Build 2025 - My List of Highlighted Sessions
An Explorative Outlook into the AI Journey

Build 2025 - My List of Highlighted Sessions

It's that time of the year again - Microsoft Build is upon us (Register Here) May 19-22.

Aside from the opportunity to craft a cool article image, I am always really excited to attend the sessions to get a sense of the key practices and innovations in the market, and how organisations can leverage the Microsoft stack to build out leading industry solutions. Be it for their employees or as part of innovative customer facing experiences.

Sifting through the list of 300+ online sessions, here are some that I am bookmarking for closer consideration. There is an incredible list of sessions that you might want to explore, but here's a bit of a subset to give you a flavour across specific areas of interest areas of interest.


The Keynotes

There are always jam-packed sessions that'll give you an overview of the new practices, frameworks, devices and tooling made available. Critically, they also share a view of how connected and natively integrated the tools are (look at Fabric, fast become the core for Data). Definitely priority sessions to watch at the event.


With the Generative AI momentum in its 3rd year, the shift from PoC to production is in full swing, the below set of sessions will give insights into key factors for AI solution success.

Building Agents

The last year has seen the rise of agents. A new paradigm in software development, Agents are intelligent software entities that have an array of capabilities, spanning from answering questions, to performing actions on a user behalf, or indeed automate complete workflows.

With the addition of reasoning models to the roster of GenAI capabilities, Agents have taken on significant roles in organisations, and changing the organisational blueprint  - giving shape to "Frontier Firms".  You can explore some of the key concepts of building successful agents in the following sessions, showcasing the latest patterns and innovation i.e. the integration with MCP:



Power your enterprise with Low/Code and Copilot Studio & M365

There are a number of patterns on getting agents live and operational for your audiences. These span from Low/Code to Pro/Code - and offer benefits across the board. To help accelerate into production at pace, and take advantage of hundreds of pre-existing connectors, exploring the low/code offering may well help you accelerate innovation, and simplify the path to production in key ways.

Whether you are looking at automating business processes, or offering new conversational interfaces to customers, explore these ideas and more in the following sessions:


Innovation with AI

Capitalise on the latest capabilities to innovate your services. Multimodal in particular unlocks exciting new opportunities, as it takes transformation outside of the bounds of text based data, and helps interact with and understand images, video, audio. There is a wealth of opportunity, not least in delivering voice-activated experiences, that can help make software smarter, more intuitive, and context aware. The Healthcare industry has delivered some incredible innovation already, but the tech foundation is accessible across all industries.


Developer Experience and Tooling

AI has changed not only the experiences delivered through software, but also how software is built. From agentic assistance to vibe coding, there are some exciting innovations that will help you transform the way you build software and innovate. There are some key sessions that look in detail how leading development teams can deliver secure software at pace, and boost productivity and innovation like never before:


Vibe Coding

This is an area I get truly excited about, and have experimented in the last couple of weeks. The ability to express application outcomes in normal sentences and have GitHub and Visual Studio execute the ideas into working code is an exciting premise - helping to accelerate the ability to innovate and create new and improved software experiences in a way that is far more accessible. It certainly transforms the relationship between developers and product managers, but critically, makes AI innovation far more accessible to business users that would want to see their transformative ideas come to life.  


Platform Engineering: Modernising Your Software Estate at Scale / Automate / Reducing Tech Debt with Azure

Working and collaborating with AI is a fantastic new skill for developers, and it is certainly starting to transform the professional landscape. It can also go a step further, helping organisations strategically, in their pursuit of ensuring the right DevOps and Platform Engineering principles are backed into workflows, Security practices are tightly woven into dev practices and the pace of eliminating tech debt is accelerated. The following sessions will cover these topics, exploring how new code frameworks and agentic automation can deliver key outcomes in software development:


Moving Confidently into production

There's certainly been a shift in the number of organisations that have moved from PoC and AI trials to production solutions that offer tangible value for both improved customer experiences and new services brought to market. Scaled rollout of software calls for optimisation, a solid API strategy, and security.


Next-Gen Data Platforms

A few months ago, we ran a session on delivering differentiated customer experiences with AI. A well attended session, the one statement that stood out from a partner: "We've seen the architecture of SaaS and ISV software evolve profoundly - data has moved much closer to the end-user interface, making it more accessible, and essential to AI driven experiences, in ways never seen before." The secure availability to high quality data is indeed a core premises for successful AI solutions, but there are also some key opportunities unlocked by the next-gen data platform, making existing data more accessible, enhancing governance, and underpinning demanding data-driven experiences. Here are some key sessions


Security

Security definitely shouldn't be looked at in isolation, and most certainly has a place deeply integrated into development practices, tooling an platform engineering strategy. That said, there are some specific sessions at Build worth highlighting as they explore the details around approaches and tooling that supports new considerations as you move confidently into production:


Transformation learnings from leading organisations.

Transformation can be a nuanced pursuit. It's always insightful to tap into the learnings of organisations that have sought to push the boundaries with AI, delivering exciting and personalised new customer experiences. 

Now, this list is by no means comprehensive. Build is incredibly rich, and I'd recommend checking out the full list of sessions on the official event site. The site also allows you to register and build your own session track.


See you all at Build!


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