Microsoft AI Roundup MCP server

Microsoft AI Roundup MCP Server

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for searching the archive of Merill's Weekly Microsoft AI Roundup — 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 claudedesktopconfig.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

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.