Plan and prepare to develop AI solutions on Azure | AI-103 | Episode 1

Before building an AI application or agent, understand how Microsoft Foundry organizes models, tools, knowledge, and development resources. These relationships form the foundation for everything that follows.

Foundry architecture at a glance

Think of the structure as:

Foundry Resource → Project → Models + Agents + Tools + Knowledge

The Foundry resource is the underlying Azure resource and infrastructure boundary. A project lives within that resource and organizes the models, agents, tools, and knowledge used by an AI solution. The resource is the foundation; the project is the development workspace.

Microsoft Foundry provides access to generative models alongside Foundry Tools for specialized AI capabilities such as Language, Speech, Translation, and Document Intelligence. These services complement models when an application needs capabilities such as speech recognition or structured information extraction.

Know which SDK fits

Key distinction: use the OpenAI SDK when targeting a model directly; move toward the Foundry SDK when working with the broader agentic platform, including tools and grounding.

For development, Visual Studio Code with the Microsoft AI Toolkit is the recommended combination presented in the course. In the Foundry portal, Discover is primarily for finding models, tools and templates, while Build is where deployed resources are configured and tested.

Remember the six Responsible AI principles

Fairness • Reliability & Safety • Privacy & Security • Inclusiveness • Transparency • Accountability

These are not an afterthought: they influence grounding, prompts, guardrails, UX, evaluation, and ongoing operation of the solution.

Memory model: Resource hosts → Project organizes → Model reasons → Knowledge grounds → Tools act → Responsible AI governs.

Related Snipps

• What Microsoft Foundry Provides for Building AI Agents — Explains models, tools, knowledge, security, monitoring, and managed agent capabilities.
• Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Microsoft — Covers agents, tools, orchestration, monitoring, and production-oriented architecture.
• Choosing the Right Platform for Building AI Agents — Places Foundry and Azure within the broader range of agent-development approaches.