Agents of Tomorrow: Building the Next Generation of Intelligence

We stand at the edge of a profound shift in artificial intelligence. Over the last five years, generative AI has moved from novelty to necessity—transforming how we create, code, and collaborate. Now, a new frontier is emerging: AI agents. Unlike traditional tools that wait for instructions, agents can perceive, decide, and act toward goals—expanding the boundaries of what humans and machines can achieve together.

In this keynote, we’ll explore the evolution from copilots to fully agentic systems, highlight breakthroughs that are reshaping industries, and imagine the future horizons where autonomous agents redefine productivity, creativity, and discovery. Most importantly, we’ll discuss the role of humans in this new era—not as bystanders, but as leaders guiding how agents operate, align with our values, and amplify our potential.

The Agents of Tomorrow are here—and the future will be built by those bold enough to partner with them.

Transcript

1. Agents of Tomorrow Henk Boelman Principal Cloud Advocate @ Microsoft Building the Next Generation of Intelligence
2. Hi Henk Boelman Principal Developer Advocate, Microsoft LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/henkboelman GitHub: github.com/hnky
4. Robots are going to kill us all!!!
5. Maybe not?
6. What happens when intelligence stops waiting for instructions… and starts taking initiative?
7. Would you trust an AI to …?
8. Recommend a product or service?.
9. Help keep you safe online?.
10. Assist you in driving?.
11. Driving you?.
12. Drive you kids school bus.
13. Assist you in coding?.
14. Write and runs code on its own?.
15. Detects if you are a terrorist?.
16. How does it make you feel?
17. /demo
18. Avatar – Creepy or not
19. Computer Use https://github.com/Azure-Samples/computer-use-model
20. Computer Use – Creepy or not
21. People are saying they’re building AI when they’re not
23. The year was 1955
24. Shakie
28. Generative AI Goes Mainstream (2020–2022) The Copilot Paradigm (2021–2023) Explosion of Multimodality (2022–2024) Democratization & Ecosystem Growth (2022–2024) Emergence of AI Agents (2024–2025)
29. We’re moving from prompting to partnering.
30. Perceive – Decide - Act
32. Agent An AI agent is an autonomous software entity that perceives its environment, makes decisions, and takes actions to achieve specific goals, often using artificial intelligence techniques.
33. What is an AI Agent? Retrieval Actions Memory LLM Instructions Tools Agent You are a friendly assistant called PizzaBot helping customers to place pizza orders. Input Output
34. /demo
35. Agents will reshape not just tasks — but entire systems.
36. Human with assistant Every person has an AI assistant that helps them work better and faster Phase 1
37. ChatGPT
39. Do you still use search?
40. GitHub Copilot
42. Human-led agents Phase 2 Agents join teams as “digital colleagues,” taking on specific tasks at human direction
43. Teams
44. Human-led, agent-operated Phase 3 Humans set direction and agents run entire business processes and workflows, checking in as needed
45. Enterprise Customer Support Human-led: The business sets strategy — e.g., “Deliver 24/7 global support with consistent quality.” Agent-operated: AI agents handle the bulk of tickets — categorizing, resolving common issues, escalating edge cases. Humans check in only for exceptions, policy changes, or high-stakes cases.
46. Finance & Operations Human-led: CFO sets business rules (spend thresholds, reporting cadence). Agent-operated: AI agents reconcile transactions, flag anomalies, prepare reports, and forecast cash flow. The CFO intervenes only when anomalies are escalated.
47. Humans provide the vision and guardrails while agents execute the workflows and handle complexity and checking back only when needed.
48. We all will become managers
49. We all will become agent managers
50. AI Taking over the dev jobs?
51. COBOL devs were still being summoned …in 2020
52. AI Engineers are the most sought after people in tech right now
53. Agents expand human potential when we design for collaboration.
54. Be EXTRA human in the AI- verse?
55. It also forces us to re-evaluate what makes us humans unique
57. The future won’t be built by AI agents alone
58. It will be built by humans bold enough to imagine what’s possible with them.
59. “What happens when intelligence takes initiative?”
61. What is our responsibility? As a project manager? As an engineer? As a founder? As a developer?
63. Can we do it? Should we do it?
65. Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down. That is not my department Wernher von Braun
66. We are building the future
67. “The future we invent is a. choice we make, not. something that just happens” Satya Nadella