Microsoft Technology Briefing - January 2026

Vill du ligga steget före i den snabba teknikutvecklingen? Missa inte chansen att ta del av de allra senaste nyheterna inom Copilot och agenter! Vi har nöjet att bjuda in dig till detta webinar som fokuserar på de senaste nyheterna inom agenter.

Are you ready to build real AI solutions and tackle challenges hands-on? Join us for a practical, hands-on hackathon focused on Predictive Maintenance for Manufacturing companies. You’ll work through real-world challenges, collaborate with peers, and learn from Microsoft specialists. Location: Microsoft Office, Regeringsgatan 25 Läs mer om Microsoft Agentic AI Hack...

Det här webbinariet fokuserar på hur vi går från silos till säkerhet och hur Microsoft Sentinel driver framtidens cyberförsvar.

Join the Agentic AI & DevOps Days roadshow - an exclusive, hands-on technical event for Builders & Innovators across EMEA. Dive deep into the latest advancements in agentic AI, DevOps automation, and the Azure AI platform. Experience live demos, real-world use cases, and hands-on labs designed to empower you to build, deploy, and scale intelligent solutions. Location: Microsoft Office, Regeringsgatan 25 Läs mer om Microsoft Agentic AI...

Join us for an exclusive, in-person event ”Innovate with AI agents ” designed to help enterprise business leaders and technical teams transform their workflows using AI. Learn how to build custom Copilot agents, and unlock scalable innovation with Microsoft 365 Copilot. Location: Microsoft Office, Regeringsgatan 25 Läs mer om Innovate with AI Agents...

Vill du ligga steget före inför årets första Release Wave? I det här webinaret guidar vi dig genom de viktigaste nyheterna och trenderna i kommande Dynamics 365 och Power Platform Release Wave 1, så att du kan planera smartare, prioritera rätt och maximera värdet av dina investeringar.

Join us for this free, one-day event and learn how to become a frontier leader in AI. Gain expert insight from Microsoft leaders, alongside other innovators driving real change. Discover how you can enrich employee experiences, reinvent customer engagement, and reshape business processes with the latest AI technology. Avicii Arena, Globentorget 2, Stockholm.

Join us for this free, one-day event and learn how to become a frontier leader in AI. Gain expert insight from Microsoft leaders, alongside other innovators driving real change. Discover how you can enrich employee experiences, reinvent customer engagement, and reshape business processes with the latest AI technology. Registrations open soon.

Discover key strategies and leadership insights to help government agencies protect sensitive data and strengthen overall cybersecurity resilience.

Why securing AI agents at runtime is essential as attackers find new ways to exploit generative orchestration.

Discover how Ford, Icertis, and TriNet modernized security with Microsoft—embedding Zero Trust, automating defenses, and enabling secure AI innovation at scale.

Microsoft Defender Researchers uncovered a multi‑stage AiTM phishing and business email compromise (BEC) campaign targeting multiple organizations in the energy sector.

AI agents are transforming how organizations operate, but their autonomy also expands the attack surface.

Discover four key identity and access priorities for the new year to strengthen your organization's identity security baseline.

Microsoft is honored to be named a Leader in the 2025–2026 IDC MarketScape for Unified AI Governance Platforms, highlighting our commitment to making AI innovation safe, responsible, and enterprise-ready.

Microsoft’s investigation into RedVDS services and infrastructure uncovered a global network of disparate cybercriminals purchasing and using to target multiple sectors. In collaboration with law enforcement agencies worldwide, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) recently facilitated a disruption of RedVDS infrastructure and related operations.

Learn how Microsoft unites privacy and security through advanced tools and global compliance to protect data and build trust.

The new proactive services from Microsoft Incident Response turn security uncertainty into readiness with expert‑led preparation and advanced intelligence.

We’re launching Evals for Agent Interop, a starter evaluation kit that provides curated scenarios and representative data that emulate real digital work, and an evaluation harness that organizations can use to self-run their agents across Microsoft 365 surfaces.

If you build agents with the Copilot Studio extension for Visual Studio Code, you already know the fastest way to iterate is to treat your agent like software: version it, review changes, and promote it through environments with confidence. Today, the Microsoft Copilot Studio extension for Visual Studio Code is generally available, so you can...

We’ve put together something special just for students—a limited time offer that helps you study smarter, stand out in your job search, and turn your ambitions into reality.

At Microsoft, we empower organizations to achieve more through intelligent communication, inclusive collaboration, and connected workplace experiences. Our customers are looking for scaled, widespread access to powerful tools that enable workforces to interact and communicate with more intelligence and precision. To facilitate that, we’re announcing Teams licensing...

The pace of change for retail organizations has never been faster. To meet the rising bar, store associates need quick access to accurate information, centralized communication, and AI-powered tools integrated directly into their daily flow of work. Retail teams are ready for frontline tools that meet the moment. We’re excited to share new agentive innovations that empower frontline workers...

As 2025 comes to a close, I want to thank you all for being part of the Microsoft Tech community! Your suggestions and feedback have been incredibly impactful as we’ve continued working toward our goal of making Teams smarter, more secure, and easier to use. In 2026, you can look forward to new ways to collaborate and do more, with Teams as the platform...

Research Drop in Brief: Employees want to meaningfully shape AI transformation, yet 34% still lack opportunities to give feedback on their AI experience. High frequency AI users are more likely than low frequency AI users to report regular requests for input, suggesting that listening and adoption positively reinforce each other. AI feedback is social: Informal conversation and team meetings are the most utilized feedback channels across industries, making them critical early-signal channels...

Organizational Data in Microsoft 365 is a robust platform that streamlines how admins and data custodians bring HR data into Microsoft 365, Copilot, and Viva. With a single, secure ingestion point, Organizational Data in Microsoft 365 validates data integrity, enables access to shared data services, and governs data usage — empowering organizations to unlock business-critical scenarios with confidence.

New Year’s is all about fresh starts—and this year, nothing offers more potential than AI. So, make a resolution that will transform both your personal and professional life: learn to use AI effectively. Just as regular exercise strengthens your body, making AI a daily habit will transform how you work - unlocking new opportunities and giving you more time to focus on what matters most. The key is consistency: make it a habit to ask, “ How can AI help me with this? ” each day.

Note: This playbook is designed for Microsoft partners operating within the AI Business Solutions commercial solution area to support their customers with the adoption journey of Microsoft 365 Copilot. The Copilot Readiness Challenge Microsoft 365 Copilot represents a transformative shift in workplace productivity. However, organizations face a significant hurdle before deployment: verifying that their security, compliance, and governance infrastructure is ready for AI.

EPAM is a global engineering consulting organization with a deep technical foundation and a culture that embraces innovation. The organization was among the first in Europe to provision Copilot licenses through Microsoft’s Early Access Program, taking a proactive approach to AI enablement. EPAM’s commitment to AI fluency and Copilot adoption is driven by both internal innovation and client demand as a Microsoft partner .

Managing app security and compliance in Microsoft Teams just got easier! With recent updates in Teams Admin Center (TAC) , IT admins can now quickly identify trusted apps and enforce organizational standards with confidence. These enhancements not only simplify governance but also underscore the value of Microsoft 365 Certification as a key trust driver. What Existed in TAC?

Retail frontier firms don’t just digitize commerce, they operationalize intelligence.

Earlier this year, we launched Agent Academy: Recruit, a foundational learning path designed to help makers and developers get started with building agents in Copilot Studio. The response exceeded our expectations. Since launch, thousands of learners have worked through the Recruit curriculum, and through the Global AI Community we’ve issued 500+ badges to people who...

2025 was a pivotal year in Azure Storage, and we’re heading into 2026 with a clear focus on helping customers turn AI into real impact.

Organizations deploying workloads on Kubernetes often need a consistent way to enforce pod security configurations across clusters. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) now supports Pod Security Standards within Deployment Safeguards, enabling centralized manag...

StandardV2 SKU NAT Gateway is now generally available, delivering enhanced resiliency, greater performance, and dual-stack connectivity, all at the same price as the Standard SKU. StandardV2 Public IP addresses and prefixes are also generally available.

Reporting capabilities are now live in Playwright Workspaces. The latest update brings you an integrated, flexible and collaborative reporting experience designed to make debugging tests in Playwright Workspaces easier, faster and more efficient. Customer...

Azure Load Testing capability in Azure App Testing is now generally available in Switzerland North. Customers can now use Azure Load Testing, a fully managed load-testing service to generate high scale load and run simulations, easily identify performance...

The functionality of application volume group for Oracle has been expanded with the ability to create data protection volumes in a volume group with the same anti-affinity layout as production volume groups. Customers benefit from this ability for creatin...

Azure File Sync enables seamless tiering of data from on-premises Windows Servers to Azure Files for hybrid use cases and simplified migration. It also enables you to leverage the performance, flexibility and compatibility of your on-premises File Server...

Customers upgrading AKS clusters often need a clear and flexible path to adopt new OS versions without disrupting workloads. Ubuntu 24.04 is now generally available on AKS starting with Kubernetes version 1.32, with containerd 2.0 enabled by default. It...

Ubuntu 24.04 is now generally available on AKS in Kubernetes version 1.32 and above. Containerd 2.0 is enabled by default. Ubuntu 24.04 is default with `Ubuntu` OS Sku in kubernetes version 1.35 and above. There are two ways that Ubuntu 24.04 can be enabl...

The new cloud-native apps on Kubernetes pricing calculator scenario allows teams to estimate the total cost of ownership for a production-ready AKS cluster with other key Azure services, including Azure Container Registry, Azure Monitoring, Microsoft Defe...

The Geo-Replication feature for Azure Service Bus in the premium tier is now generally available. The Service Bus Geo-Replication feature is one of the options to insulate Azure Service Bus applications against outages and disasters, providing replication...

Azure Premium SSD v2 is now available in Austria East and in a second Availability Zone in Japan West. Azure Premium SSD v2, a next-generation general-purpose block storage solution, offers sub-millisecond latencies and exceptional price performance for...

A new category of organization is emerging that embeds AI across every layer of their operations—accelerating delivery, scaling efficiently, and unlocking new business potential.

CES 2026 showcases the arrival of the NVIDIA Rubin Platform, along with Azure’s proven readiness for deployment.

Surge protection in Microsoft Fabric has been a key feature for managing capacity usage and preventing overload. Today, it helps you: Until now, surge protection applied only at the capacity level—meaning all workspaces shared the same rules. What’s new: workspace-level surge protection We’re taking surge protection to the next level with workspace-level controls. This update …

The SQL community is gathering in Atlanta this March for the first‑ever SQLCon, co‑located with FabCon, the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference, March 16-20. One registration unlocks both events, giving you access to deep SQL expertise and the latest in Fabric, Power BI, data engineering, real‑time intelligence, and AI. Whether you’re a DBA, developer, data engineer, architect, or a …

Microsoft Fabric continues to expand the OneLake security surface with new granular REST API support for role management, giving developers and platform teams far more control over how security policies are created, retrieved, and managed programmatically. In addition to the existing batch role API, Fabric now offers discrete Create, Get, and Delete role APIs, making …

The modern enterprise runs on data-driven decisions. And the modern data warehouse, isn’t just a system of record, it is the foundation for trusted decision-making and AI-powered innovation. With OneLake at its core, Microsoft Fabric unifies data across the enterprise, eliminating fragmentation and enabling true openness. This architecture means that Fabric Data Warehouse isn’t just …

Turning questions into KQL queries just became part of Real-Time Dashboard tile editing experience, using Copilot. This new feature brings the power of AI directly into the tile editing workflow. When editing a tile, you’ll now see the Copilot assistant pane ready to help you turn natural language into actionable queries. Whether you’re new to …

Performance matters—especially when you’re exploring live data and making decisions in real time. We have released a set of improvements, all aiming to make Real-Time Dashboards faster, smoother, and more responsive, based directly on what our customers and community told us. We listen to your feedback and take action! What’s Improved Thanks to a series …

The exchange of real-time data across different data platforms is becoming increasingly popular. The Cribl source (preview) is now available in Real-Time Intelligence, allowing real-time data to flow into Fabric RTI Eventstream through our collaboration with Cribl, enabling you to take full advantage of Fabric Real-Time Intelligence’s robust analytics tools for their real-time needs. Collaborating to broaden …

OneLake security now supports Mirrored Databases in Microsoft Fabric with the ability to define OneLake data access roles on all Mirrored item types. This update brings granular, role-based access control to data replicated into OneLake from transactional systems, extending the OneLake security model beyond lakehouses and enabling secure reuse of mirrored data across the organization. …

Copy job is the go-to solution in Microsoft Fabric Data Factory for simplified data movement, whether you’re moving data across clouds, from on-premises systems, or between services. With native support for multiple delivery styles, including bulk copy, incremental copy, and change data capture (CDC) replication, Copy job offers the flexibility to handle a wide range …

The SQL tools and experiences team at Microsoft is full of product leaders and engineers who care about YOU and your productivity at every stage. We focus on building the tools, SDKs, and experiences that matter most—so you can get the greatest value from Microsoft SQL Server, Azure SQL, SQL database in Fabric and Fabric …

I always enjoy the quiet stretch between Christmas and New Year’s. It’s one of the few moments in the year when things slow down just enough to reflect on what actually resonated. While many of us were unplugging, our digital team was doing the opposite, editing and publishing 19 sessions from VS Live! Orlando to...

How to read this article This article is a reflection based on hands-on experience and is written for engineers and technical leaders who are facing a new application modernization effort and want to build a realistic mental model before reaching for tools. If you are new to application modernization, I recommend reading the article end to end.

Announcing GitHub Security Lab Taskflow Agent, an open source and collaborative framework for security research with AI.

In December, we experienced five incidents that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.

User feedback led us to clean up outdated mitigations. See why observability and lifecycle management are critical for defense systems.

Copilot’s cross-agent memory system lets agents learn and improve across your development workflow, starting with coding agent, CLI, and code review.

Learn how we are using the newly released GitHub Security Lab Taskflow Agent to triage categories of vulnerabilities in GitHub Actions and JavaScript projects.

Code will be generated, not written. Working with 100+ companies, I have seen this firsthand: most enterprise workloads taking dependencies on AI SDKs are usually net-new microservices. Hardly anyone has Windows-scale codebases for their new AI features. This is modular, greenfield work. Perfect for coding agents. The catch? Out-of-the-box agents lack domain knowledge about your...

Run tests, fix code, and get support—right in your workflow. Stay focused and let Copilot handle the busywork.

Now in technical preview, the GitHub Copilot SDK can plan, invoke tools, edit files, and run commands as a programmable layer you can use in any application.

Explore the GitHub Copilot CLI and try interacting with Copilot directly from your terminal.

Read GitHub’s position on the European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy and learn how to participate.

Microsoft is committed to providing the tools that developers and scientists need to enable applications on quantum machines.

We’re learning a lot from integrating AI into our use of Microsoft Viva here at Microsoft, lessons we want to share with you. Microsoft Viva is a digital employee-experience platform that brings together essential capabilities such as knowledge, learning, and workplace insights in the flow of work to empower people and teams to be their...

Microsoft 365 Copilot helps our employees work faster and be more creative. But sometimes it slams on the brakes and says, “Whoa, there! You can’t do that!” And that’s by design, to keep us safe from stuff that doesn’t belong in the workplace anyway. In this article, we’re going to show you what kinds of...

Microsoft SharePoint is where business knowledge lives. As AI-driven capabilities, assistants, and agents have exploded onto the scene, new possibilities for managing that knowledge and presenting it to our employees are emerging. At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’ve been using the latest AI-enabled features in SharePoint to unlock more flexible, branded, and enjoyable...

With more than 200,000 employees located in offices around the world, an organization the size and complexity of Microsoft will always face challenges in creating a tight-knit culture of trust and community. Engage with our experts! Customers or Microsoft account team representatives from Fortune 500 companies are welcome to request a virtual engagement on this...

Higher education is navigating one of its most transformative moments. As AI reshapes teaching and learning, Microsoft continues to partner with colleges and universities to support them with the tools, training, and communities needed to build AI-ready campuses. Through global faculty development programs, student growth and leadership opportunities, and AI Skills Navigator—an agentic learning space—we aim to foster a connected ecosystem that helps everyone build meaningful AI skills.

Learn how industrial AI is reshaping the economics of manufacturing: where the ROI is real, what’s driving it, and how you can take the next step on your own AI journey.

Organizations must deliver better personalization, higher volume, and increasingly complex insights while operating with greater efficiency.

Microsoft is leading retail’s agentic future, empowering human creativity with AI-powered automation to deliver authentic, personalized customer experiences.

Microsoft accelerates automotive innovation with AI-powered engineering and in-vehicle tech as the industry prepares for CES 2026.