Foundry Tools Roadmap

by
Andrew Snodgrass

by
Andrew Snodgrass

Andrew analyzes and writes about Microsoft's data management, business intelligence, and machine learning solutions, as well as aspects of licensing... more

Foundry Tools are a collection of cloud services enabling developers to add specific AI functions to applications with reduced upfront cost and expertise. They are less expensive to deploy and scale than comparable machine learning environments built separately. Foundry Tools have had many previous names (including Azure AI Services, Cognitive Services, and Applied AI Services) as have the individual services.

Microsoft’s other Foundry offerings include the following:

• Foundry, a Web-based development tool for professional developers to create, test, and deploy applications powered by AI language models
• Foundry Models, a set of hosted large language models (LLMs) that includes Azure OpenAI service, which hosts OpenAI’s LLMs.

Product: Foundry Tools

Near Term (2025–2026)

Foundry Tools offerings are updated separately and have individual roadmaps.

Azure AI Search, which provides search functionality to Azure services and applications, now supports new features for AI use cases (in particular, the use of vector databases). These include significantly higher capacity quotas to support vector databases (which are storage intensive), image search using vectorized image content, and numerous query and performance enhancements on vectorized databases.