Microsoft Build 2026 starts today: Live updates on Copilot AI and developer tools

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

Microsoft Build kicks off just days before Apple hosts its own developers conference, WWDC 2026. The two companies have been linked 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 be taking the top spot lately. Apple is a very successful hardware and software company that is trying to find its place in AI and appears to be well behind Microsoft and others. Today’s Build talk isn’t even about Apple: it’s rather Google, OpenAI and Anthropic that should worry Microsoft.

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 products, software and services business. This year’s WWDC will also be important because it will be the last major event with Tim Cook as Apple CEO.

We expect to hear a lot about software today. This is, after all, a developers 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 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, scheduled to ship this fall, includes laptops from Microsoft, Dell, Asus, HP, Lenovo and MSI as well as desktop minicomputers.

The bottom line is that these are computers specifically designed to handle on-device AI tasks, particularly inference, which is when a model actually “thinks” to make things happen. This will be done on a wearable platform designed for agents, which are AI robots capable of performing tasks independently. So keep that in mind when you hear the word “agent” many times today.

Tuesday’s kickoff for Microsoft Build follows Google I/O, which was packed with Gemini expansions in agentic AI. Google previewed the new versions of Gemini: Gemini 3.5 Flash, Gemini Spark and a teaser for Gemini 3.5 Pro.

Speaking at a Build event Monday evening, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said one of the challenges with new AI tools is “how to figure out how to make these capabilities more useful” so that people will actually use them.

“Pure human psychology…stifles things,” Scott said.

In other words, people need proof that this new way of doing things is better than what they are used to. This is especially true when it comes to agentic AI, which he says requires a lot of trust.

“We need to think hard about what it means to build trustworthy software,” Scott said, adding that only when people trust the software will they hand over control of their devices to an autonomous assistant.

Finally, he said that creating a tool with artificial intelligence does not automatically make it useful.

“Just because you use AI to create a lot of activity doesn’t mean the activity you create has value,” he said, referring to a “meme chat app” he created solely to irritate his children.

CNET’s Faith Chihil and Corinne Reichert arrived at Microsoft Build 2026, having collected their badges in the media registration area the day before the conference kicked off.

There’s no shame in asking the question: What is Microsoft Build, anyway? The technical answer is that it is 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 this is all we know for sure.

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