Azure AI Foundry: The best ally to create GenAI applications

The latest and improved AI applications are completely transforming today’s business landscape. These solutions provide a wide range of options, such as process automation, generation of all types of content, improved decision making, more personalized experiences, etc.

Their development and management represent a strategic challenge for organizations, which must integrate these technologies in a scalable, secure, and aligned way with their objectives. To provide a solution to this, Azure AI Foundry was born, a platform that makes life easier for developers and companies. We’ll tell you all the details!

What is Azure AI Foundry?

Azure AI Foundry is a platform that provides access to a wide range of artificial intelligence and Machine Learning models and services, and is designed for developers to build, test and deploy generative AI applications in various business processes.

Its functions range from email classification to audio transcription tasks, or image analysis to detect objects. For all these reasons, this platform allows automating processes in a secure, responsible, and compliant way.

Its main functionalities are:

• Customization with an agent toolchain: Access comprehensive and collaborative GenAIOps tools to accelerate development and differentiate your applications.
• Ensure security with trusted AI: Evaluate and protect applications with configurable assessments, filters, and security controls.
• Manage and optimize applications at scale: Monitor and optimize application performance across environments, and control resource usage and access privileges.
• Optimize development: Accelerate the AI development lifecycle with an integrated library of SDKs and APIs.
• Experiment locally: You can easily provision resources in the cloud, access Azure AI capabilities, and consume models without switching platforms.
• Optimization to improve performance: evaluate, debug, and improve the quality and security of applications in development, test, and production environments.
• AI agents: automate workflows with action connectors, ground agents with business and relevant knowledge, choose the agent model that best fits your needs, and design secure agents that comply with a responsible AI model.

Azure AI Foundry Benefits

As we have been reviewing in the previous point, Azure AI Foundry offers numerous possibilities and use cases. Some of the most important ones are:

• Incorporation of multiple models and data sources to combine basic and open models with diverse datasets to innovate and differentiate your AI solutions.
• Model customization through RAG aggregation, enabling model extraction and tuning.
• Transformation of applications with agent-like workflows that respond to events, support reasoning, and perform autonomous tasks.
• Supporting perimeter and cloud deployment, AI applications can be run anywhere with Azure Container Apps and AKS.
• Continuous control and monitoring in a secure and compliant manner.

Azure AI Foundry Labs

Azure AI Foundry Labs is a hub for developers, startups, and enterprises to explore innovations from Microsoft research. It is an initiative that bridges cutting-edge research with real-world applications to enable developers and creators across industries to discover new possibilities, solve complex problems, and share knowledge to shape the future of AI.

The center’s latest breakthrough is Muse, the first global human-action model. This is a clear example of bringing cutting-edge research innovation to this AI platform for customers to use.

But it’s not the only example, as we can also find new assets that allow developers to explore, participate, and experiment with agentic models, such as:

• Aurora: is a large-scale atmospheric model that provides high-resolution weather forecasts and air pollution predictions, outperforming traditional tools.
• ExACT: is an open source project that allows agents to learn from past interactions and improve search efficiency dynamically.
• Magentic-One: a multi-agent system that solves complex problems by orchestrating multiple agents.
• MatterSim: a deep learning model for atomistic simulations that predicts material properties with high accuracy.
• TamGen: a generative AI model for drug design, which uses a chemical language model similar to GPT for the generation and refinement of target-aware molecules.

Azure AI Foundry Agent Service

The AI Foundry Agent Service is a fully managed service designed to enable developers to securely create, deploy, and scale high-quality, extensible AI agents without the need to manage the underlying processing and storage resources. What would originally take hundreds of lines of code to support client-side function calls can now be done with just a few lines, thanks to the Foundry AI Agent Service.

Because Azure AI Agent Service uses the same connection protocol as Azure OpenAI Assistants, you can use either the OpenAI SDK or Azure AI Foundry SDK to create and run an agent in just a few lines of code.

Azure AI Agent Service provides a more simplified and secure way to compile and deploy AI agents:

• Automatic tool call: No need to parse a tool call, invoke it, and control the response; everything is done on the server side.
• Securely managed data: Instead of managing your own state of preservation, you can rely on threads to store all the necessary information.
• Out-of-the-box tools: In addition to code interpreter and file retrieval tools provided by Azure OpenAI Assistants, Azure AI Agent Service also includes a set of tools that can be used to interact with data sources.

At Plain Concepts, we specialize in helping our clients design their strategy, protect their environment, choose the best solutions, close technology and data gaps, and establish rigorous oversight that achieves accountable AI. So you can achieve rapid productivity gains and build the foundation for new business models based on hyper-personalization or continuous access to relevant data and information.

We have a team of experts who have been successfully applying this technology in numerous projects, ensuring the security of customers. We have been bringing AI to our clients for more than 10 years, and now we propose a Framework for the adoption of generative AI:

• Unlock the potential of end-to-end generative AI.
• Accelerate your AI journey with our experts.
• Understand how your data should be structured and governed.
• Explore generative AI use cases that fit your goals.
• Create a tailored plan with realistic timelines and estimates.
• Build the patterns, processes, and teams you need.
• Deploy AI solutions to support your digital transformation.

Don’t wait any longer to take advantage of the full potential of generative AI!