Microsoft has unveiled Project Solara, a new operating system and hardware platform designed to run AI agents on small, low-power devices – including a wearable access badge aimed at office workers that can see, listen, and act on behalf of the user.
The announcements came at Microsoft Build 2026, where CEO Satya Nadella and senior executives outlined a broader shift in company strategy – away from traditional software navigation and toward AI agents that carry out complex tasks autonomously.
What Is Project Solara?
Project Solara is a new platform built from the ground up to power AI agent-driven experiences on compact hardware.
Unlike Microsoft’s existing software portfolio, it runs on Android – specifically Microsoft’s own Device Ecosystem Platform – rather than Windows.
The choice was deliberate: Android allows the devices to run on lower-power hardware while retaining the security and management capabilities enterprise IT teams expect.
Microsoft Fellow Steven Bathiche described the platform as “highly flexible,” designed to support a wide range of device form factors that hardware manufacturers can build around.
The Two Concept Devices
Microsoft demonstrated two prototype devices running Solara at Build.
The first is a desk unit – roughly the size and shape of an Amazon Echo Show – that unlocks via facial recognition and gives workers quick, voice and touch-activated access to their AI agents.
The second, and more striking, is a wearable access badge. Designed to hang around the neck on a lanyard or clip to a belt loop, the badge is roughly the size of a standard ID card and packs a small camera, a touchscreen, and a fingerprint scanner. A single press wakes an AI agent.
In one demonstration, Bathiche used his fingerprint to unlock the badge, then directed its camera toward the audience and asked the agent to capture and forward images of the crowd – a task it completed in moments.
The camera capability, Microsoft said, enables agents to perceive and respond to a user’s physical surroundings.”
Nadella was also shown wearing the badge on a lanyard during the keynote – a visual nod to the office access cards the device is clearly modelled on.
Both devices are powered by chips from Qualcomm and MediaTek. Microsoft said it is currently testing the hardware with a few hundred of its own employees.
Reference Designs, Not Retail Products
Microsoft was clear that neither device is headed to market directly. Instead, both are reference designs – blueprints the company hopes third-party hardware manufacturers will use to build real products.
Early enterprise and retail pilots are already underway with CVS Healthcare, Best Buy, Target, and AccuWeather, which Microsoft says will help inform how these form factors develop in practice.
“That’s what we’re trying to get done with Project Solara, so that you, as developers and enterprises, have the flexibility to imagine the form factors that you want and have your agents be ubiquitous,” Nadella said.
The Broader Context: A Crowded Race
The wearable and ambient AI device space is moving fast.
Meta’s AI-enabled smart glasses are already on the market, though their camera capabilities have drawn scrutiny over privacy. Google is making a renewed push into smart glasses more than a decade after the Google Glass failure. OpenAI is developing AI hardware in partnership with designer Jony Ive.
For Microsoft, Project Solara also represents a careful re-entry into hardware after the costly collapse of HoloLens.
The mixed-reality headset, once earmarked for a multi-billion dollar US Army contract, was discontinued in 2024 following nearly a decade of development. This time, the company appears to be building the platform and letting OEM partners absorb the manufacturing risk.
Build 2026 also featured other significant announcements, including the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box – an Nvidia-powered desktop capable of running 120-billion parameter AI models locally – a new Copilot agent called Scout, and MAI Thinking-1, Microsoft’s first in-house reasoning model.
But it was Project Solara, and the badge in particular, that represented the most tangible signal of where Microsoft believes the next wave of workplace computing is headed: off the desk, onto the body, and always connected to an agent.
