Announcing new models, customization tools, and enterprise agent upgrades in Azure AI Foundry 

By Dustin Ward

At Microsoft, we are dedicated to advancing AI innovation to empower organizations, transform industries, and redefine productivity. Today, we are excited to announce major updates to Azure AI Foundry, our integrated platform for designing, customizing, and managing enterprise-grade AI applications. These updates include groundbreaking new models like OpenAI’s GPT-4.5, enhanced fine-tuning and distillation techniques, and…

Empowering innovation: The next generation of the Phi family

By Dustin Ward

We are excited to announce Phi-4-multimodal and Phi-4-mini, the newest models in Microsoft’s Phi family of small language models (SLMs). These models are designed to empower developers with advanced AI capabilities. Phi-4-multimodal, with its ability to process speech, vision, and text simultaneously, opens new possibilities for creating innovative and context-aware applications. Phi-4-mini, on the other…

AI innovation starts here—join Microsoft at NVIDIA GTC

By Dustin Ward

AI is within reach of any company, large or small. But many companies are unclear where and how to practically apply AI within their business; have concerns about security, privacy and compliance; and perceive AI as complex and costly to integrate into existing services, products and processes. Rapidly evolving AI technologies can also make it…

Introducing Azure AI Foundry Labs: A hub for the latest AI research and experiments at Microsoft

By Dustin Ward

Today we’re launching Azure AI Foundry Labs, a hub for developers, startups, and enterprises to explore groundbreaking innovations from research at Microsoft. Foundry Labs unites cutting-edge research with real-world applications, to enable developers and creators across industries to discover new possibilities, solve complex problems, and share insights to shape the future of AI.  Explore Azure…

AI agents at work: The new frontier in business automation

By Dustin Ward

Microsoft’s AI agents are at the forefront of a significant transformation in modern business operations. These intelligent agents automate routine tasks, helping employees by freeing up valuable time to be more efficient, productive, and empowered to drive business—and industries are discovering their value. Across sectors such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing, AI agents handle tasks…

Announcing the availability of the o3-mini reasoning model in Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service

By Dustin Ward

We are pleased to announce that OpenAI o3-mini is now available in Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. o3-mini adds significant cost efficiencies compared with o1-mini with enhanced reasoning, with new features like reasoning effort control and tools, while providing comparable or better responsiveness. o3-mini’s advanced capabilities, combined with its efficiency gains, make it a powerful tool…