Microsoft AI Roundup

Microsoft AI Roundup MCP Server

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for searching the archive of [Merill's Weekly Microsoft AI Roundup](https://msai.ms) — a curated weekly Substack newsletter by Merill Fernando (with Joanne Hayek) covering Microsoft AI: Copilot, GitHub, Azure AI, M365 AI integrations, and the surrounding ecosystem.

Ask natural-language questions like *"When did Copilot get feature X?"*, *"What did the roundup say about Build?"*, or *"Which GitHub projects has it highlighted?"* and get sourced answers with issue numbers, dates, and links.

Sister project to entra-news-mcp.

Quick Start

No installation, no API keys, no configuration required:

npx microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp

On first run the server downloads a pre-built search index (SQLite database) from this repo's GitHub Releases and caches it locally. It checks for an updated index at most once every 7 days.

Requires Node.js 22 or later — the server uses Node's built-in node:sqlite module (no native dependencies). Node 20 will not work.

Client Configuration

Claude Desktop

Add to claude_desktop_config.json:

{

"mcpServers": { "microsoft-ai-roundup": { "command": "npx", "args": ["microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp"] } } }

Claude Code

claude mcp add microsoft-ai-roundup -- npx microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp

Cursor / VS Code / Copilot Studio

{

"mcpServers": { "microsoft-ai-roundup": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp"] } } }

Optional: semantic search

Keyword search works with zero configuration. For semantic (meaning-based) search, add an OpenAI API key:

{

"mcpServers": { "microsoft-ai-roundup": { "command": "npx", "args": ["microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp"], "env": { "OPENAI_API_KEY": "sk-..." } } } }

Without a key the server degrades gracefully to keyword-only search.

Tools

Example queries

• "Search the Microsoft AI roundup for Copilot Studio agent announcements"
• "Get issue #4 of the Microsoft AI roundup"
• "List all roundup issues from May 2026"
• "What GitHub projects has the Microsoft AI roundup mentioned?"

How It Works

Substack API (https://msai.ms/api/v1/posts)

│ ▼ TypeScript ingestion script (scripts/ingest.ts) │ weekly GitHub Action — Tuesdays 09:00 UTC ▼ OpenAI text-embedding-3-small embeddings (1536 dims) │ ▼ SQLite via node:sqlite (Node 22 built-in — no native deps) │ ▼ GitHub Release asset: microsoft-ai-roundup.db │ ▼ NPX MCP Server (stdio) └─ Downloads DB on first run → caches in ~/.microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp/ └─ Re-checks for updates weekly (7-day staleness + tag diff) └─ In-memory cosine similarity + SQL LIKE keyword search

Search implementation (honest version): semantic search loads all embedding vectors into memory at startup and ranks by cosine similarity in JavaScript; keyword search uses SQL LIKE (exact phrase first, then per-word fallback). Hybrid mode merges and de-duplicates both result sets. No sqlite-vec, no FTS5 — deliberately simple, and more than adequate at this archive's scale.

Automated Weekly Updates

A GitHub Actions workflow runs every Tuesday at 09:00 UTC (the morning after the newsletter's usual Monday publish). It incrementally ingests any new issues, verifies the database, and publishes it as a new GitHub Release tagged db-YYYY.MM.DD-NNNN. The NPX server picks up the new database automatically within a week (or immediately on a fresh install). A workflow_dispatch trigger provides a manual escape hatch for off-schedule publishes or full rebuilds.

Cache Locations

Delete the folder to force a fresh download of the latest database.

Local Development / Ingestion

git clone https://github.com/darrenjrobinson/microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp

cd microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp npm install npm run build

Build the search index locally (requires an OpenAI API key for embeddings)

export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-... node dist/scripts/ingest.js # full ingest node dist/scripts/ingest.js --incremental # only new issues

On Windows there's a PowerShell wrapper:

./scripts/ingest.ps1 -Incremental

Run the server against your local database

MSAI_ROUNDUP_DB_PATH=./microsoft-ai-roundup.db npx microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp

Permissions & Licensing

Newsletter content is © Merill Fernando & Joanne Hayek. This project indexes the freely available public archive via the public Substack API (all posts are free, audience: "everyone") and always links back to the original issues. The code is MIT licensed.

Credits

• Newsletter: Merill Fernando & Joanne Hayek — msai.ms
• MCP server: Darren Robinson
• Sister project: entra-news-mcp for entra.news