Agentic web: Microsoft holds out the prospect of an AI Internet

AI is littering the internet. Anyone can create even more websites with AI-generated content even faster and try to earn a bit of money with clicks. AI chatbots use content for AI-generated responses, so that website operators lose clicks and therefore revenue. These two threat scenarios have so far dominated when it comes to AI and the web. Microsoft has now painted a different picture at its in-house developer conference Build.

An open, agentic web is supposed to make everything better. This is where AI agents make decisions and complete tasks, says Frank X Shaw, Microsoft's Head of Communications, in his keynote speech. He explains how Microsoft is laying the foundations for such an internet. Of course, this involves a whole host of developer tools.

It is also about the Model Context Protocol (MCP) – an open-source protocol that was originally introduced by Anthropic. Microsoft ascribes it a similar importance to the hypertext protocol – the cornerstone of the previous Internet. It makes the web usable for agents in a standardized way in the future.

NLWeb turns websites into AI services

NLWeb is also intended to transform all websites into a kind of AI-powered app. NLWeb stands for Natural Language Web and, according to Microsoft, is set to become the “HTML of the agent-based web”. Websites are to be given a natural language interface with just a few lines of code and a freely selectable AI model. People and agents will then be able to interact with a website via this interface. Every page that uses NLWeb also supports the Model Context Protocol.

NLWeb is an open project that is technology-independent. Microsoft writes in the Build blog post that it supports all common operating systems as well as all common models and vector databases. “Just as the introduction of HTML has made it easy for almost anyone to create a website, with NLWeb we want to give every web publisher the ability to create an intelligent, natural language experience for their website.”

Moreover, the agentic web is only possible if AI systems are given a kind of memory. However, this is expensive because a correspondingly large amount of computing capacity is required if all previous knowledge has to be remembered. Microsoft's approach to solving this problem is called Structured Retrieval Augmentation. This means that the memories are strongly summarized.

(emw)