At Singapore’s National Trades Union Congress, AI readiness begins with leading by example. Chief transformation and technology officer Siow Shong Seng uses Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents in his daily work, helping shape how staff adopt AI. He’s also showing the way for over 1.4 million union members navigating new ground in AI-forward Singapore.

Microsoft says Microsoft 365 Copilot has surpassed 30 million paid seats, with net seat additions more than doubling quarter over quarter, as organizations increasingly incorporate AI into everyday work. The company says AI is shifting from a productivity tool to a participant in workflows, including the adoption of agent-based products such as Copilot Cowork and Microsoft Scout. Microsoft says future progress will be measured not just by AI adoption but by how work itself changes.

Tokenmaxxing might be the AI story of the summer, but token efficiency is the next big focus across the industry. Microsoft’s latest approach is to get better results from AI tokens, which are the small units of text models process, rather than simply using the maximum amount of them. The company says a series of specialized models, tuned for specific tasks, are matching or exceeding the performance of larger alternatives while cutting costs, in some cases by 50% to 90%.

In Mexico, AI skilling is moving beyond theory and into people’s daily lives. Through Microsoft Elevate, these four young entrepreneurs and educators are applying AI skills to challenges they know firsthand: water scarcity in Ciudad Juárez, recruiting efforts and productivity in Chihuahua, recycling in Querétaro and personalized learning in classrooms. They are among the 3.5 million people reached by the initiative in Mexico. Their work shows how personal stories can shape practical innovation, and how access to AI training can help local builders turn curiosity, community needs and real-life experience into tools with real impact.

In a fiscal year defined by AI’s shift from promise to practice, businesses moved beyond experimentation to deploying AI for real-world business outcomes. They unlocked innovation and created new opportunities for growth, moving beyond efficiency gains to focus on human ambition and embed AI at the core of how they operate. Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft Commercial Business, looks back at Fiscal Year 2026 and the emergence of Frontier Firms. Read more on the Official Microsoft Blog.

The Premier League is rolling out a new tool to help football fans around the globe manage their fantasy teams. The Fantasy Premier League Companion powered by Copilot is built using Microsoft Foundry and official Premier League data to offer advice, answer questions and provide suggestions to managers as they build and maintain their squads. It’s all in time for the start of the season, which kicks off Aug. 21.

As cyberattacks become faster, cheaper and increasingly driven by AI, Microsoft says security needs to evolve beyond existing systems that were built for a human-scale threat landscape. Project Perception, a new agentic security system entering public preview Aug. 3, uses specialized teams of AI agents acting at machine speed to identify risks before attackers can exploit them, investigate and evaluate threats and then take corrective actions. Microsoft says the system will help organizations strengthen defenses while keeping humans in control.

Microsoft’s latest threat report found that the company’s efforts to disrupt the Tycoon2FA phishing platform in March continued to ripple through the second quarter, driving a sharp decline in related phishing activity. But even as some email threats fell, attackers increasingly turned to Microsoft Teams-based social engineering and voice phishing. The company detected 7.6 billion email phishing threats during the quarter, with credential theft remaining the primary goal.

XBOX is bringing some of its oldest games to new devices. Starting today, four original XBOX titles are playable on PC and supported handhelds for the first time, including the ROG XBOX Ally. Launching in early release, the effort begins with four classic games and new features such as graphics customization and cloud support. Microsoft says the program is part of a broader push to preserve older games and make them playable across more devices.

A year after launching an effort to build AI models in-house, Microsoft says its MAI models are now powering products including Bing, PowerPoint, OneDrive, Dynamics 365 and Azure. The company introduced two new variants — MAI-Image-2.5-Pro for high-fidelity image generation and MAI-Voice-2-Flash for faster voice applications — while expanding use of its own models across consumer, enterprise and healthcare products.

An animal shelter forecasting where foster homes will be needed before kitten season. Researchers studying a neurodegenerative disease that affects hundreds of thousands of people. A small team spending more time mentoring and less doing paperwork.

These stories don’t have much in common on the surface, but together, they point to a broader shift: AI is helping nonprofit organizations across the globe meet pressing challenges, make better use of limited resources and expand their reach. Read on to meet three nonprofits using Microsoft’s AI to help solve different problems.

The future of AI depends on more than bigger models. The real challenge is getting the best results at the right cost, says Microsoft. Its MAI models are trained inside products such as GitHub Copilot and Excel, learning from the tasks people actually perform. Early results show these smaller, specialized models can match or outperform larger, more expensive alternatives in common workflows while using fewer tokens and lowering the cost of deployment.

Microsoft and Databricks are expanding their decade-long partnership into the 2030s to help the companies’ customers use AI more effectively while maintaining governance, security and cost controls. Databricks will expand its use of Azure technologies, while Microsoft will further integrate Databricks’ data and AI tools into its products, helping connect AI tools to trusted business knowledge organizations rely on, from customer data to internal processes.

Manulife is expanding its longstanding partnership with Microsoft through a new five-year agreement aimed at helping the company use AI more broadly. The financial services provider will roll out Microsoft 365 Copilot to more than 30,000 employees and deploy Microsoft Agent 365 to help oversee AI agents across the business. The companies said the move will support innovation while strengthening AI governance and security across Manulife’s global operations.

Much of what AI knows about the world comes from data most people never see and from technical processes that determine what’s included or left out.

As AI becomes increasingly influential in daily life, a new platform aims to help communities participate in that foundation being built behind the scenes to ensure they’re portrayed accurately and fairly, especially in imagery. Called the Community Library Creator, the Microsoft research effort gives groups a structured way to help shape how they show up in AI-generated pictures.

Microsoft is deepening its commitment to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, an effort to use AI to accelerate scientific discovery, with a $60 million investment and the launch of SPARK, a new hub for scientific collaboration. The effort brings together national laboratories, AI, advanced computing and emerging quantum technologies to support research in areas including energy storage, biosecurity, materials science and nuclear energy.

As Mistral expands its AI computing capacity in Europe, Microsoft is deepening its partnership with the French AI company through a multibillion-dollar infrastructure agreement. Mistral’s models will be available across Microsoft services, including Microsoft Foundry, Copilot Studio and Azure, giving customers more options for how and where they run AI. The move is designed to help organizations access advanced AI while maintaining control over data, operations and critical workloads.

As AI workloads become more specialized, Microsoft is bringing Advanced Micro Devices’ (AMD) Helios AI platform and next-generation EPYC processors to Azure. The technologies will power three upcoming Azure offerings for AI inference, data processing and chip design, giving customers more options for matching infrastructure to specific workloads.

Australia is developing a national approach to AI as it looks to equitably expand the technology’s use across the country’s economy. Microsoft is supporting that effort by backing a coordinated national framework for AI and highlighting its own investments, including $25 billion Australian dollars (about $17 billion) in new digital infrastructure and a pledge to help 3 million Australians build AI skills for the workforce by 2028.

Travel plans rarely go perfectly. To help customers navigate changes, refunds and other disruptions, Indonesian travel platform tiket.com has built AI-powered tools using Microsoft’s cloud and AI technologies. Its CRATER assistant now handles more than 75,000 customer interactions a month, while its halo tiket AI agent automates 87% of inquiries, allowing customer service teams to devote more time to complex cases. Together, the tools are helping customers get support faster when their travel plans change.

Security teams have more data than ever, but knowing what deserves attention and what to do next remains a challenge. The new Microsoft Defender Experts Threat Intelligence and expanded Defender Experts MDR services are designed to help organizations act sooner by closing the gap between threat intelligence and action. The goal is to provide expert guidance that brings clarity before threats arrive and support that follows attacks across environments.

As AI-driven phishing attacks become more effective, Microsoft is making passkeys the default sign-in method. Starting Sept. 1, Entra ID users will be prompted to register passkeys during multifactor authentication. Microsoft will retire its native SMS and voice authentication service on Feb. 1, as it pushes organizations toward phishing-resistant alternatives. Passkeys use public-key cryptography rather than shared secrets, making them more secure and easier to use, the company says.

What if your sales and service teams spent less time hunting for information and more time interacting with customers? Microsoft is expanding Microsoft 365 Copilot and Dynamics 365 with new agentic AI tools designed to bring customer context, next-step guidance and CRM updates into the flow of work. The company says the new capabilities help connect data, teams and customer interactions across workflows.

What if weather forecasts could show not just what is likely to happen, but what else might happen too? Aurora 1.5 expands Microsoft’s open-source Earth-system foundation model with more weather variables, hourly forecasts and a new ensemble forecasting capability. Developed by Microsoft Weather, the model is designed to evaluate, extend and apply weather and Earth-system intelligence in real-world settings.

Microsoft researchers have identified GigaWiper, a malware tool that gives attackers multiple ways to cause damage. First observed in 2025, it combines remote-control capabilities with tools that can wipe disks, encrypt files beyond recovery and sabotage systems. The analysis found that GigaWiper was built by stitching together pieces of at least three separate malware families, reflecting a broader shift toward more versatile and destructive cyber tools.

Microsoft’s latest sustainability report argues that the AI era demands a new balance between technological growth and environmental responsibility. The company reported matching 100% of its global electricity consumption with renewable energy and, for the first time, replenishing more water than it withdrew. Yet total emissions rose 25%, driven largely by datacenter growth. The report argues that responsible AI requires environmental stewardship, local community engagement and a more integrated approach to sustainability.

As hospitals and humanitarian groups rely more on digital systems, it can be hard to tell protected infrastructure from the rest of cyberspace. That’s why Microsoft is supporting the International Committee of the Red Cross as it advances the Digital Emblem, a machine-readable signal designed to help identify protected medical and humanitarian systems.

William Sieghart has spent years recommending poems to people based on what’s on their minds. Now, with help from Microsoft AI (MAI), he’s bringing that experience to a wider audience online through Ode Poetry. The tool asks how you’re feeling, suggests a poem that might resonate and uses MAI voice and speech models to create a conversational experience rooted in Sieghart’s approach to connecting people with poetry.

Customer expectations are changing faster than contact centers can keep up. So, Australia’s largest bank, Commonwealth Bank, partnered with Microsoft to rethink the model entirely. It meant separating intelligence from channels and using an AI orchestration agent to interpret intent and route interactions to connect customers to the right help, faster. It’s now a more intuitive, always-on experience that now supports over two million conversations a month, uplifting the customer self service experience, while empowering frontline teams with real-time AI assistance. Co-engineering like this is only possible when the customer’s AI ambition matches the technology partner’s AI ambition.

The AI Economy Institute has named a new global cohort of researchers to study how AI is changing the way companies and the broader economy work. This year’s fellows will examine how leading organizations are adopting AI and what that means for jobs, skills, productivity and economic growth. The research marks a shift from earlier studies on education and career pathways, with a goal this year to generate evidence that can help policymakers, businesses and institutions navigate a rapidly evolving AI economy.