Transcript of WF2026: Software Factories & Keynotes ft. Microsoft, OpenAI, OpenClaw, Z.ai (GLM), MiniMax, HF

Key takeaways

• Advancements in model vision, tool ecosystems, larger context windows, reasoning capabilities, and AI security have moved software factories from a future vision to a practical reality.
• Intrinsic knowledge stored in model parameters has driven exponential productivity gains, illustrated by milestones like IntelliSense, GitHub Copilot, and recent models that can generate complete products without hand‑written code.
• Microsoft Foundry offers a unified platform for model catalog, agent hosting, observability, and knowledge grounding through Microsoft IQ's four layers (Work IQ, Fabric IQ, Foundry IQ, Web IQ).
• Evaluations show that combining multiple retrieval techniques (vector, lexical, and agentic) consistently outperforms any single method in real‑world customer scenarios.
• The Agent Optimizer in Foundry automates a learning loop: it evaluates a baseline agent, generates and hill‑climbs candidate configurations, and deploys the best version without manual rewrites.