AI - Jannik Reinhard

AI Models in 2026: What I Would Actually Pick

15. June 202622. June 2026 jannikreinhardLeave a comment

Almost every week someone asks me the same question: “Which AI model should we use?” When I look at the AI models in 2026 I do not do it from a research lab, I look at them the way most of you do — from the outside, with a budget, a compliance team, and real data I am not allowed to leak. In this blog post I go through the latest AI models in 2026 (snapshot June 2026) and sort them by price, capability and use case. I also do something most comparison posts skip: I look at what they mean for European companies and data sovereignty. At the end I tell you plainly what I would choose.

A short warning first: this is the fastest moving topic I have ever written about. Almost every model below was released between April and June 2026. So treat this as a snapshot, not a law. The way of thinking will last longer than the model names.

Foundry Local: Run AI Models Offline on Your Mac

14. June 202622. June 2026 jannikreinhardLeave a comment

In this blog post I explain how to run AI models offline on a Mac with Microsoft Foundry Local — completely offline, on your own hardware. No Azure subscription, no API key, no internet connection. Everything runs on your own device.

I made a short video that walks through the whole thing. If you prefer watching over reading, here it is:

The rest of this post is the written version, so you can copy the commands and follow along.

Microsoft Build 2026: A Field Guide to the Agentic Stack

8. June 202622. June 2026 jannikreinhardLeave a comment

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.

MICROSOFT 365 AGENTS EXPLAINED: WHA AGENTS 365 MEANS

Microsoft Agent 365 vs. Microsoft 365 Agents: A Field Guide for IT and Architects

5. May 202622. June 2026 jannikreinhardLeave a comment

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.

Microsoft 365 Agents: declarative agents, custom engine agents, and Agent Builder in the Microsoft Copilot host

Intune Policy Manager AI-powered policy descriptions and conflict analysis dashboard.

AI-Powered Intune Policy Documentation and Conflict Analysis

28. March 202622. June 2026 jannikreinhard2 Comments

If you manage Microsoft Intune at scale, you know the pain: hundreds of policies, most of them with empty or outdated descriptions, and zero visibility into which settings overlap or even contradict each other across policies. I’ve seen this in pretty much every tenant I’ve worked with and honestly, it’s one of the most underestimated operational risks in modern endpoint management. This is where AI-powered Intune policy documentation and conflict analysis comes in.

So I built a tool to fix it. It builds on the same idea I explored in Create your own Intune Co Pilot using Azure OpenAi Studio, but takes it further with automated Intune policy documentation and conflict analysis. Let me walk you through it.

Intune policy documentation tool showing conflict analysis dashboard

CLI Tools vs MCP: Better AI Agents With Less Context

22. February 202622. June 2026 jannikreinhard9 Comments

Let’s be honest: MCP (Model Context Protocol) was supposed to be the universal connector between AI models and the real world. A clean, structured protocol that lets your AI agent talk to any tool through a standardized interface. Sounds great in theory. In practice? I’m increasingly reaching for good old CLI tools instead — and I’m not alone.

After months of building AI agent solutions and working with both approaches in real-world enterprise scenarios, here’s my take: CLI tools are the better choice in many cases, and the reason is surprisingly simple — context efficiency. Microsoft’s own guidance on CLI tools like the Azure CLI reflects how mature this tooling has become.

CLI tools for AI agents shown in a terminal window next to MCP

8 Productivity Tools I Use Daily for AI, Coding, and Planning

9. February 202622. June 2026 jannikreinhard1 Comment

There’s a question I get asked very often: “What daily tools do you actually use every day?”

These are the daily tools I personally rely on to stay productive and creative — and if you use AI in your workflow too, my guide on prompt engineering is a good place to start.

So here it is – my complete daily tools toolkit, broken down by what each tool actually does for me and why I chose it over the alternatives.

My daily tools and apps on a desk for planning

Azure OCR Comparison: Mistral, GPT & Document Intelligence

12. January 202622. June 2026 jannikreinhard

Document Intelligence vs. Content Understanding vs. Mistral OCR 3 vs. GPT-5 vs. Azure Vision

Choosing the right Azure OCR engine is no longer just about “reading” text—it’s about intelligent understanding. Whether you’re digitizing 10,000 invoices, building a real-time app to read street signs, or preparing scientific papers for RAG pipelines, Azure offers a specialized toolkit within its Foundry ecosystem.

In this post, we’ll dive deep into the performance, pricing, and capabilities of the leading Azure OCR models—including the brand-new Mistral OCR 3 and VLM-based approaches with GPT-5. You can also follow the official Microsoft Learn documentation for hands-on setup.

Azure OCR document analysis tools comparison with papers and AI icons

Build a Microsoft Intune AI Agent with Foundry

2. January 202622. June 2026 jannikreinhard3 Comments

We’ve all built PowerShell scripts to query Intune, wrapped them in some automation, and called it a day. It works. But with Azure OpenAI Service and models like GPT-4.1 and GPT-5.2 optimized for tool calling, there’s a more interesting approach—building an actual Intune agent that can talk to your Intune environment in plain language.

Instead of writing a script for every query, you build one Intune agent that understands natural language and calls the Graph API on your behalf. Ask it “which Windows devices are non-compliant?” and it figures out the right API call, executes it, and summarizes the results. It’s not magic—it’s function calling with a nice interface.

In this post, I’ll walk you through two different approaches to building this Intune agent: the classic direct SDK approach and the newer Microsoft Agent Framework. Both use the same underlying Graph API client, but differ in how they orchestrate the AI. Let’s dive in.

How to Create an AI Selfie Tour Video with Tech Icons

21. December 202522. June 2026 jannikreinhard

This post shows you How to Create an AI Selfie Tour Video with Tech Icons — using a stack of generative AI tools to produce a polished short video that animates well-known industry figures into a single tour. I cover the prompts, the model choices, and the editing pipeline behind this AI Selfie Tour Video with Tech Icons.

Let’s be honest: the AI video space has exploded. Every week there’s a new tool promising Hollywood-quality results. But what happens when you combine AI image generation with video transformation and some creative editing? You get an AI Selfie Tour Video with Tech Icons that looks surprisingly real – and it’s easier than you might think.

I recently created a video that looks like I’m walking around, taking selfies with some of the most recognizable faces in tech. Sam Altman, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs – the whole crew. And no, I didn’t actually meet them at a conference. Here’s exactly how I built this AI Selfie Tour Video with Tech Icons.

Microsoft Intune & AI Insights

AI — Articles by Jannik Reinhard