Reimagining Collaboration with AI: Yina Arenas on Azure AI Foundry
Source: microsoft.com
FYAI: Leveraging AI for Cross-Functional Collaboration
Microsoft Build 2025 demonstrated Microsoft's innovative approach to the software development lifecycle, showcasing powerful new AI capabilities. AI agents are revolutionizing developer workflows and business operations by streamlining enterprise processes and expediting scientific discovery. In this FYAI edition, Yina Arenas, Vice President of Product, Azure AI Foundry, discusses empowering developers to create the future using generative AI, breakthrough models, and enterprise AI agents.
Yina Arenas shares insights into the changing AI landscape, addressing why businesses are struggling to move past the “proof of concept” stage and how Azure AI Foundry can help organizations advance their AI projects. There's a significant shift from viewing AI as a research tool to recognizing it as a crucial business function.
The focus has moved from “Can we build this?” to “How do we build this responsibly, at scale, and with real impact?” This transition demands new tools, perspectives, and collaborative methods across teams. Microsoft aims to make AI more accessible and inclusive, enabling everyone to contribute to relevant solutions. The emphasis is on empowering individuals to tackle real-world challenges with AI.
Azure AI Foundry's Role
Many organizations face challenges in transitioning from proof of concept to production due to the complexity involved. It's not just about model selection but also about integrating it into existing systems, ensuring security and responsibility, and aligning it with business objectives. A comprehensive, end-to-end strategy is needed, incorporating the right tools, governance, and collaboration within a developer-friendly environment.
Azure AI Foundry is designed to help teams accelerate progress while maintaining a thoughtful approach, offering a cohesive platform with traceability across prompts, models, and runtime behavior. It simplifies app development for developers and provides business decision-makers with insights into app performance, ROI measurement, and compliance adherence. Collaborative, transparent, and outcome-driven AI development is essential to unlock further value.
Azure AI Foundry is tailored to meet organizations at any stage, from initial projects to enterprise-wide scaling. It unifies Microsoft's AI capabilities, from foundational models to orchestration and monitoring, within a single platform. Azure AI Foundry is built with humans at the center, ensuring that AI solutions are accessible and beneficial for data scientists, product managers, engineers, and business leaders. It integrates tools for testing, monitoring, and governance to support the entire lifecycle, ensuring responsible AI practices from the outset.
Key Features and Benefits
Azure AI Foundry caters to anyone looking to advance their AI projects, whether in large enterprises, startups, or software development firms. It provides access to leading-edge models, integrates orchestration frameworks, supports open protocols for multi-agent collaboration, and offers native observability tooling within a secure, governed environment. It streamlines various processes, including call center optimization, data analysis, product search enhancement, and workflow automation, by consolidating models, tools, and agents into a user-friendly platform.
Using tools like GitHub, Visual Studio, and Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry streamlines the journey from idea to production for developers, data scientists, IT professionals, and decision-makers, allowing them to design, customize, and manage AI apps and agents at scale. As the central hub for AI solution development, orchestration, and management, Azure AI Foundry is a key component of Microsoft's AI platform strategy. It's currently used by developers at over 70,000 enterprises and software development companies, including Atomicwork, Epic, Fujitsu, Gainsight, H&R Block, and LG Electronics, to design, customize, and manage their AI applications and agents. In just six months, over 10,000 organizations have utilized Azure AI Foundry Agent Service to build, deploy, and scale their agents.
Developers are creating agents that can act, reason, take initiative, and deliver tangible business results. For instance, Heineken utilized Azure AI Foundry to create a multi-agent platform called “Hoppy,” enabling employees to access data and tools in their native language, saving thousands of hours by reducing task completion times from 20 minutes to 20 seconds. Fujitsu evaluated Azure AI Foundry Agent Service to automate sales proposal creation, boosting productivity by 67% and enabling teams to prioritize customer engagement. The AI agent integrates with existing Microsoft tools used by approximately 38,000 employees, retrieves dispersed knowledge, and establishes a foundation for broader AI-powered innovation. Draftwise, a digital native offering an AI-powered contract drafting and review platform, uses cutting edge models in Azure AI Foundry (Cohere multimodal and AOAI reasoning) to help streamline the contract drafting process by integrating with a lawyer’s document storage system.
Azure AI Foundry is unlocking a new era of creativity and empowerment for developers and others. It’s shifting the focus from AI as a tool to AI as a co-pilot. The platform empowers users to create agents that understand their objectives, adapt to their workflows, and evolve with their needs. This shift enables product managers, marketers, and frontline workers to influence AI functionality without requiring machine learning expertise. The goal is to democratize AI, making it accessible to a broader audience. The agents being developed are automating processes, accelerating insights, and freeing up time for meaningful work. The future agents will be collaborators in creativity, partners in problem-solving, and catalysts for innovation. Through leaders such as Yina Arenas, Microsoft’s vision for AI’s future is both inspiring and human-centered.
Platforms like Azure AI Foundry are ushering in an era where AI acts as a collaborator, empowering individuals to innovate and address real-world problems, regardless of their technical background. Azure AI Foundry is unlocking AI's potential for developers, driving transformation and boundless opportunities.
In May 2024, the inaugural Responsible AI Transparency Report was released. Stakeholder insights have informed the second annual Responsible AI Transparency Report, underscoring a continued commitment to building AI technologies that people trust. Microsoft has developed best practices and resources to guide employee AI skill-building initiatives. Microsoft is demonstrating the steps being taken to make the AI agent era a reality through its platforms, products, and infrastructure. The cloud can help you meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world.