Microsoft on Tuesday announced Azure AI Foundry at its annual Ignite conference, a new product that brings together Microsoft's existing AI services for enterprises under one umbrella. Azure AI Studio is Microsoft's hub for building generative AI-based applications and the management console and portal for AI Foundry.
“Business leaders are looking to reduce the time and cost of bringing AI solutions to market while continuing to monitor, measure, and assess their performance and ROI. We are excited to announce Azure AI Foundry as a unified application platform for Microsoft,” wrote Jessica Hawk, corporate vice president of data, AI, and digital applications at Microsoft. “Azure AI Foundry helps bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI technology and practical business applications, enabling organizations to efficiently and effectively leverage the full potential of AI.”
Foundry includes Microsoft's model catalog, which includes closed and open weight foundation models, task models, and specialized industry models. The service combines these with existing Azure AI tools such as Azure AI Search, AI Agents, AI Content Safety, and Azure Machine Learning.
New here is the Azure AI Foundry SDK, currently in preview, which Microsoft says is an integration for “customizing, testing, deploying, and managing AI apps and agents with enterprise-grade control and customization.” Provides a toolchain. Microsoft provides developers with 25 prebuilt app templates to help integrate AI services into their own applications.
The portal (formerly Azure AI Studio) will be a place for developers to find and evaluate AI models, services, and tools, and Microsoft says the team will be able to “manage and optimize AI apps at scale. The new management center will help with resource utilization (including resource utilization). Multiple hubs and subscriptions, permissions and connected resources. ” It’s basically a great dashboard.
And since no AI announcement in late 2024 would be complete without mentioning agents, Microsoft also plans to include the Azure AI Agent service in this package (or will include it when it launches next month). This allows developers to coordinate multiple AI tools to build agents that can automate business processes. This includes features like personal storage and private networks to keep personal business data private.
“In a market flooded with disparate technologies and options, we created Azure AI Foundry to thoughtfully address the diverse needs of organizations across organizations pursuing AI transformation,” Hawk wrote. “It's not just about providing advanced tools; we also have them. It's about facilitating collaboration and alignment between technical teams and business strategy.”