Microsoft Foundry Agent Service Build 2026 Guide: Hosted Agents, Memory, Toolboxes, Evaluations, and Governance
Microsoft Foundry Agent Service Build 2026 is Microsoft’s production platform for running AI agents with managed hosting, memory, tool access, evaluations, and governance. The practical shift is that teams can keep their preferred agent framework while moving runtime, identity, observability, and policy controls into a managed Azure control plane. What Did Microsoft Announce for Foundry Agent Service at Build 2026? Microsoft Foundry Agent Service Build 2026 is a set of production agent capabilities around hosted runtimes, Toolboxes, managed Memory, Foundry IQ, evaluations, and governance controls. Microsoft positioned the service as the operating layer for enterprise agents, while Gartner predicts 40% of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025. The important developer news is not a single model endpoint. It is the packaging of agent execution, identity, lifecycle management, tool calling, long-term context, tracing, evaluation, and compliance into one managed service. Hosted agents let teams bring code from Microsoft Agent Framework, LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, Anthropic Agent SDK, GitHub Copilot SDK, or custom runtimes. Toolboxes and Memory move common platform concerns out of each application. The takeaway: Build 2026 made Foundry Agent Service look less like a demo builder and more like infrastructure for operating agents repeatedly. ...
