Microsoft reportedly laid out a vision for AI agents from different companies to work together through open standards, as it prepares to host its Build 2025 developer conference.
Speaking at the company’s Redmond headquarters, CTO Kevin Scott said the company’s focus is on driving industry-wide standards to enable collaboration between AI agents built by different vendors, Reuters reported.
Agents are AI-powered systems designed to carry out tasks independently, such as identifying and resolving software bugs.
To this end, Scott revealed that Microsoft is supporting the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source framework from Google-backed AI company Anthropic aimed at enabling communication and integration between AI models. According to the executive, MCP has the potential to enable AI agents to collaborate across products and platforms.
Scott pitched MCP as a key step toward building what he called the “agentic web”, comparing it to how early internet standards powered the growth of the internet. “It means that your imagination gets to drive what the agentic web becomes, not just a handful of companies that happen to see some of these problems first,” he noted.
The CTO also addressed limitations in current AI systems, noting most interactions today are short-lived and “very transactional”. However, meeting this challenge by boosting AI recall and memory retention from past interactions typically demands more computing power.
As a result, Scott revealed that Microsoft is working on enhancing memory in AI agents using an approach dubbed ‘structured retrieval augmentation’, which captures and organises key snippets from past conversations rather than storing entire interactions, reducing the need for expensive full-memory processing.
The updates comes as Microsoft kicks off its Build developer conference in Seattle today (May 19). According to Reuters, the event is expected to focus heavily on the company’s AI ambitions as it seeks to turn large-scale investments in services like Copilot into profitable tools for enterprise and cloud customers.