Thousands gathered at London’s Excel Centre to hear Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella outline the company’s enterprise AI strategy during a keynote at its AI Tour event, with a strong focus on how artificial intelligence is being embedded across Microsoft’s productivity tools and cloud stack.
Addressing attendees who made it through lengthy security queues, Nadella highlighted the opportunity to use organisational data within Microsoft 365 to build powerful knowledge applications and agentic AI workflows that operate alongside employees. He described how AI agents can act as virtual data scientists, using Agent Mode in Excel and PowerPoint to surface insights and generate new functionality.
Drawing comparisons with the rise of Excel macros in the early 1990s, Nadella said: “Excel is a great example of what happened with software development. Now, people who are using Excel can generate code using a single prompt.” He explained that users can now interact conversationally with Excel, using prompts to work with advanced models and produce AI-generated artefacts.
However, Nadella stressed that such outputs require what he called “precision augmentation”, adding: “Rather than purely looking at AI’s ability to create, it’s important that anyone who receives the AI-generated artefact understands how it works.” This transparency, he argued, improves explainability and clarifies how humans fit into AI-driven workflows.
Positioning Microsoft 365 as the foundation for enterprise AI, Nadella described the platform’s data as representing “your people”, including relationships, files, projects, calendars and communications. “This is massive information, and to have what is essentially a stateful system with AI reasoning that can then translate all of that information into what we describe as Work IQ can bootstrap any agent you build,” he said.
Nadella also highlighted Microsoft Fabric as the data layer that ingests information from Excel, Power BI and Microsoft 365 before exposing it to enterprise AI agents. He pointed to Microsoft Foundry as the company’s cloud-native platform for building agentic AI systems. “Once you have data, the next thing is a classic middle-tier application platform. Microsoft Foundry comes with frameworks for you to build agents or multi-agent systems, guardrails for AI safety and all of the run-time services that are required to build full production-ready AI systems,” he said, noting that Foundry supports 11,000 AI models.
With AI agents gaining traction in areas such as code generation, Nadella urged developers to focus on productivity gains within everyday enterprise tools. “Where we want to start is in our own everyday use of information for knowledge worker tools,” he said, adding that organisations are already building increasingly sophisticated AI applications grounded in enterprise knowledge.
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