Today, Microsoft marks a milestone with the general availability of Azure Enclave in both Azure and Azure for US Government. Azure Enclave is a managed Azure service designed to help organizations streamline the deployment and management of their isolated cloud environments for sensitive and special access workloads while applying policy governance and monitoring.

For US Government agencies and the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), Azure Enclave builds on Microsoft’s experience supporting sensitive, classified, and special access program missions where agencies, mission partners, contractors, national laboratories, academic institutions, and suppliers need to work together across organizational boundaries. That experience requires a repeatable approach to network isolation, explicit connectivity, and centralized visibility.

Those needs are not unique to a single mission or sector. Governments worldwide and organizations in highly regulated industries also need to collaborate around sensitive information while maintaining strong controls over access, connectivity, monitoring, and operations. Azure Enclave addresses that shared challenge by helping organizations start from a governed foundation rather than assembling custom isolation architectures independently for every program or workload.

A repeatable foundation for mission success

Sensitive government work rarely occurs within a single program office, agency, or organization. Agencies may need to collaborate with mission partners, contractors, suppliers, national laboratories, or academic institutions, and some participants may not have the resources to independently establish and manage a complex isolated environment.

Azure Enclave brings together managed infrastructure and predefined architectural isolation patterns so organizations can begin with a foundation designed for isolation and adapt it to their workload, policy, and operational requirements. The service uses a community-and-enclave model: a community provides shared network controls, while each enclave provides an isolated workload boundary. Policy and routing controls can be applied across explicitly approved connection paths among authorized users, applications, services, and data.

This model helps teams streamline planning, configuration, testing, and ongoing management. Workload resources can span subscriptions while organizations apply shared governance across related enclaves, giving agencies and partners a consistent way to establish compartmentalized, policy-governed environments, potentially reducing the need to create one-off architectures for every workload.

Delivering mission-critical capabilities requires infrastructure that helps us move quickly without compromising security. Azure Enclave helps simplify the deployment of applications and services across secure, isolated environments, allowing us to provision mission workloads and expand capacity more efficiently while maintaining the controls our customers require. This enables teams to spend less time managing infrastructure and more time focused on delivering outcomes for the mission.

—Justin Shirk, Joint & Strategic Defense Lead at Accenture Federal Services

Our customers are looking for ways to modernize sensitive workloads without compromising security, compliance, or operational effectiveness. Azure Enclave helps address that challenge by reducing the complexity of establishing secure cloud environments and enabling trusted collaboration at scale. Azure Enclave is well-aligned to the security standards the US Government and its partners rely on, making compliance reviews and security conversations much easier compared to traditional deployment models. Combined with our expertise in cloud operations, security and compliance, we look forward to helping our customers accelerate their delivery while staying focused on what matters most: the mission.

—Carroll Moon, CEO and co-founder, CloudFit

Layered security, governance, and visibility

Azure Enclave is designed around a defense-in-depth approach. Virtual networking infrastructure is isolated by default, connections are explicitly configured and managed by the customer, and Azure Policy supports policy governance across communities and enclaves. Network segmentation, role-based access, controlled endpoints, defined permissions, and approval workflows provide multiple layers of control and oversight.

Centralized logging and built-in observability help teams monitor access, configuration changes, and data flows. Security alerts and analytics can be established with Microsoft Sentinel or other Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools. This will provide additional visibility into activity and system changes, helping mission owners, security teams, platform teams, application teams, and compliance stakeholders maintain a clearer view of an environment’s posture.

Azure Enclave complements, rather than replaces, an organization’s broader security and compliance program; customers remain responsible for configuring their environments, evaluating the service against applicable requirements, and meeting the obligations associated with their workloads. For US Government agencies and their partners, Azure Enclave provides a governed foundation for sensitive mission workloads, with accreditation efforts underway to comply with FedRAMP and DoD Impact Levels 4, 5, and 6, as well as Intelligence Community environments governed by ICD 503 requirements. Its tools are designed to support alignment with the applicable requirements as workloads move across classifications up to the Top Secret level.

Extending the model to worldwide governments and regulated industries

Government organizations worldwide may face similar requirements to control connectivity, govern access, monitor activity, and collaborate with external institutions or partners. Azure Enclave can provide a repeatable model for isolated environments, while each organization remains responsible for evaluating its deployment against the legal, regulatory, security, and operational requirements applicable to its workloads.

Highly regulated industries face similar collaboration and data-protection challenges. Healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, and research institutions can establish isolated environments for projects involving protected health information, clinical research, genomic data, and other sensitive datasets. Universities, laboratories, and research organizations can create shared environments for joint studies and multidisciplinary programs while maintaining separation among projects and applying consistent controls. Financial institutions can use isolated environments to support sensitive analytics, risk modeling, regulatory reporting, and controlled collaboration involving confidential financial information.

Azure Enclave provides capabilities for bringing authorized users, applications, services, and data into controlled environments while preserving boundaries between workloads.

Get started with Azure Enclave

Azure Enclave helps support sensitive collaboration by helping reduce the complexity of the underlying infrastructure, allowing teams to focus on mission, research, services, and business outcomes.

Organizations can start with a focused deployment for one workload and a defined group of users, then expand to include additional teams, applications, partners, or data sources. Azure Enclave supports that progression by enabling users to group enclaves with similar requirements into communities, deploy workload resources across subscriptions, and manage access at the application level. This structure gives organizations a path to evolve deployments as mission and operational requirements change while maintaining a consistent approach to isolation, governance, and observability.

Explore Azure Enclave to learn more about its capabilities, use cases, and pricing. Connect with your Microsoft representative to discuss how Azure Enclave can support your organization’s security, governance, operational, and collaboration requirements.

Azure Enclave

Streamlines the deployment and management of isolated cloud environments for sensitive workloads.

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The post Azure Enclave is now generally available: Managed workload isolation for government and regulated industries appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

The next evolution of Microsoft 365 for government brings productivity, AI, agents, security, identity, compliance, and governance together for organizations operating in Government Community Cloud (GCC) environments.

Across government, leaders are being asked to modernize services, address evolving cybersecurity needs, and help their teams meet growing demands simultaneously. AI tools can play an important role, but technology alone is not enough. Agencies need intelligence grounded in how they work, agents that extend that intelligence, and a control plane to help govern AI adoption securely. Innovation and trust must advance together.

Today, we are announcing the launch of Microsoft 365 G7, the Frontier Suite for government, to Government Community Cloud (GCC) environments. G7 extends the Intelligence + Trust vision introduced with Microsoft 365 E7 to government agencies, bringing together productivity, AI, agents, security, identity, compliance, and governance to support government organizations as they help accelerate mission outcomes and further mature their governed approach to adopting AI at organizational scale.

Both Microsoft 365 G7 and Agent 365 will be available for GCC customers to purchase beginning October 1, with additional purchasing options available November 1, and capabilities expanding in phases. Customers can begin licensing, planning, and adopting available experiences at launch, with additional workloads rolling out as they complete required GCC authorization milestones. This phased approach advances innovation with the rigor government missions demand.

Built on the trusted foundation of Microsoft 365 for government

Microsoft 365 G7 extends the Microsoft 365 foundation agencies know, starting with Microsoft 365 G5 solutions that bring together productivity and collaboration with information protection, security, and compliance capabilities. Microsoft Entra Suite builds on this with advanced identity, access governance, and network security capabilities for users and agents.

G7 is designed to support Frontier Transformation across the U.S. public sector by providing capabilities that agencies can use as they move from isolated AI experimentation toward governed adoption at organizational scale. It connects intelligence to the flow of everyday work, gives agencies a foundation for creating and using mission-focused agents, and provides the controls that IT and security leaders need to manage people, agents, data, and access with confidence.

AI embedded in the flow of work

AI should make everyday work simpler, not create another destination. G7 brings Microsoft Copilot and AI-powered Microsoft 365 experiences into the applications government employees already use. Work IQ grounds these experiences in organizational data, context, and tools with governance capabilities designed to operate in accordance with applicable permissions, so Copilot can provide assistance informed by an agency’s work context and help users complete mission-related work.

At general availability, G7 will bring the value of Microsoft Copilot into a unified offering designed for government. Government teams can use Copilot to support research and analysis, find and synthesize organizational knowledge, and draft, refine, and collaborate on content in the Microsoft 365 apps and experiences they use every day. 

In the months following GA, G7 will also benefit from a surge of new capabilities rolling out in Microsoft Copilot across our US Government clouds, including the latest commercially available GPT models, Work IQ memory and personalization, Edit with Copilot across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and Copilot Cowork for longer-running, multi-step work. To learn more about how these advances can help public servants navigate complex work and support their organizations’ mission priorities, read our companion announcement on the Microsoft Public Sector blog.

Agents at the mission’s edge

Agents can support specialized government work, from research and policy analysis to case management, grants, inspections, and constituent service. G7 provides an agentic foundation for government, with mission-focused agents grounded in Work IQ, and operating in accredited government clouds with policy-governed access for connecting to approved agency systems and data.

Agencies can start with Microsoft agents available in GCC, including Researcher and Analyst, and use Agent Builder to create experiences closer to the work. For specialized missions, teams can build custom agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio. Microsoft 365 Copilot Connectors bring agency knowledge from other systems within reach, while managed connections provide secure access to approved data and line-of-business applications. Natural-language creation broadens who can build, while organizational controls keep deployment aligned to agency standards.

Agent 365: The control plane for AI adoption

The speed of agent adoption creates enormous opportunity, but without the right controls it can also create new blind spots. Leaders need to know which agents exist, who owns them, what they can access, and whether they are operating as intended. Agent 365 provides the control plane for agents in G7, helping organizations discover, register, and manage agents and take governance actions such as deploying, blocking, or removing them.

At general availability, Agent 365 will give organizations a unified foundation to discover, identify, and govern agents, with core controls to manage how they are deployed and used. Over time, we expect Agent 365 capabilities to evolve across security, risk management, and lifecycle governance. For detailed information about GCC feature availability, customers can refer to the Microsoft Agent 365 service description. As additional services complete required GCC authorization and readiness milestones, their status will be updated there.

Advancing the mission with confidence

AI creates tremendous opportunity for government teams to build capacity, strengthen resilience, and respond more effectively to the people they serve. Realizing that opportunity requires leadership, workforce readiness, responsible governance, and technology that unites intelligence and trust.

Microsoft 365 G7 advances Frontier Transformation for government, giving agencies a path to empower employees, scale agents and adopt AI securely as capabilities expand. By combining AI in the flow of work, mission-focused agents, and a unified control plane, agencies can advance modernization with controls designed to support the stringent trust, security, and governance needs of public service and national missions.

Public sector transformation is about more than technology. It is about helping people serve communities and advance the mission. With G7, Microsoft builds on its longstanding government partnership to help public servants apply AI with the intelligence to support the mission and the controls to move forward with confidence.

The post Introducing Microsoft 365 G7: Intelligence + Trust for the mission ahead appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

These advancements help enable government organizations to accelerate mission outcomes, empower their workforce, and deliver services more effectively, all while meeting the rigorous security, compliance, and operational requirements their missions demand.

Moving from AI interactions to mission-ready agents
Government organizations often need more than a simple prompt-and-response AI experience. They need AI solutions that can understand their mission, use approved information, follow established processes, and keep people involved in important decisions.

The Microsoft Foundry Agent Service helps organizations build these kinds of AI-powered assistants in Azure Government. These agents can be used with trusted data and tools, directed to follow organizational rules and policies, and support work in secure mission environments.

This makes it easier for agencies to create AI solutions that can be reused across different teams and missions, rather than building a new system for every need. For example, agents can help employees find and summarize information, support case management and service delivery, assist with planning and operations, and provide guided support for employees and the public.

AI agents are designed to help people, not replace them. People remain responsible for important decisions and actions, while agents handle time-consuming tasks, help coordinate complex processes, and provide the right information when it’s needed. This allows government employees to spend less time on the leg work and more time focused on serving their mission and constituents.

Bringing advanced models to government missions
The availability of GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna in Azure Government gives organizations the flexibility to choose the AI model that best fits their needs, whether they’re tackling complex analysis, supporting everyday productivity, or delivering fast and responsive experiences at scale.

These models can help government organizations:

Review and summarize large amounts of mission-relevant information more quickly.
Build AI-powered applications and agents that assist employees and improve services for the public.
Speed up software development, research, planning, and operational work.
Create experiences that can understand and work with multiple types of information, such as text, images, and other content, while providing data management and oversight capabilities.
Azure Government provides a trusted environment for adopting these capabilities responsibly. Organizations can take advantage of advanced AI and leverage the enterprise capabilities in Azure to help protect sensitive information.

Building a trusted AI foundation
AI adoption in government must be grounded in trust. Microsoft continues to invest in the controls, platforms, and services that help enable customers to innovate responsibly, protecting sensitive data, supporting compliance obligations, and providing the operational visibility needed for mission-critical deployments.

With GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna and the Microsoft Foundry Agent Service now available in Azure Government, organizations can use these models directly or through agents to turn AI experimentation into scalable mission impact.

We look forward to working with our government customers and partners as they use these capabilities to build the next generation of trusted AI solutions.

Learn more about GPT-5.6 and Microsoft Foundry Agent Service and get started today!

The post Advancing trusted AI innovation with Agents and new Azure OpenAI models in Azure Government appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

For government, the significance is straightforward. The software weaknesses that put agency missions at risk are rarely the obvious ones. They are subtle problems that only become visible when you look across an entire software supply chain at once, and they are precisely what a well-resourced cyberattacker will be looking to exploit. Codename MDASH was built specifically to find those kinds of vulnerabilities, and to help find them first.

Defending the nation’s critical systems from an increasingly sophisticated cyberthreat landscape is a shared mission, and Microsoft is committed to bringing the most advanced security capabilities to US government agencies, building on its longstanding partnership with federal, state, and local government customers.

How codename MDASH works: Finding flaws faster

Most traditional security scanning tools work by looking for known patterns, the software equivalent of checking for a list of common mistakes. They are fast but quickly become difficult to maintain at high quality as the number of patterns to scan for can number in the thousands. This approach can miss more complex flaws that could matter most, and in the process generate so many uncertain results that developers and security teams often spend more time sifting out the false positives than fixing real issues. Codename MDASH takes a fundamentally different approach by working as an agentic code scanner that finds and validates exploitable vulnerabilities in source code. It reads and reasons about software the way an expert security researcher would, rationalizing the codebase and following how information moves through a program to work out whether a weakness could actually be exploited by a cyberattacker.

Codename MDASH works by putting more than 100 specialized AI agents, leveraging a variety of models, to work on the same body of code, each trained to recognize a different category of weakness. Their findings are then handed to a second group of agents whose job is to argue the case, for and against, whether each suspected flaw is genuinely reachable and genuinely dangerous. The harness also saves time for defenders by merging and deduplicating results, and where possible the system demonstrates the flaw rather than merely asserting it. What reaches the security team at the end is a more comprehensive, refined, and prioritized list of vulnerabilities that can be assessed and acted on, consistently finding strong signals in the noise.

This multi-model, multi-step agentic approach is the key factor in how codename MDASH scored a 96.55 on the public CyberGym benchmark of real-world vulnerabilities and has produced similar results on first-party code validated against Microsoft’s historical vulnerability cases.

Built to keep getting better: The advantage of a multi-model approach

The key differentiator of codename MDASH is its harness design, a system that directs and coordinates the use of whichever models are best for a specific task. This allows for more robust analysis, increased cost effectiveness, and the flexibility to rapidly adopt new models. Multiple models provide independent analysis, because disagreement between models is useful information in its own right: when one AI flags a problem and another cannot argue it away, or when two models agree out of the gate, confidence in the finding rises.

This matters more than it might first appear. AI models improve at a rapid pace, and a security tool tied to one model is only ever as good as that model’s last release. Because codename MDASH is multi-model by design, adopting newer, better models as they arrive doesn’t require going back to the drawing board, and everything an agency has already invested in downstream of the system carries forward. The models will keep changing. The harness stays the same, and for the customer the experience remains consistent in their existing Microsoft security products.

This design also helps control costs. Microsoft’s own MAI model family is designed to make this work affordable at scale, and our newest addition is expected to cut the cost of an individual scan roughly in half. There is far more code in the world than can currently be reviewed at this level of depth, so agencies are ranking their software by mission importance and working steadily down the list. Every reduction in cost moves that line closer to the goal of 100% code coverage without additional budget cycles.

Azure Government: A secure home for sensitive work

The source code behind a mission system is a critical element of national security systems that requires additional levels of assurance, especially when dealing with vulnerability analysis. Azure Government provides a separate, isolated cloud operated by screened US persons and built to meet the compliance obligations that federal, national security, and state and local government customers carry, including FedRAMP High authorization and Department of War accreditation for controlled and mission-critical workloads. Codename MDASH is available in Azure Government as a feature of Microsoft Defender that works with models available within the FedRAMP High-authorized Microsoft Foundry service. This allows an agency’s source code and everything the system learns about it to remain within a boundary already approved for handling of that data.

A warning worth heeding

AI offers tremendous capabilities for interacting with software that can cut both ways. An AI system capable enough to find a vulnerability in a defender’s software is capable enough to help a threat actor find one to exploit. Threat actors are investing in AI capabilities, and the only durable advantage available to defenders is time—the gap between when a weakness can be found and patched and before someone else finds it.

The good news is that agencies do not have to wait to act. Microsoft has been using codename MDASH on its own software for months, and the US government is not far behind, with customers across national security and civilian agencies already exploring its capabilities. If your organization owns software a mission depends on, the question is no longer whether to examine it with a system like this. It is how quickly you can work through the list.

For more information on how to access codename MDASH in your tenant contact your Microsoft account team about MDASH in Azure Government.

The post Codename MDASH brings agentic AI security scanning to US government appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Today, we are excited to announce the availability of Microsoft Fabric in Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud High (GCC High). Beginning September 2, 2026, Microsoft Fabric will be available in public preview for GCC High customers, with general availability starting October 1, 2026. Feature availability at public preview and general availability will vary by workload and expand over time. Visit the Microsoft Fabric for US Government GCC High customers Learn page for current details.

To realize the full potential of AI, agencies need a modern data foundation that brings together analytical, operational, transactional, structured, and unstructured data while meeting the security, compliance, and governance requirements of regulated environments.

That is the challenge Microsoft Fabric is designed to address. As Microsoft’s unified data and AI platform, Fabric helps organizations unify their data, establish shared business context, and move from isolated AI experiments to production-ready agent systems grounded in trusted organizational knowledge.

Experience a unified data and AI platform designed for the next frontier of AI

Microsoft Fabric brings together data integration, analytics, databases, real-time intelligence, and business intelligence into a single open SaaS platform. By unifying data in OneLake and connecting people, data, and workloads on a common foundation, Fabric helps organizations achieve faster insights, more productive teams, and optimize costs on an enterprise-grade platform.

For government organizations, this provides a modern data foundation for analytics, AI, and intelligent agents on a single, integrated platform. Instead of managing separate tools for data movement, storage, analytics, and reporting, agencies can bring these capabilities together in a single environment that helps teams collaborate, simplify governance, and prepare data for analytics, AI, and intelligent agents.

Building this kind of AI-ready foundation typically involves four key steps:

• Unify your data estate: Eliminate silos and reduce architectural complexity by bringing data together.

• Process and harmonize data: Stream, integrate, and transform historical and real-time data to make it AI-ready.

• Create semantic meaning: Add business context to data so agents understand data the same way your teams do.

• Empower AI agents to act: Use unified, context-rich data to automate workflows, accelerate decisions, and drive action.

Microsoft Fabric unifies data integration, databases, analytics, business intelligence, and AI on a single platform while delivering the capabilities organizations expect from category leaders. Microsoft is recognized as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms and in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Data Integration Tools, Cloud Database Management Systems, and Cloud AI Developer Services.

Unify your data estate with Microsoft OneLake

Preparing data for AI often starts with a simple challenge: finding and connecting all the data an organization already has.

Most government data estates span multiple systems, clouds, departments, and applications. Data teams spend significant time moving, copying, synchronizing, and managing data before they can use it for analytics or AI. This complexity creates additional cost, operational overhead, and governance challenges.

At the center of Microsoft Fabric is Microsoft OneLake, a single, unified data lake that helps organizations bring together their entire data estate. With zero-copy, zero-ETL tools in OneLake, agencies can connect data across clouds, on-premises systems, and third-party platforms without creating unnecessary copies or duplicating data across multiple environments. For example, Lumen, a leader in enterprise connectivity, cut 10,000 hours of manual effort.

We used to spend up to six hours a day copying data into SQL servers. Now it’s all streamlined…OneLake allowed us to ingest once and use anywhere.

Chad Hollingsworth, Cloud Architect at Lumen

This approach reduces data silos, simplifies architecture, and creates a common foundation that analytics, reporting, AI applications, and agents can all leverage. By bringing data together in one place, organizations can spend less time managing infrastructure and more time extracting value from their information.

Process and harmonize data

Unifying data is only the beginning. To support AI and advanced analytics, organizations also need to prepare, transform, and continuously refine their data.

Microsoft Fabric provides a complete suite of analytics capabilities that help organizations ingest, process, analyze, and visualize data across the entire lifecycle. Data engineers can build pipelines, data scientists can develop models, analysts can create reports and dashboards, and operational teams can monitor live streams of information, all on a shared platform operating over a common data foundation.

Because these capabilities are integrated within Fabric, organizations can move seamlessly from raw data to analytics, business intelligence, and AI applications without stitching together multiple disconnected services.

Instead of managing fragmentation, my team now focuses on building reliable patterns that scale with closely integrated capabilities like Fabric Data Warehouse and Fabric’s native executive engine for Spark. The shift reduced costs and operational friction and restored confidence.

Nagaraju Gutlapalli, Head of Data Engineering, Bajaj Finserv

For government organizations, this creates a more efficient path from data collection to actionable insight, helping teams respond more quickly to changing operational needs while maintaining trust in the underlying data.

Create semantic meaning

One of the biggest challenges with AI is that data alone is not enough. To generate meaningful insights and take useful actions, AI systems need to understand how an organization operates, including its business processes, policies, operational state, and institutional knowledge.

Fabric helps address this challenge through Fabric IQ, the intelligence layer for enterprise knowledge and operations. Fabric IQ brings together unified data in OneLake, business intelligence through semantic models and metrics, and operational intelligence. Together, these capabilities create a shared knowledge foundation that gives data consistent business meaning across the organization.

For government organizations, this is particularly important because useful AI outcomes often depend on understanding complex relationships between people, programs, assets, operations, and policies. By combining data with institutional and operational knowledge, Fabric helps ensure AI systems are grounded in trusted organizational context rather than isolated datasets or technical schemas.

The result is a shared intelligence foundation that people and AI can understand, reason over, and act upon. This foundation enables trusted AI experiences, intelligent applications, and specialized agents that can analyze information, recommend actions, automate workflows, and support mission-critical decisions.

Empower AI agents to act

As organizations move beyond AI assistants and toward intelligent agents that can reason, automate work, and take action, the quality of the underlying data foundation becomes increasingly important.

Microsoft Fabric provides the foundation for these next-generation AI experiences by bringing together unified data in OneLake, analytics across the Fabric platform, and enterprise knowledge through Fabric IQ. Together, these capabilities enable agents to access trusted data, understand business context, reason over current conditions, and take informed action.

Organizations can connect data and knowledge from Fabric to AI experiences built with Microsoft Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and custom applications, helping ensure agents operate with a consistent understanding of enterprise data and operations.

Using Fabric and Foundry Agent Service, we’ve built agents that allow us to talk to our data, ask personalized questions, and uncover insights based on role or function.

Maureen Tan, Head of AI Center of Excellence, NTT DATA

For government agencies, this creates new opportunities to accelerate analysis, improve operational efficiency, automate mission-critical processes, and empower employees with AI experiences grounded in trusted organizational knowledge.

Getting started with Microsoft Fabric in GCC High

The availability of Microsoft Fabric in GCC High represents an important milestone in bringing Microsoft’s data and AI platform to government customers operating in regulated environments.

Organizations can begin exploring and adopting Fabric capabilities using their existing Power BI Premium capacities. Both Power BI and Fabric workloads will consume from the same capacity, enabling you to start using Fabric workloads immediately while continuing to run existing Power BI reports, dashboards, and semantic models without interruption.

For organizations already using Power BI Premium, Microsoft Fabric is available as part of their existing capacity. To learn more about the changes coming to your Power BI Premium environment, visit the Microsoft Fabric for US Government GCC High customers Learn page.

For GCC High organizations that do not currently have Power BI Premium, Microsoft Fabric capacity is available for purchase starting today.

Not all Microsoft Fabric capabilities will be available at launch. To view the complete list of supported features and the latest availability information, visit the same Fabric in GCC High Learn page. Please continue checking back as many more features will continue to be released over the following months.

Building the data foundation

As agencies continue their AI transformation journeys, success will increasingly depend on the strength of their data foundation. By helping organizations unify their data estate, prepare data for analytics and AI, add business context, and create trusted AI experiences, Microsoft Fabric provides a platform designed for the next generation of government innovation.

The future of AI starts with data. With Microsoft Fabric in GCC High, government organizations can begin building that foundation today.

Explore Microsoft Fabric in GCC High

Discover the latest information and a complete list of available features.

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The post Microsoft Fabric in GCC High: Building the data foundation for AI appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Everything we are doing at Microsoft is empowering Frontier Transformation: Copilot enables AI in the flow of human ambition, Microsoft IQ amplifies and protects an organization’s IQ and Agent 365 is the trust platform that enables observability at every layer of the stack.

Businesses are not static, and neither are the AI systems that support them. As organizations evolve, AI systems must continuously learn and improve. Agentic workflows need to be built, observed and tuned against the outcomes organizations seek and the ROI they demand. Microsoft’s open, model-diverse and heterogenous platform powers that improvement loop. We also recently announced Microsoft Frontier Company, bringing our AI engineering approach to customers around the world to help them build these AI systems to accelerate measurable business outcomes.

Throughout the past year, we saw customers put these capabilities to work in powerful ways — embedding AI into core business processes, building agentic systems, strengthening security, accelerating innovation and creating new sources of value. The stories below highlight organizations leading Frontier Transformation, demonstrating how intelligence, trust and human ambition come together across industries.

To advance its journey to become a global AI-powered company, Atos Group deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot to 56,000 employees across 54 countries — from consultants to engineers to frontline workers — and was one of the first organizations globally to adopt Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite. Using Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft Copilot Studio and Agent 365, Atos is building, operating and governing a growing ecosystem of 19,000 AI agents through a unified operating model that brings together productivity, security, compliance and agent governance. As Atos embeds secure agentic AI across its workforce, the company is creating a repeatable model to continuously improve thousands of agents at scale while applying the same playbook to help customers accelerate adoption across highly regulated industries.

Facing state-sponsored threats and complex global operations, ASM is strengthening cyber resilience with Microsoft Security Copilot, helping protect the intellectual property behind advanced semiconductor manufacturing. By bringing threat investigations into a unified AI-powered experience, ASM enables analysts to investigate incidents faster, apply consistent decision-making across global operations and accelerate the development of cybersecurity talent. The company reduced incident triage time by 68%, cut laptop compromise investigations from 25 minutes to eight and now saves 337 hours each week on investigations while redeploying 20% of its security operations staff to governance, risk and compliance initiatives.

Banco Popular Dominicano, the largest private-sector bank in the Dominican Republic, transformed operational risk management from periodic, sample-based reviews into continuous, AI-powered supervision. Using AURA — an ecosystem of specialized agents built on Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Power Platform — the bank monitors 100% of its operational risk universe in real time, up from roughly 40% coverage, and can automatically analyze changes, validate controls and surface issues as they occur. The shift has delivered seven times greater analytical capacity, reduced manual operating effort by 70%, achieved 98% methodological accuracy and enabled continuous processing of approximately 80,000 documents per week and more than 300 cases per day. Just as importantly, risk teams have moved from reacting to problems after the fact to anticipating and preventing deviations before they occur. These results demonstrate the power of AI democratization. By enabling business teams to build intelligent solutions themselves through low-code tools, Banco Popular transformed operational risk management while fostering a culture of innovation led by domain experts.

To help reduce the manual burden for employees while meeting the pharmaceutical industry’s strict data security requirements, Cactus Life Sciences modernized scientific workflows with Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents. The company has deployed more than 30 custom automation agents to streamline document review and structure data extraction and information retrieval across scientific writing and project management teams. Supported by a centralized knowledge repository and the Copilot Champions community, the company reports efficiency improvements of approximately 35% to 50% in structured data extraction. By automating labor-intensive tasks and maintaining human review and quality controls, the company is enabling scientific writers to focus on deeper analysis, synthesis and delivering exceptional science to clients.

Chow Tai Fook is redefining luxury retail with Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Foundry. The company has deployed over 400 customized AI agents supporting more than 24,000 employees, with millions of AI interactions each month and core business-process efficiency gains exceeding 70%. Through its AI Fook super-agent ecosystem, frontline associates can instantly access product expertise, inventory insights and personalized recommendations, helping drive sales conversion improvements of up to 57% while delivering hyper-personalized omnichannel experiences at scale. With hundreds of AI agents operating across the business, Chow Tai Fook is creating a foundation where customer, product and operational intelligence can be applied across every interaction, helping personalize experiences and improve decision-making across its global retail network.

To accelerate AI adoption, EY moved AI from experimentation into enterprise-wide transformation. After deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot to 150,000 employees and realizing a 15% productivity gain, the firm is expanding the Microsoft 365 Frontier Suite across its global workforce of more than 400,000 people, embedding agentic AI capabilities across the enterprise. As Client Zero, EY is applying Microsoft technologies across its own operations, including Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Copilot Studio, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft Fabric. The results include 95% faster lead times, a more than 37% reduction in finance operating costs and up to a 90% reduction in manual workloads across key business processes.

To reimagine the grocery shopping experience, Grandiose Supermarkets created an AI-powered shopping companion — GrandChef — built on Microsoft Foundry and Azure OpenAI Service. By connecting meal inspiration, recipe discovery and product purchasing into a single experience grounded in live product and inventory data, GrandChef helps shoppers move from intent to purchase faster and with greater confidence. This has led to a 31% increase in conversion, a 20% lift in average basket value and shopping journeys that are 40% faster. Together, these gains are helping Grandiose Supermarkets create more personalized customer experiences while driving measurable business growth. By connecting customer intent, product data and purchasing decisions in a single experience, Grandiose is creating a feedback loop that helps continuously improve recommendations and shopping experiences.

To support audits across its global organization, Grupo Bimbo built two agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio and deployed them through Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams: the result was Audit Assist, an idea generated from a Microsoft-supported internal hackathon and Comatrix. By connecting auditors directly to approved guidance, procedures and templates in SharePoint, the company is helping teams work more efficiently across 39 countries while improving consistency and audit quality. The solution/AI agents reduced planning-phase audit time by 20% and accelerated risk and control matrix creation from days to seconds, enabling auditors to spend less time searching for information and more time on analysis and decision-making. By making approved audit knowledge instantly accessible across its global audit organization, Grupo Bimbo is creating a foundation where expertise can scale with the business — improving consistency, reducing rework and enabling auditors to focus on higher-value analysis and decision-making.

To create a unified foundation for data, automation and AI across its operations in 47 countries, Navien built a connected, intelligent operating model with Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft Copilot Studio. By connecting fragmented data and processes across procurement, manufacturing, quality and customer service, the company is enabling more consistent, data-driven decision-making across its operations. Navien saved 28,000 hours annually through AI agents and automation, with 32% of employees using self-service analytics to make decisions without IT support. Through its migration to Azure, it also expects more than 1.4 million in total cost-of-ownership savings over five years. By connecting data, insights and workflows across the business, Navien is enabling faster, more consistent decision-making at scale across its global operations.

NHS England is accelerating AI adoption across the healthcare system with the largest implementation of its kind in the healthcare sector. Following a trial involving 30,000 workers across 90 NHS organizations — where users saved an average of 43 minutes of administrative time per day — NHS England is rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot to over 500,000 clinicians and support staff. Organizations can use Microsoft Copilot Studio to build and deploy AI agents that streamline clinical, operational and administrative workflows. Through Agent 365, NHS England can govern and scale those agents across the healthcare system while enabling individual trusts to build solutions for local needs — creating a secure framework where agentic workflows can be deployed, managed and expanded consistently to improve service delivery, reduce costs and create more time for patient care.

Novo Nordisk is using AI to help researchers make faster, more quantitative decisions in pharmaceutical R&D. Working with Microsoft’s AI Acceleration Studio within the Forward Deployed Engineering team, the company built a governed reasoning agent on Microsoft Azure with its proprietary dataset, including more than 200,000 patient-years of harmonized clinical trial data, while maintaining rigor, oversight and compliance. The system has expanded the team’s capacity to evaluate potential opportunities from 5 to 10 strong ideas per quarter to more than 50, and the company expects it to reduce time to insight for exploratory analyses from weeks to minutes. By grounding AI in its datasets and governed workflows, Novo Nordisk is helping scientists turn decades of institutional expertise into a reusable intelligence layer that can help accelerate discovery across the organization.

As AI becomes part of investment decision-making, SimCorp is helping financial institutions bring AI into investment workflows without compromising governance, auditability or control. By unifying SimCorp One on Microsoft Azure and leveraging Microsoft Foundry, the company is helping portfolio managers, risk analysts and operations teams access insights faster, automate manual processes and spend more time on higher-value decisions. By standardizing how AI is deployed and governed across global investment operations, SimCorp is creating a foundation for trusted AI at scale, helping organizations embed AI into investment workflows while maintaining the controls required in highly regulated markets. One study found SimCorp One customers realized 134% ROI over three years, improved operational efficiency by 45 percent, saved 10 hours per person per week and accelerated time to market by 50 to 60 days.

Stellantis is accelerating AI-led strategy and digital transformation across its global business, co-developing more than 100 AI initiatives across sales, customer care, product development and operations. By applying AI-powered insights across the business, the automaker is streamlining product development and validation, advancing predictive maintenance and bringing new digital features and services to market faster for customers. Stellantis is also deploying an AI-driven global cyberdefense center to help protect vehicles, customers and operations worldwide while modernizing its infrastructure on Microsoft Azure with a targeted 60% reduction in its datacenter footprint by 2029, powering a more scalable and interconnected digital ecosystem for future digital and connected services and resilient operations.

Facing a growing volume of cyberthreats across a complex healthcare environment, St. Luke’s University Health Network is using Microsoft Security Copilot to help protect the systems clinicians and patients depend on every day. Across 15 campuses, 300 outpatient sites and more than 2.5 petabytes of data and patient records, the organization needed a unified view of threats across a complex environment. Security Copilot connects Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Purview and other security tools, helping analysts correlate threats faster, eliminate silos and respond with greater precision. St. Luke’s is saving nearly 200 hours each month in phishing alert triage and creating incident reports in minutes instead of hours, helping security teams focus more time on protecting patient care.

University of Kentucky unified more than 150 AI initiatives across classrooms, research labs, healthcare settings and administrative offices through its CATS AI governance framework. Standardizing on Microsoft’s AI portfolio — including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Dragon Copilot, GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Azure — the university achieved campus-wide deployment, providing more than 70,000 students and employees with access to AI capabilities. Clinicians are using Dragon Copilot to reduce documentation burdens and spend more time with patients, and students are using GitHub Copilot to become active builders of digital solutions, such as the Socratic Tutor: an AI-powered learning platform aimed at helping medical students master complex curriculum.

Looking back on FY26, I am inspired not only by the continued pace of AI innovation, but by what our customers are achieving. Across every industry and segment, organizations are turning their unique IQ into strategic advantage with continuously improving agentic workflows. The companies leading this next phase are building, observing and tuning agentic workflows against business outcomes. Intelligence compounds, trust scales and AI can work in the flow of human ambition. As Frontier Firms redefine what is possible with AI, we remain focused on helping our customers amplify and protect their intelligence so they can transform how they operate, compete and grow.

The post Looking back on Microsoft’s FY26: From AI experimentation to Frontier Transformation appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

What stands out this month is not a single technology trend, but the range of government challenges that Microsoft partners are tackling. These solutions cover needs as varied as protecting identities to expanding access to digital health guidance. They also address the less visible work behind government services, including procurement, software security, asset oversight, and municipal training. These solutions offer a useful reminder that transformation happens both in the services that residents experience and in the systems that help the government run.

Whether you run a national program, lead a municipal department, or manage an agency’s software estate, there’s something here worth a closer look. Check out the partners’ solutions descriptions below. 

New solutions for government customers in June 2026 

CaseGuard

Solution released: June 19, 2026 

Solution description supplied by CaseGuard Inc. 

CaseGuard provides AI-powered video redaction services to help law enforcement, government agencies, and public safety organizations protect sensitive information. CaseGuard’s redaction service automatically detects and redacts faces, license plates, and other personally identifiable information from video footage quickly and accurately.

Learn more on marketplace.

SonarQube Advanced Security 

Solution released: June 18, 2026 

Solution description supplied by Carahsoft Technology Corporation. 

Sonar enhances the public sector by promoting code quality, security and compliance, critical for government software handling sensitive data. Through STIG (Security Technical Implementation Guide) support, Sonar assists agencies in meeting strict security standards, identifying vulnerabilities and generating audit-ready compliance reports.

Learn more on marketplace.

Unified Acquire 

Solution released: June 18, 2026 

Solution description supplied by Rohirrim. 

Unified Acquire enables government agencies to streamline the acquisition process at mission speed of need by automating the creation of procurement artifacts and key acquisition documents. Leveraging secure single-tenant architecture and organizationally specific AI, our purpose-built platform unlocks the power of an organization’s unique corpus of knowledge to modernize the acquisition lifecycle. Unified Acquire is already deployed across several federal agencies, global Fortune 100 companies, and tier 1defense contractors, supporting tens of thousands of users.

Learn more on marketplace.

SonarQube Cloud 

Solution released: June 16, 2026 

Solution description supplied by Carahsoft Technology Corporation. 

Cloud-based static analysis tool tailored for CI/CD workflows. SonarQube Cloud enablesteams to deliver clean, high-quality code consistently using SaaS with an easy-to-use codereview tool that integrates smoothly into cloud DevOps platforms. Developers are providedwith instant feedback, the right context and minimal distractions so that clean code can bedelivered seamlessly.

Learn more on marketplace.

Trace360 

Solution released: June 8, 2026 

Solution description supplied by Brace Innovations (Proprietary) Limited. 

Trace360 Firearm Asset Management is a cloud-based platform that gives armories, law enforcement agencies, private security firms, and firearms organizations complete visibility and control over their firearm inventory.

Learn more on marketplace.

Solutions for local and municipal governments 

Neumo Short-Term Rental 

Solution released: June 29, 2026 

Solution description supplied by Neumo. 

Neumo Short-Term Rental helps governments maximize compliance and enhance the constituent experience, with a solution that streamlines identification, monitoring, and enforcement, supported by a 24/7 hotline and community portal.

Learn more on marketplace.

Municipal Leadership LMS 

Solution released: June 8, 2026 

Solution description supplied by Stratus Change and Training. 

The Municipal Leadership LMS™ is a modern, cloud-based Learning Management Systempurpose-built to support the development of municipal executives, strategic departments, senior management teams, and public sector professionals. Designed specifically for the unique needs of local government, the platform provides a centralized digital learning environment that enables municipalities to deliver, manage, monitor, and measure executive development programs, compliance training, and more.

Learn more on marketplace.

PowaNow 

Solution released: June 4, 2026 

Solution description supplied by dandoFin. 

PowaNow is dando Fin’s Prepaid Electricity Advance (PEA) solution that enables municipalities and vending partners to offer qualifying prepaid electricity customers an advance when they face short-term cash constraints, in much the same way that prepaid airtime advance works.

Learn more on marketplace.

Solutions for national governments 

Dr.Pal 

Solution released: June 18, 2026 

Solution description supplied by Diyar United Company. 

 Dr. Pal (MoH Edition) is a cloud-based digital health coaching and engagement platform for Ministries of Health and public-health partners. It supports citizen-facing wellness and symptom-guidance conversations, proactive nudges, and structured pathways that encourage prevention and earlier intervention.

Learn more on marketplace.

Closing thoughts 

June 2026’s solutions show government modernization becoming more targeted. Agencies are applying technology to specific challenges, whether protecting sensitive information, improving procurement, or overseeing critical assets. At the same time, digital tools are helping governments respond more directly to community needs. 

The common thread is practical, trusted transformation. These solutions turn new capabilities into tools that public servants and residents can use in the moments that matter. Each is available today on the Microsoft Marketplace.

Disclaimers and Microsoft Marketplace Terms of Use:  

Microsoft doesn’t guarantee the accuracy or timeliness of information available from the Microsoft Marketplace. Description places authoring of the offer Summary and Description on the publisher—the policies dictate what the publisher must write, confirming the descriptions originate from the partner, not Microsoft. The contract of sale is concluded directly between you and Publisher, and the terms of use, licenses, and other applicable terms that apply to your acquisition and use of Publisher Offers are governed by separate terms between you and the Publisher. 

The post 9 new government solutions available on Microsoft Marketplace appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

The Genesis Mission represents an ambitious vision, bringing together DOE’s 17 National Laboratories, world-class experimental facilities, decades of irreplaceable scientific data and next-generation computing into a single, unified platform capable of transforming how science gets done. The critical goal of the Genesis Mission is to double the productivity and impact of American research and innovation within a decade by embedding AI directly into the scientific process. It’s a bold step forward and exactly the kind of moonshot that defines American science.

At Microsoft, we believe that this goal is not only achievable, but also essential as a national security imperative and an economic engine for generations to come. With this commitment and the launch of SPARK, we’re ready to partner fully in this mission and build on our collaborations across government and with academia.

Microsoft investing in AI for science

Today, Microsoft’s $60 million investment package will begin to accelerate AI for science in support of DOE and the National Laboratories. As sustained scientific impact requires more than infrastructure alone to enable lasting scientific outcomes, Microsoft’s investment package is structured in two parts:

• $40 million in Azure compute and AI credits, distributed over three years, to power the large-scale AI and scientific workloads at the heart of the mission. This gives researchers room to train, simulate and iterate at a scale that matches their ambition.
• $20 million in solution engineering enablement services. Dedicated engineering, architecture, deployment, adoption and acceleration support to turn cloud and AI capacity into operational scientific outcomes. This investment helps ensure that the Genesis Mission advances in practice and in principle.

Together, this investment reflects a simple conviction: While infrastructure opens the door, it is people, expertise and disciplined delivery that carry discoveries across the finish line. Microsoft is committing to both.

Introducing SPARK: Microsoft’s catalyst for advancing scientific partnerships

Great partnerships need more than good intentions and good technology — they need a clear way to work together. So, alongside this commitment, we are standing up a new program office and coordination hub: SPARK, or Scientific Partnership Advancing Research & Knowledge.

SPARK is the single front door and coordination hub for Genesis Mission collaboration with Microsoft. SPARK orchestrates the full breadth of what Microsoft brings to bear: program, technical, research, engineering, security, compliance, partner and field teams into one clear, consistent path from first idea to deployed science.

SPARK is built around five commitments:

• A dedicated Genesis Mission Program Management Office. This office handles intake, prioritization, a disciplined sprint-and-checkpoint cadence and a steady operational interface with DOE for alignment, reporting and sustained partnership.
• An AI for Science Center of Excellence. An integrated delivery team that moves use cases from concept to secure, compliant, scalable implementation, with enablement through office hours, hackathons and training grounded in responsible AI and reproducible research.
• Optimization of Azure credits. Ensures computing resources are directed toward the projects where they can accelerate science most.
• Management of technical services. Dedicated support to help labs adopt and operationalize AI-for-science capabilities, delivered by Microsoft teams and select partners.
• Joint research and development. A focused set of Genesis Mission-aligned challenge problems, co-developed by Microsoft researchers and DOE scientific leadership, with milestones, publications and IP governed by mutually agreed terms.

Underneath SPARK sits the full breadth of Microsoft’s secure, FedRAMP-authorized cloud and AI portfolio. This includes Microsoft Azure infrastructure, Microsoft Foundry and Zero Trust security through Microsoft Defender, Sentinel and Entra. Azure capabilities will help extend the DOE’s American Science Cloud capabilities by providing computing, AI, data and collaboration services that complement existing scientific infrastructure. Together, these capabilities will help accelerate discovery, enable secure collaboration across institutions and provide researchers with flexible access to advanced technologies and resources. This will enable DOE and National Laboratory scientists to move faster from hypothesis to discovery, without compromising the security, reproducibility and governance that mission-critical research demands.

Accelerating science with Microsoft Discovery and Quantum

Microsoft’s new commitments build on capabilities we recently announced through Microsoft Discovery and Microsoft Quantum. They are designed to accelerate scientific research and will support the Genesis Mission’s ambition to bring AI, advanced computing and emerging technologies more deeply into the scientific process.

To enable a unified research platform for Genesis Mission work, Microsoft will provide access to Microsoft Discovery, our integrated platform that unites AI models, simulation, data and experimental workflows driven by advanced cognition rooted in scientific method, within a single governed environment. Microsoft Discovery, now generally available, includes support for autonomous lab orchestration, integration of Microsoft Research’s AI models for science, continuous AI learning through the scientific loop and agentic memory, advances in Discovery Bookshelf for data curation and scalable indexing and deeper integration and multi-hop reasoning over enterprise science data estates, including data governance. Together, these capabilities are designed to help researchers move more quickly from data to insight, from simulation to experiment, and from promising idea to scientific breakthrough.

We also recently announced the preview of the Microsoft Discovery app, a local desktop experience that helps researchers, students and scientific teams begin working with Microsoft Discovery today. Our support for the Genesis Mission will include access to the Microsoft Discovery app to enable DOE and National Laboratory teams with early access to its capabilities.

Microsoft’s recent quantum progress further strengthens the foundation for Genesis Mission work. With Majorana-based quantum advances, including more reliable topological qubits and a roadmap toward scalable quantum computing, Microsoft is helping move quantum from long-range research toward practical scientific capability. For DOE and National Laboratory teams, that progress can open new ways to model complex materials, chemistry, energy systems and national security challenges that are difficult or impossible to solve with classical computing alone. Just as important, the same agentic AI for science approach behind Microsoft Discovery is helping accelerate quantum research itself, creating a reinforcing cycle in which AI speeds quantum breakthroughs and quantum computing expands what scientists can ultimately discover.

The work is already underway

Working alongside and supporting federal researchers and universities, we’re already seeing real-world impact, from faster materials screening to advanced biosurveillance modeling. Four of the first projects taking shape under this partnership show what that looks like in practice:

Discovering critical energy storage materials and biosystems design (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
Using AI to dramatically accelerate the discovery of new energy storage materials through novel experimentation design and shrinking analysis of massive volumes of scientific data from years to weeks. In biosystems design, Microsoft Discovery is plugging directly into PNNL’s laboratory automation infrastructure to launch self-driving scientific workflows that autonomously design, run and fine-tune biological experiments in real time.

Strengthening biosecurity (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Pairing advanced AI with modern bioinformatics to identify emerging biological threats sooner and develop responses faster, strengthening the nation’s ability to stay ahead of the next outbreak and developing proactive defenses against evolving biosecurity risks. By applying advances in AI, scientific computing and biotechnology, Microsoft and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are helping strengthen the nation’s ability to prevent, detect and respond to biological threats, advancing US biosecurity and biodefense priorities while supporting the long-term resilience and competitiveness of the US bioeconomy.

Autonomous labs for accelerated materials discovery (Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory)
Supporting the development of AI-enabled autonomous (“self-driving”) laboratories through the integration of advanced foundation models and simulation tools — including MatterGen and MatterSim — to rapidly design, execute and optimize experiments for structural materials and superconductors. By combining autonomous experimentation with accelerated computational materials discovery, this approach dramatically shortens the path from scientific hypothesis to validated, manufacturable, mission-enabling materials, while exploring a vastly larger design space than is possible through traditional methods.

Accelerating nuclear energy permitting and autonomous energy operations (Idaho National Laboratory)
Applying AI to streamline the licensing, permitting and review of new nuclear projects. AI helps automate the development of complex engineering and safety analysis materials, a historically time-consuming and expensive process, to get this critical documentation into the hands of regulators and safety reviewers sooner. The lab also demonstrated that secure, distributed, hyperscale cloud can enable autonomous remote operations for nuclear power generators. Together, these efforts are helping bring safe and reliable power online faster and ensure scalable, efficient and reliable operations to meet the nation’s surging demand for energy.

Why this matters

We are entering an era where AI and quantum don’t just support the scientific process — they are essential to it. Through the Genesis Mission, Microsoft is committing to work as part of America’s research enterprise by providing hyperscale compute, advanced models, emerging quantum capabilities and dedicated expertise that run alongside the labs’ own world-leading systems. We are helping to ensure that the nation’s scientific strength is built on American technology. This commitment builds and expands upon the decades of collaboration through Microsoft Research and partnerships across the US government and our national labs. Now is the time to scale these breakthroughs across the entire R&D ecosystem.

The mission ahead is significant, and it should be. Whether it’s advancing the frontiers of energy, chemistry and materials science, hardening our national security or simply giving the country’s best scientists better tools to ask bigger questions, this is work worth doing and worth doing together. With a $60 million investment and SPARK, Microsoft is ready to help ensure America’s scientific leadership continues to accelerate.

Fueling scientific discovery is one of the most important things these technologies can do. AI and quantum are transforming how we tackle the toughest challenges facing the country, from sustainable materials and clean energy to biosecurity and drug discovery. The Genesis Mission is a pivotal step toward advancing that progress. We commend the DOE’s vision in building a unified, holistic approach to these critical national missions. For America to seize this opportunity and set the global standard, we must put these breakthrough technologies to work advancing the nation’s research and development.

We’re ready to deepen this partnership across government and academia. We move faster together. I’ve never been more optimistic about what’s possible when the nation’s scientific talent meets the best of modern AI and quantum. The Genesis Mission is that moment. Let’s get to work.

To get started, reach out to your Microsoft account team or email genesismission@microsoft.com.

The post Powering America’s Genesis Mission: Microsoft’s commitment to scientific discovery appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

With the rollout of the Analyst and Researcher agents and expanded agent creation capabilities in U.S. Government clouds, we’re marking another step forward in our commitment to delivering Copilot experiences to public sector customers—deliberately, responsibly, and ready for use from day one. 

Agentic experiences, built for U.S. Government clouds 

Agentic capabilities in Copilot for U.S. Government clouds now include Researcher and Analyst, along with Agent Builder and Copilot Studio publishing to create and share agents. 

Researcher (rolling out now, starting with GCC) supports multi‑step research by gathering and synthesizing information across work content to produce clearer, grounded drafts—within U.S. Government cloud security and compliance boundaries. Learn how to get started with Researcher today. 

Analyst (now available in GCC, GCC-High, and DoD) supports data analysis by turning information into structured insights and visualizations for decisions and briefings, including pattern detection and clear summaries of large volumes of information. Learn how to get started with Analyst today. 

Agent Builder (now available in GCC and GCC-High) expands agent creation capabilities in U.S. Government clouds by enabling users to package instructions, prompts, and work knowledge into reusable agents that help ensure more consistent Copilot responses—grounded in the right organizational context and shareable across teams. Learn more about Agent Builder. 

Publishing Copilot Studio Agents to Teams and Microsoft 365 (now available in GCC) extends agentic experiences to the tools users rely on every day. By enabling agencies to make vetted, purpose-built agents available directly in familiar Microsoft 365 surfaces, this capability helps scale consistent, role-relevant guidance and workflows—while keeping usage within the same security and compliance boundaries of U.S. Government clouds. Learn how to connect and configure an agent for Teams and Microsoft 365. 

What else is new this quarter 

Many core Microsoft 365 Copilot capabilities have also been enhanced in U.S. Government clouds in recent months, including: 

• Updated OpenAI models (GCC, GCC-High, DoD): Microsoft 365 Copilot for U.S. Government now leverages GPT 5.1 for Copilot Chat, GPT-5 for reasoning, and GPT-4o for image generation, supporting more accurate and contextual responses.  
• Microsoft 365 Copilot app enhancements: Copilot Search (GCC, GCC-High, DoD) helps users find relevant info across work content; the Create module (GCC, GCC-High) helps draft and refine images and other content.  
• Copilot Chat improvements (GCC, GCC-High, DoD), including enhanced language understanding for clearer, more accurate responses; Code Interpreter for in-chat data analysis and complex problem solving; and image upload with OCR to extract text for summaries, interpretation, and next steps.  
• Microsoft 365 Copilot Connectors (GCC, GCC-High) expand access to relevant third-party and line-of-business data sources to ground Copilot experiences in more of your organization’s knowledge. Learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot Connectors. 
• In-product user feedback (GCC, GCC-High, DoD). U.S. Government users can now submit in-product feedback directly within Microsoft 365 and Copilot to help improve product experiences for mission work.  

All these capabilities – agentic and otherwise – are built to support applicable regulatory and compliance requirements out of the box. U.S. Government compliance needs—including data residency, operational isolation, and restricted personnel access—are carefully considered prior to release, reducing the need for administrators to retrofit controls, disable features, or manage separate compliance workflows.

Moving forward 

Delivering Copilot to U.S. Government clouds is a journey, not a single moment. Each new capability reflects a careful, staged approach to availability—helping to ensure features are compliant by design and usable as-is by government organizations. 

For guidance on leveraging Microsoft 365 Copilot effectively, visit the Microsoft 365 Copilot for US Government Adoption site. Admins can also review how to manage Copilot agents in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center to help make the most of new agentic capabilities as they roll out. 

We’ll continue to share updates as additional Microsoft 365 Copilot features continue to roll out across GCC, GCC‑High, and DoD. Thank you to our government customers and partners for your continued engagement and feedback. Your input helps shape how we responsibly bring AI to mission critical work. 

The post Continuing our momentum: Expanding Microsoft 365 Copilot capabilities across U.S. Government clouds appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

That is where AI comes in. To break the infrastructure bottleneck and shift the industry from ambition to delivery, Microsoft is announcing an AI for nuclear collaboration with NVIDIA, to provide end-to-end tools that streamline permitting, accelerate design, and optimize operations across the industry.

This set of technologies brings disciplined engineering to the entire lifecycle of a nuclear plant—spanning site permitting, design, construction, and continuous operations. By enabling these capabilities within a connected, AI-powered foundation, we are empowering energy developers to make highly complex work repeatable, traceable, secure, and predictable—slashing development timelines and eliminating rework without sacrificing safety.

The digital foundation for nuclear at scale

The only thing that may be more complex than building a nuclear plant is designing and permitting one. Permitting alone can take years, cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and involve an immense amount of data processing and reporting. It’s not a lack of need, knowledge, or even willingness that’s holding development back, but rather the inability to progress efficiently and consistently through rigorous permitting and development processes.

Engineers can spend thousands of hours drafting, cross-referencing, formatting, searching, reviewing, and reworking materials. They have to identify and fix inconsistencies across tens of thousands of pages. It is little wonder that plants have been notorious for construction delays and cost overruns.

To break this infrastructure bottleneck, we need to move away from highly customized engineering towards repeatable, reference-based delivery—while maintaining regulatory standards and engineering accountability.

With AI, we can identify tiny documentation inconsistencies and resolve them quickly. By unifying data and simulation across the lifecycle, we ensure complex work remains:

• Traceable: Every engineering decision is digitally linked to the evidence and regulations that back it up.
• Audit-Ready: The system keeps a perfect “paper trail,” ensuring that regulators can verify safety instantly.
• Secure: High-level intelligence is applied within a governed, protected environment.
• Predictable: High-fidelity simulations map time and cost, catching delays before they happen in the real world.

This isn’t just about speed; it’s about trust. Engineers and regulators are freed to focus on what matters most: building a safe, secure, high-capacity, carbon-free power source that’s on-time and on-budget.

Here is how AI and Digital Twins can carry a project from the initial phases to efficient operations:

• Design and engineering: Digital Twins and high-fidelity simulations enable faster iteration. Engineers can reuse proven patterns and instantly see how a tiny design change impacts the entire model, creating a validated plan before breaking ground.
• Licensing and permitting: Generative AI handles the heavy lifting of document drafting and gap analysis. It unifies all project information, ensuring comprehensive applications aligned with historical permits. This allows expert regulators to focus their time on safety judgments rather than reconciling thousands of pages of text.
• Construction and delivery: While traditional 3D models only map physical space, 4D (time scheduling) and 5D (cost tracking) simulations can virtually construct the plant before shovels hit the dirt. AI and Digital Twins allow developers to track physical progress against the digital plan in real-time, catching potential delays and preventing the schedule collisions that lead to expensive rework.
• Operations and maintenance: AI-powered sensors and operational digital twins detect anomalies early, ensuring higher uptime and predictive maintenance that keeps the grid stable with human operators firmly in control.

By unifying data, traceability, and simulation across phases, AI accelerates design validation with high-fidelity 3D models and Digital Twins, improves licensing consistency through AI-assisted document workflows, and connects design assumptions to operational performance—giving operators, regulators, and stakeholders clearer, continuous visibility.

Accelerating delivery: How Aalo Atomics, Idaho National Labs, and Southern Nuclear are deploying AI for nuclear

The proof is in the progress. Our collaboration is already changing the pace of nuclear delivery.

Aalo Atomics

Aalo Atomics has reduced the time-intensive permitting process by 92% using the Microsoft Generative AI for Permitting solution, saving an estimated $80 million a year. For Aalo, the value of the Microsoft and NVIDIA collaboration isn’t just speed—it’s confidence.

“Two things matter most: enterprise-scale complexity and mission-critical reliability. We’re deploying something complex at a scale only a company like Microsoft really understands. There’s no room for anything less than proven reliability.”

—Yasir Arafat, Chief Technology Officer, Aalo Atomics

Southern Nuclear

Southern Nuclear has developed and deployed agents using Microsoft Copilot across its fleet, including engineering and licensing, to improve consistency, reuse knowledge faster, and support better decision-making in key workstreams.

Idaho National Laboratory

When it comes to the public sector and specifically United States Federal, Idaho National Laboratory (INL) has become an early adopter of AI for nuclear technology. By using the AI capabilities to automate the assembly of complex engineering and safety analysis reports, INL is streamlining the review process and creating standard methodologies for regulators to adopt these tools safely, further speeding deployment.

Expanding the ecosystem: How Everstar and Atomic Canyon are operationalizing AI for nuclear on Microsoft Azure

Microsoft is actively expanding this secure ecosystem. Everstar—an NVIDIA Inception startup—brings domain-specific AI for nuclear to Azure to modernize how the industry manages project workflows and governed data pipelines.

“The nuclear industry has been bottlenecked by documentation burden and regulatory complexity for decades. This partnership means our customers get the secure, scalable cloud deployments they demand. It’s a significant step toward making nuclear power fast, safe, and unstoppable.”

—Kevin Kong, Chief Executive Officer, Everstar

We are also excited to highlight Atomic Canyon, whose Neutron platform is now available in the Microsoft Marketplace, allowing nuclear developers to deploy these capabilities with consistency and control through trusted procurement pathways.

Progress at the pace this moment requires

AI is enabling the energy industry to deliver more power, faster, and safely. This Microsoft and NVIDIA collaboration provides the path to do exactly that for advanced developers, owners, and operators. By turning fragmented, high-variance workflows into governed, auditable systems, we can compress timelines without compromising rigor. By unifying data, simulation, and evidence across design, permitting, construction, and operations, we are accelerating the deployment of firm, carbon-free power while strengthening regulatory confidence and operational resilience.

The AI for nuclear operations collaboration brings together NVIDIA Omniverse, NVIDIA Earth 2, NVIDIA CUDA-X, NVIDIA AI Enterprise, PhysicsNeMo, Isaac Sim, and Metropolis with Microsoft Generative AI for Permitting Solution Accelerator and Microsoft Planetary Computer to create a comprehensive, AI-powered digital ecosystem for nuclear energy on Azure.

Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Aalo Atomics will be presenting this AI-lead industry perspective at CERAWeek 2026 in a session entitled “A Digital Age for Nuclear: Aalo Atomics, NVIDIA, and Microsoft.”

Discover more

Ready to move from ambition to delivery? See how the Microsoft and NVIDIA nuclear for AI collaboration can drive change within your organization.

Contact us to learn more.

The post AI for nuclear energy: Powering an intelligent, resilient future appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.