identify the capabilities needed to move from AI pilots to broader adoption. Read on for the five drivers of successful AI transformation.

When market research firm Kantar handed Copilot licenses to every employee, chaos and creativity erupted. Andy Doyle, the company’s chief people and agent officer, joins the WorkLab podcast to share how a wave of maverick experimentation led to the creation of more than 15,000 AI agents — and an “agent factory” that’s reshaping the enterprise. He explains how the experiment pushed leaders  to rethink control, scale and what’s possible when you let employees drive transformation.  

As AI moves from experimentation into implementation, some companies are struggling to translate early momentum into broad business impact beyond isolated use cases. A new e-book from Microsoft explores why progress may stall and outlines four key areas where organizations are focusing to get more value from AI.

A few years into her time as a technology leader, Julie Averill started asking herself a question she couldn’t shake: What is this actually for? As CIO at lululemon and REI, the work was clear on paper, but her real impact showed up somewhere else.
In her new book, “Chief Impact Officer,” she unpacks that shift — and what it takes to build trust with your team when technology is changing fast.

What can disability teach us about leadership? Microsoft design leader Dave Dame shares lessons from his life with cerebral palsy—from learning to embrace imperfection to building trust and better teams along the way.

The world of AI is moving too fast for any organization to figure it out alone. That’s why Microsoft recently convened 250 customers at the leading edge of AI transformation for a summit. The goal was to shorten the distance between the teams building Copilot and the people actually using it. As Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer of AI at Work, writes in a new post, they learned the reality is that AI results depend more on leaders’ choices than the tools they buy. Read on for the five major takeaways from the summit about AI adaption in the workplace.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As the way we work changes amid the AI era, one industry is ahead of the curve. Software engineering is experiencing a broad shift: AI isn’t just boosting productivity, it’s reorganizing how work gets done. Four human‑agent patterns have emerged as capabilities grew and responsibilities shifted— writing, reviewing, delegating and orchestrating. Those patterns are now spreading across knowledge work in general. But as other industries shift, the key will be matching the work to the right patterns.

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.

AI is already doing work inside the software companies rely on, quietly handling tasks in the background and changing what the software tools are built for. Instead of people navigating the software, the AI does the work. That means the focus now must shift to making sure systems are set up properly and that humans stay in charge of setting direction and judging the results.

AI’s promise is real. But the challenge to realizing its value isn’t technology — it’s people. AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor Rana el Kaliouby joins podcast host Molly Wood to explain why adoption breaks down when AI doesn’t fit how people actually work and how to close the gap between experimenting and making AI actually useful.

“It’s not just about like getting the work done,” el Kaliouby says. “It’s actually how do you … dissect an everyday workflow and inject AI in it in a way that’s sustainable, that’s repeatable, that’s trustworthy?” She says it’s easy to try tools, but much harder to build them into your day‑to‑day in a way that people trust and keep using.

We’ve all looked at the clock and wondered “how is it already 4 p.m.?!” at least a few times. Maybe your workday feels like a mysterious blend of brilliance and busyness? Now you can use AI to help decode how you’re spending your time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What will humans do in the AI era? In an upcoming book, Ryan Roslansky, the CEO of LinkedIn and executive vice president of Microsoft 365 and Copilot, explores how work is changing, what tools are accelerating that change and how human workers can find their footing in a rapidly changing landscape. Roslansky makes the case that as AI absorbs more of the drudgery of work, people will have the space to do the human work they’ve always been best at but rarely had time for.

Ever been asked to take on “just one more thing” and felt that sinking feeling? This prompt helps you gracefully say no — without burning any bridges.

Every time technology takes a leap forward, workers wonder what they will do next. Steam power, electricity and then computing each reshuffled how people made a living, producing genuine anxiety about what would be left on the other side.

“And each time, the answer turned out to be: more than before, but different than expected,” Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s CMO of AI at Work, writes in a new post. He says the future of the workplace will be defined by humans who can identify “what’s worth doing and how the work should run.”

If you’ve ever stared at your overflowing to-do list and thought, “Surely AI could help with some of this,” you’re right. Now you can use AI as a personalized consultant to help you figure out the best way to go about your workday.

The future of work isn’t just something that happens to us, Jared Spataro, Microsoft CMO of AI at Work, writes in a new blog post. It will be shaped by the choices we make about roles, incentives and standards. Spataro writes that amid all the uncertainty about how the AI era is unfolding, it’s important to maintain perspective. “While AI has extraordinary potential to improve our lives, it raises issues that require deliberate choices — exercising our human agency to shape the future,” he says. Read more about what Spataro believes will be the future of the workforce, and what he says everyone should be cautious about.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a crystal ball to see what the future holds?  The next best thing is using AI to create a vision and habits that will help you max out your potential in the coming year. After all, big ideas deserve a plan.

For decades, technological progress has been measured by how quickly and easily we can access information. PCs put knowledge on desktops, the internet made it searchable and mobile placed it in every pocket. But that abundance has created a new burden: consumers and businesses are left to sift through overwhelming choices with little clarity. Now, in a sweeping vision of the near future, Microsoft’s CMO of AI at Work, Jared Spataro, argues that artificial intelligence is poised to transform commerce not by giving people more information but by providing something far more valuable: expertise and the ability to narrow down our choices before humans make the final call.