Azure AI Foundry is like GPS in your AI ambitions: it simplifies navigating the insane tempo of innovation within the AI panorama so that you see the place you’re right now, consider what’s new, and plan, execute, and handle your rising AI portfolio.
I spent a lot of the final decade within the Midwest (howdy, Chicagoland!) however now stay within the Seattle space and work on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. Earlier than shifting right here, I’d visited the Redmond campus dozens of occasions as a Microsoft associate and buyer, however had solely primary airport-campus-hotel-restaurant navigation expertise. Relocating a household of 4 meant loads of exploring to seek out my option to grocery shops (what do you imply there’s no Mariano’s in Seattle?), colleges, medical doctors, dentists, and many others. I couldn’t have achieved it with out GPS: Simply plug within the vacation spot and let it information us, flip by flip, on the quickest, most secure route, avoiding visitors and roadwork alongside the way in which.
The hallmark of excellent tech is taking one thing advanced and traumatic (ever been misplaced in an unfamiliar metropolis?) and making it easy. Trying over the checklist of recent AI capabilities we introduced in simply the previous month, it’s simple to see why turn-by-turn steerage is required on this quickly increasing AI panorama. Azure AI Foundry is like GPS in your AI ambitions: it simplifies navigating the insane tempo of innovation within the AI panorama so that you see the place you’re right now, consider what’s new, and plan, execute, and handle your rising AI portfolio whereas optimizing prices. All with the boldness that it all the time has the most recent AI factor.
This wayfinding offers dexterity to assist your groups keep nimble as AI presents new strategic alternatives and efficiencies. Listed below are only a few new capabilities in Azure AI Foundry this month that present the worth of managing your AI portfolio on a single do-it-all platform.
Fashions: Extra is extra
As I write this there are 1,917 fashions within the Azure AI Foundry mannequin catalog. Selecting one—or three, since many AI apps now use a number of fashions—is less complicated than you may assume when going through an abundance of selection. On Azure AI Foundry, your workforce can shortly consider fashions on high quality, value, and throughput, or filter by business, inference duties like translation or textual content technology, or different key options to shortly get a brief checklist of fashions to think about. New instruments just like the Analysis API in Azure OpenAI Service give builders the flexibility to run automated comparisons between OpenAI fashions, quantify high quality enhancements, and speed up the iteration cycle. Along with the Saved Completions API, the Analysis API offers a programmatic answer for refining and evaluating AI fashions with accuracy and management.
That’s essential when you think about we introduced eight new Azure OpenAI Service fashions in a single week—the brand new GPT-4.1 mannequin collection, three superior audio fashions, and the o3 and o4-mini reasoning fashions. You possibly can fine-tune GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1-mini to adapt them to your distinctive enterprise necessities. And final week we introduced GPT-image-1, the most recent and most superior picture technology mannequin, in addition to the most recent GPT-4o-realtime-preview and GPT-4o-mini-realtime-preview API updates together with WebRTC help, semantic voice exercise detection and superior enter noise discount and extra.
Try how Costar Group makes use of Azure OpenAI Service fashions to remodel their clients’ expertise of discovering the appropriate dwelling.
That a lot newness in a single week may appear to be an anxiousness accelerator—particularly in case your workforce simply constructed an app utilizing an earlier mannequin—however Azure AI Foundry was designed for the progressive, iterative movement of AI improvement. It’s simple for groups to shortly consider new mannequin execs and cons, drop the mannequin within the playground for some hands-on testing, decide if it’s higher, quicker, cheaper, and many others., and deploy it if desired. Easy. And we intend to allow OpenAI fashions in Azure AI Foundry the identical day as OpenAI broadcasts them. They’re backward-compatible and could be deployed with a single click on or by including a brand new mannequin with a number of easy traces of code.
Azure OpenAI accounts for 35 of the 1,917 fashions in our catalog, however will not be alone in introducing new fashions. Additionally new in our mannequin catalog this month:
The first fashions within the Meta Llama 4 herd arrived, together with Llama 4 Scout, which focuses on condensing or analyzing intensive data, like analyzing all paperwork in an enterprise SharePoint library to reply a selected question, or studying a multi-thousand-page technical handbook to supply troubleshooting recommendation. And Llama 4 Maverick, which specializes in picture and textual content understanding with help for 12 languages for exact picture understanding and inventive writing.
An unbelievable quantity of information sits in file cupboards world wide, invisible to AI. Mistral OCR, a state-of-the-art Optical Character Recognition (OCR) mannequin, can learn and perceive the construction and nuance of laborious copy paperwork. It could actually extract equations, pictures, tables, and multilingual textual content from scanned contracts, handwritten kinds, analysis papers, regulatory filings, and extra at scale, making all that information accessible for AI to motive over and your workforce to be taught from and act on.
Optimized for the enterprise, Cohere’s Command A and Embed 4 fashions type a powerhouse for superior apps like extracting insights from hundreds of monetary filings, earnings name transcripts, and market analysis.
Deep Search acquired the world’s consideration with the discharge of its R1 mannequin earlier this yr. It’s a strong and succesful, low-cost mannequin with some security challenges requiring cautious administration. The Microsoft AI workforce developed its personal Deep Search R1 variant, MAI-DS-R1, that outperforms Deep Search R1 on responses to blocked matters and lowering dangerous content material whereas sustaining the identical reasoning capabilities. You could find MAI-DS-R1 in Foundry right now.
Go to market quicker with Azure AI Providers
Azure AI Providers are environment friendly time-to-market accelerators that assist your builders construct clever apps with no need direct AI or information science expertise. Think about agent constructing. Till not too long ago, creating brokers was sophisticated and consumed loads of developer time. With Azure AI Agent Service in Azure AI Foundry, what initially took a whole bunch of traces of code can now be achieved in only a few traces of code. Azure AI Agent Service is utilized by tens of hundreds of organizations to create and deploy brokers. Prospects like Fujitsu, who constructed an agent to assist prioritize gross sales leads, and NTT DATA, which constructed an agent that speeds proposal creation and surfaces shopper insights.
Azure AI Search is one other nice instance. This revolutionary retrieval system offers extremely related search outcomes at scale. It connects company information into AI functions to energy experiences like UBS’s Authorized AI Assistant (LAIA). This assistant helps their authorized workforce carry out analysis throughout a number of languages and 26 million paperwork to shortly discover associated clauses to a case or provisions throughout funding funds.
We not too long ago introduced a number of enhancements enabling your workforce to improve to the most recent retrieval and storage options with out disrupting service. These new options make Azure AI Search one of the crucial cost-effective choices available on the market, delivering an enterprise-ready, full-featured retrieval system with superior search know-how with out sacrificing value or efficiency. The result’s empowering your app to ship high-quality experiences for each consumer and interplay with no compromises.
Coca‑Cola turned its iconic Santa right into a globe‑trotting conversationalist in simply 60 days due to an AI‑prepared basis on Azure. Utilizing Azure AI Speech in Azure AI Foundry, the workforce constructed an actual‑time mannequin that allow Santa chat with greater than one million individuals in 26 languages, powering an immersive Create Actual Magic vacation marketing campaign throughout 43 markets. It’s a masterclass in how Azure unlocks lightning‑quick innovation at world scale.
Get there with Azure AI Foundry
Organizations constructed new muscle round resiliency and accelerating know-how adoption in the course of the pandemic and that conditioning is paying off because the AI period shifts the world once more, reshaping what is feasible. Effectively navigating this fast-changing panorama is crucial in staying aggressive and constructing differentiation in a busy market. Our intent is for Azure AI Foundry to be your trusted information, simplifying advanced processes and empowering your workforce to realize extra. With the most recent developments and a sturdy platform, you’re outfitted to harness the total potential of AI, driving innovation and effectivity throughout your group. Keep forward of the curve with Azure AI Foundry—your GPS for the way forward for AI.
About Jessica
Jessica leads Azure Information, AI, and Digital Purposes at Microsoft. Discover Jessica’s weblog posts right here and make sure to comply with Jessica on LinkedIn.
