Microsoft Corp. is rolling out a suite of new tools and services that are designed to accelerate the development and deployment of the autonomous assistants called artificial intelligence agents across its platforms. The Azure AI Foundry Agent Service is now generally available, allowing developers to build, manage, and scale AI agents that automate business processes. It supports multi-agent workflows, meaning specialized agents can collaborate on complex tasks. The service integrates with various Microsoft services and supports open protocols like Agent2Agent and Model Context Protocol, ensuring interoperability across different agent frameworks. To streamline deployment and testing, Microsoft has introduced a unified runtime that merges the Semantic Kernel SDK and AutoGen framework, enabling developers to simulate agent behavior locally before deploying to the cloud. The service also includes AgentOps, a set of monitoring and optimization tools, and allows developers to use Azure Cosmos DB for thread storage. Another major announcement is Copilot Tuning, a feature that lets businesses fine-tune Microsoft 365 Copilot using their own organizational data. This means law firms can create AI agents that generate legal documents in their house style, while consultancies can build Q&A agents based on their regulatory expertise. The feature will be available in June through the Copilot Tuning Program, but only for organizations with at least 5,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses. Microsoft is also previewing new developer tools for Microsoft Teams, including secure peer-to-peer communication via the A2A protocol, agent memory for contextual user experiences, and improved development environments for JavaScript and C#.