Embracing frontier R&D with Microsoft Discovery | DEM315
Microsoft Discovery applies agentic AI to autonomously run the R&D cycle, mirroring AI's takeover of software development.
“We're flipping from AI assisting work to AI performing work.”
At Microsoft Build, the Microsoft Discovery team argued that agentic AI has crossed a threshold from assisting to autonomously performing work, and is bringing that shift to scientific R&D across chemistry, drug discovery, physics, and silicon design. They frame R&D's reason-hypothesize-experiment loop as analogous to software's design-implement-test cycle, which agents have already transformed 'almost overnight.'