Microsoft will soon begin selling its first-ever desktop PC, the company said Tuesday. The $349 device, called the Windows 365 Link, is meant for enterprise customers and streams Windows from Microsoft’s cloud servers, rather than running the operating system on-device. The new device shows how Microsoft is aiming to turn hardware sales into a source of recurring subscription revenue from businesses—customers will also need a Windows 365 subscription to use the device, which ranges from $28 to $315 per user per month. Microsoft also announced updates to its artificial intelligence software for businesses. Starting next year, Microsoft’s 365 Copilot—which relies on OpenAI models to summarize meetings, create Word or Powerpoint documents, visualize data, and carry out other workplace tasks—will add “agent” features that can automate repetitive work. For example, the agent can automatically create a summary of a salesperson’s recent customer interactions 30 minutes before their next scheduled meeting. Microsoft has been trying to convince customers that 365 Copilot is worth the $30 per user per month sticker price, with mixed success. And the company announced a new product for developers, Azure AI Foundry, which lets customers build and customize their own AI applications using models from OpenAI, Meta, Mistral, and other AI labs. The software, which competes with Amazon’s Bedrock, combines existing developer tools on Azure with features geared towards building AI agents that can carry out multi-step tasks. Microsoft is offering Azure AI Foundry for free in the hopes that it will coax developers to rent servers from Azure to run the AI applications they’ve built. https://www.microsoft.com.. #Gadgets