Announcing new agents for modernization that are built to scale and designed for control.
When you watch a live broadcast—like the Olympics Games or a major sporting event—you aren’t thinking about the coordination behind it. You simply experience the event. Out of sight, specialized teams synchronize cameras, replays, data, and commentary in real time. When that coordination works, complexity disappears.
This is how I think about AI agents. Each one observes a different signal and contributes a piece of the picture. Telemetry surfaces what’s happening, dependencies reveal how systems are connected and risks are surfaced as work progresses. The human stays in control throughout—deciding what to act on and how to validate outcomes.
This model matters because modernization is becoming one of the biggest opportunities in the AI era. In fact, according to Forrester’s Q1 2026 Cloud and AI Application Modernization Survey, 91% of IT leaders see application modernization as necessary to enabling AI advancements in their business.1 However, many organizations still operate complex legacy estates with disconnected tools and months of manual planning just to decide what to modernize. IT and developers often work in parallel but without a shared view of the system. AI changes the dynamic, helping teams analyze environments, prioritize workloads, and accelerate modernization.
Today, we’re taking another step to help organizations adopt new AI capabilities with real business impact. We’re announcing the first agentic end-to-end modernization solution that brings IT and developers into a single, connected workflow. With expanded capabilities across Azure Copilot and GitHub Copilot, we are infusing AI through these tools to accelerate insight‑driven decisions and move modernization from analysis to action—faster and at scale.
AI agents make this possible by operating in parallel across discovery, assessment, planning, migration, and code transformation. They automate dependency mapping, generate decision ready plans, and guide execution inside the tools teams already use. Work that used to be slow, manual, and fragmented becomes coordinated and continuous as teams modernize across applications, infrastructure, data and code.
One system. One team.
The newest agentic teammate, Azure Copilot migration agent, is now in public preview. The migration agent helps organizations eliminate technical debt by embedding AI across discovery, assessment, planning, and deployment, reducing modernization timelines dramatically. It works for your most mission-critical servers, virtual machines, applications, and databases, turning migration from a one-time project into a continuous modernization motion.
The agent uses what customers already know about their environments to create this continuous modernization system providing early clarity on their inventory of servers, databases, applications and their dependencies, how it all works, what it costs, and what’s worth modernizing. What once took months of manual planning can now take minutes of conversation with the agent and a data-driven plan.
By reducing toil, closing skills gaps, and aligning IT and development teams through connected workflows, the Azure Copilot migration agent can help enterprises move to Azure faster, more confidently.
GitHub Copilot modernization capabilities also add to your modernization team with agents to transform legacy applications to become cloud and AI-ready. Embedded directly where developers work, these agents can pull assessments, build customized modernization plans for each application, execute upgrades, and deploy directly to Azure—all with developers in the driver’s seat.
And today, its newest capability, the modernization agent, is in public preview. The modernization agent allows you to go beyond individual applications and tackle modernization at scale, acting as an orchestrator to simultaneously run multiple code assessments, build unique modernization plans for each application, and execute the plans with automated framework and runtime upgrades. This is a major step forward in how application owners, architects, and developers can transform a broad set of applications at scale while keeping the customization needed for each application.
In a true multi‑agent experience, the modernization agent directs the broadcast—application owners and architects set direction, specialized agents execute, and developers stay in the loop to guide and validate.
Organizations have already seen success using GitHub Copilot capabilities made generally available this past fall, modernizing in hours instead of months with automated .NET and Java upgrades. For a recent customer, total modernization effort was reduced by 70%.2 Today, with its connection to Azure Copilot migration agent and native integration within developer environments, GitHub Copilot modernization can transform applications end-to-end, with higher confidence outputs and control at every step.
Playing together for the win
Historically, infrastructure decisions—landing zones, networking, governance—were made upstream, without visibility into application realities. Developers modernized code without knowing how it would run, scale, or be governed in the target environment. This meant mismatches surfaced late, when fixes were most expensive.
With Azure Copilot and GitHub Copilot working together, that disconnect disappears. Agents help bridge developer‑level code insights with cloud migration and modernization planning. GitHub Copilot modernization capabilities scan application code to produce detailed code assessment reports, while Azure Copilot’s migration agent ingests those reports to surface code‑level issues, warnings, and insights. This integration allows Azure Copilot to incorporate real code analysis when assessing readiness and recommending the right Azure target, connecting developer‑driven modernization work with the cloud and infrastructure planning used by migration teams. You get AI guided migration and modernization planning with intelligent workload prioritization, cost visibility and automated wave recommendations.
Why your database is critical to modernization
Modernizing apps is only part of the journey. Your database is critical, because your AI strategy is only as strong as your data strategy. When data is fragmented or locked into aging infrastructure, even the most sophisticated agentic workflows hit a ceiling.
Moving to Azure managed database services readies your database for AI and transfers the operational burden of infrastructure management to a platform built to handle it. Fully managed services reduce overhead, improve resilience, and free teams to focus on building intelligent applications. The result is a data foundation that can scale with demand, meet security expectations, and stay ready for what AI workloads require.
Once your data estate is modernized on Azure, the destination is a unified data platform—where databases, analytics, and AI operate as one coherent estate. With AI capabilities natively built into Azure databases, organizations can build cloud-native AI applications that leverage semantic search, memory integration, and advanced model invocation. Those capabilities are grounded in Azure’s data layer, so models always work from the most current, trusted signals the business produces.
How modernizing on Azure empowers customers
Our agents are making more possible. We’re moving away from one-off use of agentic tools to consistent, repeatable agentic execution. This is the importance of pairing agentic tools with structured delivery models, so organizations can scale modernization confidently across teams and environments.
Ahold Delhaize, one of the world’s largest food retail groups, shared how they modernized their application and data estate on Azure to support AI-powered business outcomes. Using agentic tools across migration and modernization workflows, they reduced complexity, improved modernization collaboration across teams, and accelerated delivery.
By applying agents across discovery, assessment, and execution, Ahold Delhaize moved away from fragmented modernization efforts and toward a more continuous, intelligent process—one that provided confidence in both the plan and the execution.
Customer results like these point to the same conclusion: the future of modernization is agentic, connected, and human-led.
Cloud Accelerate Factory brings agentic modernization to life at scale
Agentic tools are redefining what’s possible, but outcomes scale when innovation is paired with execution. Cloud Accelerate Factory, a benefit of Azure Accelerate, helps organizations operationalize modernization with zero-cost, hands‑on delivery from specialized Microsoft experts.
As Microsoft’s first-party modernization delivery engine, Cloud Accelerate Factory works alongside customers and partners from discovery through production, applying a structured approach to modernization at scale across applications, infrastructure, and data—often in days, not months.
Combined with agentic capabilities like Azure Copilot and GitHub Copilot, Cloud Accelerate Factory helps organizations confidently modernize, fast, so that plans become measurable progress across key workloads including .NET, Java, and SQL.
Join the visionaries at the Microsoft Azure Summit
Get ready for a rich agenda at this year’s Microsoft Azure Summit: Migrate and Modernize with Agentic AI. This livestream event on March 12, 2026, (Asia and Europe) and April 23, 2026, (Americas) features interactive sessions led by Microsoft engineering with compelling customer stories and live demos of the latest innovations discussed in this blog. Hear directly from organizations that have successfully leveraged the latest agentic tooling and capabilities to migrate and modernize to Azure, and see firsthand how new offerings can make a tangible impact on your business.
This year’s summit features an impressive lineup of topics helping you build the future of cloud and AI.
- Keynote: Migrate and modernize with agentic AI
- Regional session (customized): Modernization for a sovereign, AI-ready figure
- Breakout: Accelerate and simplify planning, migration, and operations using AI agents
- Breakout: Reimagine application and database modernization with agentic tools
1Forrester’s Q1 2026 Cloud and AI Application Modernization Survey [E-66670] Base: 223 Global leaders in charge of their organization’s cloud and AI strategy
2Accelerate migration and modernization with agentic AI, Amanda Silver, September 23, 2025