Imagine Cup World Championship at Build pits three AI startups against each other for $100,000 and a Satya Nadella mentoring session.
“The entirety of the startup and tech world is right there for you to meet.”
Latest signals
Every signal tracked from the world's AI conferences — 4,665 talks, quotes & announcements, newest first.
Microsoft's EngThrive framework reframes developer productivity around using AI to change how engineers work, not what they build.
“how we use AI to make ourselves better, to change how we work, not what we build”
OpenMind's OM1 is an open-source, hardware-agnostic orchestration layer bringing LLM cognition to robots.
“we are building software that brings cognition to the robots”
Elastic's hosted and serverless offerings are now available on Azure across ~15 regions with single-bill procurement.
“it's available in I think about 15 different Azure regions right now and they're adding more of those regions”
Microsoft Foundry lets developers create multimodal AI agents that behave like people in a few clicks.
“Next year you're going to come and you're going to see agents that are no longer just chat bots. You're going to see agents that are like people.”
Anthropic's Claude models, including newly released Opus 4.8, are available in Microsoft Foundry for agentic coding.
“We've pretty well solved coding when you look at it from this metric's perspective.”
A .NET conference talk covers building apps that communicate with hardware using MAUI and Uno across platforms.
“they've got it to where it can run net packages or net frameworks that can run on very limited hardware it it runs everywhere”
Microsoft Fabric multi-agent workflows ground agents using three IQ knowledge layers: Work IQ, Fabric IQ, and Foundry IQ.
“So we talk a lot of it about broken chatbots right now.”
A Build demo shows responsible AI moving from principles to observable, production-ready agent engineering.
AI agents can compress the 3-9 month developer onboarding ramp by mapping codebases and surfacing hidden context.
“Three to nine months. That's how long it takes on average for a developer to become fully productive in a new codebase.”
Databricks updated Agent Bricks Knowledge Assistant for 3x faster, higher-quality search via parallel test-time scaling.
“Today we're announcing a major update that makes Agent Bricks Knowledge Assistant both faster and higher quality.”
Most developers building agents lack visibility into what their agent does under the hood; observability and evals close that gap.
“you probably don't know what your agent is actually doing under the hood”
MCP support for Power Apps is in public preview, letting M365 Copilot discover and query Power App data.
“I'm going to actually code a custom tool for you to use in the standard MCP for Power Apps.”
Microsoft announced public preview of Azure HorizonDB, a cloud-native PostgreSQL with built-in AI features for agents.
“Horizon DB is designed for this new era of AI agents. So it comes with built-in AI models, AI pipelines and AI functions.”
An MVP demos turning Azure bicep/ARM infrastructure-as-code templates into sellable Microsoft Marketplace products.
“I believe that building Azure solutions today is easy... But shipping something to customers in a way that they able to trust it and to deploy it at scale that is where it becomes challenging.”
Traditional ML remains essential alongside generative AI for low-latency, reproducible, edge-deployable use cases, supported in Microsoft Fabric.
“even though there's a more and more push for generative AI there are a lot of edge cases where traditional ML is still relevant”
NVIDIA announces Nemotron 3 Ultra, its next open model for building agents.
“Today we're announcing the Nemotron 3 ultra. Yep, our next open model. And it is smart.”
NVIDIA's OpenShell offers a zero-trust, secure-by-design runtime for running hundreds of autonomous agents at machine speed.
“Every sandbox, every environment starts completely closed down.”
Engineers at energy firm Think run autonomous, parallel multi-agent flows that break PRDs into features and tasks for AI-driven implementation.
“within 5 to 10 years 80% of the simple code will be uh done by AI”
Ollama introduces hybrid local-cloud inference and a 'launch' command to run open models in agent tools.
“Ola is really the easiest way for developers to access open models and use it with your own tools.”
NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Ultra delivers faster, more token-efficient reasoning for long-running, multi-turn AI agents.
“Single-turn chatbots are evolving into long-running agents that can reason, maintain context, use tools, and run efficiently across many turns to complete complex workflows.”
Azure Container Apps is positioned as an AI-native runtime to get agents to production in seconds.
“Gartner's predicting over over 40% of these agentic AI projects will be cancelled by 2027.”
Microsoft announces Foundry Local 1.2.0 at Build 2026, expanding on-device edge AI development across platforms.
“These updates expand platform support, improve control over inference and acceleration, add new on-device APIs, and simplify deployment across disconnected, regulated, and sovereign environments.”
Post-training open-source reasoning models with reinforcement learning keeps agent costs flat while quality improves in Foundry.
“deploying a model into production is just the beginning”