Keeping Things Local. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took to the stage in San Francisco on Wednesday afternoon to announce what he called "the birth of the next generation of Windows agentic platforms." Nadella and members of the Microsoft team demonstrated new AI capabilities in Windows alongside fresh hardware designed to harness them.

The beginning of the event focused on artificial-intelligence updates to Copilot for developers, including the ability to distinguish between a user's actions and those of AI in every project, and at every step of it. The company also announced that Muse, Meta Platform's personal AI agent, is coming to Windows.

As expected, Microsoft used the event to show off the Surface Laptop Ultra, its answer to the Apple MacBook Pro -- and something of a look-alike -- and a device it's billing as the most powerful Windows laptop to date. It was first announced in May, and developers and creative consumers have been waiting ever since for updates from the company about pricing and availability.

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that the Surface Laptop Ultra is available for preorder, starting at $2,599. It will begin shipping on Oct. 16. That price tag isn't a surprise given how memory costs have soared in recent years.

Microsoft also announced a desktop device for developers looking to run the latest open-weight AI models called the Surface RTZ Spark Dev Box, priced at $5,999. Open-weight models like DeepSeek can be downloaded and run on any capable device, unlike proprietary models like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude which can only be accessed using the companies' dedicated apps or online.

The Surface Laptop Ultra uses Nvidia's RTX Spark chip and can run powerful AI and agentic workloads directly on the device, which is something hardware makers, including Apple, consistently point to as a crucial part of the AI future. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pulled no punches in his assessment of today's announcements, saying "We have reinvented the computer as we know it."

Microsoft also announced what it calls "Hybrid Intelligence," the ability of its latest version of Windows and new devices like the Surface Laptop Ultra to use a mixture of on-device AI models and cloud-based ones for more taxing tasks. The idea is to keep less-demanding or sensitive tasks on users' devices, while also reducing costs by only turning to token-intensive cloud models when necessary. That is a move that should please chief technology officers looking to tame ballooning AI costs.

Hybrid Intelligence can, with a user's permission, access every file on a computer and take local actions, like moving or renaming items, or directly operating apps. That means Microsoft services like Autopilot can be instructed to collate documents, images, or other content from anywhere on a user's machine, and rearrange them for easier management. It can also make changes directly to documents, spreadsheets, or other Microsoft Office files.

Interest in on-device AI is growing as new AI agents come to market. Meta Platforms launched Muse last month, a consumer-focused personal AI assistant that can complete tasks like scouring bank statements for forgotten subscriptions from simple prompts. OpenAI followed at the end of September with Dots -- ChatGPT-powered agents marketed as personal assistants for enterprise users.

Today's news is also positive for Nvidia, as the PC market is one of the few chip-heavy sectors in which it isn't the de facto supplier -- instead, it's chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) that are found in most PCs and laptops.