We are excited to announce that Microsoft has been named a Leader for the fifth year in a row in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud AI Developer Services and are especially proud to be placed furthest for our Completeness of Vision. 

We’re pleased by the recognition from Gartner as we continue to prioritize investments across our Azure AI portfolio. We’re at the forefront of empowering customers on their generative AI journey—offering a feature rich, unified platform that provides cutting-edge models, services, and fully integrated tooling to accelerate innovation. It’s why over 65% of the Fortune 500 now use Azure OpenAI Service, and tens of thousands of other organizations across industries and around the world are innovating with Azure AI.

Cutting-edge APIs and models 

Azure AI has continued to push the boundaries of innovation, providing customers with cutting-edge APIs and models that are transforming industries and empowering businesses to achieve more. Our Azure AI services are feature rich and bring the capabilities for responsible AI solutions to create, receive, and respond with images, videos, and audio—enabling more natural interactions with technology, and expanding the possibilities for generative AI applications.    

Azure AI’s model catalog is a testament to Microsoft’s commitment to bringing the most advanced AI models to our customers, fostering an environment of innovation and growth. Through industry leaders like OpenAI, Mistral AI, Cohere, Hugging Face, Meta, and more, the model catalog makes available a diverse selection of over 1,600 large language, small language, and vision models accelerating the availability and diversity of AI models for customers, allowing them to choose the best performance and cost options for their applications.  

Albert Heijn, the leading supermarket chain in the Netherlands, is using Azure AI’s cutting-edge APIs and models to power a series of initiatives covering use cases from customer personalization to demand forecast and food waste projects. One of these applications is “Scan my Recipe,” powered by Microsoft Azure AI Vision and Azure OpenAI Service, the tool allows users to conveniently add all the ingredients from a cookbook recipe to their shopping cart, making healthy cooking more accessible.  

“Because we rely heavily on Azure OpenAI and other Azure services for the use of generative AI, we are co-creating with Microsoft and exploring all the technological possibilities together.” 

Noortje van Genugten, Vice President, Product Operations, Albert Heijn 

Fully integrated tooling 

In the fast-paced realm of AI development, developers need a comprehensive ecosystem of tools that support the development lifecycle, from concept to production and ongoing monitoring. Azure AI’s integrated tooling brings together all the tools you need for building your generative AI solution. Retrieval augmented generation, powered by Azure AI Search, enhances AI models by grounding them securely on your chosen data sources, allowing for more contextually relevant and accurate outputs. Fine-tuning further refines these models with specific data, improving their performance on tasks. Prompt flow orchestrates the development process, enabling efficient experimentation and iteration, while model evaluations offer a robust mechanism to assess and improve model performance systematically. Azure AI Content Safety includes a set of customizable filters for both human- and AI-generated content to help ensure safe generative AI experiences for employees, customers, and partners—free of harmful content. Together, these tools streamline the path from AI conception to deployment, enabling rapid innovation and providing the tools to safeguard your applications across the generative AI lifecycle. 

Telstra, Australia’s leading telecommunications and technology company, is using retrieval augmented generation, powered by Azure AI Search, to ground their generative AI solutions securely on their own data. Their new solutions help frontline workers and customer service agents respond to customers more quickly and effectively with Ask Telstra, which puts technical information at the agents’ fingertips, and One Sentence Summary, which instantly brings agents up-to-speed on customer history.  

“90% of customer service agents who tested One Sentence Summary increased their effectiveness. Their calls required 20% less follow-up….Ask Telstra was judged by 84% of the agents using it to positively impact customer interactions.” 

Rohit Lakhotia, General Manager of Customer and Channel AI, Telstra 

Unified AI development platform  

Today’s generative AI solutions, like custom copilots, require various APIs, models, development tooling, responsible AI features, monitoring, and governance. Stitching together disparate products can be a roadblock, and a drain on developer’s time. That’s why we’re bringing together all the needed services and tools for enterprise generative AI, simplifying the creation, testing, and deployment of AI applications, with our investment in Azure AI Studio.   

Azure AI Studio emphasizes a code-first approach, enabling developers to swiftly move from concept to production while adhering to responsible AI practices. It’s a collaborative space that streamlines the development lifecycle, ensuring security, privacy, and compliance are at the forefront of innovation. 

Together, these tools form a robust ecosystem within Azure AI Studio, empowering customers to develop transformative AI-powered applications with confidence and agility. 

Discover resources for your AI journey

• Learn more about the Microsoft Azure AI portfolio.
• Register for Microsoft Build 2024 and check out the upcoming AI-focused sessions.
• Request access for Azure OpenAI Service.

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*Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Cloud AI Developer Services, 1 May 2024. 

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