Build AI agents using Claude in Microsoft Foundry

1. SPSpeaker0:00

   [on-hold music] Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Um, thank you for joining us in this session today. Um, my name is Marlene Mhangami, and I am a senior developer advocate at Microsoft. And I'm joined today as well by two of my colleagues, uh, Liam Hampton, who's also from Microsoft, and Chris Snoering, who I'm not sure where Chris is. [laughs] He's probably around the room somewhere. And today, we are going to be building AI agents using Claude in Microsoft Foundry. And the approach that we're taking today is super practical. So we're not just gonna be talking about what AI agents are, but we're actually gonna be building them using Claude models in Foundry. So we'll take a look at what that looks like in a second. I'm just gonna move through my slides. So one of the things I'm gonna point out is that in this session today, by the end of the session, you're going to have deployed Claude models in Microsoft Foundry. You're also going to plug that model into an agent, and finally, you'll give that agent tools as well. So just to get started before we start the workshop, some things to point out in terms of some of the changes we're seeing in the industry right now. You probably have noticed that over time or over the past few years especially, we've really seen the, the industry moving away from just single-turn AI conversations where you're just talking to an AI and it's giving you a response. And now we're actually building agentic systems where our agents can plan, um, they can reason, and they can take action on our behalf over time. And there's three specific things that are new challenges that come with these agentic systems. The first thing is that the models need to be able to handle multi-step reasoning over long context. And the second thing is the systems need to be reliable, especially when you're working with enterprises. They need to be, be reliable. They need to have observability built in, and they also need to be secure. And then the third thing is that, uh, as developers are building out their agents, they need to be able to connect to different tools and external systems, uh, data sources as well, to bring that information in for their agent. And this next wave of AI actually makes it so that even though we love the Claude models, and I think the models are getting better every day, you can't just rely on the models getting better. We also need systems to be able to actually have those models with that intelligence executed. So, um, this is exactly where we believe this partnership between Microsoft and Claude comes into play. So we... What is Microsoft Foundry? How many of you have actually used Foundry before or are Microsoft users? Okay, great. That's a decent amount. That's, that's a really good number. And for those of you who are new to Foundry, Microsoft Foundry is our unified platform for building AI applications and agents at scale. So you can work in the tools that you want with Foundry, whether you're using things like GitHub, Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio itself, or Copilot Studio. You can u- work wherever you would like. And, um, at the core in Foundry, we have several different products that we offer. The first is Foundry models like Claude. The second is we have something called Agent Service. We also have tools and integrations. And then we also offer some different machine learning services, things like fine-tuning, that you can access through the platform. Now, we support over 1,400 built-in connectors and MCP tools, so your agents can take real action in the real world. So you can use things like you can build agents that have access to SAP or ServiceNow and, and different things like that, so you can work, um, on real systems. And our agents-- or we believe that agents that are built on Foundry come with some enterprise-ready features. So you'll have built-in security. You have built-in observability, um, governance features as well. And then we also have integrations with Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Purview, and Entra ID, so you're not working with .env files all the time. So we really focus on security as well. We do believe that actually when you use Microsoft Foundry, this is us moving from just building prototypes or being empowered to build prototypes and actually deploying those agents into production, um, enterprise environments. So why exactly should developers use Claude in Foundry? Uh, there are a couple of different advantages of doing this. There are four things that we think developers love about this combination. The first thing is best-in-class reasoning for agents. You are here at a Claude Code Conference, so I'm assuming you like the Opus or the Claude models. Opus 4.7 is my current daily driver, so I'm a big fan. And we've really seen that a lot of developers love these models. They are excellent at planning and working with long context over time and understanding that context, which is critical for agents. We also see that when you're using Foundry, you're not just getting the model itselfYou are also going to have the ability to create agents in the platform, orchestrate those agents, and then, um, give those agents access to the tools that we saw early on. And then, like I mentioned, you have enterprise features that come out of the box, so you get to actually get security compliance and so on like we talked about. And then we have this faster development to production cycle. So we have a number of different tools that we offer, including built-in de- evaluation tools, observability, monitoring tools, integrations that can take your agent from that prototype and deploy it into production. So instead of building out your own platform from scratch, with Microsoft Foundry, you get all of these p- pre-built and you're able to, uh, scale your applications. Great. So now that we kind of have an idea of what Foundry and Claude offer together, we are going to go straight into the workshop. So I really encourage you to work alongside with us. So if you have a laptop, go ahead and navigate... We're gonna switch over to the workshop screen now, so my laptop. And you can go ahead and navigate to this website here. We have cupcakes in the beginning here. And so if you go through the workshop with us, you will get a cupcake. So we are bribing you to also do the workshop [laughs] with us. Um, but don't worry if you, [laughs] if you would prefer just to watch, you can. But if you have your laptop, go ahead and navigate to this page, uh, that website, and it will open up the workshop page for you to take a look at us- uh, at the workshop with us. Um, I will give you just a couple of minutes to do that. It's aka.ms/claude workshop for the link we are gonna get started on. And once you take this, so we can go ahead and copy this website. I already have it open, but once you copy it, you should see a screen coming up that looks like this. And if you're on that screen, just click the Launch button and it will launch this environment for you. So this environment is going to start preparing, um, to load our content, and it already has loaded, and you should find yourself on this screen. So we, like I mentioned, are gonna be building out an agent with, uh, AI Foundry- with Microsoft Foundry and Claude. And you can go through... I will mention several things. The first thing is that if you feel pretty confident, um, and you are a self-paced person and you like going ahead, you should be able to just go through the instructions and click Next, and it will have the instructions as you go along. So you can actually do this workshop at your own speed and go quickly if you'd prefer going on your own. But I'm also gonna walk you through step-by-step each of the steps. And if you get any problems throughout the workshop, uh, my colleagues are here and we're here to help you if you have any issues. So the first thing I will mention before I start reading is you can-- we're using an environment called Skillable, and two, you don't have to type things in. If I click on a, uh, an input, uh, box and I click on the Skillable part here, it's going to immediately fill out that box for me. So wherever you're, you would like something filled in, if you see this green box, you can just click it and it will automatically fill in that box for you so you don't have to type things out by hand, um, all the time. So Skillable is gonna open this virtual machine for you, and we'll be doing the workshop here. And we have an introduction to what we're doing. Welcome to Sparkles, which is the friendliest cupcake shop on the internet, and Sparkles has a big problem. We have the most bakery... We have a, a big problem where most bakeries would love to have this problem, where we have too many customers and too many flavors and not enough hands behind the counter. And so we're gonna build today an AI agent that's going to help the Sparkles team be able to handle all of the, the, the incoming traffic from people wanting to get cupcakes. So the first thing you're gonna do is you're gonna start by navigating to the browser. So you can click in, uh, after you've signed in, and it's going to launch the browser for you. And when you open-- click the browser, it is going to open up on the Foundry page. And you can... When you get to this page, just click on the Sign Up button. And if you scroll down... Oh, we're gonna switch over to the next tab. You can go ahead and where it says Sign in with the username details, I'm just gonna click on that, and it's gonna fill in the username for me. So I'm now on the second page, and then I scrolled down. You... Once you click on the Edge, um, icon, it's going to open Foundry immediately. You navigate there, and then I clicked on the username to fill that out, and I'm gonna press Next. I'm gonna fill in the password so I can go ahead and sign in. Uh, all of these instructions, again, are there, so if you wanna go quickly, you are welcome to do that. So this is Microsoft Foundry. This is what it looks like. I love purple, so I'm a big fan of the design. But once you have Foundry, uh, opened up, you can click on the project that, uh, comes up. So this is the project here. And we can go ahead and click on that project, and that's going to open us, for us, um, this project space here, and we should be able to click on that, I believe.Oh, wait, actually, let's go back. [laughs] And let's click on the Start building page instead. So when we click on the Start building page, it should take us here, and then we can click on this toggle that says Build. And when we get to that Build toggle, we have some boxes here on this side, and those boxes say Models. So we're gonna click on that. And so I clicked on the Build button, and then I clicked on this Models button to the side, and it brought up this page for me. Now, when I'm on this page, this shows me which models are available for me to use. So you'll see that you already have Claude Sonnet 4.6 and when I click on this model here, it's going to open a playground environment for me in Foundry. And this playground environment allows me to be able to chat with the model. These are some custom instructions. So the custom instructions on this side are saying, "You are an AI assistant that helps people find information," and I can chat with the model here. So once we finish this step, you can switch on... You can switch to this page here, and it's gonna give you some information. So here in the Foundry environment, this is a great place to experiment with the model and see and compare different models to see which ones you like and how they perform with different system prompts. So in our instructions we-- So we can just say here, "Hello," uh, to the model. "Hello, who are you?" And it's going to respond and say, "Hello, I'm Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic." So it's working as expected. But again, we can switch out that system prompt if we want to try... Oh. If we want to try different system prompts, we have to click here. I'm gonna delete the current ones, and then I'm gonna click this green button for it to fill. And our new system prompt is that I'm a-- you are a sentient cupcake. Answer every question with frosting-related puns. So we will say, "What do you think..." Let's say, "What do you think of Claude?" And hopefully it's gonna give us an answer. It's saying... What is it saying here? It's saying, "I think Claude is simply frosting with potential. You could say they're icing-- be the icing on the cake when it comes to AI assistance." Wow. Who would have expected? Maybe we should ask what they think of GPT. I'm joking. I'm joking. Wrong conference. [laughs] Anyway, yeah. But there's lots of different questions that you can test out and different system prompts, and I think the playground is a fantastic way for us to do that. So this is one way, uh, or interface that we can use to be able to try out our models and decide, uh, you know... Obviously, you can, you can test out more serious prompts and, uh, different features with it here. So once you are done with this step, with this, uh, testing out in the playground, we can move on to part three where we want to actually take the model that we have in the Foundry environment and actually bring it into our development environment, so into our IDE. So we have VS Code already installed here, and like the instructions say, in Foundry, we can click on the Details tab here. And when we click on the Details tab, the main thing we want to grab is this URI, our target URI. And so once we have this, we wanna get the target URI, and we wanna get the API keys. Um, and once we have that, we are going to go a-ahead, and we're gonna open up VS Code. And when we open up VS Code, it's going to come with some pre-built files already, uh, available for us to use. So the main thing we're going to start by editing is our .env file. So here, this is a little bit tricky, is that we want to make sure that we update the endpoint. So if we go here, I'm just making it so that you can see. We wanna, uh, paste in that endpoint that we have, and we wanna remove, at the end it says v1 messages, and that's not going to work. We have to remove the v1 messages part, and the endpoint should end with Anthropic. So this is what we want it to look like. There's a note for us as well, um, in here about what it should look like. So it should end like that. And I'm gonna go back as well, and I'm gonna grab my API key. Ideally, I would not be pasting it so you can see on stage, but it's okay for today. Uh, we pa-paste the API key in here, and it's already seeing that Claude Sonnet 4.6 is our model. So now when we have these three environment variables, we're ready to start testing our agent locally. Um, and when we s- we're here, we will open up the agent.py file, which is where we're going to test. So I'm now going to try to expand my VS Code.And hopefully you will have finished this step and already completed the ENV file. So, the next step is that we want to build out our agent for helping with the cupcake store, and we are going to be using Microsoft Agent Framework. And this is a Pyth-- it's available in Python, and I think it might be available in TypeScript as well. But this is a framework that is also built by Microsoft. It's open source, um, for you to use, and it's a great way for you to get started with building agents. So the main thing that we want to do is there's a number of different dependencies if you would like, you can find those. The-- There's an SDK to be able to install this, but you can read a little bit more about this. Um, I would say you wanna also make sure that the terminal is open. But we're just gonna move on to the next step, where we copy here this, uh, block of code. We're gonna paste that block of code in, and this is going to be all of the code that we need to run our Sparkles agent with Agent Framework. So we're importing, um, our agent, and then we're going to initiate the client here. So this is what the chat client looks like, and it's going to detect which environment variables we put into the .env file so that it can use them. So we have the deployment, the key, and the endpoint that we set as well. And then we're going to, uh, define the agent here in our Python code, and we're calling the agent a cupcake agent. So now, when we want to run this, there should be a command for us to be able to type. So we can copy this command here, paste it in our terminal, and when we run it, it should start our agent for us. So this is just Python code that's going to start a, a terminal here. So we can greet our agent and say, "Hello," to the agent, and it should be ready to start saying, "Hi, how are you? Is there something I can help you with today?" So this is just a basic sort of hello world to Microsoft Agent Framework. Now, once you are feeling comfortable with this... Again, if you would like to spend more time reading about Microsoft Agent Framework, you can go a little bit slower if you would like as well. But the next step here is that we want to connect to the cupcake-store MCP server. So for those of you, uh, we've probably heard about... How many of us have heard about MCP before? It's an Anthropic conference, I am assuming most of us have. But MCP is Model Context Protocol, and this is an open standard for letting AI agents talk to external systems. So an MCP server is going to, uh, when we publish this, this is going to allow us to access a different set-- a, a number of different set of tools, which can be functions the agent can call. It's also gonna allow us to access prompts, which are just going to be reusable instruction snippets that we can plug into the agent as well. And then it's also going to let us access resources, which are, uh, data that can be sent over HTTP and in a specific way that your agent will expect. So with MCP, one of the nice things is that you just need a URL, and you can plug it in, and you get, like, a-- the full API, uh, available in a format that's easy for your agents to read. Uh, there's obviously some thoughts that people have about how MCP sort of handles context, but there's also a number of ways that you can handle that with context engineering as well. So here, the first thing that we are going to do is we're gonna pull down the terminal, and I'm gonna delete everything that's currently in the terminal. And instead, I want to replace it with what's in this new code block. And in this code block, you'll see that we've connected to this MCP server, which is our cupcake-store MCP server. And this will have all of the information from our store about, you know, how many cupcakes are available, what flavors are available as well. And all of this, you get through this URL that you can connect to. So once we have the MCP server in the code, we, uh, we provide it to the agent as a tool, so the agent will be able to access the information that's available through that server. So in our example here, um, I'm just going to close and restart the agent. So just Control + C, or we can just type in "Exit." Oh, what just happened here? I think I pressed Control + C, uh, and... Okay. And we can run the same command that we did earlier to get our agent going. But this time, it will have the information from our cupcake store because of the MCP server that we connected it to earlier. So here we're asking-- we wanna ask the agent: "What flavors do you have today?" And I'm not sure if it's going to... I hope I updated, so it has the correct flavors. But I think it says, "I think there might be some confusion. I'm still [laughs] an AI assistant." Uh, oh, it's because I did not save the file. You see, and this is where-- this is a good example of why it needs the MCP server because it needs to have that context available for it to be able to know which flavors are available. So we're gonna save the file, and we are gonna rerun the agent, and we're gonna ask it that question again to see which cupcake flavors we have available today. So we're gonna ask the agent: "What flavors do you have today?"And it should let us know what they are. Okay. So it lets us know it has... We have classic today actually available in the front [laughs] . We have classic vanilla, we have lemon sponge, we have red velvet, and we also have chocolate flavor as well for, um, the flavors that are available. So these are... This is just a basic overview of how to connect to an MCP server, and in our case, the, uh, cupcake server as well. So then the third step here is that we want to load instructions and a welcome banner, um, from MCP. So the agent is... We want it to have a specific persona, and we also want the agent to greet us in a specific way, and we can do that by making the... updating the system prompt to make sure that it, uh, works in a specific way. So again, what we can do is just copy this code, and I'm gonna paste it through. Oh. And you will see that we have got some instructions that we're pulling in from the AC-- uh, the MCP server. So we're actually getting a prompt, which is already available through the MCP server, um, which is gonna have some agent instructions. And we also have the specific welcome banner that we're getting, as well as a prompt. So this is how... Prompts are reusable, so this is a great way to, uh, simplify workflows if you're, if you're going to have people build with your project, for example. So again, to get this to work, all we need to do... Oh. All we need to do is run the same command. Uh, I don't know if I pressed Exit. Ah, I did not press Exit. Let's clear that, and let's rerun the agent. And when we do, we should now see it have a custom banner because we got that from the MCP server as a prompt to tell it, "This is how you should introduce yourself." And then it's also going to know that this is how I should respond to the user or interact with the user. So it's saying, "Hi there. Happy to help you order a cupcake today. First, do you already have a custom- a customer ID, or do you want to order a new one? Enter an existing ID." So if you have gotten to this stage, we are almost at the stage where we can order a cupcake, and we have more instructions here on what to do. So we can try it. We can answer the question. I don't actually have a- an ID, but I can create... say I want the agent to create a new ID for me, so I'm saying, "Create one." And these instructions, and the agent is saying, "Great. What's your first name?" I'll say Marlene is my first name. Uh, the agent is saying, "What's my last name?" I'll say my last name. And then, "What city are we in?" London is the city we are in. Okay. And great. It's saying, "You're perfect. Let me register you. Let me get you registered now. You're all set, Marlene. Your customer ID is this number here. Please write that down." I'm just gonna copy it, "And you'll need it if you want to order again in the future. Let's pick a cupcake." So whatever flavor you'd like. I like red velvet, so I am gonna go with number four. And when I enter that number... Again, all of this is coming from the MCP server 'cause it has those custom instructions and custom prompts. And it says, "Red velvet is a good choice. Could you look at the big dashboard at the front of the room and read the six, uh, character voucher?" So once I've gotten to this stage, I now will be able to see the vouchers available to me or, you know, I can, I can see... We just have... This is going to refresh every few minutes, every minute or so, I think. Um, oh. Yeah. And it's mainly just so we don't get overwhelmed by cupcake [laughs] orders. But once you do, you put in the voucher that you see on the screen. Uh... Oh, I, I pasted in a customer ID. Ah. Oh, okay. People have already ordered. I will serve you later. But once you put that in, the agent is going to put your name here. And you can... It should first start in this page. Wow, so many people. I'm amazed by how many people have already ordered. And so we're preparing your order. Once your order is done, it's going to appear here, and then you can come to the front to collect your cupcake. So again, I'm not gonna change back to order mine because I want the voucher to be on the screen. But basically, you paste in the voucher, and then once your name appears, then you are ready to go with the order. I think... Do we have to... Liam? Yes. I think... Do we have to approve the orders that are being prepared from the dash? Yeah. Okay. Okay. So then Liam at the front here is going to start to approve some of these orders. Ken B. is the first order, I think. I'm not sure if Kat was the first order. But these should then show on the Ready for Pickup part.And this is just an introduction. We wanted to create something that was fun, and again, an introduction to how to use Foundry. Again, we're using the Claude models that are available. We're using Sonnet for this workshop. And then, um, we are plugging that into Foundry. I see Nick has gone to the test feed, um, Nick N., but you can o- you can actually order a real cupcake. You, you don't need to test. It's fine to test as well, but a real cupcake is also allowed as well. [laughs] Um, we should have... I'm gonna take a second just to double-check. I think we have got it working now, and if you see your name on the Pickup Ready, you can come to chat to Liam and Chris, and they will have the cupcake ready for you. Yay. [clapping] Uh, Renato, Chris K., Simon Y., Isa K., Terry O., Vicky, and Cat, your cupcakes are ready at the front. [laughs] Nick N. is still stuck in the test feed. You gotta make it over to the main feed. [laughs] Okay. I should have a link, just to mention, we will have, like, the full workshop available and the code for this. Um, so afterwards, if you wanted to try it at home or if you had any questions, you can feel free to, um, try it out on your own later. And we'll be around, uh, for the rest of the day and throughout the workshop, so if you wanted to chat to us and ask us questions about Foundry, you can also go ahead and, and take... Actually, if anyone has questions now, you can also ask. Let me know. Um, and yeah, other than that, that's pretty much our workshop for today. Um, yeah. [clapping] Thanks, everyone. I'll let the names keep going on the screen. I do think we had one more slide at the end to show. If we can switch maybe to... Barisi, Tom C., Ian as well can collect... Oh, no, those are preparing. But Damian, James, Tom, Dima, Chris, you can all come and grab your cupcakes. Ah, perfect. Yes. We have a final slide, um, just to reiterate some of the points and to also say a couple of things to work on in the future. And if you want to keep working with, um, Microsoft and Foundry, go ahead and, uh, Bing search [laughs] Microsoft Foundry, and it should come up, and you can go ahead and ex- experiment with it. We have free Azure credit, so you can try. Review the documentation. We have pretty good documentation, um, on Foundry docs there. And you can also go ahead and take some of our free courses. We have some courses available through Microsoft Learn. Um, if you go to this link, those courses will be available for you to try. Um, I think there's also some of the code that will be available there too. All right. I think that is it for the workshop today. I'm gonna switch back to my local machine so you can see the orders in case. Perfect. Um, yeah. Thanks for joining us, everyone. [outro music]

Episode duration: 34:16