Microsoft rebrands Azure AI Studio to Azure AI Foundry

Microsoft is packaging its Azure AI Studio and other updates into a new service — Azure AI Foundry in response to enterprises’ need to develop, run, and manage generative AI applications.

Launched at the company’s annual Ignite conference, Azure AI Foundry is being marketed as a “unified application platform in the age of AI,” akin to the Azure AI Studio, which was released in November last year and made generally available in May this year.

[ Related: Microsoft Ignite 2024 news and insights ]

Azure AI Studio was developed and marketed by Microsoft as a generative AI application development platform with support for model filtering, model benchmarking, prompt engineering, retrieval augmented generation, agent building, AI safety guardrails, and to an extent low-code development.

Azure AI Studio also has speech, vision, and language capabilities to help build apps with support for voice and the ability to read text and images in multiple languages.

However, Azure AI Studio is not to be confused with the Microsoft Copilot Studio, which experts claim is a  “2nd-floor level low-code tool for customizing chatbots.”

What is Azure AI Foundry?

The new Azure AI Foundry service comprises the Azure AI Foundry portal, which was earlier the Azure AI Studio, the Azure AI Foundry software development kit (SDK), Azure AI Agents, and pre-built app templates along with some tools for AI-based application development.

The Azure AI Foundry SDK, in turn, comprises the AI toolchain that makes Azure AI services and capabilities accessible from tools such as GitHub and Visual Studio, the company said in a statement, adding that these tools allow developers to build an application that can be integrated with another program.

Microsoft said it has morphed the Azure AI Studio into the Azure AI Foundry portal along with new updates that help in the development, running, and management of AI-based applications.

Azure AI Foundry would act like a management console, akin to the AWS Management Console that lets enterprise users access different tools including a cost estimator, usage checker, billing console, and other core services offered as part of its cloud services.

Inside the Azure AI Foundry portal, Microsoft said it was introducing a new management center experience that brings subscription information, such as connected resources, access privileges, and quota usage.

“This can save development teams valuable time and facilitate easier security and compliance workflows throughout the entire AI lifecycle,” the company said in a statement.

Other updates include the addition of new specialized industry-specific generative AI models from companies including Bayer, Sight Machine, Rockwell Automation, Saifr/Fidelity Labs, and Paige.ai targeting the healthcare, finance, IT, and the manufacturing sector among others.

What is the new Azure AI Agent service?

The new Azure AI Agent service, which comes packaged with Azure AI Foundry, is an upgrade over the agents available inside Azure AI Studio and falls into the genre of autonomous AI agents that Microsoft showcased last month.

Autonomous AI agents, otherwise known as agentic AI, can perform tasks without human intervention and Microsoft’s new agents, according to the company, are targeted at automating business processes.

However, the company pointed out that the agents will ask its users for a final review or call for them to take action before it completes the process. This process has been put in place to ensure that these autonomous agents operate responsibly, it explained.

In contrast, the agents bundled inside Azure AI Studio were conversational retrieval agents, which is essentially an expansion from the idea of conversational large language models (LLMs) combined with tools, code, embeddings, and vector stores. Other updates that are packaged with Azure AI Foundry includes updates to Azure AI Search, which now includes a generative query engine; migrated features from Azure OpenAI service, simplified navigation, and more detailed documentation.