At Build 2026, Microsoft un­veiled Project Solara, an early-stage plat­form for de­vices that run AI agents in­stead of tra­di­tional apps, prov­ing the com­pany is fi­nally ready to com­pete with the rev­o­lu­tion­ary home as­sis­tant mar­ket of 2014. The com­pany showed off two con­cept de­vices, a wear­able badge and a desk hub, pow­ered by off-the-shelf Qualcomm and MediaTek chips, with Azure do­ing the cloud work and ex­ec­u­tives do­ing the much harder job of pre­tend­ing this is go­ing to play out bet­ter than Windows Phone did.

According to Microsoft, Solara will even­tu­ally help users man­age tasks, in­for­ma­tion, and daily rou­tines, which is a bold new cat­e­gory pre­vi­ously ex­plored by Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home, Siri, sev­eral failed Kickstarter cubes, and every lonely coun­ter­top speaker cur­rently blink­ing in a di­vorced dad’s kitchen. CEO Satya Nadella re­port­edly be­came in­ter­ested in the space af­ter dis­cov­er­ing one of his chil­dren had an Echo Dot that could set a pasta timer, and play jazz when ask­ing it to turn on the kitchen lights.

Microsoft said the Solara busi­ness model and many prac­ti­cal use cases are still be­ing worked out, which in fair­ness puts the prod­uct slightly ahead of most things an­nounced at Build. Early demos sug­gest the desk hub may even­tu­ally help users man­age rou­tines, re­trieve in­for­ma­tion, and in­tro­duce even more ways to jam Teams down peo­ple’s throats.