Dev Conference Season Is Back: What to Watch at I/O and Build
A preview of Google I/O and Microsoft Build, both landing this month with a heavy focus on AI-assisted and low-code developer tools.
May is shaping up to be the month developers circle on their calendars every year, and 2021 is no exception. Google I/O is set to run virtually May 18-20, and Microsoft Build follows close behind on May 25-27. Both are free, both are fully online again, and both are happening under the same pandemic constraints that shaped last year’s editions. No campus keynotes, no expo floor small talk, no free swag lines — just streamed sessions and a lot of pre-announcement speculation in the meantime.
That said, going fully virtual two years running hasn’t hurt the substance of these events. If anything, it’s forced both companies to be more deliberate about what they show, since there’s no in-person spectacle to lean on. Expect denser, more technical content and fewer stage theatrics.
What I’m expecting from I/O
Google’s keynote is usually a grab bag — new Android build, some Search and Assistant updates, a Chrome OS mention, and whatever the current AI research push looks like packaged for developers. Given how much Google has been talking about large language models and multimodal search over the past year, I’d be surprised if I/O doesn’t lean hard into AI-assisted developer tooling this time: smarter code completion, better natural-language interfaces to Google’s APIs, maybe something new on the TensorFlow or on-device ML side. Android itself is also due for its next major version reveal, and there’s been chatter about a broader design refresh across Google’s apps that could show up here too.
What I’m expecting from Build
Microsoft’s angle tends to be more enterprise- and productivity-focused, and Build has increasingly become the venue where Microsoft shows off how AI is creeping into Power Platform and its low-code tools. Given Microsoft’s deepening partnership with OpenAI, I wouldn’t be shocked to see natural-language-to-code or natural-language-to-formula features get a spotlight — the pitch being that non-developers can describe what they want and have Power Apps or Power Automate generate the logic behind it. Visual Studio and .NET tooling updates are close to a lock every year, and I’d expect at least one announcement aimed at making Windows Subsystem for Linux more useful for day-to-day dev work.
The bigger theme
Zoom out and the throughline for both events looks like the same one we’ve seen building for a couple of years now: AI moving from “impressive demo” to “thing baked into the tools you already use,” alongside a continued push toward low-code and no-code platforms that let non-specialists build software. Whether that’s genuinely empowering or just shifts complexity around is a fair question, but the direction of travel from both Google and Microsoft seems clear.
I’ll be watching both keynotes and will have full write-ups as the announcements land — starting with I/O in a little over two weeks. If you’ve got predictions for what either company will show, now’s the time to make them before the news cycle proves you right or wrong.