The Complete Guide to Microsoft AI Tools

Microsoft's unified platform to build, run, and govern AI apps and agents — formerly Azure AI Foundry (and Azure AI Studio before that). Brings models, agents, and tools into one place.

Managed service to build, deploy, and scale production AI agents through a single Responses API — with built-in tools, tracing, Entra identity, and Teams/Microsoft 365 publishing.

Grounding and knowledge layer for Foundry that connects your agents to enterprise data and web sources for accurate, cited answers.

The end-to-end ML lifecycle service — train, deploy, and manage classic and custom models with MLOps. Stays separate alongside Foundry (which is Microsoft's surface for generative AI).

The unified catalog of 1,900+ models inside Foundry — first-party and partner models sold by Azure (OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Mistral, xAI, DeepSeek) plus Marketplace/community models (Anthropic, Cohere, Hugging Face).

OpenAI's models on Azure, now delivered as "Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models" — the GPT-5 family (GPT-5 … GPT-5.5 GA) plus GPT-4.1, via the v1 Responses API with enterprise security.

Microsoft's own in-house model family — MAI-Thinking-1 (reasoning), MAI-Code-1 (coding), MAI-Voice-2 (speech), MAI-Image-2.5, and MAI-Transcribe-1.5.

Microsoft's family of small, efficient open language and multimodal models designed to run fast on-device and at low cost.

The paid AI layer across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and the standalone Copilot app — now with Agent Mode, the Researcher & Analyst agents, and Work IQ memory.

A free, secure AI chat tier for existing Microsoft 365 subscribers, with pay-as-you-go access to agents built in Copilot Studio.

Lets Copilot autonomously plan and execute multi-step tasks inside Word, Excel (GA), and PowerPoint (preview) — building spreadsheets or decks end to end.

Two reasoning agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot: Researcher runs deep multi-source research across your work data and the web; Analyst turns raw data into insights like a data scientist.

The free consumer Copilot app — now with Copilot Vision (it sees your screen/camera), Voice, the Mico visual character, memory, actions, and shared Copilot Groups.

AI across the developer workflow — completions, agent mode in VS Code, an autonomous coding agent that opens PRs, plus a Copilot CLI. Choose from multiple frontier models.

The low-code platform to build and orchestrate custom AI agents (formerly Power Virtual Agents) — grounded in enterprise data via 1,400+ connectors, with multi-agent orchestration and Computer Use.

Add prebuilt and custom AI models (document processing, prediction, prompts) to Power Apps and Power Automate — capacity now metered via Copilot Credits.

Hosts bots and agents and relays them across channels (Teams, Web Chat, Direct Line). It underpins Copilot Studio publishing; the legacy Bot Framework SDK is now succeeded by the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK.

Code-first SDK (C#, JavaScript, Python) to build enterprise-grade agents and publish them to Microsoft 365, Teams, and any channel — the successor to the Bot Framework SDK.

Speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and speech translation — plus Voice Live for real-time, humanlike AI voice agents.

Neural machine translation for 100+ languages across text, documents, and apps — now with selectable LLM models and adaptive custom translation.

Unified NLP (formerly Text Analytics): PII detection, entity recognition, sentiment, summarization, key phrases, and question answering — also exposed via an MCP server.

Image and video analysis — object detection, OCR, and scene understanding (formerly Computer Vision).

OCR and intelligent document processing that extracts key data from forms and documents (formerly Form Recognizer); current version v4.0.

Generative, multimodal service (GA since Nov 2025) that turns documents, images, video, and audio into your own structured fields with confidence scores and source grounding.

Face detection, recognition, and liveness — a gated Limited Access service (apply via Microsoft's intake form); emotion/gender inference retired, barred for US police use.

In-app Copilot chat plus named autonomous agents across Sales, Customer Service, and Finance that research, draft, and act with human approval — replacing the old single "Dynamics 365 Copilot".

AI across the Fabric data platform and Power BI — generate reports, DAX, and data pipelines in natural language, and build Fabric data agents over your own data.

A conversational sales agent inside Microsoft 365 Copilot (formerly Copilot for Sales / Viva Sales) that lets sellers act on CRM data — Dynamics 365 or Salesforce — from Outlook and Teams.

An autonomous customer-service agent (GA June 2026) that resolves cases end to end — retrieving knowledge, drafting responses, and taking actions across channels.

A meeting agent that takes real-time collaborative notes, tracks decisions and action items, and keeps a shared, always-current summary during Teams meetings and chats.

The AI assistant for security and IT teams — investigate incidents, hunt threats, and automate response, with its own security agents. Now included for Microsoft 365 E5 customers.

The control plane to register, secure, and govern AI agents across the org (GA May 2026) — extending Defender, Entra, and Purview to discover and protect agents.

Data Security Posture Management for AI — discover, monitor, and protect sensitive data flowing into and out of AI apps and agents across Copilot and third-party tools.

Detects and filters harmful text and images and guards against prompt-injection — the classifier layer behind Foundry's guardrails.

Runtime safety for agents in Foundry — Prompt Shields and content filters applied at four points (user input, tool call, tool response, model output).

Community-driven open-source Python toolkit to assess and mitigate unfairness in ML models — the fairness component of Microsoft's Responsible AI dashboard.