Microsoft unveiled new capabilities for Azure AI Foundry on April 4th, 2025, announcing general availability of an agent framework and AI Red Teaming Agent to help customers build and scale advanced AI agents. Corporate Vice President Asha Sharma positioned the enhancements as foundational tools for the digital economy as AI evolves from assistants to workplace teammates, coinciding with Microsoft's 50th anniversary.
Azure AI Foundry now serves more than 60,000 customers with access to more than 1,800 models and sophisticated tooling for designing, customising, and managing AI apps and agents. The platform functions as an "agent factory" with modular production systems featuring pre-built components, standardised processes, and continuous improvement through operational feedback.
The agent framework, an extension of Azure AI Foundry's open-source Semantic Kernel, simplifies multi-agent system orchestration and dramatically reduces developer code requirements. Organisations like KPMG are using Semantic Kernel to orchestrate workflows among specialised agents, reducing development complexity. Fujitsu implemented Azure AI Agent Service and Semantic Kernel for sales automation, achieving 67% productivity improvement in sales proposal creation while freeing employees for customer engagement and strategic planning.
The AI Red Teaming Agent, entering public preview, systematically probes AI models to uncover safety risks by integrating Azure AI Foundry's evaluation systems with Microsoft Security's PyRIT framework. The agent generates comprehensive reports tracking improvements over time, creating an AI safety testing ecosystem that evolves alongside system capabilities. MIT Technology Review highlights that more than half of businesses still manually evaluate AI, making automated solutions essential for scalability.
New agentic evaluations provide comprehensive risk and quality assessments, enabling teams to build trustworthy, compliant AI agents from day one through systematic risk identification and mitigation in agent behaviour. The Azure AI Foundry extension for Visual Studio Code enters public preview, allowing developers to build, test, and deploy agent-based applications entirely within their IDE without context switching.
Atomicwork's Atom AI agent demonstrates early adoption success with significant productivity gains, reduced operational costs, and increased employee satisfaction for IT and HR teams. Accenture leverages Azure AI Foundry as a "one-stop shop" for agentic applications, implementing the AI Red Teaming Agent to automatically scan and ensure responsible development while meeting growing client demand for secure applications.
Microsoft strengthened GitHub collaboration through integrations with Azure AI Foundry and open-source frameworks, extending agent mode in GitHub Copilot to all users for complex multi-step changes, testing, and reasoning guidance. The platform addresses enterprise AI investment optimisation by balancing proprietary data integration, domain-specific actions, and secure environments with frontier models. Fine-tuning and distillation capabilities enable model customisation and enterprise value unlocking through standardised intelligent system building processes.