At Ignite 2024, Microsoft announced Azure AI Foundry, a unified AI application platform for enterprises. Several AI tools and services from Microsoft and other leading tech companies exist, but enterprises still find it difficult to build practical AI-powered business applications. Azure AI Foundry is not an entirely new service; instead, it brings together Microsoft"s existing AI offerings and makes them more accessible for everyone involved.
In a typical enterprise, customizing, hosting, running, and managing AI applications requires the involvement of developers, AI engineers, and IT professionals. The new Azure AI Foundry can serve all three with a unified approach.
The new Azure AI Foundry SDK preview will act as a unified toolchain that will allow enterprises to customize, test, deploy, and manage AI apps and agents with the control and customization they typically expect. With the availability of a library of models and tools and 25 prebuilt app templates, developers can easily integrate Azure AI into their apps from popular developer tools, including GitHub, Visual Studio, and Copilot Studio.
Microsoft is renaming Azure AI Studio to Azure AI Foundry portal. Instead of using the SDK, developers and AI engineers can use the easy-to-use visual UI to explore and test new AI models, services, and tools. The Azure AI Foundry portal preview also brings a new management center that will allow users to easily track their subscription information. This new portal can also be used to manage resource utilization, access privileges, and connected resources.
Finally, the new Azure AI Agent Service will allow developers to orchestrate, deploy, and scale enterprise-ready agents to automate business processes. It will support enterprise-friendly features like bring your own storage (BYOS) and private networking for compliance. Azure AI Agent Service can also easily connect with existing enterprise data available in Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Fabric"s AI skills for grounding. The Azure AI Agent Service preview will be available next month.