Microsoft seeks to be AI’s center of gravity again. CEO Satya Nadella is in San Francisco to make the case

Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella proclaimed a “new paradigm” on Tuesday in a keynote at the company’s Build conference in San Francisco. He was talking about the advent of agentic AI, but for anyone who has followed Nadella’s company closely in recent years, he could have just as easily been talking about Microsoft. After taking an early lead in the AI race by forging a close alliance with Chat GPT-maker Open AI beginning in 2019, Microsoft, and Open AI, are both now playing catch-up in a heated field of rivals that include Google, Anthropic, Meta, and even SpaceX. As Nadella kicked off the company’s conference on Tuesday, the CEO delivered a message designed to show the strength and breadth of Microsoft’s AI initiatives, and to re-ignite some of the buzz the company had at the onset of the AI revolution just a few years ago. Even the choice to hold the Build event in San Francisco for the first time since 2016 seemed designed to send a message. If there was one unifying theme to the sweep of product announcements and partnerships made by company executives, it’s that Microsoft’s portfolio of technology—from AI models to devices to chips—anchors it at the center of the AI industry. “It’s a new paradigm,” Nadella said of the agentic era. Agents “reason continuously. They generate and run code dynamically. They take actions across files and devices, as well as across the network.” Nadella announced “Project Solara,” which the company pitched as a purpose-built agentic platform for devices that could include a desktop device and badge that people may wear to interact with their agents. The company also revealed a new family of home-grown AI models, including a fresh image model, coding model, and its first reasoning model. Nadella also brought Peter Steinberger, the founder of open-source agent tool OpenClaw, on stage to announce that the trendy personal AI assistant will be integrated into Windows. In addition, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang joined virt