Great example of what Foundry enables: durable, stateful agents that run across time boundaries, orchestrate tools and models, and close the loop with evaluation and improvement over long-running workflows. Jeff Hollan
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Transcript
Transcript
Transcript
Everyone, I’m really excited to show off some of these powerful new capabilities possible with Microsoft Foundry to show how you can build long running and persistent agents on the new hosted agent service. So this is something that Teams actually been hacking around a little bit this week and I wanted to give you an early glimpse. It’s inspired by one of our customers. I wanted to build an agentic system that can help in managing and monitoring our marketing campaigns. So first things you’ll notice right here inside of Foundry actually have a number of agents already deployed. Now each of these are running on this new hosted infrastructure. Now what that means is that as different sessions get spun U from different users, they’re automatically spun up on an isolated persistent sandbox. These enables these agents to do powerful capabilities all while maintaining state. Now before I get to showing you some of that in action, one thing I want to call out for each of these agents. They each have different tasks and performance capabilities that they need to adhere to. One of the things that I love about Foundry is that you can run any model. All within foundry over here, I can actually switch to the model gallery. There’s over 11,000 models here, including the latest and greatest models like Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5 image generation models. This means I can choose the right model from the right provider for the right task to make my agents execute at the highest quality. Now what do all these pieces look together in a solution? Let’s go ahead and switch over to the application. Now if I navigate. Over here to this web UI. This is a marketing campaign management hub. Let’s go ahead and start with something simple. I’ll go ahead and ask a question in the chat window. Of course you’ve all seen chat experiences before, but what makes this special? Well, one of the things is that as I interact with these agents, they can actually get smarter over time. You’ll notice here that I have this set of skills. Now these are skills that are actually being stored inside of my Foundry session. So you can see here a few different skills you know. For instance, if I have a new proposed campaign that has a high audience overlap, I need to go ahead and pause this campaign. That’s something that I learned from previous interactions that I’m able to persist. So as I use this more and more, the agent actually gets smarter. Now, another really cool thing here is let’s go ahead and kick off a longer process. So I’ll go ahead here and start a new marketing campaign. I’ve gone ahead and given it a budget, told it to social channels, and I’ve actually chose to render this workflow right here within this UI. Now, what’s cool here isn’t just that you can build agents that follow a workflow. What’s actually happening here is during each step, the agent is actually able to checkpoint its state and checkpoint its progress. What that means is that if something were to go wrong, maybe this was a very long running workflow, this agent could resume at any time. He could go ahead and inspect that persistent state that we give you inside of Foundry and load in the latest checkpoint. Go ahead and pick up where it left off so I don’t have to waste any time. This is a powerful pattern for any long running agent. Now, the last thing that I just want to showcase here is that I also want this agent to be proactive. I don’t always want to tell it what it should do. I want it to understand for itself how it can add value to the team. So I’ve configured so that every 30 minutes, this session actually gets notified by a heartbeat. This means that this session gets kicked off, the agent can wake up, it can look at its checkpoints, it can look at its context, it can look at the campaigns and maybe send me a notification on something like Teams. This is just a few examples of the type of powerful things possible inside of. Boundary using any model, all built so that you can build incredible agents all inside of Microsoft Foundry.
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