Microsoft Launches Azure AI Foundry to streamline enterprise AI development

Last week at Ignite 2024, Microsoft revealed it would unify its AI Foundry portal (also known as the Azure AI Studio) and its Azure AI Foundry SDK into a single product to be known as the Azure AI Foundry. This new offering aims to reduce the time and costs incurred by businesses in the process of deploying AI solutions, and to provide the necessary tools to develop AI applications and monitor their performance and ROI metrics in a single unified platform.

The Azure AI Foundry includes access to Microsoft's model catalog, which features open and closed-source models, as well as models for specialized industry-specific tasks. The AI Foundry also integrates existing Azure AI tools like Azure AI Search, AI Content Safety, and Azure Machine Learning. The other main component of the Azure AI Foundry is the Azure AI Foundry SDK which allows developers to build AI applications in GitHub, Visual Studio, or Copilot Studio. The AI Foundry SDK is currently available in preview for Python and C#, with a planned JavaScript version coming soon. The SDK includes the tools needed to build and monitor AI applications, including Azure OpenAI, AI model inferencing, Azure AI Search, Azure AI Agent Service, Evaluation, Tracing, and AI app templates.

Now that we have entered the 'agentic' AI era, an essential component of the included tool set will be the Azure AI Agent Service (upcoming public preview). This service will let customers leverage Microsoft's model catalog, knowledge sources such as Bing, Fabric, Sharepoint and AI Search, and over 1,400 connectors from Azure Logic Apps within a friendly user interface to build custom business process automation workflows.