What it does
Azure AI is Microsoft's platform for creating AI apps and agents, plus tooling to tune and govern them. Its central product, Microsoft Foundry, offers a catalog of models, agents and tools, and the page says more than 11,000 foundation, open, task-specific and industry-specific models are available. For agents it offers orchestration frameworks, tracing and debugging tools, and a Foundry Agent Service. For apps it supports retrieval-augmented generation, evaluations, safety filters and content safety controls, and deployment options include serverless GPUs and Foundry Local, which runs models on a local device with privacy and offline access. The platform sits alongside Azure databases such as PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB and SQL Database, plus Kubernetes Service, App Service and API Management for hosting AI-enabled apps. Azure accounts are pay as you go, or can be tried free for up to 30 days.
Capabilities
- Model catalog of 11,000+ foundation, open, task and industry models
- Agent and multi-agent orchestration with tracing and debugging
- Retrieval-augmented generation and workflow automation
- Evaluations, safety filters and content safety controls
- Serverless GPUs and Foundry Local for running models on the edge
- Managed databases and app-hosting services for AI apps
When to use it
- You are building enterprise AI apps or agents on Azure
- You want one place to pick models, add retrieval and apply safety and governance controls
- You need to run models locally or at the edge with offline access
