Stop treating agents as one-off projects and start running them as a continuous discipline

By Dustin Ward

Transformation begins at the line between an experiment that works and a capability the business depends on. Scaling intelligence requires production capabilities built for sustained business performance, with investments prioritized against financial thresholds, tied to measurable outcomes, instrumented for unit costs, and owned by accountable leaders. This approach manages cost, performance, governance, and reliability as…

The Platform Behind the Next AI Breakthrough

By Dustin Ward

This article has been written and paid for by Microsoft. The content is not WIRED editorial content. The content does not necessarily reflect the views of WIRED, its affiliates, or owner, and does not reflect any endorsement direct or indirect of Microsoft, its affiliates, or other clients. The next frontier of AI is coming into…

Introducing the Microsoft Copilot harness in Foundry Agent Service

By Dustin Ward

A model can reason about a task. Completing that task takes more: the right context, tools, execution environment, and controls, and an agent loop that brings them together. Microsoft’s unified harness strategy brings a shared execution foundation across our agent experiences while preserving customer choice. In Microsoft Foundry, that means you can choose a supported…

Advancing digital sovereignty with greater control and choice

By Dustin Ward

Across my conversations with leaders in government, critical infrastructure and regulated industries, one priority consistently rises to the top: putting technology to work on their most important systems while maintaining the control those systems require. This challenge is becoming more important as advanced cloud and AI capabilities move into public services, regulated processes and essential…

Managing open-weight model risk in enterprise deployments

By Dustin Ward

The growing AI landscape is giving enterprises more choice in how they build, customize, and deploy increasingly capable models. Open-weight models are an important part of that landscape. They give enterprises access to model weights and greater flexibility to inspect, evaluate, modify, and run models within their own environments. While that flexibility can be valuable,…