In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into business operations is no longer a luxury but a necessity. However, despite the promising growth, many companies face barriers in scaling their AI initiatives. According to a Deloitte report*, nearly 70% of organizations have moved 30% or fewer of their Generative AI experiments into production. As organizations strive to harness AI’s full potential, a unified user interface and management center streamlines resource allocation, governance, and compliance, making AI development more efficient and secure.
Today, we announced Azure AI Foundry , our unified AI platform that includes our Azure AI Foundry portal (formerly Azure AI Studio) and our code-first unified SDK experience with pre-built app templates for developers.
Azure AI Foundry addresses development needs by providing a comprehensive toolchain that integrates multiple AI services and models from various providers. Our unified approach simplifies the development and management process, empowering Developers and IT Admins to design, customize, and manage AI solutions with greater ease and confidence. By offering a streamlined navigation experience and centralized management center, the Azure AI Foundry portal helps stakeholders focus on what matters most – driving innovation to achieve their business objectives.
With Azure AI Foundry, IT Admins can provision cloud resources and manage AI projects and deployments, and developers can discover AI capabilities and models. Azure AI Foundry SDK , a unified toolchain for AI development, brings Azure AI capabilities to popular coding workspaces like GitHub, Visual Studio, and Copilot Studio. Azure AI Foundry portal offers a visual user interface to discover AI tools and manage AI applications at scale.
We are excited to announce significant transformations to Azure AI Foundry portal. The user interface now features a revamped and streamlined navigation experience, making it easier to discover AI capabilities and manage applications efficiently. Additionally, we’ve enhanced the model catalog and integrated Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Speech, and Azure AI Language Studios for improved playground experiences. A brand-new management center has been added to govern projects, resources, deployments, and quotas, and we’ve made accessibility improvements to support end-to-end development. Finally, we’ve improved access to documentation with a new help pane.
Streamlined Navigation
The revamped and streamlined navigation experience in Azure AI Foundry portal is designed to help you discover models and AI services and manage applications efficiently. After you explore in the global landing page, you can seamlessly transition into Azure AI projects. AI projects can help you manage multiple AI services and model deployments from various providers. In this latest update, we've made several enhancements to Azure AI projects to improve your workflow:
- Activity-centric Organization : All tools are now organized around your activities, to help you find the right tools exactly when you need them.
- Centralized Assets : All of your assets including model deployments, endpoints, keys, data, indexes, and more are now easily accessible from a single location.
- Unified Resource Management : A new management center allows you to easily organize and govern resources, control project access, view quota, and more. This space provides a comprehensive overview of your resources, helping you manage them more effectively.
If you worked with Azure AI Studio before, you'll notice there are fewer navigation menus on the left side of the screen to sift through when working with a project in the Azure AI Foundry portal. Rest assured, all of your assets from Azure AI Studio are available in the Azure AI Foundry portal, though they may have been reorganized. Learn more.
Enhanced Model Catalog
The model catalog in Azure AI Foundry has a new look, simplifying model exploration and discovery. Now users can find the latest models, quickly locate model information - such as training data and supported data types, and compare models using benchmarks on public data or evaluations using their own private data.
Model benchmarks are now built directly into the model catalog for easier access and navigation. Developers can quickly select and compare models using detailed benchmarks for cost, latency, and throughput. After comparing models and narrowing their selection based on public data, developers can evaluate how each model performs on their own data for their unique scenario. Azure AI Foundry provides a robust set of pre-built evaluations for quality and safety, plus tools to build custom evaluations.
These updates to the model catalog help provide valuable insight into the tradeoffs between model quality, safety, and performance, so developers can select the right base model(s) for their application quickly and with confidence.
According to Azure AI Foundry customer, Mars,
“The Azure AI model catalog provides access to a wide range of pre-built models such as Mistral to help restructure data and enhance our accuracy. We know it’s accurate because nothing goes into our production systems without being validated and signed off by radiologists." - Mark Parkinson, Mars Senior Director of AI Development
Migrated Azure OpenAI Studio Features
We are thrilled to announce that Azure OpenAI Studio is now merged into Azure AI Foundry portal, enabling Azure OpenAI Service customers access to more models and tools.
A dedicated space within Azure AI Foundry supports developers that prefer to build AI apps and APIs only using Azure OpenAI Service models for various applications. However, we recommend using an AI project to leverage a wide range of AI models, functionalities, and tools when designing, customizing, and managing AI solutions.
If you've been using Azure OpenAI Studio, all of your work, such as your deployments, content filters, batch jobs, and fine-tuned models are still available through Azure AI Foundry. Learn more .
Speech & Language Integration
We are excited to unveil new playgrounds in Azure AI Foundry portal, designed to enhance your experience with Azure AI Speech and Azure AI Language. These playgrounds provide a hands-on environment where you can explore and integrate powerful features like real-time speech-to-text and translation into your AI applications, in addition to other AI services.
One standout feature we are enabling is the ability to create custom speech models through our fine-tuning experience. This allows you to achieve better quality results tailored to your specific needs.
In addition to these updates, users can now easily discover Speech and Language services within the model catalog and begin building with them from the Models + Endpoints section. Learn more .
New Management Center
At different stages of AI development, IT admins and other users will need to complete day-to-day administrative tasks but may prefer to do them all in one place. The new management center provides cross-functional teams with simplified, centralized management and governance within Azure AI Foundry portal. Users can monitor resource utilization and compliance across multiple hubs and Azure subscriptions, assign roles, and manage users and quota. Additionally, the management center provides convenient links to Azure Portal for IT Administrators seeking more advanced, granular controls - such as network configurations.
By bringing essential subscription information behind one pane of glass, the management center in Azure AI Foundry saves development teams time and supports easier resource management, security, and compliance workflows across the AI development lifecycle. Learn more .
Improved Accessibility
Our team has prioritized accessibility for the Azure AI Foundry portal. This is key for a platform that supports innovation at scale. To support accessibility, we worked with Fable and EY to gather feedback from developers with vision and mobility disabilities and neurodiverse abilities to improve our platform experience.
“Microsoft products will maximize the power of thinking differently and being different.” - Hiren Shukla, EY Global Neurodiversity and Inclusive Value Leader
The collaboration with EY was a multi-month effort resulting in an improved notification system. The updates reduce disruption by grouping notifications and deployment errors, thereby minimizing cognitive overload. We believe these updates will benefit focus and productivity for all Azure AI Foundry users, not just those who are neurodivergent. Read the story.
Improved Documentation Access with the Help Pane
As part of simplifying navigation and improving access to important documentation when needed, we’ve brought a new help pane to all ai.azure.com screens. Developers can use the help pane to access enhanced documentation and tutorials that assist with learning how to use specific features. This documentation supports the discovery, development, deployment, and optimization of AI apps and agents using the Azure AI Foundry portal and SDK.
How Customers are Innovating with Azure AI Foundry
More than 60,000 customers around the world use Azure AI to develop and scale their AI innovations. Including, PIMCO, BMW, NBA, and ABB.
PIMCO boosts client service with an AI-powered search platform built on Azure AI
To help associates find relevant information faster, PIMCO built an enterprise tool, named ChatGWM , using Azure AI. ChatGWM is a secure, RAG-based application that searches across PIMCO-approved structured and unstructured data sources to deliver fast, relevant information to its teams.
“We loved the completeness of vision Microsoft has shown with AI, including security and compliance. Azure AI Foundry has allowed us to spend time building solutions instead of building AI plumbing.” - Sanket Bafna, PIMCO Senior Vice President, Head, Client Data Intelligence and Sales Technology
BMW Group innovates with Azure for 10 times more efficient data delivery
BMW Group used Microsoft Azure and Azure AI Foundry to create a mobile data recorder (MDR) solution, placing an IoT device in each development car to transmit data over a cellular connection to an Azure cloud platform, where Azure AI Foundry solutions facilitate efficient data analysis.
“Azure AI Foundry works smoothly, significantly lowers the entry barrier, and will open up a much wider range of applications.” - Sebastian Heinz, BMW Group MDR Co-Creator
NBA transforms basketball fandom with Azure OpenAI Service giving game insights
Focused on its fans, the NBA began exploring new technologies to enhance the fan experience, wanting to harness data to provide insights behind all the great moments in every game.
“By harnessing the computational power of Azure, NBA Insights delivers detailed analysis for every aspect of the game. We’re taking the experience even further by integrating historical context and real-time sources.” - Ian Allen, NBA Senior Software Engineer, AI
ABB transforms manufacturing, making industrial-sector leaner and cleaner with analytics via Azure OpenAI Service
ABB customers using Genix Copilot can see up to 35% savings in operations and maintenance, and up to 20% improvement across energy and emission optimization. ABB sees about 80% decrease in service calls with Genix Copilot self-service.
“We made a strategic decision to collaborate with Microsoft to use generative AI to solve some of the most complex problems in the industrial landscape. Microsoft brings the technology expertise, and we bring the industrial application. Together, we are transforming the industry.” - Rajesh Ramachandran, ABB Global Chief Digital Officer for Process Automation
Are You Ready to Create the Future?
We are pleased to incorporate these enhancements into Azure AI Foundry, and we will continue to invest and evolve to offer enhanced user experiences, streamlined navigation, and powerful tools for developers, IT managers, and technical decision-makers. We are committed to providing you with the best tools to achieve your goals and drive your projects to success. And we always look forward to receiving your feedback.
- Explore Azure AI Foundry
- Start using the Azure AI Foundry SDK
- Review the Azure AI Foundry documentation
- Take the Azure AI Learn courses
*Deloitte, State of Generative AI in the Enterprise Quarter three report, August, 2024
Updated Nov 20, 2024
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