GeekWire is profiling over the next few weeks some of the people and teams that are shaping the evolution of Microsoft in what we’re calling its “Microsoft 2.5” era.

Just Don’t Call It an ‘Agentic OS.’ Given Microsoft’s one-pointed AI focus these days, it’s not surprising that the Windows organization is on the agentic train.

But Executive Vice President of Windows + Devices Pavan Davuluri has learned the hard way not to call Windows an agentic OS. He did so back in November 2025, via a tweet and blog post, and the customer backlash was quick and biting.

But Davuluri has not done a complete U-turn because of the criticism. Instead, he has changed how he talks about where Windows is going — which is still in an agentic direction.

“The user of Windows going forward will continue to be users … but it’s also going to add these agentic workloads,” the nearly 26-year Microsoft veteran Davuluri told GeekWire in a recent interview.

During his time at Microsoft, he’s held a variety of roles, from intern to General Manager of Surface, to Corporate Vice President of Windows Silicon & Systems Integration. He was appointed Executive Vice President of Windows + Devices in March 2026, reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella.

Windows needs to evolve to support agentic workloads through new platform capabilities that the team is building under the covers, Davuluri said. These low-level capabilities, or “primitives,” affect how Windows handles security, identity, governance, observability, and performance when it comes to building and running agents natively.

These coming changes likely will affect the Windows file system, security model, PowerShell, and other foundational components.

Microsoft already is working on Windows identity and manageability to make them better able to service agents. Windows can assign agents a local ID, or a cloud-provisioned identity backed by Entra.

And it also has an early preview of technology known as Microsoft Execution Containers, meant to help secure agents by running untrusted code in sandboxes or virtual machines. It’s these system-level areas where the team is focusing first in preparation for a human+agent future, Davuluri said, rather than the UX/UI level.

Going Back to Basics. Windows has had a lot of very different leaders over the years, with very different management styles and priorities.

For his part, Davuluri said he plans to run the Windows and Surface teams with four principles in mind: Maintaining customer obsession; treating Windows as a complete end-to-end system (“full stack”); focusing on complete user experiences and workflows rather than individual features; and building Windows openly and transparently, with clearer communication about plans and priorities.

On the heels of his promotion to EVP, Davuluri committed publicly to the much-needed goals of improving Windows quality and reliability. In a blog post, he outlined some of the requested changes that his team would be making to Windows, ranging from fixing the way the Insider test program works, to more granular improvements like allowing users to reposition the Windows task bar.

And since then, the team largely has been delivering to the surprise and delight of many long-time Windows users.

Davuluri has also been working to shift the conversation from which new features are coming to a specific build to what are the outcomes Microsoft wants to enable for specific groups of Windows users.

“There is no one single sort of ring for a billion-plus users on the platform,” Davuluri said. Windows users encompass people who use the product in a variety of different ways, so “we need to get clarity in our minds on the things that we do that lift all boats that raise the entire platform — and things that we have to go do that are specific and unique to each of our sets of users based on how they primarily or typically use the device.”

Full-Stack Thinking. Is there still a role for Microsoft as a PC maker in the coming agentic future? Not surprisingly, given his heavily hardware-focused background, Davuluri insisted there is.

When Microsoft debuted its first Surface devices in 2012, officials said the company needed to build its own hardware to create reference designs and innovative form-factor examples for other Windows PC makers.

These days, most Surfaces that ship arguably are not better, spec- or design-wise, than other PCs. But Microsoft still needs to keep a hand in hardware design to understand the full stack, Davuluri claimed.

Surface plays a key role in how Microsoft develops platform abstractions, incubates support for technologies like pen, facial-recognition, and neural-processing units that later spread across Windows, and optimizes for silicon-to-cloud, he said.

While the company’s attempt to create a distinct category of “Copilot+” AI PCs fizzled, Microsoft continues to try to find AI-centric reasons to convince customers to choose Windows devices. Davuluri and others have referred to the idea of “unmetered intelligence” to attempt to make the case for running AI models locally on PCs.

This fall, Microsoft (and other Windows PC makers) plan to roll out new PCs built on the Nvidia RTX Spark platform. The coming Surface Laptop Ultra, which will be optimized for RTX Spark, is aimed at creators, developers and AI builders, all of whom — Microsoft is hoping — will be fueling the growth of its next target user category: Agents.

GeekWire is profiling over the next few weeks some of the people and teams that are shaping the evolution of Microsoft in what we’re calling its “Microsoft 2.5” era.

From AI Frontier Lab to Frontier Ecosystem: Microsoft got a foothold in AI thanks largely to its partnership with OpenAI. But that’s not the way it is planning to continue growing its AI business.

Inside Microsoft AI (MAI), the Microsoft Superintelligence team is focused almost entirely on building its own frontier-level models. That team already has developed a handful of home-grown offerings, including MAI-Code-Flash for writing code faster; MAI-Cyber-Flash, a cybersecurity model; and MAI-Image, a model for creating images.

The head of the Superintelligence team is Ali Farhadi, corporate vice president of AI. Farhadi, who joined Microsoft five months ago, is also a professor at the University of Washington, where he has worked for nearly 15 years. He was previously CEO of the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and before that was an AI and machine learning leader at Apple for more than three years, after it acquired his startup, Xnor.ai.

When he joined Microsoft, Farhadi said in a LinkedIn post that he believed “Microsoft has all the pieces to win in this AI race: data, search, coding, infrastructure, agents, software and the world’s biggest Fortune 500 companies taking dependencies on Microsoft every day.”

Farhadi elaborated on that in an interview with GeekWire this week. AI is shifting from a “Frontier Lab” era to a “Frontier Ecosystem” era, he said. It’s no longer just about training models; it’s about integrating the models with enterprise data, platforms, distribution systems and customers in a trusted way.

The next battlegrounds in AI will be around cost, reliability, specialization, and deployment at scale, rather than simply building larger models that beat others in benchmark scores, he said.

“If you look around, there are not that many places to have all these missing pieces together at scale, especially if you add the element of trust to it,” Farhadi said.

Cutting through the AI noise: Farhadi said his management philosophy is grounded in the importance of personal relationships, which are especially key in big organizations. People need to understand your rationale and to trust you can deliver on what you’re tasked to do, he said — an approach that has served him inside both Microsoft and Apple.

Staying on top of the flow of information while filtering out the AI noise makes prioritizing crucial. The team has “a long list of things that we believe we should be doing,” he said, but much of it stays on the back burner to maintain a “laser focus on delivering on the main mission.”

The priority is building high-quality models, both generalist and domain-specific. On the domain-specific front, Microsoft is working with the Mayo Clinic on a healthcare-specific model based on Mayo’s own clinical data, as well as Microsoft’s cybersecurity and coding models.

The thinking: For a lot of enterprise work, a narrower model beats a bigger one.

“If you can do something at [the same] quality or better quality at a fraction of a cost, it’s just a no-brainer. And having a way to specialize to domains, to industries, to enterprises is one way,” he said.

Microsoft execs have referred to this approach as a “hill-climbing machine,” meaning the ability of a model to scale and continuously improve within a specific domain. Microsoft is coupling the hill-climbing with “frontier tuning,” like it is doing with the Mayo Clinic. Frontier tuning includes customizing frontier models; keeping proprietary data private, preserving institutional know-how; and avoiding leaking intellectual property (IP) into shared models.

“We all thought that IP is your data,” Farhadi said. “But we learned that IP is also how you work.” And that’s why safeguarding these elements is so crucial.

Open all the things? Farhadi led an expansion of open-source AI development at Ai2, the Seattle-based institute founded in 2014 by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. While Microsoft has contributed to the open-source community on various fronts, including AI tooling, it hasn’t open-sourced its frontier models.

Farhadi said he personally remains “a big advocate of open source,” but noted that the industry has changed since his Ai2 days as there are now more credible Western open-source models and businesses forming around them.

He didn’t rule out Microsoft doing something in open-source models, or the somewhat less-open “open weights” area, but there’s seemingly nothing happening on that front in the near term.

In the coming months and beyond, the focus of Farhadi’s team is helping Microsoft turn into a Frontier Ecosystem by building cutting-edge AI capabilities; helping enterprises create their own tuned versions of them; continuously improving models; and making sure customers keep control of their own destinies and data.

Success for Microsoft’s Superintelligence team has nothing to do with the idea of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which OpenAI, Anthropic and others have positioned as their ultimate goal over the years. In fact, when I asked Farhadi about AGI, he said, “I don’t understand what that means.”

Don’t worry, Ali. You’re not the only one.

GeekWire is profiling over the next few weeks some of the people and teams that are shaping the evolution of Microsoft in what we’re calling its “Microsoft 2.5” era.

The Copilot Super App cat is only partially out of the bag. Sometime in the coming weeks, Microsoft will launch its entry into the AI “super app” space, company officials have said. But Microsoft hasn’t talked much about what the coming Copilot Super App will include beyond a few of the top-level experiences that are meant to unify and organize consumer and business users’ access to key Microsoft AI properties.

Executive Vice President Charles Lamanna is part of the inner circle known as the Copilot Leadership Team that is spearheading the Super App effort. He also oversees building out and securing the back-end services that will power the Copilot Super App.

As head of Copilot, Agents, and Platform, Lamanna has a lot of responsibility for someone who has been with Microsoft for “only” 13.5 years. He has actually been with the company a bit longer than that, as he has done three tours at Microsoft: He first interned for Windows Live OneCare, then returned in 2009 to work on message-filtering services. He rejoined Microsoft when it bought his cloud performance-management startup MetricsHub Inc. in 2013. He worked as an engineering manager on Azure, then ran the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 teams, before assuming his current role in March 2026.

Lamanna says he emphasizes three things with his team: Be customer-obsessed; get things done by having a “total ownership mindset”; and be kind, not jerks.

Every six months, he writes a “State of the Business” paper for the team, in which he outlines their priorities. In addition to focusing on changing how people work — from tooling, technology, budgeting and organization perspectives — he emphasizes the importance of keeping “the crown jewels” of Office and Microsoft 365 up, reliable and secure.

“There’s going to be a massive surge of demand on the back end (Microsoft 365) because of agents. They’re nonstop,” said Lamanna during GeekWire‘s interview with him this week.

While the Super App itself will likely be free (like the Copilot App today), the services it exposes will likely not. The company has been moving toward usage-based pricing with its AI products, the way it already has with GitHub Copilot and Microsoft 365 Cowork. That kind of model makes sense for the company in a world where always-on agents, not the number of users, drive a lot of the demand.

He also said his team needs to be at the frontier for AI products. “We need to have AI startup and lab characteristics but with Microsoft sensibilities,” he said.

Lamanna made a similar case publicly this week, asserting in a LinkedIn post that “the most important thing my team will do this year won’t be any single product or feature we ship” but rather changing how the team works.

Reining in the Copilot-Palooza. Despite the rise of agents and all things “agentic,” Copilot is still Microsoft’s top priority, Lamanna said. Microsoft’s goal is for Copilot to be a truly personal AI assistant that will know how you work, the apps you use, the processes and workflows that matter to you, and more.

“We had some missteps because we fragmented,” he acknowledged. “It’s like we had a consumer Copilot and we have like a commercial Copilot and we have GitHub Copilot and yeah — ‘Copilot Palooza’ is what I call it internally.”

This is where the coming Copilot Super App fits in. Microsoft wants it to be a single destination that brings the key Copilots together on the work and home fronts.

He said to think of the Super App “almost like a browser or an operating system.” In the same way a browser might have a bunch of different tabs, or Windows a bunch of different apps, the Super App will be the home for Code, Chat, Cowork and Autopilots, or always-on agents. Microsoft is expecting that users still will go directly to apps when needed, but it’s working to make Copilot the first app people boot into and live in, similar to the way many do today with Outlook or Teams, he said.

Microsoft’s goal is to wire into the Super App even more of its core franchises over time. Dynamics 365, its CRM and ERP offerings, are morphing into a set of agents that connect to Dynamics Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, which connect AI models to back-end data. The plan is to integrate those Dynamics agents into the Super App.

The company also is in the midst of integrating the Dataverse storage and management platform that underlies its Power Platform and Dynamics directly with Copilot. That capability, in testing now, would give users a more streamlined way to query data stored in their ERP and CRM systems from inside Copilot.

Rethinking the ‘headless’ approach. With Microsoft looking to make the Super App its new front-end user experience, what happens to Office? Its competitors like Salesforce and SAP are moving toward the idea of a “headless” approach, meaning customers would access the backend CRM or Commerce data via agents, rather than traditional desktop apps.

Lamanna said he’s not a fan of the “headless” term, as it implies “it’s dumb.” He also said you can’t simply connect an AI model to a programming interface built 10 years ago without working through how to optimize for cost, performance, and retrieval.

He said the Microsoft IQ suite of intelligence layers is the key here. Work IQ analyzes emails, chats, meetings and usage patterns and preferences so Copilot and agents can make context-aware suggestions. Fabric IQ is a similar layer for Microsoft’s data platform.

Work IQ is becoming like the headless version of Microsoft 365, Lamanna said. That means users can get to their email, docs, and files without having to use applications like SharePoint or Outlook in between. Work IQ becomes a kind of in-the-background version of Microsoft 365, and the Super App automatically invokes whichever IQ/service/backend is needed.

“Copilot can navigate to these IQs as needed. For email, go to Work IQ. Info inside Dynamics 365, go to the MCP servers that it publishes. Data from Salesforce or ServiceNow, we have connectors. But you stay in the Super App,” Lamanna explained.

If Microsoft is no longer the Windows company or the Office company, what is it going to be when it grows up?

“We want to be the Copilot company,” said Lamanna without hesitation. “Copilot with the Super App is the front door to basically everything, from Dynamics, to GitHub, to Exchange, to SharePoint, to OneDrive, to other services I don’t even remember.”

Alongside that, Microsoft will continue to be an infrastructure company, he added, focusing on tokens, compute and storage.

“Those are probably the two most interesting businesses in technology for the next 10 years.”