Microsoft Build 2026 runs May 19 to 22 at the Seattle Convention Center and the Hyatt Regency Seattle. The keynote agenda is published. Satya Nadella delivers the opening keynote Tuesday morning May 19 at 8:30 AM Pacific. Kevin Scott, Microsoft chief technology officer, follows with the platform keynote Tuesday afternoon. Mustafa Suleyman, head of Microsoft AI, speaks Wednesday morning. Scott Guthrie, head of cloud and AI, anchors the Wednesday afternoon developer track. Registration crossed 6,400 in person and 87,000 virtual based on Microsoft data shared April 22.
Copilot Studio is the lead expected announcement. Microsoft seeded the agent platform across Build 2025 and shipped the general availability of the multi-agent orchestrator in February 2026. The Build 2026 update is expected to cover deeper Microsoft 365 integration, expanded model choice including Anthropic Claude and OpenAI GPT-5, agent-to-agent protocol support, and reduction in token consumption costs by 25 to 35 percent. Reuters reported April 24 that Copilot Studio crossed 230,000 enterprise developers in February, up from 47,000 in March 2025.
Azure AI Foundry pricing is the second focus. Foundry was the unified developer surface launched at Ignite 2024 and consolidated at Ignite 2025. The platform combines Azure OpenAI Service, Phi family models, and partner models including Mistral, Meta Llama, and Cohere. Microsoft is expected to publish reserved instance pricing for inference workloads, three-year commitments at 38 to 47 percent discounts, and a free tier for evaluation work. Azure revenue grew 37 percent year over year in the third fiscal quarter reported Wednesday afternoon, with AI services contributing approximately 21 points of that growth.
.NET 10 general availability is on the keynote slide. The release reaches GA at Build with Long Term Support out of the box. Performance gains over .NET 9 hit 14 to 22 percent on web workloads in Microsoft internal benchmarks. ASP.NET Core gets the new minimal APIs improvements. Blazor United combines server-side and client-side rendering with a single project structure. C# 14 lands alongside the runtime release. Microsoft engineering published .NET adoption data showing 9.4 million monthly active developers worldwide.
SQL Server 2026 is the database announcement. Microsoft confirmed the release on the Data and Analytics blog April 14. The release adds vector search built on the diskANN algorithm, native JSON type support, and 47 query optimizer improvements. SQL Server 2026 also lands with Microsoft Fabric integration that enables querying SQL Server tables from OneLake without data movement. Pricing remains aligned with the SQL Server 2022 model. Customers running SQL Server 2014 face mainstream support end July 9 with the upgrade path now clear.
GitHub Copilot will land its workspace mode general availability at Build. Workspace lets developers describe a feature, see a plan generated by Copilot, edit the plan, and execute changes across multiple files. The capability has been in preview since November 2025. GitHub Copilot crossed 12 million paid users in February per Microsoft second quarter earnings. Pricing tiers will adjust with workspace included in Copilot Enterprise at $39 per user per month and as an add-on for Copilot Business at $10 per user per month.
Windows on ARM continues to advance. The Snapdragon X Elite second generation chip from Qualcomm shipped in late 2025 to Surface devices and partner OEMs. Build sessions on Windows ML, Phi-Silica on-device models, and ARM-native Office optimization will run Wednesday afternoon. Microsoft estimated 31 percent of new Windows commercial PCs shipped in the first quarter were ARM-based, up from 8 percent a year ago. Apple Silicon comparison benchmarks will be inevitable in conference coverage.
Power Platform updates focus on the Power Apps coding agent that lets business analysts describe applications in natural language and have Copilot Studio generate working canvas apps with Dataverse tables, security roles, and basic flows. The agent has been in invite-only preview. General availability lands at Build with monthly active maker target of 4.2 million for fiscal year 2027. Power BI gets a new visual library and a Fabric-integrated semantic model authoring experience.
For Wesley Insider readers building businesses on Microsoft surfaces, the practical takeaway is that the cost of building AI features is falling fast. Token prices have dropped 84 percent over 18 months. Copilot Studio sits below most rival agent platforms on per-message economics. Azure AI Foundry reserved pricing will lower the floor again. Build 2026 will land enough announcements to give small teams without an AI engineering function a credible path to deploy a working agent in a single sprint. The session catalog opens for registered attendees Monday May 5.