Microsoft brings together its enterprise AI offerings in the Azure AI Foundry

At its annual Ignite conference, Microsoft on Tuesday announced the Azure AI Foundry, a new offering that brings together a number of Microsoft’s existing AI services for enterprises under a single umbrella. Azure AI Studio, Microsoft’s hub for building generative AI-based applications, is the management console and portal for the AI Foundry.

“Business leaders are looking to reduce the time and cost of bringing their AI solutions to market while continuing to monitor, measure and evaluate their performance and ROI. Which is why we’re excited to unveil Azure AI Foundry today as a unified application platform for your entire organization in the age of AI,” writes Jessica Hawk, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Data, AI, and Digital Applications. “Azure AI Foundry helps bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI technologies and practical business applications, empowering organizations to harness the full potential of AI efficiently and effectively.”

The Foundry will include Microsoft’s model catalog, with closed and open weight foundation models, task models, and specialized industry models. The service combines these with existing Azure AI tools like Azure AI Search, AI Agents, AI Content Safety, and Azure Machine Learning.

New here is the Azure AI Foundry SDK, which is now in preview and which provides a unified toolchain for “customizing, testing, deploying and managing AI apps and agents with enterprise-grade control and customization,” according to Microsoft. Microsoft will offer developers 25 prebuilt app templates that will help them integrate the AI services into their own applications.

The portal (previously Azure AI Studio) will be where developers can find and evaluate AI models, services, and tools, as well as a new management center that Microsoft says will help teams “manage and optimize AI apps at scale, including resource utilization across multiple hubs and subscriptions, access privileges and connected resources.” It’s basically a nice dashboard.

And since no AI announcement in late 2024 is complete without mentioning agents, Microsoft is also including the Azure AI Agent Service in this package (or it will when it launches next month). This will enable developers to orchestrate multiple AI tools to build agents that can automate business processes. It will include features like bring-your-own-storage and private networking to keep private business data private.

“In a market flooded with disparate technologies and choices, we created Azure AI Foundry to thoughtfully address diverse needs across an organization in the pursuit of AI transformation,” Hawk writes. “It’s not just about providing advanced tools, though we have those, too. It’s about fostering collaboration and alignment between technical teams and business strategy.”

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