In the first of a series of videos, Microsoft is beginning the discussion about the changes that AI will bring to Windows in the coming decade. This one focuses on security, which is the first of three focus tiers, along with quality and AI transformation, that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella explicitly identified for employees in a recent all-hands memo.
“The world of mousing around and typing will feel as alien to Gen Z as using MS-DOS,” Microsoft corporate vice president David Weston says at the start of the video. “[AI] will allow folks to do less toil work, the work we don’t love today, and allow them to focus on what humans are good at: ideation, creativity, vision, [and] connecting with other humans on what products are necessary. [AI] agents will be net amplifiers that enable us to do the things that we could only dream of just a few years ago.”
Weston was the obvious choice for this first video, as he heads up Microsoft’s operating systems security group. But that means that much of the video focuses on pragmatic security topics, not visionary product updates. So he discusses the Windows Resiliency Initiative and how it ties into Microsoft’s broader Secure Future Initiative, making Windows “post-quantum”/”quantum-safe,” various security tools, and the like.
But there are a few fun bits for those who care about the future of the Windows user experience, too. Weston says that the shift to agentic systems will bring increased personalization, automation, and decision helping in daily workflows, and that the way we interact with PCs will change dramatically.
“We will do less with our eyes,” he says, “and [do] more talking to our computers. I truly believe that future versions of Windows and other Microsoft operating systems will interact in a multimodal way. The computer will see what we see, and hear what we hear. And we can talk to it and ask it to do much more sophisticated things. This will be a much more natural form of communication.”
From a security perspective, Weston says that customers are looking for what he calls “appliance-level security,” where it just works. And that customers will use teams of AI agents to build a virtual corporate security team, even in the smallest businesses.
This all makes sense, of course, but that appliance bit is interesting as it ties into a lengthy piece I started writing on the flight home yesterday about how the iPad with iPadOS 26 changes the dynamics of personal computing in dramatic and, I think, permanent ways. So I will try to get that completed ASAP.