Introducing Azure AI Foundry

Last week at Microsoft Ignite, we announced Azure AI Foundry: A unified platform to design, customize, and manage AI solutions. This platform helps bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI technologies and practical business applications, empowering organizations to harness the full potential of AI efficiently and effectively.

A few key takeaways from this announcement:

• Azure AI Agent Service enables developers to automate business processes and help you focus on your most strategic work.

• Azure AI Foundry portal, formerly known as Azure AI Studio, provides enhanced observability and collaboration with a new management center experience.

• Our AI model catalog is expanding with more specialized solutions and customization options, including models from Bria, now in preview, and NTT DATA, now generally available. Industry-specific models from Bayer, Sight Machine, Rockwell Automation, Saifr/Fidelity Labs, and Paige.ai are also available today for specialized solutions in healthcare, manufacturing, finance, and more.

• New collaborations with Weights & Biases, Gretel, Scale AI, and Statsig can help accelerate your end-to-end AI model customization.

• More RAG (Retrieval-augmented generation) performance with Azure AI Search

• Advanced vector search and RAG capabilities now integrated into Azure Databases  

• There are two new responsible AI tools you can use to help ensure safety and compliance: AI reports and risk and safety evaluations for images.

• Azure AI Content Understanding, now in preview, makes it faster, easier, and more cost-effective to build multimodal applications with text, audio, images, and video.    

• We’re introducing two offerings in Azure Container Apps to help transform how AI app developers work: serverless GPUs, now in preview, and dynamic sessions, available now.  
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• Read the full blog here to learn more about this announcement: The next wave of Azure innovation: Azure AI Foundry, intelligent data, and more | Microsoft Azure Blog

What news coming out of Ignite are you most excited about? Let us know in the comments!