This is what its Chief Technologist said on Sunday ahead of the company's annual software developer conference.

Microsoft is holding its Build conference in Seattle on May 19, where analysts expect the company to unveil its latest tools for developers building AI systems.

Speaking at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, ahead of the conference, Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott told reporters and analysts the company is focused on helping spur the adoption of standards across the technology industry that will let agents from different makers collaborate.

Agents are AI systems that can accomplish specific tasks, such as fixing a software bug, on their own.

Scott said that Microsoft is backing a technology called Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source protocol introduced by Google-backed Anthropic. Scott said MCP has the potential to create an "agentic web" similar to the way hypertext protocols that helped spread the internet in the 1990s.

--Reuters--