Microsoft Build 2026 Kicks Off Today: Follow Along for Copilot AI News and More (Live)

2 weeks ago 11

We're on the ground in San Francisco for Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's keynote address. Here's what's happening.

June 2, 2026 7:20 a.m. PT

Microsoft Build 2026 kicks off on Tuesday, June 2.

Microsoft/Jeffrey Hazelwood/CNET

It's software conference season, and this week, it's Microsoft's turn. At Microsoft Build 2026, the company is expected to unveil a slate of new updates to its many software products, including Copilot and Windows.

CEO Satya Nadella is kicking off the event on Tuesday. While conferences like Microsoft Build are primarily aimed at developers, there are often a lot of announcements that affect anyone who uses those developers' products. In Microsoft's case, that's a lot of us. Undoubtedly, there will be news about AI. Microsoft plans to transform its AI, named Copilot, from merely a chatbot to "async coworkers that can execute long-running tasks across key domains," Nadella said in an earnings call last week.

Our CNET team is on the ground in San Francisco to cover the event live. Follow along as we track every major announcement.

How to watch the Microsoft Build keynote

You can follow along with all the AI news by tuning into the YouTube livestream here. You can also tune into the CNET livestream and talk with us in the chat as the event goes on. Nadella's keynote is expected to begin at 9:30 a.m. PT (12:30 p.m. ET, 5:30 p.m. BST) on Tuesday, June 2.

Ahead of Apple's WWDC conference next week, Microsoft has nothing to lose

By Patrick Holland

Microsoft Build kicks off just days before Apple holds its own developer conference, WWDC 2026. The two companies have been intertwined since the 1980s and yet, in 2026, they couldn't be more different. Microsoft still makes Windows, but its pursuit of AI with Copilot seems to take top billing as of late. Apple is a very successful hardware and software company that's trying to find its footing in AI and appears to be well behind Microsoft and others. Today's Build keynote doesn't even concern Apple -- it's more Google, OpenAI and Anthropic that Microsoft should be worried about.

While Apple has had a lot of success with its wait-and-see approach to new categories, Apple Intelligence hasn't made much of a splash. Apple seems stuck in terms of AI -- albeit in the context of a very successful product, software and services business. This year's WWDC will also be significant because it will be the last major event with Tim Cook as Apple's CEO.

We've already seen some big hardware news

By Jon Reed

We expect to hear a lot about software today. This is, after all, a developer conference. But all that software has to run on something, and we got a glimpse of some interesting new hardware the other day at the Computex trade show in Taiwan.

Nvidia announced a new Arm-based system-on-a-chip platform for Windows, the RTX Spark, which Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said is "reinventing the personal computer."

The lineup, expected to ship this fall, includes laptops from Microsoft, Dell, Asus, HP, Lenovo and MSI along with mini desktops.

The key thing is that these are computers built specifically to handle on-device AI tasks, especially inference, which is when a model actually does its "thinking" to get things done. That'll be done on a laptop platform built for agents, which are AI bots that can perform tasks independently. So keep that in mind as you hear the word "agent" many more times today.

What Microsoft has to prove after Google I/O

By Patrick Holland

gemini presentation by josh woodward at google i/o 2026 event

Tuesday's kickoff for Microsoft Build comes on the heels of Google I/O, which was filled with Gemini expansions into agentic AI. Google previewed new versions of Gemini: Gemini 3.5 Flash, Gemini Spark and a tease for Gemini 3.5 Pro.

There were also Gemini-powered features shown off in Maps, YouTube and Google Docs that support verbal prompts that are more natural, rambling or, as Google CEO Sundar Pichai described it, "a verbal brain dump." We saw the debut of Gemini Omni, a hyperrealistic video generation tool that can also augment real videos of people, all from verbal prompts.

Google set the bar pretty high for Microsoft. It will be interesting to see how far along Copilot AI is compared to Google's announcements and whether we'll see new features that match it. Though how wild would it be for Microsoft to announce Copilot-powered smartglasses to rival the Android XR specs that Google showed off at I/O!

Microsoft CTO: Making AI more usable

By Corinne Reichert

Speaking on Monday night at a Build event, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said one of the difficulties with new AI tools is "how do we figure out how to make these capabilities more valuable" so that people will actually use them.

"Pure human psychology ... is throttling things," Scott said.

In other words, people need proof that this new way of doing things is better than the way they're used to. That's particularly so when it comes to agentic AI, which he said requires a lot of trust.

"We need to think really quite hard about what does it mean to build trustworthy software," Scott said, adding that not until people trust the software will they hand over control of their devices to an autonomous assistant.

And last, he said that creating a tool with artificial intelligence doesn't automatically make it useful.

"Just because you are using AI to create a lot of activity does not necessarily mean the activity you're creating is valuable," he said, referencing a "meme chat app" he created solely to irritate his children.

We're on the ground in San Francisco

By Corinne Reichert

CNET's Faith Chihil and Corinne Reichert have arrived at Microsoft Build 2026, having collected their badges from the media registration area the night before the keynote kicks off the conference.

Wait, what is Microsoft Build?

By Katelyn Chedraoui

There's no shame in asking the question -- what is Microsoft Build, anyway? The technical answer is that it's Microsoft's annual developer conference, where the tech giant shares updates and other progress reports on its software products. The more interesting answer is that's all we know for sure.

Developer conferences are opportunities for companies to tease new projects, show off experimental tools and introduce us to the next generation of the company. In recent years, Microsoft's Build conferences been all about AI, so we expect to hear a lot about Copilot today.

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