Agents go beyond chatbots to combine multiple skills, and often multiple agents, to perform tasks and achieve an objective. In this advanced session we’ll go beyond prompt engineering and RAG, and look at some of the industrial-strength techniques that power agents, including function calling, fine-tuning, and multi-agent systems. We’ll look at Microsoft Foundry and how it allows us to select from a wide range of state-of-the-art models from a wide range of development labs. We’ll use it to host and agents directly, and also use hosted models with Microsoft Agent Framework to develop custom agents locally in .NET. We’ll also see how to consume these in custom Copilots for Microsoft 365.

Assumed Knowledge:

Development knowledge, .NET, some familiarity with Visual Studio Code and Azure.

Practical Takeaways:

How to build agents and AI-powered apps using code.

Out of Session Scope:

Not covering low-code or no-code solutions such as Copilot Studio.