Microsoft AI Tour Sydney – What Satya Nadella Actually Showed
I was in the room at the Microsoft AI Tour Sydney when Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft, took the stage with the Keynote, and the first thing that stood out was how little time he spent trying to sell AI. There was no attempt to prove that AI matters. That argument is already over, everyone is using it. The real question he focused on was much harder. If AI is already everywhere, why does most work still look the same? Because right now, in most companies, AI is sitting on top of existing workflows. It helps you write faster, analyze faster, summaries faster. Useful, yes. But the underlying structure of work hasn’t really changed. That is the gap this keynote kept circling back to. And the examples made it clear that something bigger is already underway. Access to data is getting significantly faster. Work that used to take weeks is being completed in days. Those gains are real, and they are already happening inside organisations. But that is not the story. What is starting to change is where AI sits in the process. It is beginning to sit inside the workflow itself and shaping how work moves from start to finish. With that in mind, everything else he covered started to connect. Let’s see how. Copilot Has Evolved Beyond Chat The way Copilot was described in the keynote makes a lot more sense if you stop thinking of it as a chat tool. Where it stands now is different again. Copilot is not tied to a single model or a single way of working, it pulls from multiple models depending on the task, routes requests based on intent, and even allows different models to work together. Things like critique and counsel modes are built around that idea. One model can generate, another can review, another can challenge or refine. That is a very different setup compared to a single AI answering a prompt. The more important change is how it behaves. It is not waiting for instructions in the same way anymore. It can take a task, break it down, move it forward, and stay involved as that task evolves. Copilot Co-work: The Biggest Change in Day-to-Day Work The Co-work demo takes this a step further. Instead of asking Copilot to do one thing at a time, the entire interaction was about assigning a set of tasks and letting it run. Not sequentially, but all at once. In the demo, it was building multiple outputs in parallel. An Excel budget based on previous data, a PowerPoint deck using a technical document, messages being sent to the team, and meetings being scheduled. All of this was happening at the same time. At the same time, control was still there. Nothing was sent or executed without review. Messages, invites, and emails could be checked before it went out. A few things define how this works in practice. Multiple tasks run in parallel instead of one after another. Work does not reset after each step, it carries forward. You can step in, adjust something, or add new instructions while everything else continues. And at any point, you can see what is done, what is in progress, and what needs input. This is exactly what Microsoft’s CEO was getting at when he said, “It feels like that time again where the way we work, the artifacts we create, the workflows that we’re involved in are fundamentally going through a sea change.” — Satya Nadella Because what this really changes is the rhythm of work. The system is building, updating, and coordinating in the background, while you step in where it actually matters. That is a very different way of working compared to how most teams operate today. Copilot Co-work has not fully rolled out yet, but based on how it was shown, this is already being introduced inside the Copilot experience. Agent Mode Inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint This was one of the bigger moments in the keynote https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2026/04/22/copilots-agentic-capabilities-in-word-excel-and-powerpoint-are-generally-available/ Agent mode is now available across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and the way it was explained made it clear that this is going to change how the tools behave. Excel is where this landed the strongest. You are still looking at the same grid, rows, columns, a pretty familiar layout. What changes is what happens inside it. Rather than manually building everything step by step, you can have the model put together an entire structure for you, then go in, inspect it, tweak it, and keep building on top of it. And it is not limited to just analysis. The model is actively shaping what you are working with, for example, adjusting logic, creating structure, and responding as the work evolves. That same pattern shows up in Word and PowerPoint. You are working alongside something that can restructure, expand, and refine as you go, not just filling in content or editing slides. The tools themselves haven’t been replaced, they still look and feel the same. But what you can do inside them is on a completely different level now. The AI Platform Stack After showing how this plays out in applications, Satya moved on to what lies beneath all of it. He broke the platform down into a few core layers, and the structure was very clear. “So you want to have access to all the models. You want to be able to have access to all of the rich context. You then want the agents to be built on top of that, using any model with all the context.” — Satya Nadella Each of these layers serves a different role. What this section really clarified is that none of the things shown earlier, Co-work, agent mode, or anything else, exist on their own. They are all built on top of this stack. And that stack is what actually defines how far this can go. Microsoft Azure Foundry Up to this point, you have seen what Copilot can do, how Co-work runs tasks, how agents show up inside tools. Foundry is the layer that sits underneath all of that. “Foundry brings all of these things together, whether it’s the agent and the multi-agent runtimes, whether it’s models, whether it’s the context layer.” — Satya Nadella Model Layer One of the more surprising details was the scale. Foundry already has over 11,000 models available,