Microsoft says its new $30bn (£22bn) investment in the UK's AI sector - its largest outside of the US - should significantly boost Britain's economy in the next few years. Its package forms a major part of a £31billion agreement made between the UK government and various other US tech giants, including Nvidia and Google, to invest in British-based infrastructure to support AI technology, largely in the form of data centres. Microsoft will also now be involved in the creation of a powerful new supercomputer in Loughton, Essex. Speaking exclusively to the BBC Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told the BBC of the tech's potential impact on economic growth. It may happen faster, so our hope is not ten years but maybe five.

Can you imagine yourself having a conversation with Windows about what your PC is doing? Microsoft's Windows chief can, and is trying to build a future where those interactions are the norm. In an interview with Microsoft AI product manager Christiaan Brinkhoff, the chief of Microsoft's Windows Devices group, Pavan Davuluri, explained that the company is trying to work toward a future where you can access Windows pretty much anywhere via the cloud, then use AI to fine-tune what you're trying to accomplish. Microsoft described the conversation as "the next chapter of Windows," with an eye toward delivering the changes within the next few years. Davuluri described what he hoped the Windows team could accomplish from a strategic level, without targeting any future version of Windows with these goals in mind.

Microsoft, the world's second-most valuable company, is dumping enormous sums of money into its artificial intelligence efforts. At the same time, the company is earning money hand over fist. The enterprise software giant reported fiscal fourth-quarter results that exceeded expectations on Wednesday as the company races to acquire datacenters and talent, which continues to be investigated by investors. The company predicted its capital expenditure for the next fiscal year would top 100bn, a 14% increase from the year prior. It's the fifth quarter in a row that Microsoft has beaten Wall Street's expectations.

Generative'AI' isn't just useful for making bad writing and bad images, it can be used to make software code, too. In fact, Microsoft's CEO claims that up to 30 percent of the company's new code is now created with artificial intelligence. Satya Nadella made this claim at LlamaCon (around the 45:00 minute mark), Meta/Facebook's conference focusing on generative AI tools. In fact Nadella was opposite Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and controversy lightning rod, when he said as much yesterday. "Code reviews are very high," says Nadella. "In fact the agents we have for reviewing code, that usage has increased, and so I would say maybe 20, 30 percent of the code that is inside of our repos today and in some of our projects are probably all written by software." That's a pretty stunning claim, and as Tom's Hardware points out, it seems in line with similar claim from Google CEO Sundar Pichai made last year.

A pro-Palestinian protest by Microsoft employees has interrupted the company's 50th anniversary celebration, the latest backlash over the tech industry's work to supply artificial intelligence technology to the Israeli military. The protest began on Friday as Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman was presenting product updates and a long-term vision for the company's AI assistant product, Copilot, to an audience that included Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and former CEO Steve Ballmer. "Mustafa, shame on you," shouted Microsoft employee Ibtihal Aboussad as she walked towards the stage and Suleyman paused his speech. "You claim that you care about using AI for good but Microsoft sells AI weapons to the Israeli military. Fifty-thousand people have died and Microsoft powers this genocide in our region."

Major tech moguls had their claws out for each other on Wednesday, hissing at their rivals over enormous pledges to invest in AI that had been announced by Donald Trump the day before. Trump announced Stargate, a 500bn project to be funded jointly by OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank, on Tuesday. During the announcement, the president was flanked by the leaders of those companies: Sam Altman, Larry Ellison and Masayoshi Son, respectively. Son is slated to be the chair of the project. Absent from the photo op was a representative from MGX, Abu Dhabi's state AI fund, another principal investor.

Jaime Teevan joined Microsoft before it was cool again. In 2006, she was completing her doctorate in artificial intelligence at MIT. She had many options but was drawn to the company's respected, somewhat ivory-tower-ish research division. Teevan remained at Microsoft while the mother ship blundered its way through the mobile era. Then, as the calendar flipped into the 2010s, an earth-shattering tech advance emerged.

Microsoft is introducing autonomous artificial intelligence agents, or virtual employees, that can perform tasks such as handling client queries and identifying sales leads, as the tech sector strives to show investors that the AI boom can produce indispensable products. The US tech company is giving customers the ability to build their own AI agents as well as releasing 10 off-the-shelf bots that can carry out a range of roles including supply chain management and customer service. Early adopters of the Copilot Studio product, which launches next month, include the blue chip consulting firm McKinsey, which is building an agent to process new client inquiries by carrying out tasks such as scheduling follow-up meetings. Other early users include law firm Clifford Chance and retailer Pets at Home. Microsoft is flagging AI agents, which carry out tasks without human intervention, as an example of the technology's ability to increase productivity – a measure of economic efficiency, or the amount of output generated by a worker for each hour worked.

Microsoft outperformed analyst predictions in its latest quarterly earnings report, revealing on Tuesday that its revenue was up 15% year-over-year. But growth of the company's closely watched Azure cloud computing services failed to meet expectations and shares in Microsoft fell as much as 7% in after-hours trading. The company was expected to report steady growth in its fourth quarter earnings report, mostly on the back of its cloud services. Revenue from those services grew 29%, lower than the 30% to 31% that analysts predicted, resulting in a sell-off that exacerbates big tech's recent market woes. In Microsoft's earnings report, Satya Nadella, the CEO, sought to bolster confidence in the company's performance. "Our strong performance this fiscal year speaks both to our innovation and to the trust customers continue to place in Microsoft," said Nadella in the earnings statement.

Microsoft will invest 2.2bn in artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure in Malaysia to support the country's digital transformation, the tech giant has said, following similar announcements in Indonesia and Thailand. The announcement by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday includes plans to establish an AI Centre of Excellence and provide education and training to 200,000 people in the Southeast Asian country. "We are committed to supporting Malaysia's AI transformation and ensure it benefits all Malaysians," Nadella said as he visited Kuala Lumpur on the final stop of a three-nation tour of Southeast Asia. "Our investments in digital infrastructure and skilling will help Malaysian businesses, communities, and developers apply the latest technology to drive inclusive economic growth and innovation across the country." Zafrul Abdul Aziz, Malaysia's minister of investment, trade and industry, said the investment reflected a "deep partnership built on trust".