In the following video, we are going to discuss:

• Foundry Evaluations - What are they?

• Why are they important?

• What do they test/evaluate?

  • Out of box evaluators

• How do I use them?

  • Demo

Check it out!!!

In terms of the opportunities of using Foundry Workflows, here are a few:

1. Orchestrating multi-agent solutions and being able to connect your agents in a unified way

2. These agents can connect to tools and knowledge, really creating a powerful solution

3. Leveraging Power Fx for custom scripting functionality

4. Unified observability across agent executions

5. Availability in Foundry Control Plane

Check out the following video for more info and demo

Note: The Logic Apps team is actively working on a user experience for obtaining/generating API keys, but in the interim, here is a video that describes how to call the underlying APIs to obtain this information.

• Azure Logic Apps

  • MCP Servers and Agentic Business Processes (using Agent Loop)

• Copilot Studio

• Microsoft Foundry

To learn more about the sessions, click on the link(s) above or check out the following video:

At Microsoft Ignite 2025, that took place this past November in San Francisco, it was unavoidable to notice the narrative mature from Build 2025 and Ignite 2024. We are now seeing more organizations moving from POCs to production workloads and wanting to ensure they are doing so in a manageable way.

The progress reminds me a lot of the early days in the Power Platform when people started to publish their first Power Apps and then more questions from IT Managers/Enterprise Architects/IT Leadership about “how do we manage all of this stuff if so many people are building these apps”? In response the Power Platform CoE Toolkit and Power Platform Admin Center emerged to better support those customers. We are now seeing a similar pattern.

I do see Generative AI solutions in a similar manner. The technology democratizes access to new capabilities. Whether that is writing code, reviewing documents or making decisions on behalf of users, the access to the technology is becoming more and more approachable, regardless of your skillset.

So, if we think about where organizations are headed, the natural question, once again is “how do we manage all of this stuff”?

With this in mind, my current learning plan includes the following capabilities found in Microsoft Foundry:

1. Evaluations

2. Guardrails

3. Foundry Control Plane

So let’s break these topics down to describe why they are important.

Evaluations

We often hear the terms ‘non-deterministic’ or ‘probabilistic’ when it comes to Gen AI solutions. We hear these terms for good reasons. Historically, we can go ahead and write unit tests that can be used as part of an assertion; I input X and I expect Y to be outputted. With Gen Ai solutions, it may not be as straight forward. We can use evaluations as a way to use a data-driven and more scientific approach.

Some mechanisms that we can use with evaluations include:

• Performance metrics like groundedness (aka avoiding hallucinations), relevance and coherence

• Regression Testing Models are obviously very powerful. Each new version of a model represents an opportunity to reduce latency, improve accuracy and hopefully reduce costs. But after you have tuned your solution for one model, how can you streamline adopting a new model.

• Deployment Readiness Using Evaluations in Microsoft Foundry and including a vast dataset ensures your app is ready for production. Being able to demonstrate effectiveness through performance metrics provides a measurable benchmark that can be used to demonstrate readiness.

Guardrails

When building agentic solutions, developers can get wrapped up in all the functionality that they want to include in their solution and may have exposure in areas they haven’t even thought of. This includes:

• Sensitive Content including avoiding leaking PII (personal identifiable information) or even in appropriate content being returned from a prompt response.

• Corporate Standards/Alignment your agentic solution becomes an extension of your brand and policies including avoiding being tricked into unauthorized discounts.

• Input/Output Filtering This helps avoid prompt injection attacks and provides a last mile of safety for agentic solutions.

Foundry Control Plane

With Evaluations and Guardrails in place, customers should feel more confident in the solutions that are being built. However, we still have a gap. How do we know where these agents live? What are the costs associated with them? Are they being used? Do they have errors? This is where the Foundry Control Plane can help us by:

• Visibility into all of the agents that have been deployed whether they are based upon Microsoft stack or even 3rd party.

• Consistency by ensuring all the necessary security policies and access controls are in place uniformly.

• Control by enabling administrators the ability to enable/disable agents that are not performing as expected.

Want to see the Foundry Control Plane in action? Check out this video where I show an Azure Logic Apps agentic business process being managed by the Foundry Control Plane.

Next Steps

Look for more content on this blog and my YouTube channel as we explore these topics together.

Note: Some of these resources are going to be heavily weighted on Microsoft related content as that is the world I live in, but I also try to get outside perspectives as much as possible.

Agentic Business Process Automation

Logic Apps Apps Live — The 4th Thursday of the month at 11am Pacific, the Logic Apps Product team will share the latest product developments in a live, webinar type environment.

Logic Apps Labs - Hands on labs for building agentic solutions with Azure Logic Apps. Get hand’s on experience by following these step by step labs.

Logic Apps Newsletter - The first Monday of every month, the Logic Apps Product team will share a newsletter that includes a re-cap of product developments and highlight community contributions.

Kent’s YouTube Channel - Latest tips, tricks and tutorials

Books

This list will change over time but here is a good start if you haven’t read these books.

The Coming Wave - by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar argues that the convergence of AI and synthetic biology represents a new, unprecedented technological wave that will fundamentally transform society, creating immense power but also profound risks like job displacement, misinformation, and threats to the nation-state.

Empire of AI - by Karen Hao is a book that investigates the rise of OpenAI, revealing the hidden human and environmental costs behind the AI industry's rapid expansion, contrasting its initial idealistic mission with the reality of resource-intensive development, and drawing parallels to colonialism through its exploration of labor exploitation and resource extraction in the Global South.

The Nvidia Way - Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant by Tae Kim is a book detailing Nvidia's rise from a gaming chip startup to an AI powerhouse, focusing on CEO Jensen Huang's leadership, corporate culture, and strategic decisions, including how the company anticipated the AI wave and built a near-monopoly in AI chips

Podcasts

Here are the podcasts that I consume regularly. Generally, there is a new episode out weekly and provides more macro information about the intersection of business, technology and a little politics.

All-In Podcast - The All-In Podcast delivers conversations worth having. When the pandemic prevented four friends from convening their weekly poker game, they took to the airwaves to socialize and discuss the news of the day. What started on a whim has quickly become one of the top-ranked podcasts in the world.

Hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg, the show features insider takes on business, technology, and society and interviews with the world's most influential thinkers.

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - From space travel to longevity, there are not enough people finding solutions to humanity’s grand challenges -- let’s change that. My friends and I will share everything we know about pursuing your Moonshot and solving big challenges. Together, we will orient an entire generation to solve the world’s biggest problems.

Possible with Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger - Possible is a new podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Most of all, it asks: what if, in the future, everything breaks humanity’s way? Hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger, each episode features an interview with a visionary from a different field: climate science, media, criminal justice, and more.

Acquired by Ben Gilber and David Rosenthal - Acquired tells the stories and strategies of great companies. This one is a bit newer to me, they post monthly but go super-deep on topics and talk about the history of building great companies.

Silicon Valley Girl by Marina Mogilko - Positive about tech and how it can improve our lives. Passionate about building and creating. Immigrant, mom, entrepreneur. This pod is also newer to me but Marina has had some good guests on recently.

What did I miss?

Leave a comment below, would love to hear what learning resources you are leveraging.

Sometimes you need some help from a friend! In this case, we may have async (or autonomous) use cases where we want to listen to an enterprise event using a Logic Apps trigger and then go ahead and call an Agent hosted in Microsoft Foundry. This is where Azure Logic Apps enters the picture and enable us to orchestrate the process in Logic Apps but tap into the agentic capabilities found in Microsoft Foundry.

Here is the video..check it out.

Check out the following demo where I walk through this.

Throughout my career, I have lived and breathed the evolution of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and hyperautomation. From the early days of rules-based bots to the current era of sophisticated Chatbot integration and AI-driven decision-making, I’ve seen firsthand how these technologies can transform a business from a collection of siloed tasks into a seamless, high-velocity digital ecosystem. This blog is where I break down those complex "enterprise-grade" concepts into actionable blueprints you can use today.

Join the Community

If you prefer a more visual way to learn, I invite you to join over 5,000 other automation enthusiasts on my YouTube channel. I regularly post deep-dives, "how-to" guides, and industry updates focusing on Microsoft technologies, AI integration, and real-world automation builds. Whether you are looking to master the latest agentic workflows or want to understand the architecture behind hyperautomation, you can find me at youtube.com/kentweare.