On October 7, an unusual trio stood on stage at the San Francisco event: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Pavan Davuluri, who heads Windows and Devices, and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. This was Microsoft's annual Windows and Surface event, with a clear theme—"how on-device AI will shape the next chapter of the PC." Interestingly, most of the event focused on developer tools rather than new hardware consumers can get their hands on right away.
The timing for pushing agentic AI this hard isn't exactly ideal. Copilot+ PC, the hardware strategy built around on-device compute, hasn't really landed as a market success so far—Microsoft has even started stripping some Copilot features out of Windows 11. In other words, the company is pulling back on an earlier bet while simultaneously trying to bake deeper AI capabilities into the OS core. This time, the wager is on the word "agentic."
The pressure behind this move is visible too: Meta's Muse AI agent has rapidly built up a large user base, and Perplexity's Personal Computer tool has started working its way into people's everyday routines. Microsoft doesn't want to sit out this round of the agent race for personal computing. Earlier this year it launched the agentic AI platform Project Solara, then updated the Copilot app with more automation features—and now it's going bigger.
