Microsoft’s launch of Azure AI Foundry at Ignite 2024 signals a welcome shift from chatbots to agents and to using AI for business process automation.
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The way we use artificial intelligence is changing. Chatbots aren’t going away. We’ll continue to use them to deliver basic, natural language, self-service applications. But the future belongs to multimodal applications, built on large language models (LLMs) and other AI models, that act as self-organizing software agents. These more complex AI applications will require more thought, more code, more testing, and more safeguards.
An AI evolution requires a similar evolution in our development tools. Although we’ve seen Power Platform’s Copilot Studio begin to deliver tools for building task-focused agents, more complex AI applications will require a lot more work, even with support from frameworks like Semantic Kernel.
Much of Azure’s current AI tools, beyond its Cognitive Services APIs, are focused on building grounded chatbots, using Microsoft’s Prompt Flow framework …