November 2025

Not so long ago, when generative AI took the world by storm, it was introduced to many of us as a standalone app sitting pertly on our screen, both a marvel and a novelty.

Today, AI is infused into almost every aspect of work and life.

This was abundantly clear at Microsoft Ignite, our flagship annual conference for IT professionals and partners earlier this month.

Get ready for AI to become even more ubiquitous.

Along with a slate of announcements, including a multi-billion-dollar new strategic partnership with Anthropic and Nvidia, Microsoft leaders laid out the new ecosystem of AI.

We are creating AI tools and solutions to drive the next generation of digital transformation at every level of work, turning organizations into Frontier Firms. These include AI agents to automate work tasks involved in everything from answering emails to discovering medicines.

Some of the major announcements at this year’s Ignite include:

• Work IQ. An intelligence layer that enables Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents to know how you work, with whom you work and the content you collaborate on. It connects to the rich company knowledge in your emails, files, meetings and chats. It allows Copilot to unlock insights and predict the next best action based directly on your data, not a patchwork of third-party connectors. You can tap into the expertise of Work IQ with APIs to build agents tuned to your workflow and business needs.
• Fabric IQ. People on the frontlines are closest to work challenges and can create AI agents to help them in their day-to-day work. Fabric IQ brings together analytical, time series and location-based data in one shared model to give you a live, connected view of your business, so both people and AI can act in real time. If you are already using Power BI for your business intelligence reporting, all of that pre-existing data modeling work will act as an immediate accelerant.
• Foundry IQ. A knowledge system designed to ground AI agents over multiple data sources – including Microsoft 365 (Work IQ), Fabric IQ, custom applications and the web. This single endpoint for knowledge has routing and intelligence built in, enabling higher-quality reasoning, safer actions and more value for builders.
• Microsoft Agent Factory. A program that brings these agent IQ layers together to help organizations build agents. With a single metered plan, customers can start building with IQ using Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio. They can deploy their agents anywhere, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, with no upfront licensing and provisioning required.
• Microsoft Agent 365. It enables you to observe, manage and secure your AI agents, whether the agents are created with Microsoft platforms, open-source frameworks or third-party platforms.

“AI is not something that you can just plop on the end of a finished product, like a cherry on top of a sundae,” wrote Chief Communications Officer Frank X. Shaw on the Official Microsoft Blog. “Instead, using AI responsibly and wisely means thinking through how it can be used most effectively at every layer, from the datacenter that powers AI functionality to the people and organizations that are benefiting from its capabilities.”

For more on the expanding AI ecosystem and other Ignite announcements, explore the event’s comprehensive Book of News.

A head start in housing

Kamini bought her first home in her early 50s, after decades of cycling through subsidized housing, evictions and homelessness.

She adores her two-bedroom apartment in a leafy Sydney suburb. It has a coveted bathtub and is near parks and public transit. Her home ownership was made possible by Head Start Homes, an Australian nonprofit that helps people transition from subsidized housing to home ownership by acting as a loan guarantor and financial coach.

Head Start Homes was started in 2017 by Stephen Woodlands, an attorney who worked in banking. As a child, Woodlands stayed in shelters and subsidized housing – called social housing in Australia – and witnessed his mother struggle to save enough for a down payment on a home.

The organization, which uses Microsoft 365 Copilot streamline operations, has helped 32 individuals and families buy their own homes. Not only do these new owners gain stability and build wealth, they free up subsidized housing for someone else who needs it.

For Kamini, her new home is more than a refuge, it’s empowerment. “Now I’m the author of my own life,” she says.

Meet your new assistant

Looking for a research assistant to help prep for meetings, brainstorm ideas or create a big report?

That’s what Researcher, a new AI agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot, is designed to do. You tell it what you need, and it uses deep reasoning capabilities to scour your emails, meeting notes and work documents, plus other information like news articles, to produce a comprehensive report in minutes.

Researcher is one of several AI agents, or tools for automated tasks, available in Copilot Chat for users with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses.

You can use Researcher to prepare for a sales pitch, prompting it to summarize your chain of emails, chats and meeting notes with the customer and combine those with industry news and financial filings to produce insights for your pitch.

Researcher can also help you prepare for a board presentation, compare investment strategies, explore markets for new products or help resolve customer complaints. Think of it as a power boost for your time-consuming tasks.

Microsoft at AFROTECH

AFROTECH is the largest conference for Black technology professionals and innovators in the U.S., and Microsoft showed up in a big way.

The five-day conference in Houston at the end of October featured The House of Black TechXcellence, where entrepreneurs, creatives and budding tech leaders experienced programming rooted in creativity, culture and community.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, filmmaker Isaac Yowman and Topicals skincare founder and CEO Olamide Olowe were among the speakers at the space. In Suleyman’s fireside chat with Jeff Nelson, co-founder of media group Blavity Inc., he talked about the risk and reward of AI, and how AI can unlock abundance given the right guardrails.

Want to stay on top of the latest AI and technology news each day? Check out Signal blog. No technobabble or corporate-speak — just quick, easy-to-read bites of what you need to know now, plus tips and insights that actually matter for your work, life and the world.