News
Updates, product notes and practical coverage for AI platforms and operators.
Microsoft has shown how Foundry agents can move from one-pass prompts to the Copilot harness for planning, looping, subagents and report completion. Hosted agents can also run third-party harnesses with Entra Agent ID, private networking, controlled egress, telemetry, governed toolboxes and organisation-specific benchmark-driven optimisation. It targets production-scale enterprise use.
Microsoft has made real-time multichannel speech-to-text generally available in Azure Speech, adding per-channel language identification while retaining stereo separation. The service transcribes up to two channels in one session, tags every result with its source and costs the same as single-channel transcription, targeting contact centres and voice-agent pipelines with overlapping speakers.
Microsoft has shown how ComfyUI can call Foundry image models and fal MiniMax H3 Max video generation through two custom nodes using Microsoft Entra ID instead of API keys. The workflow runs generation in Foundry, works from CPU-only clients and chains an art-directed keyframe into a five-second cinematic clip with managed identity controls.
Microsoft has outlined a closed-loop workflow that turns production agent traces into evaluation datasets, optimisation proposals, regression tests and controlled deployments. The Foundry approach uses continuous evaluation, Agent Optimizer, GitHub Actions and canary routing while keeping business criteria outside editable prompts, giving teams a more disciplined way to improve agents without silent regressions.
Microsoft is making the multi-model harness behind Copilot Code, Copilot Studio, GitHub Copilot, the CLI and Visual Studio Code available through Microsoft Foundry. The managed orchestration layer supports more than 20 frontier models, bring-your-own-key access, MCP, agent skills and plugins, while Microsoft runs the agent loop and sandbox.
Microsoft has outlined its enterprise AI strategy around Copilot as the user entry point, Microsoft IQ and Foundry for organisational intelligence, and Agent 365 for governance and observability. The company highlighted large deployments at Volkswagen, Fujitsu, Manulife and others, alongside customer-reported gains in software delivery, service operations, document work and industrial maintenance.