Microsoft Embeds Agentic AI in Developer Workflows

Microsoft is pushing to embed AI deeply into its developer workflows and to build “agentic” tools that do background work on behalf of engineers. CEO Satya Nadella has said up to 30 percent of the code for “some of our projects” is written by AI; Microsoft’s CVP Amanda Silver tells Notepad the company is focused on reducing developer toil and inefficiencies across its more than 100,000 internal repositories.

In May Microsoft added a coding agent to GitHub Copilot that can create an environment, run in the background, and produce draft pull requests. Microsoft measures impact by developer hours saved, incidents mitigated, and agent actions (for example, pull requests contributed). Silver reports average time savings of about 30 minutes for simple tasks, over a half day for medium tasks, and up to two weeks for complex tasks.

The company gives concrete examples: Xbox used Copilot’s modernization agent to move a service from .NET 6 to .NET 8 and saw an “88 percent reduction in manual migration effort,” and an “ES Chat” agent reportedly saves engineers about 46 minutes per task; SRE tooling has reclaimed over “10,000 hours of operational time.”

But adoption and outcomes aren’t uniform: Microsoft says 91 percent of engineering teams use Copilot, while other data and anonymous employees point to spotty or reluctant uptake. Engineers still review AI output, and some inside Microsoft worry about autonomous agents displacing junior roles or leaving senior devs to “babysit” AI-generated code. Microsoft also recently released Fara-7B, an experimental small agentic model meant to control computer interfaces, as part of its broader push toward agent-driven work.

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