Microsoft AI Tour: Discovering the Future

Author: Federica Grieco, April 2025

---

A New Era for Business

Artificial intelligence is already an integral part of our daily lives, significantly transforming the ways we work, interact, and innovate. From healthcare to finance, from industrial production to cybersecurity, AI is redefining the business landscape with exceptional opportunities and new challenges to tackle.

How can we harness the potential of AI in an ethical, safe, and sustainable manner? How can AI improve decision-making processes and optimize business operations? These were the questions that Microsoft and its partners aimed to answer during the Microsoft AI Tour event held in Milan on March 26th, which Proxima had the pleasure of attending.

Over 2000 attendees, including entrepreneurs, managers, IT professionals, and developers, participated in the event. The day was characterized by numerous parallel sessions on generative and agentic AI, distributed across various theaters, allowing attendees to select the sessions most relevant to their needs.

Initial Speech, Microsoft AI Tour, Milan, March 26, 2025

Agentic AI: The New Frontier of Artificial Intelligence

Among the main topics addressed, a standout theme was agentic AI, which represents a new evolution of AI characterized by the ability to make decisions, act, and adapt in real-time to emerging scenarios. This technology does not merely analyze data but can learn from situations and act autonomously thanks to "agents" that can work and operate intelligently and independently.

In the era of Generative and Agentic AI, companies can choose to rely on ready-to-use tools or create customized solutions. Microsoft, in fact, introduced and presented Copilot Studio, a low-code development tool for agents that allows organizations to create their own personalized copilots to automate and improve the efficiency of specific processes.

This has sparked a growing trend in the adoption of Copilot and its derivatives among companies, across roles and sectors, using both preconfigured agents and custom agents created ad hoc based on their specific needs.

AI increases productivity, manages more work, accelerates processes, and reduces completion times. It eliminates repetitive actions, allowing people to focus on more human roles. It optimizes the use of natural resources, reducing consumption and costs without compromising product quality. It enhances workplace safety by reducing contact with machines, ensuring transparency in production processes, and enabling predictive maintenance.

If the scope of Generative AI has proven to be revolutionary, Agentic AI is set to have an even more disruptive impact, increasingly amplifying human capabilities and further accelerating companies' innovation processes to contribute overall to the country's competitiveness."

Vincenzo Esposito, CEO of Microsoft Italia

Challenges

The AI Tour in Milan highlighted the potential of artificial intelligence and how it can transform various sectors of our society. It offered a valuable opportunity for networking and collaboration among researchers, entrepreneurs, and professionals in the technology sector.

Today, AI represents a technological, managerial, cultural, and design challenge. To address it, we need a balanced and responsible approach to ensure that AI is used in a way that maximizes benefits and minimizes risks.

The future is at our doorstep, are we ready?