Rise of Microsoft’s Open Agentic Web and why it matters to CDAOs and AI leaders
Microsoft is tackling data silos, disconnected agents, and contextless AI head-on.
Among a stack of announcements, including Copilot Studio, Microsoft Fabric, Entra, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Microsoft is building an operating system for intelligent, agentic decision-making. This is Microsoft aiming to do for enterprise AI what Windows did for personal computing: orchestrate it all.
At Build 2025, CEO Satya Nadella framed the moment clearly: “We are in the mid-innings of a major platform shift.” His message? Expect architectural transformation from the market to defining how data, logic, and action converge. And Microsoft is not alone this month in announcements where AI is not an app, but an embedded behavior in every enterprise decision.
If you’re a CDAO or analytics leader trying to decode what this means, here’s your guided tour through the most meaningful announcements—and what to ask next.
Multi-Agent Systems Are the New Platform Battleground
Microsoft is laying the foundation for a new paradigm: AI agents that coordinate, collaborate, and drive enterprise workflows autonomously.
What’s New:
- Multi-agent orchestration in Copilot Studio: agents can delegate, coordinate, and execute together.
- MCP + NLWeb: Microsoft is laying the foundation for an "agentic web" with standardized context and delegation, as well as interfaces for discovery and use.
- Entra Agent ID: Governance and identity management for agents, just like users.
Why it Matters:
- This is about composable agents, not monolithic AI apps. Microsoft wants enterprises to build ecosystems of AI that interoperate. This month saw similar announcements from hyperscalers, application platform vendors, and integration and orchestration vendors.
- MCP could become the TCP/IP of agentic systems-controlling context, state, and trust across your enterprise AI stack, including across Microsoft’s solutions. Interfaces set the boundaries of vendor solutions, so expect some wrestling for control.
- Agent identity, traceability, and lifecycle governance become core responsibilities of the CDAO. Note: While governance is both critical and a new moat for agentic platforms, it’s a complex enough subject that I’ll cover it in a separate blog.
- Raises new questions for data and analytics leaders: Who governs your data and analytics agents? Who secures them? If Microsoft owns identity, delegation, and context, is it the new Active Directory for AI.
Fabric Expanding BI to Decision-Making
Microsoft isn’t stopping at Power BI dashboards. Fabric is evolving into an execution platform that unifies your view of data, integrating operations, analytics, and AI-driven decision-making.
What’s New:
- Cosmos DB is now mirrored into Fabric (OneLake) for real-time, semi-structured data, opening up operational capabilities on top of analytic workloads.
- Digital Twin Builder brings physical-world data into AI loops.
- Power BI gets full-screen "Chat with Your Data" and data agents.
Why it Matters:
- Fabric simplifies the incorporation of real-time operational data on top of traditional analytic data, extending dashboards to decision-making platforms. Examples include Digital Twin monitoring to track manufacturing flow and e-commerce personalization that can search for unstructured concepts like “comfortable.”
- Fabric is absorbing ETL, MDM, and governance, all as SaaS. Expect data platform players to subsume and simplify the unification of simple data, even as they extend their catalog capabilities to encompass business meaning.
- Forces the question: What decisions could your ops teams automate if they had simplified, real-time access to both analytics and agents?
Agent Development is Now a Developer Discipline
What is Microsoft Build without a flurry of announcements for the developer-centric audience? Of course, Microsoft had announcements on equipping developers for a future of agent-driven logic and automation.
What’s New:
- New CLI tools, Terraform support, User Data Functions, and Windows AI Foundry, a unified platform for local AI development.
- Copilot APIs + GitHub Copilot enable agentic DevOps.
Why it Matters:
- Microsoft is reshaping its substantial developer stack for an open agent ecosystem.
- Think app store + automation layer: Enterprises need SDKs, deployment tools, and agent lifecycle management, including testing, usage metering, and trust scoring.
- GitHub Copilot becomes an entry point for agent-based engineering. Consider the “7 tickets in 7 minutes’ example given on stage. Think of a GitHub ticket flow: a new ticket is automatically picked up by an agent. Multiple agents were tasked with evaluating and developing work plans to diagnose and resolve the issue. Developers can then review, approve, or create new GitHub tickets that they can assign to an “agent peer.”
Data-to-Decision Loop Embedded in the Flow of Work
This is where AI moves from being a project to becoming a standard template for workflow design.
What’s New:
- Power BI and Copilot Studio integration.
- Enhanced semantic modeling with natural language response tuning to make data AI-ready.
- Analytics + Transactional flows (what Microsoft has named “Translytical task flows): enabling write back, trigger workflows, and act from a report.
Why it Matters:
- Microsoft leverages its ownership of the tools people use by making it easy to publish agents to multiple channels, including embedding decision-making capabilities into Excel, Teams, and PowerPoint.
- Analysts become answer engineers, providing guides for common questions and answers alongside semantic business context. Power users become low-code AI builders. Every employee gets closer to acting on insight.
- The wave of BI becoming conversational, contextual to what each user, and executable continues. This will require enabling report and dashboard builders to start acquiring new skills in semantic modeling, tuning, and trust engineering.
- The coming question for data and analytics leaders is how to architect for domains of data ownership.
Build 2025 Wrap Up
This Build wasn’t about new products—it was about a new architecture for enterprise decisioning. One where data, context, and AI agents converge in a shared, governed substrate that Satya has named the “open agentic web.
With the announcements across the industry, data and analytics leaders have a lot to parse as AI-driven decisioning redefines the enterprise stack, focusing on decision automation and intelligent execution.
I’d love to hear your take. Are these announcements aligned with where your data and AI strategy is heading? What questions do you have about how Microsoft’s analytics and agentic architecture will impact your teams, stack choices, and decisioning workflows?
🗣️ Drop a comment, challenge an assumption, or share how you're planning to engage with Fabric—I'm listening
