Many companies are building their first AI agents right now. Most of them test the agent by chatting with it a few times in the playground and then call it done. In this blog post I explain how to evaluate AI agents in Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Foundry) in a structured way. At the end you can run an evaluation against a test dataset in the portal or with the SDK, read the results, and set up continuous evaluation for production.
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Every AI agent is only as good as the knowledge you give it. For a long time the common answer was to stuff everything into one giant system prompt. This does not scale. Agent Skills solve this problem in a much cleaner way. In this blog post I explain what Agent Skills are, why they beat the big system prompt, and how you can build your first skill step by step. At the end you will have a small working skill that runs in Claude Code and in many other AI tools.
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AI agents are everywhere right now, and many IT pros ask me where they should start. In this blog post I show you how to build your first Microsoft Foundry agent. We go step by step: create a project in the portal, deploy a model, create the agent with instructions and tools, test it in the playground, and finally call it from Python code. You do not need to be a developer to follow along. At the end you have a working Microsoft Foundry agent that you can extend for your own use cases.
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If you have sat through a Microsoft keynote more than once, you know the pattern: a wall of product names, a couple of demos that feel like magic, and then weeks of work figuring out what is actually shipping versus what is a sizzle reel. Microsoft Build 2026 (San Francisco, June 2–3) was the most agent-dense keynote Microsoft has ever given — seven in-house models, a whole context layer, a brand-new category of agent, a containment story that reaches from silicon to cloud, and a concept for hardware that runs agents instead of apps.
This post is the map I wish I’d had on the morning of June 2. I’ll walk every major announcement from Microsoft Build 2026, explain each one the way I’d explain it to a colleague (not the way the press release phrases it), and — because that’s the job most of us actually have — call out what it means for whoever has to deploy, govern and secure this stuff. It is a round-up, not a feature comparison, and I’ll flag clearly what is generally available, what is preview, and what is still just a slide.
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Microsoft Agent 365 vs. Microsoft 365 Agents is the field guide distinction for IT teams and architects: one term describes governed agent operations, while the other describes the agents users build and run inside Microsoft 365 experiences.
If you’ve spent the last twelve months in the Microsoft AI ecosystem, you’ve watched the same pattern repeat: every announcement reframes the same thing under a slightly different banner. Copilot. Copilot Studio. Microsoft Foundry. Microsoft Agent Framework. Declarative agents. Custom engine agents. And now, two terms that sound almost identical but mean very different things Microsoft 365 Agents and Microsoft Agent 365.
I keep seeing them used interchangeably, including in serious technical posts. They are not interchangeable. With Agent 365 hitting general availability on May 1, 2026, getting this distinction right is no longer a pedantry exercise it’s a procurement, governance, and architecture decision.
This post is the field guide to Microsoft 365 Agents I would have wanted before I started building.
