Microsoft AI Foundry: build your own AI, safely.
Microsoft AI Foundry, formerly Azure AI Foundry, is the Azure platform for building and governing AI on your own data. Lanmark starts with a readiness review, then runs a fixed-scope pilot of four to eight weeks on one use case, with governance set up first.
What can you build on it?
The four projects that most often justify Foundry for a small business.
- A knowledge agent
- An internal assistant that answers questions over your own policies, contracts and SharePoint files.
- A customer agent
- An assistant that reads your product documents, knowledge base and data and answers accurately.
- A triage agent
- A back-office assistant that reads incoming emails or documents, classifies them, drafts a reply and queues an action for a person to approve.
- A process agent
- A specialist assistant for a regulated process where a general tool is not controlled enough, such as a compliance check.
How does Lanmark work with you?
Deliberately small at the start.
- Step 1AI readiness reviewA focused conversation that places your business on the AI Capability Ladder and establishes whether Foundry is the right next step, or whether adopting Copilot is enough for now.
- Step 2A fixed-scope pilotFour to eight weeks on a single use case, with a written success measure agreed before we start.
- Step 3Rolling adoptionIf the pilot lands, we add use cases at the rate the business can absorb them.
Where does Foundry fit on the AI ladder?
Foundry sits at the middle rungs of our five-rung AI Capability Ladder: Aware (Rung 1), Active (Rung 2), Adopted (Rung 3), Augmented (Rung 4), AI-native (Rung 5).
Most small businesses are at the lower rungs, where Microsoft 365 Copilot is the right tool. The right first Foundry project is almost always a single grounded knowledge agent on one high-value data set, kept narrow so the build, the cost and the governance stay controllable.
Read the practical guide to Microsoft AI FoundryGovernance comes first
An AI agent inherits whatever permissions you give it, and most SharePoint estates have sharing decisions nobody has reviewed in years. Before we build, we review the SharePoint sharing model and data classification, so the agent can only see what the person asking is allowed to see.
Foundry adds content safety filters, prompt injection detection and an audit trail, so you can show AI is being used responsibly.
What do people ask about Microsoft AI Foundry?
What is Microsoft AI Foundry?
It is the platform Microsoft uses to build, deploy and govern AI on Azure, formerly called Azure AI Foundry. It is where foundation models, your own data, AI agents and the security and governance around them come together, and it is the engine room for AI your business builds for itself.
How is it different from Microsoft 365 Copilot?
Copilot is bought per user as a productivity tool inside Word, Outlook, Excel and Teams. Foundry is bought by consumption, as a platform, to build something specific. Most small businesses need Copilot first and Foundry second.
Do we need an in-house development team?
No. Most small business Foundry work is a fixed-scope, partner-led pilot, and Copilot Studio can build lighter agents without code, which is enough for many first projects.
What does it cost?
Foundry is charged by consumption inside your Azure subscription, so it moves with data volume, usage and the model you choose. A costed estimate is only possible once the use case is known. We agree the scope and the success measure for a pilot before you commit.
How long does a pilot take?
Four to eight weeks is realistic for a single grounded knowledge agent, if the data is reasonably clean and the use case is narrow.
Is our data safe?
Foundry runs inside your Microsoft tenant on Azure, uses your Entra ID identities, works with Microsoft Purview, and can keep data in UK regions for the services and models that support them. The main risk is an agent reading content that people were never meant to see, so we review your SharePoint sharing first.
Where to go next
Book a free IT review.
We look at what you have, what it costs and where the risks are, and tell you plainly if you do not need to change anything.
Book a free IT review