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Ahead of Build 2025, Microsoft Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Kevin Scott has unveiled the company’s vision for a future where artificial intelligence agents can collaborate across organizations and remember past user interactions more effectively. The announcement sets the stage for Microsoft’s annual developer conference, which takes place on May 19 in Seattle.
Speaking at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Scott highlighted the company’s efforts to standardize how AI agents—specialized software tools that perform tasks like fixing bugs—interact with each other. As part of the lead-up to Microsoft Build 2025, he emphasized Microsoft’s commitment to open technologies that would enable AI systems developed by different companies to work together seamlessly.
Scott revealed that Microsoft is backing the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source standard introduced by Anthropic, a Google-backed AI company. He described MCP as a foundation for an “agentic web,” likening its potential to how hypertext protocols fueled the spread of the internet in the 1990s. “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,” Scott said.
Improving AI Agents for Memory Retention
Another key element of Microsoft’s AI roadmap ahead of Microsoft Build 2025 is improving how agents retain memory. Currently, most AI interactions are transactional, with agents unable to recall past conversations meaningfully. Scott explained that Microsoft is working on a method called structured retrieval augmentation, where AI agents extract brief, essential pieces from each user interaction to form a memory map of prior discussions.
He noted that while stronger memory systems require significant computing power, this approach mimics how biological brains operate—recalling relevant information without overwhelming processing. “This is a core part of how you train a biological brain—you don’t brute force everything in your head every time you need to solve a particular problem,” he added.
With these advancements, Microsoft is positioning itself at the forefront of AI development, setting a forward-looking tone for Microsoft Build 2025.
