Microsoft Ignite '25 Keynote | Asha Sharma, President of CoreAI Product at Microsoft

Asha Sharma, President of CoreAI Product at Microsoft, delivered a pivotal ~10-12 minute segment during the Microsoft Ignite 2025 Opening Keynote on November 18, 2025, at the Chase Center in San Francisco. As part of the 150-minute keynote led by Judson Althoff, Sharma shifted the focus from visible AI interfaces to the "invisible engine" powering them—Microsoft's CoreAI architecture. Her talk, positioned toward the latter half amid announcements from executives like Scott Guthrie and Ryan Roslansky, emphasized how CoreAI democratizes innovation, making AI accessible beyond developers through secure, scalable foundations. It aligned with Ignite's "Frontier Firm" theme, showcasing AI as a strategic enabler for organizations to blend human ingenuity with intelligent systems for 3x productivity gains. Core Message: CoreAI as the Invisible Engine of Agentic AI Sharma declared, "AI is turning innovation into a skill everyone can contribute to, not just developers, using familiar tools," highlighting CoreAI's role in creating a unified ecosystem where agents draw from structured and unstructured data to act autonomously. She explained the shift from generative AI experiments (2023-2024) to strategic foundations in 2025, where CoreAI integrates across Azure, Microsoft 365, and partner ecosystems to surface hidden insights—like team decision patterns and information flows—while embedding security, reliability, and ethical design from the ground up. This "complete lifecycle of AI—from idea to deployment"—enables Frontier Firms to reduce risks, raise productivity, and foster ubiquitous innovation, with a focus on context engineering to extend retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for agentic workflows. Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@techusiness Follow us on Social Media: Twitter / X https://x.com/Techusiness Threads https://www.threads.net/@techusiness Instagram https://www.instagram.com/techusiness/ TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@techusiness LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/techusiness/ Contact Info Email techusiness@gmail.com