Brent Hecht serves as the Director of Applied Science & Partner at Microsoft, where he leads a team of applied scientists. His team focuses on mission-critical applied science problems within AI, including areas such as differentially-private synthetic data, multi-party (group) agents, novel approaches to fine-tuning and alignment, complex reasoning challenges, large-scale non-parametric memory, and ecologically-valid world models to power agentic systems for productivity scenarios.