At its annual Ignite conference, Microsoft announced the Azure AI Foundry - a new offering that brings together under one umbrella a number of Microsoft's existing AI services for enterprises. The management console and portal for the AI Foundry is also - what the company calls - Azure AI Studio.

“Business leaders are looking to reduce the time and cost of bringing their AI solutions to market while continuing to monitor, measure and evaluate their performance and ROI. Which is why we’re excited to unveil Azure AI Foundry today as a unified application platform for your entire organization in the age of AI,” writes Jessica Hawk, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Data, AI, and Digital Applications. "Azure AI Foundry bridges the gap between state-of-the-art AI technologies and real-world business applications, making it easy for organizations to unlock the full potential of AI in an efficient and effective manner."

The Foundry will include Microsoft's model catalog – closed and open weight foundation models, task models, and specialized industry models – combined with existing Azure AI tools such as Azure AI Search, AI Agents, AI Content Safety, and Azure Machine Learning.

New here is the Azure AI Foundry SDK, which is now in preview and which provides a unified toolchain for "customizing, testing, deploying and managing AI apps and agents with enterprise-grade control and customization," according to Microsoft. Microsoft will offer developers 25 prebuilt app templates that will help them integrate the AI services into their own applications.

The portal (formerly Azure AI Studio) will be where developers find and evaluate AI models, services, and tools but also a new management center that Microsoft says will help teams "manage and optimize AI apps at scale, including resource utilization across multiple hubs and subscriptions, access privileges and connected resources." It's basically a nice dashboard.

And since no AI announcement in late 2024 is complete without mentioning agents, Microsoft is also including the Azure AI Agent Service in this package-or it will when it launches next month. That will let developers orchestrate multiple AI tools to build agents that can automate business processes, with features like bring-your-own-storage and private networking for keeping private business data private.

In a marketplace that's awash in disparate technologies and choices, we built Azure AI Foundry to thoughtfully address diverse needs across an organization in pursuit of AI transformation," writes Hawk. "It's not just about high-end tooling, though we do that too. It's about making sure technical teams are collaborating and in alignment with business strategy.