Microsoft Previews Windows 2030: A New Era of AI-Powered Computing

Highlights

The company has hinted at such a future on more than one occasion. A future where Windows is agentic and can be used to effectively let the OS run entire workflows on your behalf, with very little else to do than ask for it.

Microsoft has shared a new video that seems to be the first of a new series of videos, to be called “Windows 2030 Vision,” in which the company lays out its five-year plan for the future of Windows. It’s curiously alluding to some potentially significant changes that may be coming our way as a Microsoft AI interface.

Episode one features Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Enterprise & Security, David Weston. He starts off the video by stating that soon using a mouse and keyboard to navigate will seem as archaic to future generations as MS-DOS does to Gen Z.

Sound familiar? It very much seems like right off the bat he’s alluding to the potential for a major new desktop UX that could be made possible with the advent of agentic AI. Weston went on to say that the future of Windows OS will likely be much more interactive and natural, with the operating system having the ability to see our environment, hear audio, and react to voice commands to perform much more complicated and advanced operations.

Alas, Weston does not expound upon this further, but it very much sounds like he’s alluding to a future with agentic AI being a core orchestrator for the next-gen Windows experience, using natural language and user input as a means for interacting with your computer and apps.

The company has teased this as a potential future of Windows before. In 2023 the company mapped out three ways it saw AI-powered Windows UI into software. It talked about how AI would be built eventually inside of apps, beside apps, and outside of apps. The talk was delivered by Microsoft technical fellow, Steven Bathiche at Build 2023.

We have yet to see an example of Microsoft AI integration outside of apps in the real world. So far every AI product has been Windows 2030 features or service that exists inside another app, or as a standalone app.