Introducing Inside Microsoft Foundry: Quickstart 🎬

Developers don’t adopt platforms. They solve problems.

When you’re building AI agents, the questions are rarely about products. They’re about outcomes:

• Which model should I choose?
• How do I ground my agent in my own data?
• How do I know if the responses are actually good?
• How do I move from a local prototype to production?
• How do I monitor, evaluate, and govern my agent once it's live?

These are the challenges we hear from developers and AI engineers every day. And they’re exactly the challenges that inspired our new video series: Inside Microsoft Foundry: Quickstart. The series is designed to help developers navigate the end-to-end journey of building and shipping AI agents, focusing on real-world developer problems.

Start here: What does it really take to ship an AI agent?

The first episode is now live:

📺 Watch the video: What does it really take to ship an AI agent?

In this episode, you'll meet Sparkles, a cupcake-ordering AI agent built using Microsoft Foundry and the Microsoft Agent Framework. Together, we walk through the development lifecycle, from connecting to a deployed model, to working with prompts and tools, inspecting execution traces, and evaluating agent conversations.

The goal is to show how the pieces come together to solve a developer problem that feels familiar: taking an AI agent from idea to something you can confidently ship.

Why this series?

Over the coming weeks, we'll release new episodes covering the foundational concepts and workflows developers need when building custom AI apps and agents. Expect practical, hands-on content across topics such as:

• Creating your first AI agents
• Working with models
• Connecting tools and knowledge
• Building in Visual Studio Code
• Evaluating and improving agent quality
• Moving from prototype to production
• Observability, governance, and ongoing operations

Our vision for Microsoft Foundry is not a collection of separate tools, but an ecosystem where developers can solve agent-building challenges end to end. Whether you're working in the Portal, the Toolkit, SDKs, GitHub Copilot, or Skills, the focus remains the same: helping you build, test, deploy, and operate AI agents with confidence.

Follow the full journey

This first episode is just the beginning.

We'll be adding new videos to the series over the next few weeks, each tackling another challenge developers face when building AI-powered applications and agents.

Explore the full playlist: Inside Microsoft Foundry Playlist

Get started wit Foundry: https://aka.ms/foundry-portal

If you're curious about building agents, evaluating them effectively, deploying them reliably, or simply understanding where to start, this series is for you.

We hope you'll join us as we go behind the scenes and explore what it really takes to build and ship AI agents with Microsoft Foundry.

Happy building! 🚀