Gregor Suttie, Azure Architect & Microsoft MVP, shares his experience of this year's Microsoft Ignite edition in the US.
Reading time 2 minutes Published: 28 November 2025
I flew from Glasgow to Dublin, where I cleared customs, then flew to San Francisco, a city I had never visited before.
The weather for the week was pretty decent, only a little bit of rain on Monday morning, which was when I scheduled a trip to visit Alcatraz, which was super cool. Cycling across the Golden Gate Bridge and then being in a Weymo driverless taxi all added to the fun before the conference even started.
Ignite itself started on Tuesday at 8am. The Keynote (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUeET4zY95c) this year was in a separate location from the conference, so I decided to skip it and wander around the expo hall and hub areas to get a feel for this year's Ignite.
I was working in the Ask the Experts within the App Modernisation area. I spent 3 days talking with attendees about modernising existing applications and incorporating AI into their daily workflows to increase productivity. Lots of people wanted to see demonstrations on how to utilise GitHub Copilot to modernise their application code, fix issues, and even document their existing code repositories. I managed to spend a lot of time with the product groups, ask them lots of questions, and gain valuable insights into what they are working on, which was really lovely.
I didn't have time this Ignite to catch any of the content, so I will be catching up on all of the announcements by reading the book of news (https://news.microsoft.com/ignite-2025-book-of-news/) and following the Ignite 25 next steps repository -> https://github.com/microsoft/ignite25-next-steps - I have a lot to catchup as there were literally hundreds of announcements, another great resource to find out more about the content from Ignite is this video from John Savill - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayWSbRDQ1ds
The sheer scale of this Ignite was massive; the Hub and the Halls, where the vendors were, were enormous, and every attendee would have done a lot of walking. San Francisco is a great place to visit; there is a lot to do and see in the downtown area where the conference was located. It has already been announced that it will return to San Francisco next year.