Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Microsoft has 2 tools for customers to create their own Generative Artificial Intelligence solutions:

• Microsoft Copilot Studio
• Azure AI Foundry

Each offers its own value and the following article helps break down what to choose when:

Are you looking to build custom Copilots but unsure about the differences between Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry? As a Microsoft Technical Trainer with over a decade of experience, I’ve spent the last 18 months focusing on Azure AI Solutions and Copilot. Through numerous workshops, I’ve seen firsthand how customers benefit from AI solutions beyond Microsoft Copilot.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat offers seamless integration with Generative AI for tasks like document creation, content summarization, and insights from M365 solutions such as Email, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams. It ensures compliance with organizational security, governance, and privacy policies, making it ideal for immediate AI assistance without customization.

On the other hand, platforms like Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry provide greater customization and flexibility, tailoring AI assistance to specific business processes, workflows, and data sources for more relevant support. In this blog, I’ll share insights on building custom copilots, and the tools Microsoft offers to support this journey.

• Navigating AI Solutions: Microsoft Copilot Studio vs. Azure AI Foundry
  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/azure-ai-services-blog/navigating-ai-solutions-microsoft-copilot-studio-vs-azure-ai-foundry/4411678

Microsoft Digital on “Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry”
Microsoft’s own IT department, “Microsoft Digital” published an article that may also provide some insight on approaching this challenge

• Customer questions answered: Should I use Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry to build my agent?
  When a customer asked us if they should use Microsoft Copilot Studio or Microsoft Azure AI Foundry to build their employee self-service agent, we knew Ravi Goriparthy was exactly the right person to talk to. He and the engineering team he works on here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, had to answer that exact question when they set out to build agents that would help our Human Resources and IT Support teams better respond to requests for support from our employees. We had Goriparthy, a principal software engineering manager, talk with our Inside Track bot, which wrote the following story (with some help from us humans).
  https://www.microsoft.com/insidetrack/blog/customer-questions-answered-should-i-use-copilot-studio-or-azure-ai-foundry-to-build-my-agent/?msockid=06377db5fd83631014c06baefce96218

Integrating Copilot Studio with Azure AI Foundry
Additionally, it is possible to integrate both Copilot Studio with Azure AI Foundry’s capabilities in some instances. Watch this video

• Copilot Studio Agents & Azure AI Foundry: better together
  Join us for a session on how to build agents in Copilot Studio with deep integration into Azure AI Foundry services. Learn to leverage your vectorized indices from Azure AI Search to perform RAG and integrate 1800+ models in the Azure model catalog into your Copilot Studio agents.
  https://build.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/d191c44a-365b-4bfb-bfbf-5bdd9da7bf24