The AI models keeps the user in the loop by providing detailed source tracking, ensuring transparency, Microsoft said.
Microsoft launched a new enterprise agentic AI platform called ‘Microsoft Discovery’ at its Build 2025 conference yesterday (19 May).
The goal is to bring AI’s power into the hands of scientists and researchers, the company said. The AI platform, built on Microsoft’s Azure, “enables researchers to collaborate with a team of specialised AI agents” to drive scientific outcomes with improved speed, scale and accuracy.
“We have architected Microsoft Discovery to be highly extensible, enabling researchers to integrate the latest Microsoft innovations with their own models, tools and datasets as well as a wide range of partner and open-source solutions.”
Discovery is built atop a graph-based knowledge engine, which allows the model to have a strong understanding of conflicting theories, diverse experimental results, and assumptions across disciplines, the tech giant claimed.
Moreover, the platform keeps the user in the loop by providing detailed source tracking and reasoning, ensuring transparency and allowing experts to validate any steps taken.
Microsoft’s AI assistant Copilot is integrated with Discovery, acting as a scientific AI assistant that “orchestrates” Discovery’s agents based on a researcher’s prompts.
According to the tech giant, its researchers used the model to discover a novel coolant prototype with “promising properties” for cooling data centres. They were able to do so in around 200 hours, the company said, a process which would have otherwise taken a much longer time.
Microsoft is working with its customer and partners, including GSK, Estée Lauder Companies, Nvidia, Accenture, Capgemini and PhysicsX, to integrate its agentic AI model into their products and services.
Just before its Build conference, Microsoft agreed to unbundle its Teams and Outlook products to avoid the wrath of the European Commission. The compromise comes following the Commission’s investigation into the company prompted by a complaint filed by rival Slack (now owned by Salesforce) in 2020.
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