Jannik Reinhard - Microsoft Intune & AI Insights

AI Models in 2026: What I Would Actually Pick

15. June 202615. June 2026 jannikreinhardLeave a comment

Almost every week someone asks me the same question: “Which AI model should we use?” I work not in a research lab, so I look at these models the way most of you do — from the outside, with a budget, a compliance team, and real data I am not allowed to leak. In this blog post I go through the latest AI models in June 2026 and sort them by price, capability and use case. I also do something most comparison posts skip: I look at what this means for European companies and data sovereignty. At the end I tell you plainly what I would choose.

A short warning first: this is the fastest moving topic I have ever written about. Almost every model below was released between April and June 2026. So treat this as a snapshot, not a law. The way of thinking will last longer than the model names.

Foundry Local: Run AI Models Offline on Your Mac

14. June 202614. June 2026 jannikreinhardLeave a comment

In this blog post I explain how to run AI models completely offline on a Mac with Microsoft Foundry Local. No Azure subscription, no API key, no internet connection. Everything runs on your own device.

I made a short video that walks through the whole thing. If you prefer watching over reading, here it is:

The rest of this post is the written version, so you can copy the commands and follow along.

Intune Advanced Analytics: How It Compares to Other Tools

13. June 202615. June 2026 jannikreinhardLeave a comment

In this blog post I want to look at Microsoft Intune Advanced Analytics and compare it, in plain words, to the other analytics tools that are out there. This is the topic I know well. Before I started writing blogs and running my own company, I spent years as the tech lead for AIOps in a large enterprise. Part of my job was to evaluate analytics and digital employee experience (DEX) platforms — Nexthink, Aternity, HP’s analytics solution and several more. So this is not a marketing piece. It is what I learned from running these tools at scale, and where I think Microsoft’s approach is genuinely different.

Here is my honest summary up front: most of these platforms cook with water. They are mature and capable, but they largely solve the same problems in the same way. The hard part was never the dashboard — it was building a business case that survived a second look, because every one of them came with its own agent, its own data store, its own portal and its own license. That is exactly the cost that Microsoft Intune Advanced Analytics removes.

Worth knowing before you read on: From July 1, 2026, Microsoft Intune Advanced Analytics is included in Microsoft 365 E3 and Microsoft 365 E5 as part of Microsoft Intune Plan 2. The separate add-on that used to cost around 10 USD per user per month is now part of the plan. Many teams already own this and don’t know it yet.
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Microsoft Build 2026: A Field Guide to the Agentic Stack

8. June 202613. June 2026 jannikreinhardLeave a comment

If you have sat through a Microsoft keynote more than once, you know the pattern: a wall of product names, a couple of demos that feel like magic, and then weeks of work figuring out what is actually shipping versus what is a sizzle reel. Build 2026 (San Francisco, June 2–3) was the most agent-dense keynote Microsoft has ever given — seven in-house models, a whole context layer, a brand-new category of agent, a containment story that reaches from silicon to cloud, and a concept for hardware that runs agents instead of apps.

This post is the map I wish I’d had on the morning of June 2. I’ll walk every major announcement, explain each one the way I’d explain it to a colleague (not the way the press release phrases it), and — because that’s the job most of us actually have — call out what it means for whoever has to deploy, govern and secure this stuff. It is a round-up, not a feature comparison, and I’ll flag clearly what is generally available, what is preview, and what is still just a slide.

My New Setup: Why the Oakywood Standing Desk Pro Has Actually Made Me More Productive

5. June 20265. June 2026 jannikreinhardLeave a comment

A quick note up front: Oakywood provided the desk and accessories as part of a content partnership. Everything you read here is still 100% my own experience. I’ve been using this setup daily for several weeks.

I’ll be honest: I spend a huge portion of my life at a desk. Coding sessions for Frontier Engine, slide decks for conferences, podcast recordings, writing on this blog,… all of it happens on a surface of roughly 1.4 by 0.7 meters. My old desk was functional, but at some point it hit me: the piece of furniture I spend 70+ hours a week at probably deserves to be more than just “functional.”

That’s where Oakywood came in.

My New Setup: Why the Oakywood Standing Desk Pro Has Actually Made Me More Productive IMG 6485

Skills, MCP, CLI, Computer Use: Mapping the AI Tooling Surface in 2026

15. May 20264. June 2026 jannikreinhardLeave a comment

If you have built more than one AI tool in the past twelve months, you have noticed the same thing I have: the surface area of “how a model talks to systems” has exploded. Skills, MCP servers, CLI tools, Computer Use, function calling, declarative agents, custom engine agents, apps, actions, extensions, gems — every vendor uses a slightly different word for what looks like the same thing on a marketing slide. They are not the same thing. The trade-offs are real, the choice changes architecture, and picking the wrong one wastes weeks.

This post is the mental model I now apply by default when I sit down to build something agentic. It is opinionated. It is not a feature comparison. The goal is to help you decide which surface to reach for first, not to memorise the spec of each one.

I’ll cover seven surfaces (the original five, plus two that are too important to skip in 2026), map them across Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google terminology, and give you the decision tree I actually use.

Skills, MCP, CLI, Computer Use: Mapping the AI Tooling Surface in 2026 image 2

MICROSOFT 365 AGENTS EXPLAINED: WHA AGENTS 365 MEANS

Microsoft Agent 365 vs. Microsoft 365 Agents: A Field Guide for IT and Architects

5. May 20264. June 2026 jannikreinhardLeave a comment

Microsoft Agent 365 vs. Microsoft 365 Agents is the field guide distinction for IT teams and architects: one term describes governed agent operations, while the other describes the agents users build and run inside Microsoft 365 experiences.

If you’ve spent the last twelve months in the Microsoft AI ecosystem, you’ve watched the same pattern repeat: every announcement reframes the same thing under a slightly different banner. Copilot. Copilot Studio. Microsoft Foundry. Microsoft Agent Framework. Declarative agents. Custom engine agents. And now, two terms that sound almost identical but mean very different things Microsoft 365 Agents and Microsoft Agent 365.

I keep seeing them used interchangeably, including in serious technical posts. They are not interchangeable. With Agent 365 hitting general availability on May 1, 2026, getting this distinction right is no longer a pedantry exercise it’s a procurement, governance, and architecture decision.

This post is the version I would have wanted before I started building.

Microsoft 365 Agents: declarative agents, custom engine agents, and Agent Builder in the Microsoft Copilot host

Intune Policy Manager AI-powered policy descriptions and conflict analysis dashboard.

AI-Powered Intune Policy Documentation and Conflict Analysis

28. March 20264. June 2026 jannikreinhardLeave a comment

If you manage Microsoft Intune at scale, you know the pain: hundreds of policies, most of them with empty or outdated descriptions, and zero visibility into which settings overlap or even contradict each other across policies. I’ve seen this in pretty much every tenant I’ve worked with and honestly, it’s one of the most underestimated operational risks in modern endpoint management.

So I built a tool to fix it. It builds on the same idea I explored in Create your own Intune Co Pilot using Azure OpenAi Studio, but takes it further with policy documentation and conflict analysis. Let me walk you through it.

Intune policy management tool showing conflict analysis dashboard

CLI Tools vs MCP: Better AI Agents With Less Context

22. February 20264. June 2026 jannikreinhard1 Comment

Let’s be honest: MCP (Model Context Protocol) was supposed to be the universal connector between AI models and the real world. A clean, structured protocol that lets your AI agent talk to any tool through a standardized interface. Sounds great in theory. In practice? I’m increasingly reaching for good old CLI tools instead — and I’m not alone.

After months of building AI agent solutions and working with both approaches in real-world enterprise scenarios, here’s my take: CLI tools are the better choice in many cases, and the reason is surprisingly simple — context efficiency.

Terminal window showing AI agent command line tools

Azure AI Content Safety Guide: Filters and Best Practices

18. February 20264. June 2026 jannikreinhard

Azure AI Content Safety is Microsoft’s AI-powered service for detecting harmful content in both user-generated and AI-generated text and images. It runs as the built-in content filtering system for all Azure OpenAI and Foundry model deployments, screening both prompts and completions through an ensemble of classification models. The service is available as a standalone API and is deeply integrated into the Microsoft Foundry portal. It went through major expansion, adding prompt injection defense, hallucination detection, copyright protection, and PII filtering alongside its core harm-category classifiers.

In my opinion, Microsoft did a great job with this service.