Actioning agentic AI: 5 ways to build with news from Microsoft Ignite 2025

The atmosphere at Microsoft Ignite was exhilarating. More than 20,000 attendees came together in San Francisco, with an additional 200,000 joining us online to delve into the future of cloud and AI. What truly inspires me is the incredible feedback we’re receiving online and the vibrant discussions happening within our technical communities. It’s impressive to see how quickly you are transforming these announcements into actionable solutions for billions, ultimately shaping our future.

As someone engaged in marketing for technical audiences across Microsoft Azure, Foundry, Fabric, databases, and development tools, I noticed how our announcements resonated, as they address genuine challenges. Now, the hard work begins.

What’s everyone saying about the latest news? Where do we head from here? Let’s take a look at the top five stories revolving around cloud and AI from Microsoft Ignite, and discuss how these innovations can be practically applied during Microsoft AI Dev Days, the Microsoft AI Tour, and beyond.

1. Claude Joins Microsoft Foundry: A Choice for Builders

The technical community is buzzing about the potential of Claude models in Microsoft Foundry. I particularly appreciated how this eWeek article highlights it as a partnership that clears one of the biggest hurdles to adopting new AI tools: vendor complexity.

Developers have expressed a desire for access to Claude Sonnet and Claude Opus alongside OpenAI’s GPT models. They seek the ability to choose the right models for their specific needs and tools to assess tone, safety, performance, and more. Now, Azure stands as the sole cloud platform offering access to both Claude and GPT frontier models for its users.

The community response highlights the importance of model diversity. When crafting AI applications and agents, having choices allows you to optimise for what truly matters to your users. Microsoft Foundry provides flexibility while ensuring enterprise-grade security, compliance, and governance.

2. The IQ Revolution: Effective Semantic Understanding

The new suite of Microsoft IQ offerings is exhilarating for data engineers and architects. One blogger captured it perfectly, stating that this initiative rewires the connections between productivity applications, analytics platforms, and AI development environments—quite a significant leap in the enterprise AI dialogue.

Foundry IQ simplifies knowledge retrieval from various sources, including SharePoint, Fabric, and the web. Powered by Azure AI Search, it provides policy-aware retrieval without the hassle of creating complex custom RAG pipelines. Developers now have access to pre-configured knowledge bases and agentic retrieval through a single API that simply works while respecting user permissions.

3. Azure HorizonDB: Harnessing PostgreSQL Power

PostgreSQL developers are celebrating the preview of Azure HorizonDB, a fully managed, Postgres-compatible database service designed for modern cloud-native and AI workloads. You can register for it here.

The tech community has widely embraced this innovation, noting how it reflects their priorities. Azure HorizonDB offers up to three times the throughput of open-source Postgres for transactional workloads, automatic scaling of storage (up to 128TB), and scale-out compute supporting up to 3,072 vCores. It also delivers sub-millisecond multi-zone commit latencies, ensuring that applications remain fast and resilient.

Developers were particularly thrilled about the built-in vector indexing with advanced filtering using DiskANN, which integrates AI intelligence right where your data resides. This innovation enables developers to create semantic search and RAG patterns without the hassle of managing separate vector stores or transferring data across systems. Furthermore, the integration with Microsoft Foundry enhances setup and AI application development.

4. Azure Copilot: Transforming the Game

The launch of Azure Copilot offers IT professionals compelling reasons to transition to the cloud. Now covering the entire cloud operations lifecycle, Azure Copilot brings a collection of specialized agents designed for migration, deployment, observability, optimisation, resilience, and troubleshooting. A standout feature is the migration agent, which accelerates manual processes by scanning environments, pinpointing legacy workloads, and auto-generating infrastructure-as-code templates to ensure seamless migrations.

With Azure Copilot, both migrating and modernizing become significantly easier. It surfaces cost improvements, aids in environment optimization, and identifies issues across containers, virtual machines, and databases—all while complying with role-based access control (RBAC) policies. Available at no extra cost in the Azure Portal, CLI, and the new Operations Center, this transformative interface empowers IT teams to take a proactive approach as they build on the Azure platform.

5. Azure Hardware: Unmatched Power and Security

When it comes to training large models or running inference at scale, performance is crucial. That’s why our latest hardware display at Ignite captured everyone’s attention.

Standing in front of a blade from our Azure AI infrastructure server, featuring NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs showcased like art pieces, felt almost like stepping into an art gallery—especially with a spotlight on the innovations brought by Cobalt, Maia, and our unique partnership with NVIDIA.

And there’s more—we’ve introduced the Azure Boost DPU, our first custom data processing unit, along with Azure Integrated HSM for superior security. We’re excited to continuously bring forward these innovations to you.

Your Keyboard, Your Impact

What makes this moment significant is that the announcements at Ignite are not the end; they are the beginning. You are the next generation of creators who will take these tools and develop new agentic experiences that go beyond our current imagination. Your implementations will reveal insights that shape the evolution of Azure. The connection between announcement and innovation fosters a partnership, with the technical community guiding this process forward.

Help Shape the Future with Us:

• Get ready for Microsoft AI Dev Days: on December 10-11. We’re hosting two days of live technical content on the Reactor, streamed across all developer channels. This is an opportunity to dive deep into building with the technologies introduced at Ignite—mark your calendars for hands-on workshops and in-depth technical sessions that will keep you at the forefront of AI innovation.
• Join us at a Microsoft AI Tour location near you. We’re hitting the road for one-day, free workshops that allow you to get hands-on experience with the technologies unveiled at Ignite. The tour continues into 2026 with 30 more locations.
• Engage with your tech community. Ignite showcased incredible technical content through hundreds of sessions. Check out three special sessions that delve deep into the tech and guide you on how to implement it in your environments.
• Elevate your skills with curated skilling plans. Whether you’re just starting with these technologies or looking to deepen your knowledge, Microsoft’s skilling plans can help advance your career from the basics to advanced applications.

What are you creating with the latest technologies from Ignite? Join the conversation in the technical community at Azure.