Azure AI Foundry is like GPS to your AI ambitions: it simplifies navigating the insane tempo of innovation within the AI panorama so that you see the place you might be as we speak, consider what’s new, and plan, execute, and handle your rising AI portfolio.
I spent a lot of the final decade within the Midwest (hi there, Chicagoland!) however now dwell within the Seattle space and work on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. Earlier than transferring right here, I’d visited the Redmond campus dozens of instances as a Microsoft associate and buyer, however had solely primary airport-campus-hotel-restaurant navigation expertise. Relocating a household of 4 meant a variety of exploring to search out my technique to grocery shops (what do you imply there’s no Mariano’s in Seattle?), colleges, medical doctors, dentists, and so forth. I couldn’t have performed it with out GPS: Simply plug within the vacation spot and let it information us, flip by flip, on the quickest, most secure route, avoiding site visitors and roadwork alongside the way in which.
The hallmark of excellent tech is taking one thing complicated and demanding (ever been misplaced in an unfamiliar metropolis?) and making it easy. Wanting over the record of recent AI capabilities we introduced in simply the previous month, it’s straightforward to see why turn-by-turn steerage is required on this quickly increasing AI panorama. Azure AI Foundry is like GPS to your AI ambitions: it simplifies navigating the insane tempo of innovation within the AI panorama so that you see the place you might be as we speak, consider what’s new, and plan, execute, and handle your rising AI portfolio whereas optimizing prices. All with the arrogance that it all the time has the most recent AI factor.
This wayfinding offers dexterity to assist your groups keep nimble as AI presents new strategic alternatives and efficiencies. Listed below are just some new capabilities in Azure AI Foundry this month that present the worth of managing your AI portfolio on a single do-it-all platform.
Fashions: Extra is extra
As I write this there are 1,917 fashions within the Azure AI Foundry mannequin catalog. Selecting one—or three, since many AI apps now use a number of fashions—is less complicated than you would possibly suppose when going through an abundance of alternative. On Azure AI Foundry, your group can rapidly consider fashions on high quality, price, and throughput, or filter by trade, inference duties like translation or textual content era, or different key options to rapidly get a brief record of fashions to think about. New instruments just like the Analysis API in Azure OpenAI Service give builders the flexibility to run automated comparisons between OpenAI fashions, quantify high quality enhancements, and speed up the iteration cycle. Along with the Saved Completions API, the Analysis API offers a programmatic resolution for refining and evaluating AI fashions with accuracy and management.
That’s necessary when you think about we introduced eight new Azure OpenAI Service fashions in a single week—the brand new GPT-4.1 mannequin collection, three superior audio fashions, and the o3 and o4-mini reasoning fashions. You’ll be able to fine-tune GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1-mini to adapt them to your distinctive enterprise necessities. And final week we introduced GPT-image-1, the most recent and most superior picture era mannequin, in addition to the most recent GPT-4o-realtime-preview and GPT-4o-mini-realtime-preview API updates together with WebRTC assist, semantic voice exercise detection and superior enter noise discount and extra.
Try how Costar Group makes use of Azure OpenAI Service fashions to remodel their prospects’ expertise of discovering the proper residence.
That a lot newness in a single week would possibly appear to be an anxiousness accelerator—particularly in case your group simply constructed an app utilizing an earlier mannequin—however Azure AI Foundry was designed for the progressive, iterative stream of AI growth. It’s straightforward for groups to rapidly consider new mannequin execs and cons, drop the mannequin within the playground for some hands-on testing, decide if it’s higher, quicker, cheaper, and so forth., and deploy it if desired. Easy. And we intend to allow OpenAI fashions in Azure AI Foundry the identical day as OpenAI pronounces them. They’re backward-compatible and could be deployed with a single click on or by including a brand new mannequin with just a few easy strains of code.
Azure OpenAI accounts for 35 of the 1,917 fashions in our catalog, however just isn’t alone in introducing new fashions. Additionally new in our mannequin catalog this month:
The first fashions within the Meta Llama 4 herd arrived, together with Llama 4 Scout, which focuses on condensing or analyzing intensive info, like analyzing all paperwork in an enterprise SharePoint library to reply a selected question, or studying a multi-thousand-page technical guide to supply troubleshooting recommendation. And Llama 4 Maverick, which specializes in picture and textual content understanding with assist for 12 languages for exact picture understanding and inventive writing.
An unbelievable quantity of information sits in file cupboards around the globe, invisible to AI. Mistral OCR, a state-of-the-art Optical Character Recognition (OCR) mannequin, can learn and perceive the construction and nuance of exhausting copy paperwork. It might extract equations, photos, tables, and multilingual textual content from scanned contracts, handwritten kinds, analysis papers, regulatory filings, and extra at scale, making all that data accessible for AI to motive over and your group to be taught from and act on.
Optimized for the enterprise, Cohere’s Command A and Embed 4 fashions kind a powerhouse for superior apps like extracting insights from 1000’s of monetary filings, earnings name transcripts, and market analysis.
Deep Search acquired the world’s consideration with the discharge of its R1 mannequin earlier this yr. It’s a strong and succesful, low-cost mannequin with some security challenges requiring cautious administration. The Microsoft AI group developed its personal Deep Search R1 variant, MAI-DS-R1, that outperforms Deep Search R1 on responses to blocked subjects and lowering dangerous content material whereas sustaining the identical reasoning capabilities. You’ll find MAI-DS-R1 in Foundry as we speak.
Go to market quicker with Azure AI Companies
Azure AI Companies are environment friendly time-to-market accelerators that assist your builders construct clever apps without having direct AI or information science expertise. Think about agent constructing. Till lately, creating brokers was sophisticated and consumed a variety of developer time. With Azure AI Agent Service in Azure AI Foundry, what initially took a whole lot of strains of code can now be performed in just some strains of code. Azure AI Agent Service is utilized by tens of 1000’s of organizations to create and deploy brokers. Clients like Fujitsu, who constructed an agent to assist prioritize gross sales leads, and NTT DATA, which constructed an agent that speeds proposal creation and surfaces consumer insights.
Azure AI Search is one other nice instance. This revolutionary retrieval system offers extremely related search outcomes at scale. It connects company data into AI functions to energy experiences like UBS’s Authorized AI Assistant (LAIA). This assistant helps their authorized group carry out analysis throughout a number of languages and 26 million paperwork to rapidly discover associated clauses to a case or provisions throughout funding funds.
We lately introduced a number of enhancements enabling your group to improve to the latest retrieval and storage options with out disrupting service. These new options make Azure AI Search one of the vital cost-effective choices in the marketplace, delivering an enterprise-ready, full-featured retrieval system with superior search know-how with out sacrificing price or efficiency. The result’s empowering your app to ship high-quality experiences for each consumer and interplay with no compromises.
Coca‑Cola turned its iconic Santa right into a globe‑trotting conversationalist in simply 60 days due to an AI‑prepared basis on Azure. Utilizing Azure AI Speech in Azure AI Foundry, the group constructed an actual‑time mannequin that allow Santa chat with greater than one million individuals in 26 languages, powering an immersive Create Actual Magic vacation marketing campaign throughout 43 markets. It’s a masterclass in how Azure unlocks lightning‑quick innovation at world scale.
Get there with Azure AI Foundry
Organizations constructed new muscle round resiliency and accelerating know-how adoption through the pandemic and that conditioning is paying off because the AI period shifts the world once more, reshaping what is feasible. Effectively navigating this fast-changing panorama is important in staying aggressive and constructing differentiation in a busy market. Our intent is for Azure AI Foundry to be your trusted information, simplifying complicated processes and empowering your group to attain extra. With the most recent developments and a sturdy platform, you’re geared up to harness the complete potential of AI, driving innovation and effectivity throughout your group. Keep forward of the curve with Azure AI Foundry—your GPS for the way forward for AI.
About Jessica
Jessica leads Azure Knowledge, AI, and Digital Purposes at Microsoft. Discover Jessica’s weblog posts right here and you’ll want to observe Jessica on LinkedIn.