India, May 26 -- An AI system found a new coolant in under two weeks. Four months later, scientists had it in hand!

Microsoft's new agent-based R&D platform, Discovery, is designed to embed AI throughout the scientific process from hypothesis generation to molecular simulation and literature analysis. The system is already surfacing in labs and industries that rely on long, expensive discovery cycles.

By turning AI into a research collaborator rather than just a tool, Microsoft and other companies are betting that science itself can be sped up, structured differently and scaled across fields that range from materials science to pharmaceuticals.

"This is not just AI speeding things up. It's AI participating in the very act of science," ...