Microsoft Unveils Major Updates at Build Conference, Nadella Emphasizes the Growing Importance of Human Qualities in the AI Era

May 20 — On Monday local time, Microsoft officially kicked off its four-day Build 2025 developer conference. Thousands of programmers, many of whom are grappling with concerns over AI taking their jobs, gathered to hear new visions from Microsoft, the company at the heart of the AI revolution.

In Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s opening keynote, the central announcement was the transformation of GitHub Copilot, the AI coding assistant, into what he described as a true "colleague" for developers. According to Microsoft, the AI assistant can now independently fix bugs, add features, and improve documentation. All developers need to do is assign tasks to it through the interface.

GitHub revealed that the assistant is capable of automatically initiating virtual machines, cloning code repositories, and analyzing codebases. During operation, it saves changes in real time and provides a summary of its logic within session logs. Once a task is completed, the assistant highlights content requiring review. Developers can leave comments, which the assistant will then process automatically.

Alongside this update, Microsoft also introduced several new features on Monday. These include model fine-tuning capabilities that allow Copilot to learn from an enterprise’s proprietary data and train models with low-code tools to build intelligent agents. Microsoft also launched what it calls an "Agent Factory," a comprehensive platform for building applications and agents, which now includes support for additional models such as Grok, Hugging Face, Meta, and Mistral.

Additionally, Microsoft introduced NLWeb, a new open-source project enabling users to interact with any website using natural language. The company referred to this as the “HTML of the agent-network era.” Another new platform, Microsoft Discovery, is designed to accelerate scientific breakthroughs using AI.

While Microsoft continues to drive the explosive development of artificial intelligence, both Nadella and the company’s Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott emphasized in an interview released Monday that AI transformation has not led to employees being replaced by automation. On the contrary, it has created a greater need for leadership rooted in core human qualities. Microsoft still plans to hire more software engineers than ever, but with a renewed focus on their human traits rather than just technical skills.

Nadella underlined this idea by saying, “You can’t just walk in and say, ‘I’m smart, I have lots of ideas, but I don’t know what to do.’ No, you need to know what to do when things are unclear and full of uncertainty. Clarity of thought becomes extremely, extremely important.”

Scott echoed this sentiment, stressing that while Microsoft is actively hiring more software engineers, the emphasis is now on who they are as people rather than their technical abilities.

He noted that the significance of being human goes far beyond the applications one writes or the coding skills one possesses. Microsoft is seeking individuals who can “think across the breadth of human history, understand how social systems work, and how groups of people act and seek interaction.”

This approach reveals Microsoft’s deeper strategic intent in the AI era — to become seamlessly integrated into the broader fabric of the times.

Nadella explained that, in the first internal memo he released after becoming CEO a decade ago, he already foresaw what he called the “era of ambient intelligence”: a future in which defining interactions like clicking, typing, and scrolling would be replaced by computing operating in the background, autonomously handling everyday tasks.

This forward-thinking vision has paid off handsomely for Microsoft’s shareholders. Over the past decade, the company’s market capitalization has grown from $300 billion to $3.4 trillion, making it the most valuable publicly traded company in the world today.

Roughly five years ago, Nadella approved Scott’s proposal to build what would become the world’s largest supercomputer, intended to train the models that ultimately led to ChatGPT. Nadella remarked, “This is the next phase. You could say we are riding the wave, making computing ubiquitous yet invisible.”

To achieve this vision, he emphasized, requires distinctly human wisdom.

“When I hire anyone to join Microsoft,” Nadella said, “I tell them, hey, listen — if you want to be cool, go to another company. If you want to make others cool, come to Microsoft.”

Scott reinforced that not being cool doesn’t mean being boring. In the age of AI, engineers will be evaluated based on the breadth of their curiosity and their creativity — qualities that clearly aren’t the current standard metrics for assessing programmers. He admitted that some of his current conversations with teams are “utterly boring.”

That’s why, according to Scott, a key message he intends to deliver at this week’s developer conference is that for various reasons, software developers have not fully leveraged the AI tools already available to them. He hopes to give everyone a gentle push to let their imaginations run free.