Building an AI app and agent factory with Microsoft Foundry

AI is shaping how we live and work. Its potential feels limitless, constrained only by what we can imagine. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index, 82% of leaders say they’re confident that they’ll use digital labor to expand workforce capacity in the next 12–18 months. AI is emerging as a clear differentiator, fueling creativity, accelerating productivity, and unlocking breakthrough innovation.  

For organizations delivering AI-powered solutions and services, this is your moment to lead. The demand is shifting from pilot projects to AI transformations, and Microsoft partners who can deliver AI apps and agents at scale will define the future of this dynamic market. According to a survey by IDC, partners with mature Microsoft AI practices outperform others in overall gross margin, 36% vs. 30%. 

In previous posts in this blog series, we explored how partners can empower customers to modernize infrastructure and unify data. In this blog, we focus on recent offerings announced at Microsoft Ignite that can strengthen your AI practice and support your move into more advanced, scalable customer engagements.  

Organizations everywhere are driving toward Frontier transformation. They want to build richer employee experiences, more intuitive customer engagement, redesigned business processes, and new momentum for innovation. Partners play an important role in accelerating that shift with solutions and services that guide customers from exploration to enterprise-wide adoption. 

If you are a services partner, this starts with value-led conversations. Can you guide your customers to prioritize use cases based on business impact, design architectures for scale and resiliency, and build trustworthy AI apps and agents quickly? As customers launch their first few AI apps or agents, have you discussed how they can drive broader transformation with AI Centers of Excellence, bringing together cross-functional teams to align on shared goals and accelerate adoption? 

Microsoft Foundry: Your AI app and agent factory 

Microsoft Foundry offers a modular, interoperable, and secure agent stack. It unifies models, tools, and knowledge into one open system. The result: developers have a powerful, simple, and trusted path to production for AI apps and agents. At Microsoft Ignite, we shared key enhancements to Microsoft Foundry, designed to give you the best tools for creating AI apps and agents. 

1. Foundry Models  added new models from Anthropic, Cohere, NVIDIA, and more. Model router is now generally available in Microsoft Foundry and is in public preview in Foundry Agent Service.  
2. Foundry IQ, now in public preview, makes it easier for businesses to connect AI agents to the right data without the usual complexity. Powered by Azure AI Search, it streamlines how agents access and reason over both public and private sources, like SharePoint, Fabric IQ, and the web.  
3. Foundry Agent Service now offers Hosted Agents, multi-agent workflows, built-in memory, and the ability to deploy agents directly to Microsoft 365 and Agent 365 in public preview.  
4. Foundry Tools empowers developers to create agents with secure, real-time access to business systems, business logic, and multimodal capabilities. 
5. Foundry Control Plane, now in public preview, centralizes identity, policy, observability, and security signals and capabilities for AI developers in one portal.  
6. GitHub Advanced Security and Microsoft Defender integration, now in public preview, improves collaboration between security and development teams across the full app lifecycle. 
7. Foundry Local is now in private preview on Android, the world’s most widely used mobile platform. 
8. Managed Instance on Azure App Service, now in public preview, supports organizations moving their web applications to the cloud with just a few configuration changes.  

Together, Foundry IQ and Fabric IQ organize enterprise data around business concepts rather than tables so that agents can understand user intent, bridge the gap between raw data and real business meaning, and surface the context needed to make decisions. 
 

Backing technology with scale enablers 

To empower partners and customers to use these new capabilities at scale, we recently introduced Microsoft Agent Factory. This new program is designed for organizations ready to move from experimentation to execution faster.  

Its foundation is the Microsoft Agent Pre-Purchase Plan (P3), which streamlines procurement and eases complexity. With P3, partners can offer their customers access to 32 Microsoft services through one flexible pool of funds, eliminating the need to manage multiple contracts or choose between platforms.  

This single metered plan not only reduces upfront licensing and provisioning but also provides greater predictability for organizations investing in AI innovation. Partners support customers as they deploy agents, including in Microsoft 365 Copilot, and take advantage of availability in the Cloud Solution Provide program and other licensing models to meet diverse customer needs. Eligible organizations can also tap into hands-on support from top AI Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) and access tailored role-based training to boost AI fluency across teams. Together, they unlock new opportunities for growth and innovation while encouraging customers to confidently embrace the future of AI.  

Your next actions 

Supporting customers in their journeys is centered on identifying the right use cases, validating business value, and delivering architectures and implementations that are robust and trustworthy. The process below is a strong place to start.  

1. Pinpoint apps that matter: Start with the apps that make a real difference for your customers.Microsoft has curated a list of popular apps that matter across industries, including financial services, retail, manufacturing, telco, and media, to spark meaningful conversations. Use this guidance to uncover customer challenges, clarify business outcomes, and shape solution architectures that deliver real impact.  
2. Prioritize use cases and design AI-ready architectures: Guide business leaders to identify their top use cases, then work with technical teams to design robust, AI-ready architectures. Explore the resource collection to leverage envisioning workshops and set the stage for proofs of concept.  
3. Drive proof of concept with Azure Accelerate: Use presales funding from Azure Accelerate to set up the proof of concept, and when your customer is ready, combine Microsoft Agent Factory and Azure Accelerate to accelerate ROI attainment.  

As you guide customers through these Frontier transformations, keep investing in your own capabilities. Explore our virtual and in-person skilling experiences and demonstrate expertise through Azure specializations focused on building AI apps and agents.  

In the next post, we’ll go deeper into one of the most significant emerging capabilities: AI agents that can reason, act, and collaborate across systems. These agents mark the next wave of productivity, innovation, and customer experience. We will explore how partners can capture this opportunity, package repeatable offerings, and strengthen their role as trusted advisors in the AI era. 

Your ability to innovate with customers is a catalyst for transformation across the ecosystem. Let’s continue accelerating what’s possible.