Raymond James Comments on Microsoft’s Build 2025 Conference

Raymond James analyst Andrew Marok reiterated on May 20, 2025, an ‘Outperform’ rating with a $490 price target on Microsoft. 

“We attended Microsoft’s Build developer conference in Seattle.

This year’s keynote speech built significantly off of last year’s, taking Al agents from isolated applications to parts of a more capable connected network.

The theme of the “agentic web” covered a number of this year’s announcements, most of which were aimed at providing force multipliers for agents’ capabilities by tying them together across functions to tackle more complex tasks than individual agents could handle.

We see many of these announcements as highly additive to Microsoft’s Al services, enabling power users to accomplish more while addressing some complaints around agents’ limited scope to date.

We come away from today’s reveals positive that Microsoft can maintain its recent Al momentum, and we reiterate our Outperform rating.

The “middle innings” of the Al push building out the “agentic web”

CEO Satya Nadella, in his keynote address, characterized the current landscape as “entering the middle innings” of Al product development.

We believe that this view led to a keynote speech that was a little less flashy than last year’s, but maybe more consequential long-term.

This year’s announcements were significant enhancements on the concepts laid out last year, and should significantly deepen the capabilities of Microsoft’s Al tech embedded across its product suite.

Build 2025 adds connective tissue to Build 2024’s bones

Last year’s address was one of the first looks at the path toward agentic Al and the ability to create agents within Microsoft’s tools like Copilot Studio. This year was more focused on the platform evolution of individual applications, and developing frameworks for agents to work in tandem with each other.

Announcements like support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Google’s A2A agent-to-agent protocol, along with deeper connections among Microsoft’s own agentic tools, seeks to compound the impact of individual agentic tools by tying them together and sharing data across them.

Agentic evolutions available across multiple environments for different levels of developers

These enhanced agentic tools will be available across Microsoft’s agent creation suite, from multi-agent orchestration in the low-code Copilot Studio to the more advanced Azure Al Foundry Agent Service to serve users at a variety of sophistication levels.

In addition, GitHub Copilot enhancements (including a coding agent, building off of previous code assist features) are set to equip developers with the tools to significantly enhance development speed and sophistication.

Microsoft Discovery shows the true potential of Al innovation

Finally, Microsoft also announced the launch of Microsoft Discovery, a platform for researchers across research-intensive fields leveraging agentic Al to push the boundaries of scientific innovation.

The platform can tie together internal research with external research publications to discover novel connections and speed the discovery process for a number of practices including materials, drug discovery, energy, and manufacturing.”

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