Announcing comprehensive guidance for AI adoption and architecture

The pace of AI innovation is moving incredibly fast with new models and solutions emerging regularly. To meet the pace of technological advancements, organizations are striving to meet the demand for scalable, efficient AI solutions. The rapidity of change places enormous pressure on organizations to scale quickly while also ensuring reliability, security, performance and cost-efficiency needs are met along the way. According to Rand Research, over 80% of early AI adoptions fail because customers miss critical steps in preparing their organizations to consider all aspects of building and running AI workloads. 

Microsoft is committed to helping organizations successfully navigate this journey of cloud and AI transformation. Over the past 18 months, Microsoft has published design patterns, baseline reference architectures, application landing zones, and a variety of Azure service guides for Azure OpenAI workloads. We have also developed specific financial best practices, as well as pricing and cost management features to make it easier to optimize AI investments. This guidance and features have been pulled together within Azure Essentials.

Azure Essentials brings together curated best practices and product experiences from customers and partners along with reference architectures, skilling, tools, and resources into a single destination to help you maximize the value of your cloud investments. The Azure Essentials resource kit includes detailed guidance tailored to specific use cases and business scenarios including achieving secure migration, activating your data for AI innovation, and building and modernizing AI applications. As you prepare to adopt AI at scale, the guidance within the Azure Essentials resource kit helps you become AI-ready.

This week, we are excited to announce industry-leading guidance for AI adoption and architectural design. This guidance ties together all of the content from the past 18 months into a comprehensive methodical approach that sets up the organization for AI success, while ensuring that AI workloads are well-architected.  

Through thousands of customer engagements focused on AI adoption, teams of Microsoft cloud solution architects, product engineers and content developers have developed specific guidance for the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure (CAF) and Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework (WAF). As a result, all of the recommendations and best practices are based on customer-proven experience that future customers can count on.  

New: Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) – AI scenario 

The AI scenario within the Cloud Adoption Framework provides prescriptive guidance that prepares organizations to adopt AI at scale. Over the past nine months, we’ve had over 100 Microsoft’s solution architects contribute their AI adoption knowledge to this guidance. The result of this collaboration is a roadmap comprised of checklists that are segmented for “Startups” or “Enterprises”. These checklists make it possible to start your adoption at any phase, while also double-checking that you haven’t missed anything along the way.

One hallmark of this guidance is the technology strategy decision tree. It provides very succinct and consumable logic to decide which AI technology works best for your specific AI strategy. To see the full tree, click on this link. 

Most (if not all) customers want to implement and adopt AI responsibly. The ramifications and risk of not doing so are just too costly. Thus, the CAF methodologies have also been adapted to Responsible AI principles so organizations can build an AI foundation that supports the design, governance, and ongoing management of responsible AI workloads. It helps users with everything from developing an adoption strategy through managing AI workloads in production.  

NEW: Well-Architected Framework (WAF) – AI workloads 

The AI workload guidance within the Azure Well-Architected Framework is a new set of best practices that allows AI architects to meet the functional and non-functional requirements for reliability, security, performance efficiency, operational excellence, and cost optimization. Designed to instill confidence in workload teams to make intelligent decisions when designing their AI workloads, the new WAF guidance for AI workloads takes a broader view covering architectural considerations at all levels of the stack, including infrastructure, data layers, and application logic. Thus, you’ll find guidance about each of the WAF pillars blended into all levels.

The WAF AI enhancements we’re announcing this week build upon the Azure Well-Architected Framework refresh we launched last year. We’ve added checklists and tradeoffs to all pillars which helps make the guidance more actionable for workload teams, including solution architects, DevOps engineers, and data scientists.  

And the WAF components are more actionable through workload designs, reference architectures, assessments, Azure Advisor recommendations, and Azure service guides. The WAF AI workload guidance also covers both traditional machine learning and generative AI architectures – ensuring comprehensive support for your AI projects.  

Prepare to scale your AI adoption 

We are confident that this comprehensive guidance will support your organization in building and deploying AI solutions responsibly and effectively. Stay tuned for more updates and resources to help you on your AI adoption journey. 

The CAF and WAF AI adoption and architecture guidance makes it possible to adopt AI at scale while fully aligning to Trustworthy AI principles. This guidance is also embedded within Azure Essentials which provides detailed step-by-step guidance through the AI adoption journey, thus providing organizations with a clear path to maximize the value of their AI investment. As you prepare to become AI-ready, these are some great resources to get you started. 

• Access the Cloud Adoption Framework for AI scenario documentation to get the guidance you need to ensure you’re ready to adopt AI at scale. Leverage the Azure Well-Architected Framework for AI workloads documentation to obtain the necessary guidance to securely design, build and manage your AI workloads.  

• Discover comprehensive skilling with free, self-paced Azure AI Plans on Learn to further develop your Azure adoption skills so you can begin your AI adoption journey with confidence.  

• Learn more about Azure Innovate and Azure Migrate and Modernize and Azure Essentials to understand how they can help you accelerate AI adoption and drive innovation in your business. 

Ready to take action? 

Connect with Microsoft Azure sales or reach out to a qualified partner.  

If you have a Unified Contract with Microsoft Support, there are multiple engagements opportunities that are based on CAF and WAF to help you accelerate your Azure and AI deployments.