REDMOND, Washington, May 18 (Reuters) - Microsoft ( MSFT )

envisions a future where any company's artificial intelligence

agents can work together with agents from other firms and have

better memories of their interactions, its chief technologist

said on Sunday ahead of the company's annual software developer

conference.

Microsoft ( MSFT ) is holding its Build conference in Seattle on May

19, where analysts expect the company to unveil its latest tools

for developers building AI systems.

Speaking at Microsoft's ( MSFT ) headquarters in Redmond, Washington,

ahead of the conference, Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott

told reporters and analysts the company is focused on helping

spur the adoption of standards across the technology industry

that will let agents from different makers collaborate. Agents

are AI systems that can accomplish specific tasks, such as

fixing a software bug, on their own.

Scott said that Microsoft ( MSFT ) is backing a technology called

Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source protocol introduced

by Google-backed Anthropic. Scott said MCP has the potential to

create an "agentic web" similar to the way hypertext protocols

that helped spread the internet in the 1990s.

"It means that your imagination gets to drive what the

agentic web becomes, not just a handful of companies that happen

to see some of these problems first," Scott said.

Scott also said that Microsoft ( MSFT ) is trying to help AI agents

have better memories of things that users have asked them to do,

noting that, so far, "most of what we're building feels very

transactional."

But making an AI agent's memory better costs a lot of money

because it requires more computing power. Microsoft ( MSFT ) is focusing

on a new approach called structured retrieval augmentation,

where an agent extracts short bits of each turn in a

conversation with a user, creating a roadmap to what was

discussed.

"This is a core part of how you train a biological brain -

you don't brute force everything in your head every time you

need to solve a particular problem," Scott said.