NHS England is giving more than 505,000 clinicians and support staff access to Microsoft 365 Copilot in what will be the largest AI deployment in healthcare globally. The rollout follows a pilot across 90 NHS organisations in which 30,000 workers used the tool for administrative tasks. NHS England says the average participant saved 43 minutes per day, roughly equivalent to five working weeks per year.

The contract is valued at approximately £120 million and covers Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, and agent-governance tooling. NHS England plans to onboard 200,000 users within the first six months and the full 505,000 within a year. The subscription includes Copilot Studio, a platform for building AI agents without requiring technical expertise.

“By rolling out Microsoft Copilot across the NHS, we can reduce that burden, free up clinicians’ time and help staff focus on what they do best, caring for patients,” UK Health Innovation and Safety Minister Preet Kaur Gill said. The deployment is framed as part of the Government’s 10 Year Health Plan for England. Rob Thompson, NHS England’s Chief Digital, Data and Technology Officer, described the potential to save clinical staff “nearly a day’s worth of admin time every fortnight” as a “gamechanger for patients.”

The administrative burden the rollout aims to address is substantial. A 2026 UK study published in the National Library of Medicine found that resident doctors spend four hours on administrative work for every hour of direct patient contact, with 73% of their time consumed by non-patient-facing tasks. Separately, research from the Health Education and Training Trust found clinicians spend an average of 13.5 hours per week on clinical documentation, a 25% increase over seven years and more than a third of their working hours.

Microsoft identified five job roles set to benefit most: clinical administration, ward clerks, medical secretaries, core services, and management. The tool will handle writing, information retrieval, summarisation, and analysis. NHS England’s internal estimates suggest the 43-minute daily saving could translate to roughly 3,600 full-time-equivalent roles freed for direct patient care once the deployment reaches full scale.

That 43-minute figure, however, has not been independently verified. It comes from NHS England’s own pilot data, and the methodology behind it has not been published. Microsoft’s consumer Copilot terms of service label the product “for entertainment purposes only,“ a clause that applies to consumer products rather than the enterprise M365 tier NHS England is deploying.

The distinction matters, but the broader adoption picture is unflattering. Only 3% of Microsoft’s 450 million M365 enterprise users currently pay for the $30-per-month Copilot add-on, and accuracy surveys have shown negative net promoter scores. Lapsed users have cited distrust of answers as their primary reason for stopping.

Accenture deployed Copilot to all 743,000 employees earlier this year in the largest enterprise rollout to date, reporting 89% monthly active usage among a 200,000-person cohort. But Accenture invested heavily in structured change management, one-on-one training, and internal communities to drive that adoption. NHS England’s ability to replicate that approach across a workforce spanning hundreds of hospitals, clinics, and GP practices, with widely varying levels of digital literacy, is an open question.

Staff training and governance are acknowledged risks. NHS England has committed to an “extensive training and adoption programme,” and experience from Welsh councils running a similar Microsoft 365 rollout suggests that internal AI champions, practitioners teaching other practitioners, are critical to uptake. The NHS will need to get its governance, data protection policies, and usage strategies in place before the tool can deliver its promised value at scale.

For Microsoft, the NHS deal is commercially significant. At an estimated £120 million, it is one of the largest single Copilot contracts in the public sector and provides the company with a flagship healthcare reference at a time when enterprise AI adoption has lagged projections. “Bringing AI safely into the flow of healthcare will help ease pressures, improve productivity, and support better decision-making across the health service,” Microsoft UK and Ireland CEO Darren Hardman said.

The deployment is a bet that an AI tool with a mixed enterprise track record can deliver measurable results in one of the world’s largest and most complex public healthcare systems. If the 43-minute daily saving holds at scale, the NHS will have demonstrated a use case that every national health service in Europe will want to study. If adoption stalls, staff resist, or the time savings prove overstated, it will be £120 million of public money spent on a product whose own maker struggled to sell to the private sector.

Microsoft is accelerating updates to its Edge browser, switching from a monthly release schedule to a biweekly one. The change takes effect with Edge 152, due on August 27, and puts the browser on the same cadence as Google Chrome.

More updates, not more features

The shift does not mean users will get twice as many new features. As Microsoft explained in a recent blog post, each release under the new schedule will carry roughly half the content of the current monthly drops, keeping the overall volume of changes roughly constant. The practical effect for most users is a steadier, smaller stream of updates rather than a sudden jump in new functionality.

Microsoft framed the change as a benefit for both consumers and enterprise customers, noting that security and platform fixes will reach users faster, and that smaller change sets are easier for IT teams to validate before deployment.

Who it affects and when

The new cadence applies to users on the standard Stable channel. Those on the Stable Extended channel, a longer-term option aimed at organizations that prefer less frequent updates, will stay on the current every-two-months schedule.

Google Chrome moved to a two-week release cycle in March, and Edge’s realignment closes the gap between the two Chromium-based browsers. The biweekly releases kick in with Edge 152 on August 27, giving users and IT admins a couple of months to prepare before the new schedule takes hold. For everyday users, the transition should be largely invisible. Automatic updates will simply arrive more often, each with a smaller footprint than before.

Microsoft has signed a three-year agreement to buy nearly 37,000 metric tons of carbon removal credits from Indian startup Alt Carbon, marking the tech giant’s first enhanced rock weathering deal in Asia.

Under the agreement, Alt Carbon will deliver 36,920 metric tons of carbon dioxide removal credits by 2029 from its Darjeeling Revival Project in eastern India. Microsoft also has an option to purchase additional volumes if the startup meets delivery and verification milestones.

The deal follows reports that suggested Microsoft — the world’s largest buyer of carbon-removal credits — had paused parts of its carbon-removal procurement program. The company rejected those claims, saying it remained committed to its climate goals even as it refined its sustainability strategy.

The agreement is a potential boon for Alt Carbon, a Bengaluru-based startup founded in 2023 that is focused on carbon removal projects, including enhanced rock weathering. This technique involves spreading crushed basalt and other silicate rocks on farmland to speed up natural chemical reactions that help store carbon dioxide. Alt Carbon sources basalt from the Rajmahal Traps in eastern India and deploys it across farmland in West Bengal, where the rock reacts with rainwater and atmospheric carbon dioxide to form stable bicarbonates.

Discussions with Microsoft began in early 2025 and culminated more than a year later after extensive scientific review, due diligence, and contract negotiations, Alt Carbon co-founder and president Sparsh Agarwal told TechCrunch. Microsoft also required additional monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) measures beyond registry requirements, including expanded data-sharing and carbon quantification protocols, he said.

The deal comes as buyers increasingly look for proven carbon-removal projects in a market where verified supply remains scarce. Hundreds of startups have emerged promising to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, only a small fraction have delivered verified credits at commercial scale.

“The problem that exists right now is that there are a lot of suppliers, but there are very few verified deliveries out there,” Agarwal said. “When companies are able to deliver, everyone wants to ensure that they get a part of the supply.”

Alt Carbon has issued nearly 10,000 carbon-removal credits through enhanced rock weathering to date, making it the world’s largest issuance of such credits, according to Agarwal. The startup expects to issue another 15,000 credits by the end of the year.

Alt Carbon operates two carbon-removal projects in North Bengal, including one dedicated to Japanese shipping giant Mitsui OSK Lines and a larger program from which Microsoft’s credits will be sourced, Agarwal said. The startup has expanded beyond tea estates into rice-growing areas and now works with more than 35,000 farmers across about 80,000 acres.

Credits under the Microsoft agreement will be issued through Isometric, a carbon-removal registry that developed an enhanced rock weathering methodology.

The deal also reflects the growing role of emerging-market suppliers in carbon removal. Developers from the Global South now account for about 26% of carbon-removal credit issuances, up from roughly 2% in 2022, Agarwal said. He added that international buyers were often skeptical of Indian carbon projects when Alt Carbon launched over two years ago, but growing issuance volumes and stricter verification standards have helped improve confidence in the market.

The Alt Carbon agreement is not Microsoft’s first carbon-removal investment in India. In January, the company signed an agreement with another Indian startup, Varaha, to purchase more than 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide removal credits generated through biochar over three years.

Microsoft joins a roster of buyers of Alt Carbon’s credits that includes procurement coalitions such as Frontier, whose members include Google, Stripe, and Shopify, and NextGen, backed by companies including UBS, Swiss Re, and Boston Consulting Group, according to registry data.

Agarwal said Alt Carbon plans to expand its deployment footprint roughly fivefold over the next four to five years from about 80,000 acres today, as demand for verified carbon-removal credits grows.

Alt Carbon, which last year raised $12 million in a seed funding round led by tech investor Lachy Groom, has built its own MRV infrastructure, including laboratories in Bengaluru and Darjeeling, that it uses to analyze soil and water samples and quantify carbon removal. Agarwal said improving verification capabilities and lowering measurement costs will be critical to scaling enhanced rock weathering projects in India and beyond.

No no no, we are not sad. *slumps in the corner crying*

Microsoft is officially shutting down Collections, one of the more unique productivity features inside the Edge browser, and many users believe the move reflects the company’s growing obsession with AI-first experiences.

According to Microsoft’s support documentation, Collections in Edge is being discontinued beginning June 2026. The feature allowed users to save groups of webpages, images, notes, shopping links, and research material into organized visual boards directly inside the browser. For students, researchers, online shoppers, and multitaskers, Collections became one of Edge’s most practical hidden tools – and one of the few browser features that genuinely stood apart from Chrome and Safari.

Collections first launched as a productivity-focused tool that blended bookmarking, note-taking, and visual organization into a single interface. Unlike traditional bookmarks, users could drag webpages, screenshots, text snippets, and images into categorized boards that synced across devices. It became especially popular for planning trips, organizing research projects, comparing products, and saving inspiration from across the web.

Now, Microsoft appears ready to move on.

Edge is increasingly becoming an AI-first browser

The removal of Collections arrives as Microsoft aggressively transforms Edge into a platform centered around Copilot and generative AI features. Over the past two years, the company has integrated AI-powered assistants into nearly every part of Edge, from sidebar chat tools and webpage summarization to writing assistance and contextual search.

Critics argue that Collections represented a genuinely useful feature focused on human productivity rather than AI automation. Unlike some newer AI additions that users may ignore entirely, Collections solved a simple but common problem: organizing information gathered across the web without relying on third-party apps like Notion, Pinterest, or Pocket.

We at Digital Trends previously described the feature as one of the browser’s best hidden tools, particularly because it offered a more visual and intuitive alternative to cluttered bookmark folders. Users could quickly collect shopping comparisons, project research, recipes, or reading material into organized workspaces without leaving the browser.

Microsoft has not directly stated that AI features are replacing Collections, but the timing has fueled criticism that practical browser tools are increasingly being sacrificed to make room for AI-centric experiences and interface redesigns.

The broader concern extends beyond Edge itself. Across the tech industry, companies are rapidly reshaping products around generative AI, sometimes at the expense of smaller features users genuinely rely on every day.

Edge users may lose one of the browser’s most practical tools

For longtime Edge users, the shutdown represents the loss of one of the browser’s clearest identity features. While Chrome dominates browser market share, Edge often differentiates itself through smaller quality-of-life tools like vertical tabs, sleeping tabs, and Collections.

The removal could particularly frustrate users who built workflows around the feature for productivity, shopping research, or creative organization. Microsoft has not yet introduced a direct replacement that replicates the same visual organizational experience.

At the same time, the decision signals how seriously Microsoft is prioritizing AI integration across Windows and Edge. The company increasingly sees Copilot as the centerpiece of its software ecosystem, and browser development now appears heavily focused on AI-assisted experiences rather than traditional productivity utilities.

For some users, that future may sound exciting. For others, it may feel like another example of useful software features quietly disappearing in favor of AI tools they never asked for.

As AI agents grow ever more capable, enterprises racing to put them to work across applications, workflows, and products face a new challenge: ensuring an agent does what it’s supposed to do when it’s deployed across different environments.

Microsoft is trying to solve this problem with a new open source standard called Agent Control Specification (ACS) that aims to give developers a more consistent and granular way to control what AI agents are allowed to do.

The specification essentially lets developer, compliance, and security teams define their own policies for agents to follow. The rules can define what the agent may do, what it must not do, when a human should approve an action, and what evidence should be logged for later review. These policy files are checked at several “interception points” when the agent is off performing a task to make sure it stays within the guardrails.

The spec comes as developers are improvising ways to control what their AI sees and does, especially with conversations focusing on AI workflows going wrong due to tool misuse, or unintended actions that result in cascading failures.

Today, developers might specify instructions in a system prompt, add custom checks in the application code, or use classifiers to catch problematic inputs and outputs. Those approaches work, but they often leave companies with fragmented controls that are hard to audit and harder to reuse across different frameworks, interfaces, and systems.

ACS aims to integrate those controls into a common governance layer. Microsoft says the specification can be used to check whether an agent is sticking to guardrails at multiple points in its workflow — before it receives input, before it calls a tool, after a tool returns a result, and before the final response is sent to the user. A policy may allow an action, block it, redact sensitive information, or even ask a person to approve it.

Developers can also insert classifiers for inputs and outputs to categorize information, predict outcomes, or determine how an agent should respond; add LLMs with prompts to act as a “judge” for policies; and logic for checking tool calls, tool selection, input accuracy, output usage, and responses.

And because these policies can be written as single files, they can be bundled with agents, allowing a security policy to follow an agent across different frameworks and environments.

ACS is shipping as an SDK with plug-ins for LangChain, the OpenAI Agents SDK, the Anthropic Agents SDK, AutoGen, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, Microsoft.Extensions.AI, MCP tools, and more.

AI researchers and labs have advanced by leaps and bounds in evaluating AI models for everything from safety and compliance to sycophancy and alignment. But it appears companies and developers are faced with a new, specific need: making sure that their AI system behaves as intended for their specific product or service.

In a bid to make that testing process simpler, Microsoft on Tuesday took the wraps off ASSERT, short for Adaptive Spec-driven Scoring for Evaluation and Regression Testing.

The open-source framework, Microsoft says, makes evaluating application-specific AI behavior easy by using AI to turn high-level, natural-language descriptions of goals, policies, or intended behaviors into thorough, scored tests that can be investigated.

ASSERT takes plain-language descriptions of an AI model’s expected behavior and policies, turns them into a structured set of acceptable and unacceptable behaviors, generates problem scenarios and test cases, runs them against the target system, and scores the results. It can also record the paths the AI system takes, including intermediate actions and tool calls, so developers can inspect where failures happen.

Devs can provide system context, tools, and constraints, too, if they want to further customize what the evaluations cover.

For example, a developer could specify that a document research AI agent shouldn’t send emails to people outside the company, limit confidential information to C-level executives, and provide concise summaries with prior context in mind. ASSERT will use those rules to generate test cases that check whether the system follows those rules on an ongoing basis.

The framework, according to Microsoft, fills a gap that broader, more general evaluations cannot when AI models are intended to behave in a manner that is shaped by an application or product’s context, policies, and tools.

“One of the things we’ve learned is that evaluations are absolutely critical to making good decisions,” said Sarah Bird, chief product officer of Responsible AI at Microsoft. “Because if you don’t understand the behavior of the AI system, it’s really hard to know if it’s meeting your organization’s bar […] What we found is that if you really want to have a trustworthy system, you should evaluate many more dimensions that are application-specific.”

Bird said ASSERT can be used to evaluate systems when they’re being built, after deployment, and even for continuous monitoring.

The release comes amidst a gradual but broader shift in the AI industry. As models grow more capable, researchers are focusing on repeatable testing and regression checks, with Stanford’s HELM, MLCommons’ AILuminate, and evaluation groups like METR rolling out benchmarks to measure how models behave under different conditions.

In the first weeks of 2026, OpenClaw spread through the AI world like a sonic boom, introducing many of the industry’s most ambitious technologists to the joy and chaos of an unrestrained AI agent. The project’s momentum tailed off after OpenAI scooped up its founder, but the influence is still being felt — particularly at Microsoft

Today, Microsoft is launching Scout, a new AI assistant meant to bring the power and flexibility of OpenClaw into the Microsoft 365 system. Built on the OpenClaw framework, Scout is an always-on agentic assistant, designed to work alongside the user with a persistent identity and style. Users name their own Scout instance — in my demo, it was named Sebastian — and are meant to give it ongoing feedback on tasks that could be automated.

As Scout VP Omar Shahine put it, the idea is to create an assistant that actively adapts to the user’s needs. “We all have our interesting quirks in how we work, and people are codifying those patterns into memories and skills that persist in their agent,” Shahine told me. “Then the agent becomes more capable, better understanding you and gaining more agency and exercising judgments.”

Scout is based in the cloud, but operates across the desktop and web browser also, so it’s easy to connect to inboxes, calendars and other systems. Scout will come with prepackaged skills for calendar management and drafting meeting agendas, among others, but Shahine expects the real value to be in the skills users come up with on their own.

The system also comes with extensive security protections, meant to address concerns of unsupervised OpenClaw agents running amok. Scout will come with a built in “policy conformance system” that will continuously check whether the system is operating according to guidelines, and each conformance check will producing its own audit trail.

It’s part of a range of AI products launched at Build, including the hardware-oriented Project Solara, an update to Copilot, and a new reasoning AI model.

The company’s developer conference opens in San Francisco with another round of AI tooling expected, against the awkward backdrop of how few people pay for Copilot.

Microsoft opened its annual Build developer conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, with Satya Nadella due to take the stage at 9:30am Pacific for a keynote that, by every signal the company has sent, will be about putting artificial intelligence into as many corners of its products as it can.

The conference runs June 2 and 3, in person and online, and is pitched squarely at the developers Microsoft needs to build on top of its platforms.

The broad direction is not in doubt. Microsoft has spent the past year reframing Windows as a host for AI tools and agents rather than a passive operating system, and Build is where it courts the developers who would write for that vision.

Reporting ahead of the event, including from Reuters, pointed to new PC-side and cloud AI tooling as the centrepiece, the latest instalment in a strategy Nadella has pursued relentlessly since the company’s OpenAI partnership began.

The specifics of what was unveiled on stage should be read against the official Microsoft announcements rather than the preview chatter, which this year has been unusually heavy on speculation.

What gives the event its tension is not the technology but the take-up. On its most recent earnings call, in late January, Microsoft said it had 15 million paid seats of Microsoft 365 Copilot. That is a striking number until it is set against the 450 million commercial Microsoft 365 seats the company also reported, at which point it becomes a conversion rate of roughly 3.3%.

Nadella told investors that Copilot was “becoming a true daily habit,” citing daily active users up tenfold year on year, but the gap between people who can use Copilot and people who pay for it remains the most stubborn fact in Microsoft’s AI story.

The company has been acting on that gap in ways that complicate the upbeat keynote framing. Earlier this year it began letting users and administrators uninstall Copilot from Windows 11 outright, a concession to the many who never wanted it bundled in. At the same time it has been building out its own MAI model family, a move widely read as an effort to depend less on OpenAI for the intelligence under Copilot’s hood.

So Build arrives as both a showcase and a sales pitch. Microsoft has the distribution, the cloud, and the developer base that almost no rival can match, and it has a product millions of people have access to and decline to buy. The keynote will be heavy on what AI can now do inside Windows and Azure.

Whether developers, and the customers behind them, decide it is worth paying for is the question the announcements are really meant to answer. The conference will say what Microsoft is building. It will not, by itself, settle who is buying.