Azure is becoming a stronger foundation for artificial intelligence with the introduction of Azure AI Foundry. This platform unifies work around customizing, running, and managing models.
The new AI approach is one of the announcements at the Microsoft Ignite conference. With Azure AI Foundry, the tech company promises to close the gap between AI technologies and practical business applications. To do so, Microsoft is taking two key steps: an SDK that makes Azure AI capabilities available from tools like GitHub and Visual Studio, and upgrading Azure AI Studio. The latter tool is now used to build and deploy generative AI apps and custom copilots. Within Azure AI Foundry, the studio will function as a management console and portal.
Customize, run, and manage
With the new product, Microsoft is mainly targeting developers, AI engineers, other IT professionals, and business leaders. They can use Azure AI Foundry to customize, host, run, and manage AI solutions. The idea is to simplify the development and management processes by offering an integrated platform. This allows different IT professionals to work on a project within a single platform, with shared responsibilities at its core.
The new platform offers developers and AI engineers access to all existing Azure AI services. For completeness, we’ve included a list of key services from Microsoft’s website below. In addition, Microsoft is expanding or introducing a set of features during Ignite.
In addition, Azure AI Foundry offers options for other IT professionals and business leaders. With artificial intelligence, they often have questions about measurability, return on investment and optimization. Through insights into AI initiatives and their impact on the business, this can change. Azure AI Foundry, therefore, measures effectiveness and aligns projects with organizational goals.
Still, Azure AI Foundry remains largely a new product. As such, many companies will wonder how to deploy it to extract value from it within their environments. That’s why new guidance options appear within Azure Essentials, the Microsoft environment for best practices, reference architectures, and other resources.
Azure AI Search
The Azure AI Search feature also gets new capabilities to directly enhance Azure AI Foundry’s options. It now features a generative query engine that should achieve higher performance for retrieval-augmented generation. To do this, it applies query rewriting, a method of creating multiple query variations. Also getting an upgrade is the semantic ranker, which is used for improved search relevance.
According to Microsoft’s figures, the two modifications improve search relevance by 12.5 percent. Additionally, Azure AI Search is said to be 2.3 times faster than it was last year.
Tip: Microsoft Azure makes AI adoption more secure with OpenAI Data Zones