Microsoft Build 2026: A Field Guide to the Agentic Stack MS Build

Microsoft Build 2026: A Field Guide to the Agentic Stack

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.

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

AI-Powered Intune Policy Documentation and Conflict Analysis

If you manage Microsoft Intune at scale, you know the pain: hundreds of policies, most of them with empty or outdated descriptions, and zero visibility into which settings overlap or even contradict each other across policies.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
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Azure AI Content Safety Guide: Filters and Best Practices

Azure AI Content Safety Guide: Filters and Best Practices

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.

Azure AI Content Safety dashboard with moderation categories
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Azure OCR Comparison: Mistral, GPT & Document Intelligence

Azure OCR Comparison: Mistral, GPT & Document Intelligence

Document Intelligence vs. Content Understanding vs. Mistral OCR 3 vs. GPT-5 vs. Azure Vision

Extracting data from documents is no longer just about “reading” text—it’s about intelligent understanding. Whether you’re digitizing 10,000 invoices, building a real-time app to read street signs, or preparing scientific papers for RAG pipelines, Azure offers a specialized toolkit within its Foundry ecosystem.

In this post, we’ll dive deep into performance, pricing, and capabilities of the leading OCR models in Azure—including the brand-new Mistral OCR 3 and VLM-based approaches with GPT-5.

Document OCR tools comparison with papers and AI icons
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Azure AI Search: Deploying a Powerful AI-Powered Search Engine

Azure AI Search: Build a Powerful AI Search Engine

Azure AI Search: Build a Powerful AI Search Engine is the practical goal of this article: turning enterprise content into a searchable, ranked, and AI-ready knowledge layer with Microsoft Azure AI Search.

This post is a hands-on guide to Build a Powerful AI Search Engine with Azure AI Search. From configuring the indexer to setting up semantic ranking and vector search, the workflow here is the same one I use to build production-grade AI search for real workloads.

The Azure AI search is one of the most powerful search engines at least in my experience. In times of AI and LLMs, the previously boring technology of search engines is now experiencing a new hype. In this blog post, I’ll guide you through deploying and configuring Azure AI Search, and show how it can transform your data into a highly searchable, AI-enhanced resource.

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Azure Monitor Agent to monitor Windows devices (1/2) – Setup

Azure Monitor Agent to monitor Windows devices (1/2) – Setup

In this blog post we want to have a closer look into a way to collect data from client systems to monitor them. With endpoint analytics Microsoft provides a very powerful way to analyze clients, remediate potential issues or also detect anomalies in the field. If you are interested in unaggregated and more detailed data to build custom solutions then the Log Analytics management agent is the right solution for you. This is the first part of a small series with two parts. In this part we will check how this service works and how to set it up, and in the other part how you can work with the data.

Diagram shows monitored object purpose and association.
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Detect anomalies in your Intune environment with Azure Cognitive Services – Part 3 Bluescreen of death detection

Detect anomalies in your Intune environment with Azure Cognitive Services – Part 3 Bluescreen of death detection

Welcome to the third part of my series in which I describe ways to get proactive notifications when something in your environment has a problem / error. So that this monitoring does not work with static values, I use Azure Cognitive Services (now Azure AI Services) to detect anomalies via machine learning. In this blog we will take a look at the Endpoint Analytics Startup performance bluescreen detection. Here we want to be notified when an unusual number of devices report a blue screen or problem during detection.

Detect anomalies in your Intune environment with Azure Cognitive Services – Part 3 Bluescreen of dea
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