By Matt Saunders
Publication Date: 2026-06-09 08:00:00
Microsoft used their Build 2026 event in San Francisco to announce new functionality for Microsoft Foundry. Citing Foundry as “the place where AI agents move from experiments to production systems,” in a blog post, Nick Brady writes that the release brings ‘runtime, tools, memory, grounding, models, observability, and governance’ that developers need for production agents, rather than just new model endpoints.
Microsoft Foundry is Microsoft’s ‘AI app and agent factory’, a unified Azure platform that Microsoft describes as an interoperable platform that lets teams build, ground, and govern AI apps and agents that understand business context, with shared observability and policy across every agent. Foundry documentation highlights native integration with Azure services, Microsoft 365 data sources, and open protocols for tools and frameworks.
Hosted agents in Foundry Agent Service provide managed sandboxed sessions with state, filesystem access, and support for multiple…
