AI Agent Fundamentals with Azure AI Foundry

Intelligent AI agents are transforming how we automate tasks, moving beyond rigid rules to dynamic, reasoning-based workflows. Understanding how to design and build these autonomous systems is becoming an essential skill for modern developers and tech professionals. This text-based course guides you from foundational AI concepts to deploying your own functional agents. You will learn how to leverage Azure AI Foundry to create agents that can reason, plan, and execute tasks. What you'll learn: - Understand the core architecture of AI agents, including reactive, deliberative, and hybrid systems. - Configure agent reasoning and planning capabilities using state-of-the-art language models. - Implement Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) patterns to connect your agents to external data sources. - Design effective prompts and system instructions to guide agent behavior and decision-making. - Evaluate agent performance, accuracy, and safety using modern evaluation tools. - Deploy and integrate your AI agents into real-world application workflows. You will start with essential terminology and the conceptual frameworks of agentic AI before moving into step-by-step written explanations and code snippets for building, testing, and optimizing your agents. This course is designed for beginners and tech enthusiasts looking to enter the world of AI orchestration; no prior AI development experience is required. Start reading today to build your first autonomous AI agent.