At Build 2025, Microsoft announced a new enterprise agentic platform called Microsoft Discovery that will help enterprises and research labs accelerate research and discovery. Microsoft Discovery will enable scientists and researchers to work alongside specialized AI agents to speed up the scientific discovery process, which involves advanced knowledge reasoning, hypothesis formulation, experimental simulation, iterative learning, and more.
Microsoft Discovery doesn't lock researchers in with Microsoft's own tools. Instead, it has been built to be highly extensible, allowing researchers to integrate with models from other partners and even their own models, tools, and datasets when required. Also, it is built on top of a graph-based knowledge engine to provide a deep understanding of conflicting theories, diverse experimental results, and more. Researchers can also validate and understand every step, or even make changes if required.
Microsoft says its own researchers used Microsoft Discovery's AI models and HPC simulation tools to discover a new coolant prototype to be used in data centers in about 200 hours, a process that Microsoft says would have taken months or years.
Microsoft is already working with a select set of Microsoft customers from various industries, including chemistry and materials, silicon design, energy, manufacturing, and pharma, to further develop Microsoft Discovery's capabilities.
Microsoft Discovery is built on top of a powerful graph-based knowledge engine to have a deep understanding of conflicting theories, diverse experimental results, and even underlying assumptions across disciplines.
With its extensible architecture and AI capabilities, Microsoft Discovery promises to significantly shorten research timelines across various scientific fields. Back in February, Google announced a somewhat similar product called AI co-scientist. It is a multi-agent AI system built with Gemini, designed to serve as a virtual scientific collaborator that helps scientists generate novel hypotheses and research proposals. It will be interesting to see Microsoft and Google compete to win over researchers and scientists in the coming years.
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