For 24 years, Microsoft’s Amanda Silver has been working to help developers — and in the last few years, that’s meant building tools for AI. After a long stretch on GitHub Copilot, Silver is now a corporate vice president at Microsoft’s CoreAI division, where she works on tools for deploying apps and agentic systems within enterprises. Her work is focused on the Foundry system inside Azure, which is designed as a unified AI portal for enterprises, giving her a close view of how companies are actually using these systems and where deployments end up falling short.
I spoke with Silver about the current capabilities of enterprise agents, and why she believes this is the biggest opportunity for startups since the public cloud.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
So, your work focuses on Microsoft products for outside developers – often startups that aren’t otherwise focused on AI. How do you see AI impacting those companies?
I see this as being a watershed moment for startups as profound as the move to the public cloud. If you think about it, the cloud had a huge impact for startups because it meant that they no longer needed to have the real estate space to host their racks, and they didn’t need to spend as much money on the capital infusion of getting the hardware to be hosted in their labs and things like that. Everything became cheaper. Now agentic AI is going to kind of continue to reduce the overall cost of software operations again, because many of the jobs involved in standing up a new venture — whether it’s support people, legal investigations — a lot of it can be done faster and cheaper with AI agents. I think that’s going to lead to more ventures and more startups launching. And then we’re going to see higher-valuation startups with fewer people at the helm. And I think that that’s an exciting world.
What does that look like in practice?
We are certainly seeing multi-step agents becoming very broadly used across all different kinds of coding tasks, right? Just as an example, one thing developers have to do to maintain a codebase is stay current with the latest versions of the libraries that it has a dependency on. You might have a dependency on an older version of the dot-net runtime or the Java SDK. And we can have these agentic systems reason over your entire codebase and bring it up to date much more easily, with maybe a 70 or 80% reduction of the time it takes. And it really has to be a deployed multi-step agent to do that.
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