Microsoft’s AI Futurist explains how he uses Copilot — and the real-world problems enterprises are solving with agents

Microsoft used its Build 2026 conference this week to push a clear message: agents are rapidly moving into production throughout enterprise systems, and the winning platform will be the one that gives them reliable context, governance, identity, memory — and secure access to enterprise data.

The company announced Microsoft IQ as a context layer across GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio; Work IQ APIs coming June 16; Fabric IQ for structured business data; Foundry IQ for retrieval across enterprise knowledge and the live web; and Web IQ as a new agent-facing web search stack.

Microsoft also introduced Scout, a personal work agent, and a whopping seven new in-house AI models in its growing MAI family across modalities and use cases, including MAI-Thinking-1.

Those announcements sit directly in Marco Casalaina’s lane. Casalaina is Microsoft’s VP Products, Core AI and AI Futurist. He leads Microsoft’s AI Futures team and previously led teams across Azure AI,…