Satya Nadella announced Microsoft will introduce CoreAI, an engineering division focusing on building AI apps and agents. (Image Credit: Microsoft)
Microsoft is launching CoreAI—Platform and Tools, a new engineering team to develop AI apps and agents for the company and its customers. Jay Parikh, ex-Meta engineering chief, leads this division, which will receive feedback from Scott Guthrie on cloud and AI, Mustafa Suleyman on Copilot AI initiatives, chief technology officer Kevin Scott, and executive vice president of security Charlie Bell.
Microsoft plans to develop "agentic applications with memory, entitlements, and action space" that inherit powerful model capabilities. The tech giant will also adapt these capabilities for improved performance and safety across roles, business processes, and industry domains. Additionally, the company's development, deployment, and maintenance of code for AI applications will change, becoming agentic.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, laid out his vision, suggesting, "We’re entering the next innings of this AI platform shift. 2025 will be about model-forward applications that reshape all application categories.” He thinks AI will impact each application stack layer. “It’s akin to GUI, internet servers, and cloud-native databases all being introduced into the app stack simultaneously. Thirty years of change is being compressed into three years!”
Before starting, Microsoft will deploy an “AI-first app stack” that includes new UI/UX patterns, runtimes to build with agents, orchestrate multiple agents, and a refined management and observability layer. “In this world, Azure must become the infrastructure for AI while we build our AI platform and developer tools — spanning Azure AI Foundry, GitHub, and VS Code — on top of it. In other words, our AI platform and tools will come together to create agents, and these agents will come together to change every SaaS application category, and building custom applications will be driven by software (i.e., “service as software”),” said Nadella.
Microsoft says it has worked on this project for over two years, learning more about the systems, app platform, and tools for the AI era. “This new division will bring together Dev Div, AI Platform, and some key teams from the Office of the CTO (AI Supercomputer, AI Agentic Runtimes, and Engineering Thrive), with the mission to build the end-to-end Copilot & AI stack for both our first-party and third-party customers to build and run AI apps and agents. This group will also build out GitHub Copilot, thus having a tight feedback loop between the leading AI-first product and the AI platform to motivate the stack and its roadmap,” says Nadella.
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