Public transcript

Satya Nadella Keynote: Microsoft AI Tour Sydney

By: Microsoft Events
Length: 1 h 23 min
Language: English
Text from: the video's captions
Transcribed: 13 October 2026

Read the full transcript Open on YouTube

Notes in English.

Summary

Satya Nadella's keynote at the Microsoft AI Tour in Sydney outlines Microsoft's end-to-end AI stack—Copilot and agentic apps, the Foundry agent platform, and the Azure cloud and AI infrastructure—unified by intelligence and trust. He announces agent mode in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, Cowork, a hosted Foundry agent service, and a A$25 billion investment in Australia, plus plans to train three million Australians in AI skills. Demos from Nirja Trivedi and Damian Brady show Copilot and GitHub tooling in practice, and customer stories from Cricket Australia, AEMO, Commonwealth Bank and others illustrate adoption. A closing panel with Telstra CEO Vicki Brady and Westpac CEO Anthony Miller discusses AI transformation, skills and Australia's productivity opportunity.

Key points

Satya Nadella frames the AI era around two threads—intelligence and trust—across a three-part tech stack: agentic apps, the agent platform, and the cloud and AI token factory.
Agent mode is now generally available across Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and Copilot has gained Cowork, which runs asynchronous tasks in parallel using Work IQ data.
Foundry is Microsoft's organizing agent platform, with 11,000 models, context layers (Work IQ, Fabric, Foundry IQ), and a new hosted agent service in preview with persistent memory and elastic scaling.
Nadella argues private evals, private benchmarks and decoupled models, context and harness will become the new IP of organizations in the AI era.
Microsoft announced its biggest commitment in Australia: A$25 billion, plus an expanded partnership with the Signals Directorate on Cyber Shield and a goal to train three million Australians in AI skills.
Australian adoption is strong: 17 of the top 20 ASX companies, all the banks, and 57 government agencies use Copilot; GitHub's Australian community is 2.3 million strong, growing 26% year over year.
Cricket Australia's AI Insights, built on Azure OpenAI and Azure Cosmos DB, serves millions of data points to fans in sub-seconds and has increased app usage frequency by 30% season over season.
In the closing panel, Vicki Brady and Anthony Miller stress foundational data simplification, skills, open-minded culture, and a more ambitious national conversation about AI's productivity benefits.

Questions it answers

00:00Opening and keynote framing

What is the big theme of Satya Nadella's keynote?

Nadella frames a new era where AI reshapes work, and says the outcomes that matter—customer engagement, employee experience, process efficiency and innovation—are moved by a new input, with intelligence and trust as the threads across the whole tech stack.

Intelligence and trust unify the three-part stack.
Applied AI starts with the mantra "the product is the eval."

06:44Copilot and agent mode

What's new in Copilot and Microsoft 365?

Agent mode is generally available in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, mixing spreadsheet representations with reasoning models that can take action. Copilot also gains Cowork for asynchronous parallel tasks, and agents like Researcher add Critique and Counsel modes using multiple models.

Agent mode combines the Excel canvas with reasoning and action.
Cowork queues synchronous tasks that keep running even with the laptop shut.

13:05Cowork demo

How does Cowork work in practice?

Nirja Trivedi shows Cowork building a launch budget, pitch deck, Teams message and stakeholder meeting in parallel from a recap email, with review before anything is sent, security labels applied automatically, and Copilot in Excel building a dashboard for an extra 100k in budget.

Work IQ is the intelligence layer personalizing Copilot.
Users can interrupt Cowork with new tasks without stopping existing ones.

25:50Foundry agent platform

What does Microsoft's agent platform consist of?

Foundry organizes models (11,000 available), context (Work IQ, Fabric, Foundry IQ), agent runtimes and security. A hosted agent service enters preview with persistent memory, isolated sandboxes and elastic scaling, which Nadella compares to the birth of cloud-native containers.

GigaTIME democratizes spatial proteomics for cancer immunotherapy.
Hosted agents get their own compute, state and scaling like cloud-native apps.

41:51Developer tools and GitHub demo

What tools can developers use to build agents?

Developers can build with App Builder in Copilot, Copilot Studio, VS Code and GitHub. Damian Brady demos GitHub Copilot CLI consolidating requirements via MCP from Work IQ and GitHub, the rubber duck agent reviewing with a different model family, a Foundry FAQ agent grounded in truth, and Copilot Code Review fixing pull requests.

GitHub becomes Agent HQ with session traces as first-class artifacts.
Australia's GitHub community is 2.3 million developers, growing 26% year over year.

49:54Agent 365 and sovereignty

How should organizations manage and protect AI agents?

Agent 365 provides a control plane for agents via Entra (identity), Defender (security) and Purview (data security), wherever agents are hosted. Nadella argues private evals and benchmarks become the new IP, models/context/harness should stay decoupled, and organizations should capture skills and traces to train their own models.

Public benchmarks are saturated; private evals are the real game.
Tacit knowledge in skills, traces and weights is the future of the firm.

56:02Australian customers and Cricket Australia

How are Australian organizations using AI?

AEMO uses Fabric and Foundry to improve alert signal-to-noise, Commonwealth Bank extended its customer bot and call-center agents, Cogniti works with the University of Sydney for teachers, and Cricket Australia's AI Insights serves millions of data points in sub-seconds, increasing app usage frequency by 30%.

AI Insights lets fans switch between newbie and stats-guru profiles.
Nadella wants to compare Steve Smith's under-15 conversion ratios with Vaibhav Suryavanshi's.

1:01:12Infrastructure and commitments

What is Microsoft investing in Australia?

Nadella announces A$25 billion, Microsoft's biggest commitment in Australia, to expand cloud and AI infrastructure across Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra regions running on 100% renewable energy. Microsoft also expands its Cyber Shield partnership with the Signals Directorate and will train three million Australians in AI skills.

Performance is about tokens per dollar per watt; Maia 200 claims 30%+ over leading ASICs.
Hosted agents and Cowork sessions need classic compute and storage too.

Notes

Overview

Satya Nadella's keynote at the Microsoft AI Tour in Sydney presents an end-to-end AI tech stack with two unifying threads: intelligence and trust.
The stack has three parts: high-value agentic applications (Copilot), the AI/agent platform (Foundry), and the cloud and AI token factory (Azure).

Copilot and agentic apps

Agent mode is now generally available in Word, Excel and PowerPoint; Nadella likened the moment to 1993 and his early Sydney visits.
Copilot has evolved from a chat UI into a "cognitive loop" or harness: Auto routes intent to the best model, and agents like Researcher offer Critique and Counsel modes using multiple models.
Cowork runs asynchronous tasks in parallel—Nirja Trivedi demoed building a launch budget, pitch deck, Teams messages and meetings from a single request, with Work IQ as the intelligence layer.
Adoption in Australia: 17 of the top 20 exchange companies, all banks, and 57 government agencies use Copilot; Australia Post uses Copilot champions to drive accessibility.

Agent platform: Foundry

Foundry brings together 11,000 models, context (Work IQ, Fabric, Foundry IQ), agent runtimes and security.
The GigaTIME model, built with Providence and University of Washington, generates spatial proteomics images cheaply, democratizing a costly cancer immunotherapy test.
A new hosted agent service enters preview: sandbox per session, instant on, persistent memory, elastic scaling—compared to the birth of cloud-native containers.
GitHub becomes "Agent HQ" with 2.3 million Australian developers (26% YoY growth); session traces become first-class artifacts alongside code.
Damian Brady demoed GitHub Copilot CLI, MCP servers (Work IQ, GitHub), the rubber duck agent for cross-family model review, Foundry custom agents grounded in documents, and Copilot Code Review.

Sovereignty and security

Agent 365 provides a control plane for agents—identity (Entra), security (Defender), data security (Purview)—regardless of where agents are hosted.
Nadella argues private evals, private benchmarks and decoupled models/context/harness become organizational IP; traces and skills can be used to train proprietary models.

Infrastructure and commitments

Performance formula: tokens per dollar per watt; Maia 200 claims 30%+ over leading ASICs; Australian regions run on 100% renewable energy.
Microsoft announced A$25 billion for Australia, expanded Cyber Shield partnership with the Signals Directorate, and AI skilling for three million Australians.

Customer and closing panel

Cricket Australia's AI Insights serves millions of data points in sub-seconds; app usage frequency rose 30%.
Telstra's Vicki Brady and Westpac's Anthony Miller discussed data simplification (80 platforms down toward three), GenAI assistants handling 30% of digital volume, and the need for ambitious national AI adoption.

Text from the video's own captions. Summary and notes written by AI from the transcript, so check anything important against the recording.