Hybrid AI Agents, Orchestration, and the Real Reason Microsoft is Fixing Windows 11 ⭐

I spent much of the previous weekend catching up on Build 2026 session videos, with an emphasis on those related in some way to Windows 11. In doing so, a few themes emerged, but one stood out above all others.

The sessions I watched fall into three general categories:

Windows app development. The smallest body of content, of course, but a topic Microsoft has only sporadically addressed in recent years. This was the strongest showing for Windows app development at Build in a long time.

Developer productivity. Microsoft has pushed Windows as the best place for developers for years, even if the work they're doing is for the web, the cloud, or cross-platform. And while this has been a theme for a while now, Build 2026 was still notable for the long list of advances that Microsoft is making in this area.

Agentic AI. This was, by far, the biggest topic this year at Build, and that's true even if you restrict the conversation just to Windows. But there is a confluence of factors that makes 2026 particularly notable for agentic AI, among them the escalating cost of cloud-based AI, the ever-improving nature of local AI, and the need to orchestrate AI between the two.

That last category is, to me, what Build 2026 was really about. We knew that agents were coming to Windows 11. But we didn't know that they would be hybrid agents with local AI sub-agents. And that Microsoft would expand the notion of hybrid AI to mean so much more than most of us ever imagined.

This is fascinating for all kinds of reasons, key among them being that all this work has also led to the "pain points" fixes we're seeing this year. But the seeds for this shift were planted years ago, back before Copilot was even a gleam in some marketer's eye and Microsoft's AI ambitions were limited to machine learning (ML) capabilities that ran only on lackluster Snapdragon-based Windows 10 PCs that no one was using anyway.

I bet you forgot about at least half of this.
From Always Connected PCs to Copilot+ PCs
Microsoft marketing is an oxymoron on the level of military intelligence, but it's interesting to look back on the initial announcement about the Windows team partnering with Qualcomm to bring Windows 10 on Arm-based PCs to market. At that time, these new Windows 10 on Arm PCs were marketed as Always Connected PCs because of their integrated cellular modems, a key feature of the Arm-based smartphones and other mobile devices. Naturally, Intel had to get in on the action, so the Always Connected PC moniker came to select x86-based PCs too.

What does that remind you of?

Several years ago, Microsoft and Qualcomm came to market with a new initiative based on a new generation of Nuvia-powered chips for Windows 11 on Arm. This time, they went to market with Copilot+ PC, and the focus this time was on the powerful NPU integrated into these new SoCs and how it would enable incredible on-device AI experiences. Naturally, Intel had to get in on the action, so the...