Azure AI Search Focuses on Enterprise AI

• Azure AI Search provides a broad, mature set of features that can be used in Azure-based applications such as chatbots and agents.
• Originally released as a general-purpose enterprise search engine, Azure AI Search now primarily targets enterprise AI applications.
• Azure AI Search is not a ready-made SaaS solution and requires developers to make best use of the service.

Azure AI Search, originally branded Azure Cognitive Search, provides full-text indexing and search as well as AI-specific features, like vector search. Azure AI Search can be used in conjunction with Azure OpenAI, which provides language models, and Azure AI Foundry, an AI-focused developer experience, as the foundation for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), an architecture often used in chatbots, copilots, and agents. Microsoft is investing heavily in each of these services.

This report is the first in a series on Azure AI services, which can be used to build AI-enabled applications. The series is designed for technically minded directors and managers who need to understand and evaluate the components, advantages, and limitations of the following services as part of their AI development efforts: