Generative AI
Microsoft Foundry (Azure AI Foundry)
Microsoft Foundry is Microsoft's unified platform for building, customizing, and deploying generative AI applications and AI agents. It brings together access to OpenAI's models and a wide range of other leading AI models, along with the tools needed to build, evaluate, and manage AI applications, all in one place. Below is an overview of what it includes and the value it delivers.
Microsoft Foundry
Designed for: Organizations building custom AI applications, chatbots, or AI agents that need secure, enterprise-grade access to leading AI models.
What's Included
- Foundry Models, providing access to OpenAI's models, including GPT-based language models and multimodal models for image and video generation
- Access to a broad catalog of leading AI models beyond OpenAI, including open-source and partner models, all through a single, consistent platform
- Foundry Agent Service, for building and running AI agents that can take multi-step actions rather than only answering questions
- Prompt orchestration, evaluation, and testing tools to help teams build reliable, high-quality AI applications
- Enterprise-grade security, including Microsoft Entra ID integration, content filtering, and private networking options
- Built-in observability, giving teams visibility into how their AI applications are performing in production
Why It Matters for Your Business
Microsoft Foundry gives organizations a single, secure platform to build generative AI applications, rather than needing to separately evaluate and integrate different AI providers, tools, and security layers. Because the platform supports a wide range of models beyond OpenAI's, a business can choose the model best suited to a specific task, and switch between them, without re-architecting the application. This is layered on top of Azure's existing enterprise security and compliance foundation, giving organizations confidence that their AI applications meet the same security bar as the rest of their Microsoft environment — a critical consideration for any business handling sensitive company or customer data in an AI application. Built-in evaluation and observability tools also help teams move AI applications from an initial prototype to a reliable, production-ready system with greater confidence.
A Note on Naming
This platform was previously known as Azure AI Foundry, and before that, Azure AI Studio. As part of that evolution, Azure OpenAI Service — Microsoft's original, dedicated service for accessing OpenAI's models — has been consolidated into Foundry as "Foundry Models," rather than continuing as a separate, standalone product. Existing Azure OpenAI deployments continue to work, and the underlying OpenAI models remain fully available, but Microsoft's current direction is to present this as one unified platform rather than two separate services.
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