Microsoft Foundry

Microsoft Foundry is a developer tool that builds ground and govern AI apps and agents on Azure. Microsoft Foundry is Azure's enterprise platform for building, grounding and governing AI apps and agents. It offers more than 11,000 models, an agent service with an open-source SDK, permission-aware grounding, 1,400+ business connectors, and a unified control plane for security, observability and compliance.

Microsoft Foundry is Azure's platform for building, grounding and governing AI applications and agents. It positions itself as an AI app and agent factory: open by design, with models drawn from many providers, and opinionated about the operational layer that surrounds them. The catalogue is the headline, with more than 11,000 foundational, open, reasoning, multimodal and industry-specific models spanning OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, xAI, Hugging Face and Microsoft's own MAI family. Models can be trained, fine-tuned and distilled, and an intelligent router picks the best model for each task at runtime without application rewrites. On top of the models sits the agent layer. Foundry Agent Service builds action-oriented agents that automate business processes while keeping humans in control, and the open-source Microsoft Agent Framework gives developers an SDK for orchestration. Hosted agents run on serverless containers and event-driven functions. Grounding comes from Foundry IQ and its three-layer intelligence stack (Work IQ, Foundry IQ, Fabric IQ), tied to Microsoft Graph and permission-aware data, while agents reach business systems through more than 1,400 pre-built connections including SAP, Salesforce and Dynamics 365, or custom tools over MCP. Pre-built tools cover OCR, translation, speech and object detection. Governance is the differentiator. A single control plane integrated with Entra, Purview and Defender manages agents, tools and knowledge sources across Foundry, Copilot Studio and partner agents. Observability runs on OpenTelemetry with built-in evaluators for coherence, relevance, groundedness and safety, and content safety filters prompt attacks, hallucinations and data leakage at runtime. Foundry Local extends the stack to devices and the edge. This suits engineering teams and platform owners inside larger organisations, particularly those already standardised on Azure and Microsoft 365. It is not a no-code playground: the workflow assumes familiarity with the Azure portal, SDKs and identity concepts. Compared with single-vendor model APIs, the value is breadth plus control; the trade-off is that costs and configuration span several Azure services rather than one simple plan.