Tag · 12 posts
#agents
Notes of the week: managed agent harnesses, Microsoft's own models and Claude in the EU
Two things stood out in this week's Notes. Microsoft now runs the agent loop for you in Foundry, with a managed harness, skills and recovery from interruptions. And it keeps widening model choice in two directions at once: its own frontier models from Microsoft AI, and Anthropic's Claude models moving into the EU Data Boundary…
aiWeb search for your agents with Microsoft Web IQ
I wasn't keen on Microsoft retiring the Bing Search APIs. We used them to ground our agents in current information from the web, and they worked from any code you liked. What replaced them in Foundry, Grounding with Bing and the web search tool in Foundry Agent Service, never felt right to me. Both are…
aiDeep Agents from zero: seven small examples
A basic agent is a model calling tools in a loop. That's enough for simple tool calls, but it falls apart on longer work: the agent loses track of what it was doing, its context fills up with tool output, and it has nowhere to put intermediate results. 🤷
aiBuilding Event-Driven Agents with Azure Functions
Microsoft now has several ways to build AI agents. You can create prompt agents in Foundry, build agentic workflows with Logic Apps, or deploy your own agent code as a Foundry hosted agent. There is another option that fits a different type of problem: the Azure Functions serverless agents runtime. This runtime lets you define…
aiHosting an AG-UI Agent on Microsoft Foundry
A while back I wrote about building an AI agent server with AG-UI and the Microsoft Agent Framework. That post walked through what AG-UI is, how you stand up a small agent server, and how a web client talks to it. Quick recap before we move on: AG-UI is a protocol between a frontend and…
aiCreating presentations with Microsoft Agent Framework and GAMMA API
Introduction Imagine automating the creation of professional presentations through a coordinated series of intelligent agents. In this blog post, we’ll explore how to build a workflow that combines research, outline generation, content creation, and design, all orchestrated through the Microsoft Agent Framework. We’ll build a practical example that generates presentations using: Azure OpenAI Responses API for…
aiEnd-to-end authorization with Entra ID and MCP
Building an MCP server is really easy. Almost every language and framework has MCP support these days, both from a client and server perspective. For example: FastMCP (Python, Typescript), csharp-sdk and many more! However, in an enterprise scenario where users use a web-based conversational agent that uses tools on an MCP server, those tools might…
aiDeploying a multi-agent solution with MCP and A2A to Azure Container Apps
In previous posts, we discussed multi-agent scenarios, how A2A servers work (here and here) and how to deploy the infrastructure to host a multi-agent application on Azure with Azure Container Apps and AI Foundry. In this post, we will take a look at deploying the different components of the solution as containers in Azure Container…
aiBuilding multi-agent solutions: what are your options?
When we meet with customers, the topic of a “multi-agent solution” often comes up. This isn’t surprising. There’s a lot of excitement around their potential to transform business processes, strengthen customer relationships, and more. The first question you have to ask yourself though is this: “Do I really need a multi-agent solution?”. Often, we find…
aiBuilding Configurable AI Agents with the OpenAI Agents SDK
In this post, I will demonstrate how to build an AI agent system where agents can collaborate in different ways. The goal is to create agents that can either work independently with their own tools or collaborate with other agents through two distinct patterns: using agents as tools or handing off control to other agents.…
aiCreating an agent with Hugging Face smolagents and Azure OpenAI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents have garnered significant attention, with numerous posts discussing them on platforms such as LinkedIn and X/Twitter. In that sense, this post is not different. Instead of theory though, let’s look at building an agent that has a reasoning loop in a very simple way. Although you can build an agent from…
aiCreating an agent with the Azure AI Agent SDK
Azure AI Agents Service simplifies building intelligent agents by combining advanced AI models, tools, and technology from Microsoft, OpenAI, and partners like Meta and Cohere. It enables integration with knowledge sources such as Bing, SharePoint, and Azure AI Search, and lets agents perform actions across Microsoft and third-party applications using Logic Apps, Azure Functions, and…
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