Microsoft AI says its MAI team will bring new models to Ignite on 17 November

Microsoft AI says its MAI team will bring new models to Microsoft Ignite, which opens on 17 November in San Francisco. In a post on X on 12 November, the account said the team is “bringing something new: new models, demos, and speaker sessions from the people who built them.”

The post doesn’t name a model, a demo or a speaker, and it doesn’t say which sessions the MAI team will present in. A second post in the same thread links to the Ignite site, which lists the event as 17 to 20 November at Moscone Center, with an online experience alongside it.

Microsoft Ignite starts next week, November 17! The MAI team is bringing something new: new models, demos, and speaker sessions from the people who built them.

— Microsoft AI (@MicrosoftAI) November 12, 2026

When the keynote starts

Ignite’s session catalogue lists Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chairman and chief executive, and Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, as the speakers for the opening keynote. It runs from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm Pacific time on Tuesday 17 November. In New Zealand that’s 7:00 am to 9:00 am on Wednesday 18 November.

What MAI has released so far

Microsoft AI announced seven models on 2 June, in a post by Mustafa Suleyman. They were MAI-Thinking-1, its flagship reasoning model; MAI-Code-1-Flash; MAI-Image-2.5 and its Flash variant; MAI-Transcribe-1.5; MAI-Voice-2; and MAI-Voice-2-Flash.

Its models page shows a release in every month since. MAI-Image-2.5-Pro and MAI-Voice-2-Flash arrived on 23 July. MAI-Thinking-1 reached public preview in Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft’s AI app and agent platform, on 12 August, and MAI-Cyber-1-Flash launched inside MDASH, Microsoft’s multi-agent vulnerability identification and remediation harness, on 13 August. MAI-Transcribe-2 followed on 3 September.

On 1 October it launched MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming with MAI-Voice-2.1 and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash. The latest is MAI Image 2.6, announced on 27 October, which Microsoft’s Foundry blog says is in preview in six Foundry regions.

The 12 November post doesn’t say whether the “something new” is one of these models or a new one. The session catalogue and livestream are on the Ignite site.