On Tuesday, March 10,  over 1,100 people attended the AI Tour in Washington, DC.

In addition to a keynote presentation, the Tour included 4 workshops, 25 lightning talks, 17 breakout sessions, and 12 sponsor booths.

PSAs David Giard and Husam Hilal were among the Microsoft volunteers.

The event opened with a keynote presentation, titled "The Frontier Transformation," which outlined Microsoft's vision for using AI to transform our customers' applications and businesses.

Over a dozen companies sponsored the event and showed up with booths and representatives. We spoke with several partners, asking each about their relationship with Microsoft. We asked them to share what we are doing well, areas where we can improve, and potential opportunities where we can better support them. We suggested ways that our team can help them.

Every partner said that their interactions with Microsoft have been positive. When pressed, some offered opportunities to improve the relationship – ideas that I took back to our team.

I served as a proctor for two of the four workshops offered at the event: "Prototype agents with the AI toolkit and Model Context Protocol" and "Real-world code migration with GitHub Copilot Agent Mode." The workshop room held over a hundred seats, and attendees filled them all for the first workshop, with some people standing in the back to listen. About twenty-five people attended the second workshop.

We received positive verbal feedback from attendees of each session. They had a chance to learn something new and try out their new skills in a sandbox environment. The most common complaint was about the Wi-Fi, which was slow and dropped too often early in the day.

Husam presented a Lighting talk session: "From Technical Debt to AI-Ready: Agentic Migration & Modernization on Azure" covering the migrations paths for customers today to get them in Azure, so their data can co-locate with all Azure data and AI services and allowing them to harvest power of all AI services available in the Microsoft ecosystem. The session helped serve a great starting point and eye opener for many of the attended customers and partners (50+ attendees) that were not even familiar with options we offer in Azure for migration, in addition to the recent released tools that form the new area of agentic migrations such as Azure Copilot Migration agent and GitHub Copilot App Modernization agent which helps refactor applications and make them cloud-ready and deployable to Azure PaaS, helping reduce the technical debt, and allowing customer to focus their spending on AI innovation.

Husam also covered the Azure Infrastructure (Cloud & AI Platforms) Booth duties. He answered many customers and partners questions about latest innovation in Azure infrastructure services, with topics related to: Sovereignty Cloud, Compliance, Confidential Computing, AI integrations, Storage, Azure Copilot, Azure Migrate and Migration Options topics. He also had the opportunity to hear latest insights and what our partners and customers are seeing, identifying opportunities for impact to address any concerns or blockers they have.

This was an excellent opportunity to teach Microsoft technologies, to connect and build goodwill with our customers and partners, and to build relationships with others at Microsoft. The feedback I received about this event was overwhelmingly positive.