Though Australian workers are quickly adopting AI, many organizations aren’t redesigning work fast enough to keep up. New data from Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index suggests culture and leadership — not technology — are now the biggest barriers to AI in the workplace. The findings point to a growing gap between how employees work and how quickly leadership and operating models are evolving to support this shift.

Right now, people have to manually find and connect tools to make AI useful, then keep everything up-to-date themselves. That may work with a few tools, but it gets too complex as more companies and developers create their own. Microsoft and partners like Cisco, Google, Nvidia and others are introducing a new open standard called Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD). It creates a shared, secure way for AI tools to be published and found, so AI systems can automatically discover and use relevant capabilities.

AI is helping cyberattacks move faster and scale more easily. But even as methods evolve, stolen identity is still one of the most common entry points. Attackers don’t need to break down every defense, just to exploit the right one. Organizations are reshaping security in response, turning to more connected approaches to better prevent, detect and respond to identity threats. Read more about how Microsoft is working to end security fragmentation in the age of AI.

Microsoft and Y Combinator (YC) are expanding their partnership to give founders building on Azure access to Microsoft Foundry and the same AI infrastructure YC uses internally. The move reflects a shift in how AI startups are built, with advanced systems and computing power needed from the beginning. Through Microsoft for Startups, founders can also get credits, technical guidance and go‑to‑market support to help move their products toward enterprise use.

Doctor visits often feel rushed, with attention split between patient and screen, leaving many unheard. The problem is especially acute for women, whose symptoms are more likely to be dismissed or misdiagnosed. A new perspective from Kearney and Microsoft, part of their [w]Health initiative, suggests better care starts with listening — and that AI tools like Dragon Copilot can help give clinicians the time and space to shift more toward human connection.

Microsoft’s Copilot Cowork is now generally available worldwide, bringing AI that can take on complex, multi-step tasks from start to finish. In one example, an engineering team used Cowork to edit batch‑job spreadsheets and generate dependency flow charts after every change, automating work that had required careful manual effort. Read more on how organizations can put Copilot Cowork to work.

Microsoft rolled out its latest Surface devices Tuesday, powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 chips. The new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop deliver more than 50% faster graphics performance than the previous generation and longer battery life to keep up with everything from creative work to running local AI models. The devices are available starting today.

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.

Her neighbors thought she was a bit eccentric when she started planting blueberries in pots in rural western Türkiye, but Pinar Ünsal persisted, using her training as an engineer to focus on data-driven farming.  Today, her thriving harvest is powered by an AI-enriched app built on Microsoft Azure — delivering crop insights from real-time satellite imagery, hyperlocal weather reports and real-time data that help her grow smarter, save time and manage risk.

What happens after a malicious email lands might matter more than expected. A year of production data and real-world benchmarking from Microsoft suggests email security doesn’t stop at the inbox. The report finds that post-delivery detection and cleanup are playing a growing role, even in layered setups designed to block threats before they arrive. Read on about a shift in how protection works in practice.

Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella shares thoughts on the future of the firm in an AI-driven economy, and why every company will need to compound the loop between their human capital and token capital. Read his post.

Hiring managers have changed what they’re looking for. It’s not just about using more tools; they want people with a deeper set of uniquely human capabilities.  New Microsoft research shows how fast that shift is happening: about 70% of the skills used in most jobs are expected to change by 2030, AI literacy now appears in job listings around six times more often than a year ago, and 66% of leaders say they wouldn’t hire someone without AI skills. All of this points to an opportunity for educators to help shape the future. Read on for five new fundamentals reshaping the future of the workforce. 

AI systems are now part of everyday work, and when something goes wrong, investigators need a clearer way to understand what happened. Security teams are already digging into incidents that involve Microsoft 365 Copilot and Azure AI services, but without structure, it can be hard to piece together a coherent account. To help, Microsoft is releasing a new investigator playbook designed to help reconstruct AI-related activity using signals that are already available across the company’s security products.

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.

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.