Hi and welcome to this video series where
we're going to talk about Microsoft Foundry.
In this part one we will start with
a high-level overview what it is and
then we'll dive into the various topics in
subsequent videos.
So let's get started.
So if I could only give you a
single sentence of what this is, it would
be this.
Microsoft's one-stop shop for all things AI.
As in a company is able to manage,
develop all their AI solution in a single
portal with Microsoft's known expertise in enterprise stuff
like compliance and governance.
Before we go into the offerings, let's quickly
have a look at the history and rebranding
that led to Microsoft Foundry.
What Foundry is today started out as something
called Microsoft Cognitive Services.
This was back in the early days of
AI where vision, speech and language capabilities were
the thing.
It was before GEN-AI.
You will still see the Cognitive Service name
popping up in various technical things, permissions and
so on in the day.
But after the moment happened in November 2022,
everything was suddenly AI.
So Cognitive Service was rebranded to Azure AI
Services.
And this is where we got the Azure
OpenAI Service, which we also have as a
NuGet package today.
And we still use that if we want
to work with individual modules in the Microsoft
Foundry.
The next years was the maturity phase of
AI.
And back then, everything just happened in the
Azure portal as services.
But in Build 2025, the Azure AI Foundry
was introduced, which was for a very brief
time also called the Azure OpenAI Foundry.
But this shifted to this one-stop mentality,
more models than just OpenAI, and it became
a dedicated portal on ai.azure.com.
So here we don't just have model services,
but we also have persistent agents that was
hosted directly in the portal and could be
controlled and managed like most enterprise companies demanded.
And finally, in November 2025, at the Microsoft
Ignite Conference, we saw the latest rebranding with
the name switching from Azure AI Foundry to
Microsoft Foundry.
Together with this name change, there was also
a kind of V2 of the portal where
the services got more evolved and workflows was
introduced.
As of this recording in December 2025, the
new V2 portal of the Microsoft Foundry is
still in preview.
So you can still switch back and forward,
but the new portal is the future.
And it looks like this.
And this is what we're going to go
walk through in the rest of this video.
In the new portal, there are three main
sections, Discovery, Build, and Operate, which you access
from the top right.
Discovery is a gallery of what models and
tools the Foundry portal offers.
As of this recording, there are 11,251
models, which you can choose.
And this is an impressive number, but in
reality, most of them are actually from Huggingface,
like 10,800 of them.
Azure themselves only host 77 models, which is
still a lot.
And in the agent capabilities, only 43 of
those work together with the agent capabilities.
And that is mostly the OpenAI models and
the ones that use the same OpenAI spec.
There are various info on each model, and
there's comparison features in the gallery that helps
you pick and choose the one model that
fits you the best.
Discovery also have various tools that they can
use together with agents.
Again, they have an impressive 1,451 different
tools.
Most of them are, however, classical logic app
connectors.
But more interesting, there's various MCP tools, and
there's also the ability to make your own
tools.
Finally, in the Discovery section are 14 solution
templates, which is our various GitHub repo samples.
Most of them are in Python, but there's
a few of them in C-sharp.
Next, we have the build section, which is
the most interesting for developers.
In here, we have agents, which is persistent
agents where we can create one or more
of them using either the GUI or create
it in code.
You can then add skills, knowledge, and memory
to them, and you can leverage them using
code, or you can publish them to Microsoft
Copilot or Microsoft Teams.
We will cover agents in much more details
in subsequent parts of this series.
You also have in the build section the
newest addition to Foundry, which is workflows.
Workflows is simply just multiple agents stringed together
in a set of steps in order to
solve more complex tasks.
We'll again have details in a later part
of this series.
The build section also has the model section,
but not as a gallery, but more what
models you have actually deployed in order to
use the agents.
So you can either use these models you
deploy in the agents or directly in your
code without agents.
It is also here you control how the
model is hosted, what throughput it has, what
version it has, and so on.
Next up is fine tuning, and this is
if you need that, you can perform a
subset of fine tuning on certain models.
You will need to provide some training data
for the fine tuning, and then deploy that
fine-tuned model yourself.
We will not cover fine-tuning in this
series, as it's very rarely used and is
only a sort of last resort for very,
very niche and specialised scenarios.
Next up we have tools, knowledge, and data.
These are essentially just where you create and
define the capabilities of agents.
So for example, you define an MCP server
or you hook up to a vector store
as a knowledge, and that is the configurations
that you then hook up to your agents.
The final two entries in the build sections
are evaluation and guardrails.
Evaluations being that you can add some data
sets to your models that you can train
them against.
So you can make a model or an
agent, you give it the training set, you
tweak your code and your agents, and you
see if it becomes better or worse, and
if there's handle of the quality and security
at the time.
Finally, guardrails allows you to guard against certain
uses of an agent like sexual content, self
-harm, hate speech, and so on.
So if you have certain use cases that
deviate from the out-of-the-box default
guardrails, it could for example be that you
had a medical AI that need to have
certain words be allowed in certain areas that
would perhaps hit sexual content or hate content
and so on.
While it could also be that you want
to have them even more strict, like for
example, in a kid's app where you want
to block certain things in a higher level
of detail than the defaults.
The final section in Microsoft Foundry is the
operate part.
This is where you control all the individual
parts of agents, tool, knowledge, and so on.
Because behind the scenes, they are still Azure
services, blob storage, databases, and so on.
You also can see a lot of stats
in here and control quotas and user access
control in all the control parts and control
planes of the Foundry portal.
So this is everything in this video.
In the next videos, we will primarily dive
into the build section, where we will go
from just knowing the portal now to actually
building something on top of it.
So see you now.