Across marketing organizations, a familiar tension is emerging around AI: if everyone is using the same tools, will everything begin to sound the same? In a new blog post, Tracie Westby, who leads integrated marketing for Commercial Cloud and AI at Microsoft, says the answer has less to do with the technology itself and more to do with how it’s applied.

Westby sees AI less as a disruptor and more as a mirror that reflects the clarity — or ambiguity — behind the work, and the leadership guiding it. More immediately, she says, AI is removing friction from creative tasks, giving teams more space to focus on ideas.

Read more here on why she says creativity isn’t being replaced but rather reshaped and even strengthened in the era of AI.

Graduating university students booing AI during commencement addresses should be a “wake-up call for the tech sector,” Brad Smith, Microsoft vice chair and president, writes in a new post.

Smith returned to his alma mater, Princeton University, over Memorial Day weekend, where he saw firsthand how students are thinking about AI. They recognize the technology’s benefits but “want to keep AI in its proper place,” he writes.

“They want the future to be determined by humans deciding the role of machines, not by machines deciding the role of humans,” he writes.

Read on for more on why Smith believes AI will be shaped by people, especially the next generation entering the workforce.

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.

Cancer treatment has gotten more precise over time, as doctors first classified the disease by where it began in the body and, more recently, by the mutations found inside cancer cells to help find the right drugs to treat it.

But why can two people with seemingly similar cancers respond so differently to the same medication? Microsoft researcher Lorin Crawford thinks the answer lies in how tumors actually behave, not just how they’re categorized.

Scammers are using increasing interest in AI to trick people online. Microsoft Security reports that in recent months, cyber attackers have been impersonating popular AI tools to lure people in via phishing, fake ads and search engine optimization-driven attacks that ultimately defraud users or infect their systems with malware. For a look at four of the biggest scams Microsoft’s uncovered and what the company is doing to stop them, read more here.

XBOX’s 2026 Games Showcase highlighted a mix of new titles, hardware and ideas, while also giving a nod to its past. Marking 25 years, the company introduced a limited-edition Series X25 console and controller inspired by the original XBOX. It also confirmed Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution as console exclusives and shared updates across major franchises and characters. Read on for all the news and announcements from the showcase here.

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.

The convergence of AI and biology has both enormous promise and consequential risks. As AI systems become more capable and widely accessible, they can lower barriers – both for beneficial scientific discovery, but also for misuse. In a new post, Eric Horvitz, Microsoft’s chief scientific officer, writes that the challenge isn’t just one model or tool: it’s the growing mix of capabilities — like general AI models, design tools, lab automation, and systems that coordinate them — and how they work together and build on each other. To really understand both the benefits and the risks, Horvitz says, one must look at the whole system.

Microsoft is rolling out a new family of seven AI models developed in-house that will form a multimodal ecosystem that is designed to work across all kinds of tasks in the real world – from image to voice, coding and reasoning. The new models and a superintelligence lab were announced at Microsoft Build, the company’s annual developer conference in San Francisco earlier this week. Read more about how it will all work here.

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.

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.

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.

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.