The 3 biggest bombshells from this week’s AI extravaganza

Basketball has March Madness. Tech has the Consumer Electronics Show. AI has been waiting for its big moment—and this week may finally be it.

With Microsoft’s Build and Google’s I/O developer conferences happening back-to-back, it was already primed to be a big week. Microsoft announced 50 new AI tools alone, and Google followed up with its own slate just a day later. Then, out of the blue, Anthropic dogpiled with Claude 4, the latest version of its large language model (LLM), on Thursday.

While the maelstrom of announcements included some gee-whiz trinkets (we’re looking at you, Google Virtual Try-On), anyone looking to build a business with AI should find plenty to look forward to and even some new tools to use immediately.

Struggling to keep up? Here are the biggest announcements from every company, and how they’ll reshape the AI landscape in the coming months.

Microsoft wants AI agents to talk to one another

By giving AI the power to perform work like a human rather than simply talking like one, agents represent an obvious next step for LLMs. But there’s been one major caveat holding them back: They can’t easily interact with one another. An agentic AI that books plane tickets for business travel and another that books hotels sounds great, until you land in London with a hotel room in Madrid.

Microsoft took a major step in resolving this impasse by adopting Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard way for different agents – even those using different LLMs – to communicate. Anthropic actually created the standard in Nov. 2024. Still, Microsoft’s adoption means it’s well on its way to becoming a fixture of future agentic architecture, as HTML was for the open web. Microsoft also added MCP to Azure AI Foundry, its tool for creating AI apps, so users can begin building agents that interact with one another immediately.

So what? Agentic AI remains in its infancy, but a widely adopted standard will pave the way for the next generation of agentic tools. Standardization between competitors means you’ll have your pick of the litter on future LLMs when automating processes, rather than getting locked into a single company’s ecosystem.

Claude 4 makes coders swoon

With just a 3.3% share of the generative AI market, ChatGPT and Gemini often overshadow Claude. However, developers won’t want to sleep on Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, which arrived unexpectedly on Thursday with some major coding bragging rights.

Perhaps most impressively, Claude 4 boasts marathon runtimes of up to seven hours in its “extended thinking” mode, which allows it to take thousands of steps and use tools like web search. Anthropic claims it will also explore more approaches, catch more errors, and break down its reasoning for more complex problems.

With these improvements, Claude Opus 4 shot to the top of the popular SWE-bench software engineering benchmark with a score of 72.5%, besting both OpenAI o3 (69.1%) and Gemini 2.5 Pro (63.2%).

So what? While benchmarks don’t always tell the whole story, Claude has already earned a reputation as the LLM of choice for developers. Claude 4 further cements that reputation with improvements for the software engineering community, which will help differentiate it from its more general-purpose peers.

Google AI Mode upends search

Google debuted plenty of consumer AI at IO 2025, from the aforementioned virtual try-ons to Google Beam, which turns 2D video streams into live, hologram-like models with the help of six different camera angles and a lot of AI. However, the most consequential change for enterprises may well be AI Mode for search.

Like AI Overviews before it, AI Mode integrates Gemini into the search experience much more thoroughly. When you activate an AI Mode search, Google executes a “query fan-out technique,” which breaks your query into multiple searches and executes them simultaneously, then stitches together the results. While this mode was previously available for Google Labs users, this week, it’s going mainstream.

So what? Even if you’re not using AI Mode personally, any change to Google Search sends ripples into the pond for the millions of businesses that depend on Google Search to draw eyeballs. AI Overviews upended the search engine optimization (SEO) industry, and AI Mode may be even more dramatic. The way most people find information online is changing, and fast.

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