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 might be right this moment, consider what’s new, and plan, execute, and handle your rising AI portfolio.
I spent a lot of the final decade within the Midwest (hey, Chicagoland!) however now reside within the Seattle space and work on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. Earlier than transferring right here, I’d visited the Redmond campus dozens of occasions as a Microsoft companion and buyer, however had solely fundamental airport-campus-hotel-restaurant navigation expertise. Relocating a household of 4 meant quite a lot of exploring to search out my method to grocery shops (what do you imply there’s no Mariano’s in Seattle?), faculties, medical doctors, dentists, and so on. I couldn’t have finished 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 best way.
The hallmark of excellent tech is taking one thing complicated and disturbing (ever been misplaced in an unfamiliar metropolis?) and making it easy. Wanting over the record of latest AI capabilities we introduced in simply the previous month, it’s straightforward to see why turn-by-turn steering 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 might be right this moment, consider what’s new, and plan, execute, and handle your rising AI portfolio whereas optimizing prices. All with the arrogance that it all the time has the newest AI factor.
This wayfinding gives dexterity to assist your groups keep nimble as AI presents new strategic alternatives and efficiencies. Listed here 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 would possibly suppose when going through an abundance of selection. On Azure AI Foundry, your crew can shortly consider fashions on high quality, price, and throughput, or filter by trade, inference duties like translation or textual content era, or different key options to shortly get a brief record of fashions to contemplate. New instruments just like the Analysis API in Azure OpenAI Service give builders the power 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 gives a programmatic answer for refining and evaluating AI fashions with accuracy and management.
That’s necessary 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 newest and most superior picture era mannequin, in addition to the newest GPT-4o-realtime-preview and GPT-4o-mini-realtime-preview API updates together with WebRTC assist, 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 would possibly seem to be an nervousness accelerator—particularly in case your crew simply constructed an app utilizing an earlier mannequin—however Azure AI Foundry was designed for the progressive, iterative move of AI growth. It’s straightforward 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 so on., and deploy it if desired. Easy. And we intend to allow OpenAI fashions in Azure AI Foundry the identical day as OpenAI declares them. They’re backward-compatible and could be deployed with a single click on or by including a brand new mannequin with a couple of easy strains of code.
Azure OpenAI accounts for 35 of the 1,917 fashions in our catalog, however shouldn’t 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 makes a speciality of condensing or analyzing in depth info, like analyzing all paperwork in an enterprise SharePoint library to reply a selected question, or studying a multi-thousand-page technical guide to supply troubleshooting recommendation. And Llama 4 Maverick, which specializes in picture and textual content understanding with assist for 12 languages for exact picture understanding and artistic writing.
An unimaginable quantity of information sits in file cupboards around the globe, invisible to AI. Mistral OCR, a state-of-the-art Optical Character Recognition (OCR) mannequin, can learn and perceive the construction and nuance of onerous copy paperwork. It could possibly extract equations, photographs, tables, and multilingual textual content from scanned contracts, handwritten types, analysis papers, regulatory filings, and extra at scale, making all that information accessible for AI to purpose over and your crew to study 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 bought 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 crew developed its personal Deep Search R1 variant, MAI-DS-R1, that outperforms Deep Search R1 on responses to blocked subjects and decreasing dangerous content material whereas sustaining the identical reasoning capabilities. You could find MAI-DS-R1 in Foundry right this moment.
Go to market quicker with Azure AI Companies
Azure AI Companies are environment friendly time-to-market accelerators that assist your builders construct clever apps without having direct AI or knowledge science expertise. Take into account agent constructing. Till not too long ago, creating brokers was sophisticated and consumed quite a lot of developer time. With Azure AI Agent Service in Azure AI Foundry, what initially took lots of of strains of code can now be finished in only a few strains of code. Azure AI Agent Service is utilized by tens of hundreds of organizations to create and deploy brokers. Clients 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 gives extremely related search outcomes at scale. It connects company information into AI purposes to energy experiences like UBS’s Authorized AI Assistant (LAIA). This assistant helps their authorized crew 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 crew to improve to the latest retrieval and storage options with out disrupting service. These new options make Azure AI Search one of the crucial cost-effective choices in the marketplace, delivering an enterprise-ready, full-featured retrieval system with superior search know-how with out sacrificing price 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 because of an AI‑prepared basis on Azure. Utilizing Azure AI Speech in Azure AI Foundry, the crew constructed an actual‑time mannequin that allow Santa chat with greater than one million folks 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 important in staying aggressive and constructing differentiation in a busy market. Our intent is for Azure AI Foundry to be your trusted information, simplifying complicated processes and empowering your crew to realize extra. With the newest developments and a strong platform, you’re geared up 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 Knowledge, AI, and Digital Purposes at Microsoft. Discover Jessica’s weblog posts right here and make sure you observe Jessica on LinkedIn.