Today, we are thrilled to announce the upcoming preview of Azure AI Agent Service, a comprehensive suite of capabilities designed to empower developers to securely build, deploy, and scale high-quality, extensible, and reliable AI agents. By leveraging an extensive ecosystem of models, tools, and capabilities from OpenAI, Microsoft, and industry-leading partners such as Meta, Azure AI Agent Service enables developers to efficiently create agents for a wide range of generative AI use cases.
In this blog, we will explore the Knowledge Integration capabilities of Azure AI Agent Service, designed not only to streamline the creation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workflow, but also to empower developers to build intelligent, knowledge-driven AI agents.
Grounding AI Agents with Knowledge
Knowledge is the foundation of generating accurate, grounded responses, allowing Azure AI Agent Service to make informed decisions with confidence. By integrating comprehensive and accurate data, Azure AI Agent Service enhances precision and provides effective solutions, elevating the overall customer experience.
With the preview of Azure AI Agent Service, you can ground your agent’s responses using data from Bing Search, Microsoft Fabric, SharePoint, Azure AI Search, Azure Blob Storage, your local files, and even your own licensed data. These data sources enable grounding with diverse data types, from enterprise private data and public web data to your own licensed data, structured or unstructured. Enterprise-grade security features, such as On-Behalf-Of (OBO) authorization, ensures your data is stored, retrieved and accessed, meeting the highest standards of privacy and protection.
Key Capabilities
Leverage Real-Time Public Web Data with Grounding with Bing Search
LLMs can sometimes generate outdated content. By grounding your agent with Bing Search, you can overcome this limitation and create more reliable and trustworthy applications. Grounding with Bing Search allows your agents to integrate real-time public web data, ensuring their response is accurate and up to date. By including supporting URLs and search query links, Grounding with Bing Search enhances trust and transparency, empowering the users to verify responses with the original sources.
Empower Data-Driven Decisions with Microsoft Fabric
Integrate your Azure AI Agent with Fabric AI Skill to unlock powerful data analysis capabilities. Fabric AI Skill transforms enterprise data into conversational Q&A systems, allowing users to interact with the data through chat and uncover data-driven and actionable insights effortlessly.
With OBO authorization, this integration simplifies access to enterprise data in Fabric while maintaining robust security, ensuring proper access control and enterprise-grade protection.
Connect Private Data Securely with SharePoint
Azure AI Agent Service supports grounding response with your data in SharePoint (coming soon). This integration makes your SharePoint content more accessible to your end users. Enterprise-grade security features, such as OBO authorization for SharePoint, ensure secure and controlled access for end users.
Ground Private Data with Azure AI Search, Azure Blob Storage and Your Local Files
Azure AI Agent Service supports connecting private data from various sources, such as Azure AI Search, Azure Blob Storage, and local files, to enhance responses.
Bring your existing Azure AI Search index or create a new one using the improved File Search tool. This tool leverages a built-in ingestion pipeline to process files from your local system or Azure Blob Storage. With the new File Search tool, your files remain in your own storage, and your Azure AI Search resource is used to ingest them, ensuring you maintain complete control over your data.
Enrich Responses with Your Licensed Data
Azure AI Agent Service also integrates your own licensed data from specialized data providers, such as Tripadvisor. Enhance the quality of your agent’s responses with high-quality, fresh data, such as travel guidance and reviews. These insights empower your agents to deliver nuanced, informed solutions tailored to specific use cases.
“We’re excited to partner with Microsoft as the first data and intelligence provider for its Azure AI Agent Service," said Rahul Todkar, Vice President, Head of Data and AI at Tripadvisor. “At Tripadvisor, we are focused on leveraging the power of Data and Generative AI to benefit all travelers and partners across the globe. With this new partnership we are making available to developers a set of APIs that provide access to granular Tripadvisor data, content and intelligence. This will allow developers and AI engineers/scientists to use our robust travel data across a broad array of AI and ML use cases including building AI agents, contextually relevant recommendations and drive increased personalization."
What’s Next
- Sign up for the private preview: Contact your account executive
- Learn More: Watch our breakout session on Azure AI Agent Service.
- See it in action: Check out our demo session on building custom agents with models and tools.
- Start building: Explore single and multi-agent solutions with our Azure AI Agent Service code samples.
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