Microsoft Foundry Blog
Your source for learning and building with our models, agents, and tools.
Latest posts
What’s new in Microsoft Foundry | October and November 2025
Azure AI Foundry is now Microsoft Foundry. Read the latest announcements about agents, models, tools and more.
Foundry IQ in Microsoft Agent Framework
Build enterprise-grade RAG agents with Foundry IQ Knowledge Bases in ~20 lines of Python. Learn how the Azure AI Search Context Provider brings intelligent, multi-hop retrieval to the Microsoft Agent Framework—no fragmented pipelines, just plug in the knowledge your agent needs.
Announcing Foundry MCP Server (preview) in the cloud, speeding up AI development with Microsoft Foundry
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a standard protocol that enables AI agents to securely connect with apps, data, and systems, supporting easy interoperability and seamless platform expansion. At Ignite, Microsoft Foundry introduced Foundry Tools, which serves as a central hub for discovering, connecting, and managing both public and private MCP tools securely, simplifying integration across more than 1,400 business systems and empowering agents. Microsoft Foundry also upleveled Foundry Agent Service to empower developers to securely build, manage, and connect AI agents with Foundry Tools, enabling seamless integra...
⭐Upcoming Virtual Event⭐ AI Dev Days, Level-Up Your AI Skills with Microsoft Reactor
Join us for AI Dev Days, a two-day virtual event exploring the latest Microsoft Azure, Foundry and GitHub innovations. Whether you’re modernizing legacy apps, building with agents, or exploring the newest AI models, this is your moment to skill up, ship faster, and connect with experts.
Introducing Memory in Foundry Agent Service
Give your agents the power to remember Imagine your agent never asks the same question twice. Until now, most agents have been stateless. Each conversation resets to zero, forgetting what users said just minutes ago or weeks ago. Developers tried to bridge this gap with homegrown solutions — storing embeddings in databases, manually retrieving prior messages, or stuffing entire chat histories into prompts. These workarounds add latency, cost, and complexity, and still fall short of delivering truly personal, context-aware interactions. At Ignite 2025, we introduced the public preview of memory in Foundry Ag...
Translation Customization, A Developer’s Guide to Adaptive Custom Translation
Introduction Translation isn’t just converting words—it’s enabling global communication. Yet for businesses operating worldwide, achieving accuracy, speed, and domain-specific terminology has been a persistent challenge. Market trends show that 70% of consumers prefer content in their native language, and enterprises are under pressure to deliver real-time multilingual experiences without sacrificing quality. That’s why we’re introducing Adaptive Custom Translation (AdaptCT) in Microsoft Foundry Tools—a breakthrough that redefines how translation systems are customized. Instead of retraining models from scr...
Introducing Multi-Agent Workflows in Foundry Agent Service
Across industries, organizations are moving from experimenting with single agents to running AI at the center of their business operations. While single agents excel at focused tasks, customers quickly discover that real enterprise work stretches across multiple steps, involves different roles, and requires strong governance. To operationalize AI in this environment, teams need a dependable way to coordinate agents, tools, and logic into complete, end-to-end processes. Over the past year, as customers deployed agents into production, the same challenges surfaced across industries: At M...
Azure Content Understanding is now generally available
At Microsoft Ignite this year, we’re excited to announce that Azure Content Understanding in Foundry Tools is now generally available (GA). Over the past months, we’ve seen preview usage across industries, from large consultancies to healthcare leaders, with invaluable customer feedback shaping this release. With this GA release, we’re enabling flexibility and control with model choice, production-grade reliability, expanded region availability, and broader scenario coverage. In addition, this update brings tight integration with Microsoft Foundry Models, Foundry IQ powered by Azure AI Search, and agent ecosys...
Assess Agentic Risks with the AI Red Teaming Agent in Microsoft Foundry
Accelerate your trustworthy AI journey with the enhanced AI Red Teaming Agent in Microsoft Foundry. Empower developers to automate adversarial testing for both models and agentic systems—covering risks like prompt injection, prohibited actions, sensitive data leakage, and task adherence. Integrate red teaming into your CI/CD pipelines using the Foundry SDK and no-code UI wizard, enabling continuous safety evaluation and rapid prototyping. With PyRIT’s open-source attack strategies and customizable risk definitions, you can systematically probe vulnerabilities, benchmark improvements, and ensure robust safeguards ...
Foundry Local comes to Android—plus on-device speech, on-prem support, and a simpler SDK
Today, we’re introducing a powerful new way to bring AI directly to your mobile apps: Foundry Local on Android. Starting now, you can build Android applications that run AI on-device—no cloud round trips required. Sign up for the gated preview here: https://aka.ms/foundrylocal-androidprp Most of us now carry a computer in our pocket. These devices are now powerful enough to run AI models locally, unlocking speed, privacy, and flexibility. With Foundry Local, you can easily deploy optimized open-source models from Microsoft Foundry directly on mobile devices. Why on-device AI matters: Foundry Local...
How to debug and optimize RAG agents in Microsoft Foundry
TL;DR Learn the best practices to evaluate and optimize the RAG quality of your agent using evaluations in Foundry Observability. This tutorial demonstrates these 2 best practices before deploying your RAG agent: 1. Evaluate and optimize end to end your RAG agent using reference-free RAG triad evaluators: Groundedness and Relevance evaluators; 2. For advanced search use case requiring ground truths and more precise measurement of retrieval quality, optimize your Search parameters using golden metrics such as XDCG and Max Relevance: Document Retrieval evaluator Framing Agent Observability Agents can be po...
Introducing GPT-4o Audio Models in Microsoft Foundry: A Practical Guide for Developers
How to get started with Azure OpenAI's next-generation GPT-4o audio models for transcription and text-to-speech applications.
Announcing Azure Language in Foundry Tools for deterministic, privacy-first agents
In today’s rapidly evolving AI landscape, developers are seeking reliable, secure, and predictable language capabilities to power the next generation of enterprise-grade agents. As agentic architecture becomes central to modern applications, teams need tools that deliver stronger privacy guarantees, deterministic behavior, and seamless integration across their AI stack. As part of the broader transition from Azure AI Services into unified Microsoft Foundry Tools, we’re excited to introduce the rebranded Azure Language in Foundry Tools with new enhancements purpose-built for agent development. Today’s release b...
Session Guide to Microsoft Foundry @ Microsoft Ignite: Must-See Developer Sessions
Microsoft Ignite 2025 is the ultimate opportunity for developers to dive deep into what’s new with Azure AI Foundry. We curated the top sessions designed for hands-on learning, practical demos, and expert insights. Whether you’re building AI apps, orchestrating multi-agent systems, or interested in exploring new developer tools, this guide will help you plan your event schedule whether you are attending in person or joining virtually! Don’t miss this Innovation Session Build and Manage AI Apps with Your Agent Factory | BRK1706 Step into the era of agentic AI with an open, modular platform for building and ma...
A Developer’s Guide to Fine-Tuning GPT-4o for Image Classification on Azure AI Foundry
Whether you’re a machine learning practitioner, app developer, or just curious about the latest in AI, this guide shows how you can quickly boost image classification accuracy using cutting-edge Vision-Language Models (VLM) on Azure—no deep learning expertise required. In this walkthrough, you’ll see how to fine-tune GPT-4o on Azure OpenAI for image classification using the Stanford Dogs dataset. Illustrations of some of dogs' breeds images presented on the dataset. We’ll use the Vision Fine-Tuning API and compare the results to a lightweight CNN baseline, so you can see the impact of modern Vision-Languag...
The Developer’s Guide to Smarter Fine-tuning: Unlock custom AI for every business challenge
Azure AI Foundry makes fine-tuning smarter, faster, and more accessible than ever. Whether you’re building agents that reason, tools that adapt, or workflows that scale, this is your launchpad for customizing models to solve real business challenges. Dive in to discover best practices, hands-on resources, and the latest innovations so you can build, test, and deploy specialized AI with confidence. What is Fine-tuning? Fine-tuning refers to customizing a pre-trained LLM with additional training on a specific task or new dataset for enhanced performance, new skills, or improved accuracy. So instead of building ...
What’s new in Azure AI Foundry | September 2025
GPT‑5‑Codex GA, Sora video‑to‑video preview, Grok 4 Fast, Browser Automation & Key Vault previews, new Search knowledge sources, Voice Live GA.
Introducing Microsoft Agent Framework: The Open-Source Engine for Agentic AI Apps
Why agents need a new foundation Over the last year, developers have been experimenting with AI agents in every imaginable form. Agents are not just chatbots or copilots — they are autonomous software components that can reason about goals, call tools and APIs, collaborate with other agents, and adapt dynamically. Whether it’s a retrieval agent for research, a coding agent embedded in a dev workflow, or a compliance agent ensuring policy enforcement, agents are becoming the next layer of application logic. Yet despite the excitement, the path from prototype to production has been fraught with obstacles. Many ...