Microsoft Project Bonsai was the first service component of Microsoft's autonomous systems vision, introduced in public preview at Microsoft Build in 2020. It was a machine teaching service for building intelligence for industrial control systems, letting subject matter experts without an AI background break their expertise into steps and tasks imparted to AI agents. Experts set desired outcomes, then supervised the agents as they solved problems in simulated environments, training them to adapt before that knowledge carried into real-world autonomous systems.

Project Bonsai was aimed at engineers and developers in manufacturing, process control, robotics, energy and smart buildings, and it paired with existing simulation packages such as MathWorks Simulink and AnyLogic scaled on Azure. Microsoft discontinued the service when it shut down its industrial metaverse work in late 2023, and the autonomous systems platform behind it was retired rather than continued as a standalone product.