Microsoft

Microsoft Ignite 2026 is scheduled for November 17–20 at Moscone Center in San Francisco, with an online digital experience focused on AI, cloud and enterprise technology.

Microsoft closed with an estimated public equity market capitalization of $3.809 trillion based on its Nasdaq-listed MSFT shares.

Microsoft makes Fabric IQ grounding generally available in Copilot Chat and Cowork, connecting governed Power BI business context to AI workflows.

Microsoft launches Copilot Managed Runtime in preview as governed hosting infrastructure for Copilot-created apps and automations.

Microsoft introduces Cowork for delegating complex end-to-end work and returning completed deliverables for iteration.

Microsoft introduces Autopilot, formerly Scout, as a persistent agent that proactively performs recurring and long-running work.

Microsoft introduces Home as Copilot's unified starting experience combining Chat, Cowork and editable Office documents.

Microsoft introduces Copilot Code for creating sandboxed applications, dashboards, automations and workflows through natural language.

Microsoft makes MAI-Image-2.6 and its Flash variant available in public preview through Microsoft Foundry.

Microsoft AI launches MAI-Transcribe-2 with automatic language identification and high-speed transcription across 60 languages.

Microsoft AI announces MAI-Image-2.6 with major benchmark improvements in generation and image editing.

Microsoft AI announces MAI-Voice-2 Flash as a lower-cost, ultra-efficient speech-generation variant.

Microsoft AI launches MAI-Voice-2 with natural multilingual speech generation and safeguarded short-sample voice adaptation.

Microsoft AI launches MAI-Transcribe-1.5 with high-speed transcription and support for domain terminology across 43 languages.

Microsoft AI launches a lower-cost, latency-optimized Flash variant of MAI-Image-2.5.

Microsoft AI launches MAI-Image-2.5 for high-fidelity text-to-image generation and controllable image editing.

Microsoft AI launches MAI-Code-1-Flash, an efficient agentic coding model integrated into GitHub Copilot and VS Code.

Microsoft AI launches MAI-Thinking-1, its flagship in-house reasoning model for complex instructions, mathematics and coding.

Microsoft AI introduces Frontier Tuning, using reinforcement-learning environments to adapt MAI models to organization-specific workflows.

Microsoft introduces Agent 365 as the trust, management and observability layer for enterprise AI agents.

Microsoft IQ becomes generally available across GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio as an enterprise context layer for agents.

Microsoft introduces an integrated enterprise agent platform spanning GitHub, Foundry, Microsoft IQ, Copilot Studio, security and governance.

OpenAI and Microsoft announce the next phase of their partnership with amended commercial terms.

Microsoft makes MAI-Voice-1 available to developers in Microsoft Foundry with custom-voice support and safety controls.

Microsoft AI launches MAI-Image-2 for faster, higher-quality image generation in Copilot and Microsoft Foundry.

Microsoft AI launches MAI-Transcribe-1 for high-speed multilingual speech-to-text through Microsoft Foundry.

Microsoft and NVIDIA expand integration across Foundry agents, Azure AI infrastructure, NVIDIA accelerators and physical-AI workflows.

Microsoft Research releases Phi-4 Reasoning Vision, a 15-billion-parameter open-weight multimodal reasoning model.

Microsoft and Anthropic expand their partnership, bringing Claude models to Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Microsoft AI announces MAI-Image-1, its first image-generation model developed entirely in-house.

Microsoft introduces the open-source Microsoft Agent Framework, unifying agent-development concepts from Semantic Kernel and AutoGen.

Microsoft AI releases MAI-Voice-1, its first in-house expressive speech-generation model, through Copilot experiences.

Microsoft AI begins public testing of MAI-1 Preview, its first end-to-end internally trained foundation model.

GitHub opens Spark to public preview for building and deploying full-stack applications from natural-language prompts.

Microsoft releases Phi-4 Mini Flash Reasoning for fast reasoning on edge, mobile and real-time systems.

Microsoft introduces Discovery, an agentic AI platform for scientific research and industrial R&D.

Microsoft launches NLWeb, an open MCP-compatible project for adding conversational and agent-accessible interfaces to websites.

Microsoft introduces Copilot Tuning for adapting models and agents to organization-specific data, workflows and expertise.

Microsoft launches Windows AI Foundry as a unified platform for the local and cloud AI developer lifecycle on Windows.

Microsoft makes Azure AI Foundry Agent Service generally available with multi-agent orchestration and open-protocol support.

GitHub launches an asynchronous Copilot coding agent that works in an isolated environment and opens pull requests for review.

Microsoft releases Phi-4 Mini Reasoning for efficient step-by-step mathematical reasoning on constrained hardware.

Microsoft releases Phi-4 Reasoning Plus, adding reinforcement learning for stronger and longer reasoning traces.

Microsoft releases Phi-4 Reasoning, a 14-billion-parameter model trained for complex multistep math, science and coding tasks.

Microsoft begins rolling out its Wave 2 spring release with Researcher, Analyst, Agent Store, richer creation and expanded enterprise search.

Microsoft updates Copilot with personalization through Memory, task execution through Actions, Deep Research and expanded Vision capabilities.

Microsoft announces Analyst, a Microsoft 365 Copilot reasoning agent for data analysis, modeling and report creation.

Microsoft announces Researcher and Analyst as reasoning agents for multistep research and data analysis in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Microsoft introduces Dragon Copilot, combining ambient clinical documentation, dictation and healthcare workflow assistance.

Microsoft releases Phi-4 Multimodal, a 5.6-billion-parameter model jointly processing speech, vision and text.

Microsoft releases Phi-4 Mini, a compact long-context language model with multilingual and function-calling capabilities.

Microsoft Research and Xbox introduce Muse, a generative world and action model trained on gameplay sequences.

Microsoft and OpenAI update their partnership structure while preserving Microsoft rights to OpenAI intellectual property and Azure API exclusivity.

Microsoft Research publishes MatterGen, a generative model that designs stable inorganic materials conditioned on target properties.

Microsoft launches Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat with web-grounded AI chat, work-data access and support for agents.

Microsoft forms CoreAI – Platform and Tools under Jay Parikh, combining developer, AI platform, supercomputing and agent-runtime teams.

Microsoft says it is on track to invest approximately $80 billion during fiscal 2025 in AI-enabled datacenters for training models and deploying AI applications.

Microsoft releases Phi-4, a 14-billion-parameter small language model specializing in complex reasoning.

Microsoft begins previewing Copilot Vision, allowing Copilot to discuss and assist with shared browsing content.

Microsoft Research introduces BioEmu for efficiently sampling diverse protein conformational ensembles.

Microsoft begins releasing Recall to Windows Insiders on supported Copilot+ PCs after redesigning security and privacy controls.

Microsoft launches Azure AI Agent Service in preview for building and managing enterprise AI agents.

Microsoft introduces Azure AI Foundry as a unified platform for developing, evaluating, deploying and governing AI applications and agents.

GitHub introduces Spark, an AI-native tool for building application experiences from natural language.

Microsoft, BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners and MGX form an investment partnership to mobilize capital for AI datacenters and supporting energy infrastructure.

Microsoft releases Phi-3.5 Vision for multimodal image and text understanding.

Microsoft releases Phi-3.5 MoE, a mixture-of-experts small language model.

Microsoft releases Phi-3.5 Mini with multilingual support and a long context window.

GitHub launches Models in beta, letting developers compare and experiment with multiple AI models inside GitHub.

Microsoft Designer exits preview as a standalone app and expands generative design capabilities across Microsoft products.

The first Copilot+ PCs become generally available from Microsoft and hardware partners.

Microsoft releases Florence-2, a unified prompt-based vision model for captioning, grounding, detection and segmentation.

Microsoft changes Recall from broad Copilot+ PC availability to a Windows Insider preview while strengthening security and privacy protections.

Microsoft introduces Phi-3 Vision, a 4.2-billion-parameter multimodal model for image, chart, graph and table reasoning.

Microsoft expands Phi-3 with 7B Small and 14B Medium open models.

Microsoft releases Phi-3 Medium for higher-capability small-model workloads.

Microsoft Research introduces Aurora, a foundation model for weather and atmospheric forecasting across multiple environmental domains.

Microsoft introduces Phi Silica, an on-device small language model optimized for Windows neural processing units.

Microsoft announces Recall, an on-device searchable visual history for Copilot+ PCs with user privacy controls.

Microsoft introduces Copilot+ PCs with neural processing units and a new generation of on-device AI experiences.

GitHub opens a technical preview of Copilot Workspace, an agentic environment for moving from issues to plans and implementations.

Microsoft releases Phi-3 Mini, a 3.8-billion-parameter model designed for capable language and reasoning on constrained devices.

Microsoft invests $1.5 billion in G42 and expands a strategic partnership covering Azure, responsible AI, infrastructure and emerging-market deployments.

Security Copilot becomes generally available with integrations across Microsoft's security portfolio.

Microsoft enters an AI licensing arrangement with Inflection and hires Mustafa Suleyman, Karén Simonyan and members of the Inflection team to build Microsoft AI.

Microsoft forms the Microsoft AI organization focused on Copilot and consumer AI, appointing Mustafa Suleyman as EVP and CEO and Karén Simonyan as Chief Scientist.

Microsoft and NVIDIA expand integrations across Azure AI, NVIDIA NIM, Omniverse and enterprise generative-AI infrastructure.

GitHub launches Copilot Enterprise with codebase-aware assistance and GitHub.com integration.

Microsoft announces a multiyear partnership and €15 million investment in Mistral AI, bringing its models to Azure AI.

Microsoft releases Phi-2, a 2.7-billion-parameter small language model with strong reasoning and language performance.

Microsoft Copilot becomes generally available with commercial data protection for eligible users.

Microsoft Research releases Orca 2 in 7B and 13B sizes, training smaller models to use different reasoning strategies.

Microsoft introduces Maia 100, its first custom AI accelerator for Azure training and inference workloads.

Microsoft introduces Copilot for Azure to help customers design, operate and troubleshoot cloud infrastructure using natural language.

Microsoft launches Copilot Studio as the low-code platform for customizing Microsoft Copilot and building standalone copilots.

Microsoft renames Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise to Microsoft Copilot and expands commercial data protection.

Microsoft 365 Copilot becomes generally available to enterprise customers across productivity applications and Microsoft 365 Chat.

Microsoft makes Azure AI Content Safety generally available for detecting harmful content in text and images.

Microsoft Research releases AutoGen, a framework for building applications with conversing and collaborating AI agents.

Microsoft and Nuance introduce DAX Copilot, combining ambient clinical intelligence with generative AI for automated documentation.

Microsoft begins rolling out Copilot in Windows as part of a Windows 11 feature update.

Microsoft announces a unified Microsoft Copilot experience across Windows, web, Edge and Microsoft 365.

Microsoft Research releases Phi-1.5, a compact language model trained primarily on synthetic textbook-quality data.

Microsoft, Anthropic, Google and OpenAI establish the Frontier Model Forum to advance frontier-AI safety research, standards and responsible development.

Microsoft launches Bing Chat Enterprise with commercial data protection and announces Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing.

Microsoft Research introduces Phi-1, showing that curated textbook-quality data can produce strong code and reasoning performance in a compact model.

Microsoft Research introduces Kosmos-2, linking generated language to object regions in images through grounding.

Microsoft Research introduces Orca, a 13-billion-parameter model trained from rich explanation traces produced by larger models.

Microsoft announces a common plugin model spanning ChatGPT, Bing, Dynamics 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Microsoft introduces Security Copilot, a generative-AI assistant for security investigation, threat intelligence and response.

GitHub introduces Copilot X, including conversational Copilot Chat experiences across editors, pull requests and command-line workflows.

Microsoft launches Bing Image Creator, integrating generative image creation into Bing chat and the Edge sidebar.

Microsoft introduces Microsoft 365 Copilot and Business Chat, combining large language models with Microsoft Graph and productivity applications.

Microsoft introduces Dynamics 365 Copilot across sales, service, marketing, supply chain and business workflows.

Microsoft Research introduces Kosmos-1, a multimodal large language model capable of perceiving visual inputs and following language instructions.

Microsoft releases Semantic Kernel to help developers integrate language models, plugins, memory and planning into applications.

Microsoft launches a new AI-powered Bing and Edge with conversational search, synthesized answers and content generation.

Microsoft announces a multiyear, multibillion-dollar extension of its OpenAI partnership covering supercomputing, model deployment and Azure commercialization.

Microsoft makes Azure OpenAI Service generally available with enterprise access to OpenAI models through Azure.

Microsoft announces Designer, an AI-powered graphic-design application using generative image technology.

Microsoft publishes the second version of its Responsible AI Standard and supporting transparency materials.

GitHub Copilot becomes generally available to individual developers as a subscription product.

Microsoft releases the Responsible AI Dashboard, combining fairness, interpretability, error analysis and causal tools in one interface.

Microsoft completes its acquisition of Nuance, adding clinical speech recognition, ambient intelligence and conversational AI to its portfolio.

Microsoft releases DeBERTa V3 with replaced-token detection and gradient-disentangled embedding sharing.

Microsoft introduces Azure OpenAI Service, providing managed access to OpenAI models through Azure's enterprise cloud controls.

GitHub launches Copilot in technical preview as an AI pair programmer that suggests code inside the editor.

Microsoft agrees to acquire Nuance Communications for $19.7 billion including net debt, expanding its healthcare and conversational-AI capabilities.

Microsoft spins Xiaoice into an independent company while retaining an investment interest.

Microsoft Research introduces DeBERTa, improving Transformer language models with disentangled attention and enhanced mask decoding.

Microsoft open-sources DeepSpeed with the ZeRO optimizer to reduce the compute and memory cost of large-model training.

Microsoft introduces Turing-NLG, a 17-billion-parameter generative language model and, at the time, the largest published language model.

Microsoft organizes Project Turing to develop large language models shared across Bing, Office, Dynamics and Azure.

Microsoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI and becomes its exclusive cloud partner for new Azure AI supercomputing technologies.

Microsoft open-sources InterpretML for training interpretable models and explaining black-box predictions.

Microsoft open-sources ONNX Runtime as a cross-platform high-performance inference engine.

Microsoft agrees to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock, bringing the developer platform that later launched GitHub Copilot into Microsoft.

Microsoft acquires conversational-AI startup Semantic Machines to advance more natural, context-aware dialogue systems.

Microsoft releases the first public preview of ML.NET, bringing cross-platform machine learning to .NET developers.

Microsoft researchers introduce Fairlearn to assess and mitigate unfairness in machine-learning systems.

Microsoft and Facebook introduce the Open Neural Network Exchange format to improve model interoperability across AI frameworks.

Microsoft introduces Project Brainwave, an FPGA-based architecture for real-time deep-learning inference in cloud and edge systems.

Microsoft launches Seeing AI, an accessibility application that narrates people, text, products and surroundings for blind and low-vision users.

Microsoft creates the AI and Research Group, combining research, information-platform and AI product teams under Harry Shum.

Microsoft launches Cognitive Services APIs for adding vision, speech, language, knowledge and search capabilities to applications.

Microsoft takes the Tay social chatbot offline after coordinated abuse caused it to produce offensive content, prompting a public review of safeguards and social-AI deployment.

Microsoft releases its Computational Network Toolkit under an open-source license for deep neural-network training.

Microsoft makes Azure Machine Learning generally available as a cloud platform for creating and deploying predictive models.

Microsoft launches Xiaoice, a social conversational AI designed for long-term, emotionally engaging interactions.

Microsoft introduces Cortana as a personal digital assistant for Windows Phone, later expanding it across Windows and Microsoft 365.

Microsoft establishes Microsoft Research to pursue long-term computer-science research, including speech, vision, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Microsoft completes its initial public offering on Nasdaq, establishing the public-company lineage represented by MSFT.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen found Microsoft, beginning the company that would later build a broad AI research, cloud and product portfolio.