Transforming R&D with agentic AI: Introducing Microsoft Discovery
Transforming R&D with Agentic AI: The Future of Scientific Discovery
In a groundbreaking move, Microsoft has unveiled Microsoft Discovery, an enterprise-grade platform designed to revolutionize the research and development (R&D) process. This cutting-edge technology leverages the power of agentic AI to accelerate scientific discovery, transform the entire discovery process, and bring the power of AI to scientists and engineers.
The Agentic Vision for Science
At Microsoft, the goal is to amplify the ingenuity of scientists to usher in a new era of accelerating discovery and expand the horizons of research. This requires empowering R&D teams with transformative technologies that can drive meaningful business impact. However, R&D has very specific challenges compared to other domains:
- Scientific knowledge is vast, nuanced, and distributed.
- The discovery process is diverse and dynamic, involving multiple highly specialized methods and tasks, making it very hard to connect the dots across the different domains involved.
- R&D is iterative. There are rarely simple, clear-cut answers. Instead, scientific knowledge evolves through evidence, discourse, and refinement.
Introducing Microsoft Discovery
Microsoft Discovery is a comprehensive platform where AI can capture both the scientific domain and the cognitive processes involved in managing scientific thought. To realize this vision, scientific AI agents must be able to:
- Reason over a complex and contextual graph connecting all knowledge sources.
- Specialize across distinct domains and tasks.
- Learn from results and adapt entire research plans accordingly.
Graph-Based Scientific Co-Reasoning
The advent of large language models (LLMs) hinted at this new era, offering capabilities to speed up certain scientific tasks, particularly for information retrieval and hypothesis generation. However, LLMs often lack the contextual understanding required to deeply reason over distributed, nuanced, and often contradictory scientific data.
Microsoft Discovery is built on top of a powerful graph-based knowledge engine. Instead of merely retrieving facts, this engine builds graphs of nuanced relationships between proprietary data as well as external scientific research. This allows the platform to have a deep understanding of conflicting theories, diverse experimental results, and even underlying assumptions across disciplines.
Specialized Discovery Agents for Conducting Research
Instead of siloed and static pipelines, Microsoft Discovery implements a continuous and iterative R&D cycle where researchers can guide and orchestrate a team of specialized AI agents that learn and adapt over time—not just for reasoning, but for conducting research itself.
Extensible and Enterprise-Ready
Microsoft Discovery is built on top of Azure infrastructure and services, leveraging by design the trust, compliance, and governance controls at the core of Microsoft’s secure cloud foundation.
Real Impact: Discovering a Novel, Non-PFAS Coolant Prototype
Over the past months, Microsoft has made significant strides aiding computational scientists in their research and incorporating cutting-edge innovations from Microsoft Research. This has led to remarkable breakthroughs, such as discovering a novel solid-state electrolyte candidate that uses 70% less lithium in collaboration with the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and enabling rapid computational simulations that accelerate scientific discoveries at Unilever.
A Growing Ecosystem
Microsoft is putting this enterprise-grade platform into the hands of global innovators to demonstrate real-world impact across industries—from chemistry and pharma to manufacturing and silicon design.
Domain-Specific Offerings
Combining Microsoft’s and NVIDIA’s strengths in generative AI and scientific computing, Microsoft plans to integrate Microsoft Discovery with NVIDIA ALCHEMI and NVIDIA BioNeMo NIM microservices to accelerate breakthroughs in materials and life sciences.
Integration Support
Microsoft is excited to partner with a growing list of software integrators, such as Accenture and Capgemini, to help customers and collaborators scale custom platform deployments.
Ready to Take the Next Steps?
Learn more about how Microsoft Discovery can help scientists and engineers transform research and development:
- Watch the announcement of Microsoft Discovery at the Microsoft Build 2025 Keynote.
- Sign up to receive updates on the Microsoft Discovery preview.
- Discover the latest news from Azure at Microsoft Build 2025.
