Microsoft Foundry - Jannik Reinhard

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

Azure AI Content Safety Guide: Filters and Best Practices

18. February 202622. June 2026 jannikreinhard2 Comments

Azure AI Content Safety is Microsoft’s AI-powered service for detecting harmful content in both user-generated and AI-generated text and images. It runs as the built-in content filtering system for all Azure OpenAI and Foundry model deployments, screening both prompts and completions through an ensemble of classification models. The service is available as a standalone API and is deeply integrated into the Microsoft Foundry portal. It went through major expansion, adding prompt injection defense, hallucination detection, copyright protection, and PII filtering alongside its core harm-category classifiers.

In my opinion, Microsoft did a great job with this service. Over the past year, Azure AI Content Safety has matured from a simple harm classifier into a full guardrail platform, and this guide walks through what Azure AI Content Safety can do and how to configure it.

Azure AI Content Safety dashboard with moderation categories

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.

Microsoft IQ Explained: Making Enterprise AI Agents Work

26. November 202522. June 2026 jannikreinhard

This post is a practical explanation of Microsoft IQ — the intelligence layer that finally makes enterprise AI agents work in production. I cover what Microsoft IQ is, where it sits in the Microsoft AI stack, and how it changes the way IT admins design and deploy AI agents grounded in tenant data.

How Microsoft IQ Makes Enterprise AI Agents Work

Diagram of Microsoft IQ intelligence layer for AI agents

Let’s be honest: building AI agents in the enterprise has been a mess. You spend 80% of your time stitching together data sources, wrestling with RAG pipelines, and praying your agent doesn’t hallucinate the CEO’s name. Every new project feels like reinventing the wheel – but a wheel made of duct tape and hopes.

At Ignite 2025, Microsoft dropped something that might actually change this. They call it “IQ” – a unified intelligence layer that spans across Microsoft 365, Fabric, and Microsoft Foundry. And no, it’s not just another buzzword. If you’ve been experimenting with smaller Foundry use cases, like a paperless-office document manager, this is the enterprise-scale version of that same idea. Let me break down what Microsoft IQ actually means for you.

Microsoft Intune & AI Insights

Microsoft Foundry — Articles by Jannik Reinhard