Krishna Madhavan

As Satya shared in today’s keynote at Build, we just launched Microsoft Web IQ - our next generation search engine for AI agents. It is a new suite of AI-native grounding APIs designed to connect AI systems with fresh, reliable web data for enhanced real-world intelligence including, web pages, news, images, and videos. Search engines like Bing were built for humans, yet the next era of search will be for AI agents. Some estimates indicate that agents will generate 1000 times more queries than all search engines for humans combined in a few years, so not surprisingly, this is an exciting space with many competing solutions already. To build Web IQ, our search team leveraged more than 20 years of technical innovations in Bing and re-architected the stack to serve agent queries most efficiently. Web IQ leads across the three things that matter most in this space: quality, latency, and token efficiency - as you can see in the graphs of the Bing blog linked below. As an example, you may remember Harrier, our best-in-class embedding model I posted about a couple months back, which is still #1 in the relevant industry leaderboard. Harrier plays an important role in this system by helping optimize semantic retrieval, which strengthens the grounding pipeline. It’s just one of the many innovations that helped us build Web IQ. Web IQ is also designed to honor publisher preferences by default, with systems and policies respecting publisher controls and content access preferences across the web. The APIs in Web IQ are already powering nearly all AI agents and chatbots in the industry today, including Copilot and ChatGPT, so Microsoft is currently leading this new and rapidly growing category of search grounding for agents. I’m proud to share this important work and to continue driving innovation that is shaping the future of search.

Bing just reached a major milestone: 1 billion monthly active users, as @satyanadella shared on today’s earnings call. We’ve added more users in the last 5 years than in the previous 10. I’m so grateful for everyone in Bing and our partners across Microsoft and beyond who have contributed over the years to this achievement, driving advances in fundamentals, differentiation, and growth with passion and tenacity. Few products reach the 1 billion user mark, and few technologies in history have been as transformative as web search. I am excited for our team to continue to drive innovation and competition in this critical area for society.