We are entering a new era where AI isn’t just a tool for transformation but the foundation for reinvention. Frontier firms aren’t waiting. Already, they’re architecting the future with agentic systems, intelligent infrastructure, responsible practices, and resilient data platforms, compounding their competitive advantage. What took months to prototype a year ago now takes hours. The combination of adoption, responsibility, and velocity signals a durable phase of value creation.
For partners and tech leaders, the question isn’t “How do we adopt AI?” It’s “How do we accelerate what AI can deliver?”
In this era, Microsoft and NVIDIA are more than technology providers. They are the platforms helping organizations move faster, scale smarter, and unlock new value across industries, ecosystems, and experiences. 2026 won’t be defined by who starts the AI journey. It will be defined by who leads it. The future of AI is agentic, native, and collaborative.
Agentic AI Is The Next Frontier
AI’s evolution is a three-phase journey: learning, creating, and doing. First, machine learning: recognizing patterns and making predictions from data, like detecting fraud or forecasting demand. Next, generative AI: models that can create new content (text, code, images, or video) from natural language. Now, agentic: where AI systems can reason, plan, and act on your behalf. If machine learning helps us understand the past, and generative AI helps us express ideas, agentic AI helps us get things done.
According to Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index, 81 percent of global leaders expect AI agents to be deeply integrated into their organizations within the next 12 to 18 months, marking the beginning of a new era of AI-powered productivity and design. The report shows that frontier firms are already embracing this shift: at Dow, agentic systems are saving millions annually by identifying hidden shipping inefficiencies, while Bayer’s R&D teams are using AI agents to reclaim six hours of research time per week.
AI Is Reshaping The Software Stack
With agentic AI emerges a new class of software. What began as copilots and assistants layered atop existing software is now a fundamental shift in how software is built, delivered, and monetized.
Microsoft and NVIDIA build the infrastructure supporting this shift. From Azure AI Foundry to accelerated computing, we help software companies move faster, optimize performance, and bring intelligent applications to market.
In this new paradigm, AI becomes the interface, the logic, and the engine, redefining how we build, consume, and interact with software. In the next few years, software won’t just be a tool you use but an intelligent system that understands intent and acts. This isn’t just a feature upgrade or a future trend, it’s a once-in-a-generation platform change that’s already happening. Leaders are already realizing faster development cycles, stronger customer engagement, and measurable ROI from systems that improve with use.
AI-Native Is Now
AI-native organizations are those building AI solutions from scratch. Their infrastructure and processes are designed to complement AI, versus integrating built or bought AI solutions within existing infrastructures and processes. The agility, flexibility, and efficiency of agentic AI is maximized within an ecosystem specifically designed to harness its capabilities.
For those who want to move quickly with agentic AI for software development, AI-native strategy is critical. To that end, Microsoft and Nvidia are heavily involved in co-innovating with AI-native startups to build agentic platforms from the ground up. Our goal is democratizing autonomy across industries, making agentic capabilities accessible to everyone.
Benefits Of AI-first
In the new agentic AI paradigm, AI-native and AI-first philosophies go hand-in-hand. AI-first organizations think in orders of magnitude, with the intent to become frontier firms. Success for AI-first frontier firms follows a framework that prioritizes enriching employee experiences, reinventing customer engagement, reshaping business processes, and truly bending the curve on innovation.
Frontier firms have already found that AI-first strategy drives significant business benefits. Actual Microsoft customers report major impacts including:
- 30 percent more developer efficiency
- 30 percent more employee productivity
- 40 percent more streamlined customer support
- 40 percent reduction in costs
- 50 percent faster speed to market
From our early collaborations in PC gaming to more recent developments in cloud computing and advanced AI, Microsoft and Nvidia have always partnered to expand digital transformation for real-world impact. Now, combining our platform strengths, we’re enabling a whole new world of opportunity for developers, startups, and enterprises.
Extending Model Choice
Microsoft is taking major steps to lead in agentic AI for customers by investing across the stack—from silicon models to orchestration. Azure is optimized for agentic workloads with specialized infrastructure, including two times GPU density and low-latency interconnects. By delivering excellence starting with the very infrastructure on which AI workloads run, we help AI natives ensure their investments drive the value they’re looking for, with reliable performance, flexibility, and scale.
With this collaboration, customers have an incredible range of choice. One of our major current priorities is to bring open, proprietary, multimodal, and specialized partner models into Azure AI Foundry to extend model choice in every direction. Integrating Nvidia libraries into Microsoft platforms (Foundry, Fabric, Discover, GitHub, Azure, and others) empowers AI customers with the best-in-class offerings and capabilities to build and customize agentic AI apps and workloads like never before.
Accelerating AI Innovation
The availability of Nvidia libraries through Microsoft isn’t only about choice – it’s about speed. Customers can quickly pick the right model for each use case, reducing time to value and accelerating time to market.
To lead in this new era, Microsoft is executing three big moves: First, we are infusing AI into everything we build – from copilots in Microsoft 365 and Dynamics to developer tools. Second, we’re scaling infrastructure with Azure AI, specialized silicon, and responsible AI frameworks that help customers deploy safely. Third, we’re empowering the ecosystem, giving every software company access to the same models, tools, and guardrails so they can build their own agents. The next wave of productivity will come from enabling others to build on this foundation.
Inspiring Trust For AI Success
In the pursuit of creating the most trustworthy platform for enterprise AI, our partnerships are evolving from transactional to deeply co-creative. Historically, ISVs built on Microsoft. Now they build with us. We’re co-developing copilots, integrating data layers, and embedding AI agents directly into customer workflows to make AI part of every product and workflow – not just an add-on.
Together, our offerings are stronger, and our customers are better equipped. Our joint go-to-market strategy and technical integrations ensure customers have simplified access to the best both companies have to offer. Our partnership removes complexity from the AI journey, uniting platforms, features, and capabilities to better serve the customer and create a stronger ecosystem than would otherwise be available.
For the AI-native startup, the enterprise investing in agentic AI, and any organization on a journey to accelerate AI outcomes, Microsoft and Nvidia are continually investing in your success. Our companies announced several joint developments in October at the Nvidia GTC Washington DC AI conference – all driven by performance, capability, and flexibility:
Expanding GPU Support To Azure Local
Microsoft will offer Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs on Azure. This expanded GPU availability will help organizations optimize AI workloads regardless of location to provide customers with more flexibility and options.
Bringing Nvidia NIM microservices to Azure AI Foundry
Azure AI Foundry now offers an expanded portfolio of secure, scalable Nvidia NIM microservices, delivering reasoning for code-based tasks, science, advanced math, real-time vision-language capabilities, and more.
Maximizing GPU Utilization
Nvidia Run:ai, an AI workload and GPU orchestration platform, is now available on Microsoft Marketplace. With seamless integration into core Azure services (VMs, AKS, AIM), Nvidia Run:ai on Microsoft Marketplace delivers smarter orchestration and cloud-ready GPU pooling so teams can innovate faster, reduce costs, and simplify management.
Evolve Your AI Approach At Ignite
The AI landscape continues to change rapidly, but with Microsoft and Nvidia, you can trust you have the information and solutions you need to stay ahead of the curve.
One of the best resources for current AI developments is Microsoft Ignite. This world-class event happening November 17–20 hosts AI experts from Microsoft, Nvidia, and others. Attendees both on-site in San Francisco and online can expect a wealth of groundbreaking AI information.
Be the first to hear about exciting AI news, get the ground-level scoop on what’s next with AI, experience new technologies and tools firsthand, and connect with partners and peers on what’s working in your industry.
If you’re planning to be there, be sure to make room on your calendar for sessions from Nvidia –topics will cover digital twins, physical robotics, AI workloads, benchmarking, infrastructure, and more. Check out Nvidia’s sessions in the Ignite session catalog, and bookmark the ones that match your interests, your industry, and your goals.
Jason Graefe, corporate vice president, ISV and digital natives, Microsoft.
Contributed by Microsoft and Nvidia.
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