Building AI Agents with Azure AI Foundry and Python SDK

Modern AI applications are rapidly moving from simple text prompts to autonomous, multi-step agents that can reason, run code, and query external tools. This comprehensive text-based guide walks you through the core concepts and practical workflows needed to build, configure, and orchestrate intelligent agents using Azure AI Foundry and its Python SDK. You will gain the practical understanding needed to connect language models with enterprise data sources, define custom tools, manage stateful agent threads, and implement robust retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures. What you'll learn: - Understand core agent concepts, terminology, and architecture patterns within AI Foundry - Configure the Python SDK environment to authenticate and interact with Azure AI services - Build autonomous agents capable of calling functions, executing code, and running multi-step tasks - Implement retrieval-augmented generation patterns using vector search and grounded knowledge stores - Manage conversation state, message threads, and execution runs reliably in Python - Apply evaluation metrics, guardrails, and tracing to monitor agent safety and performance The course begins with foundational terminology, environment configuration, and API basics before guiding you through hands-on code examples that demonstrate practical agent implementation and deployment workflows. This course is designed for Python developers, software engineers, and data professionals who are new to building agentic AI workflows. No prior cloud AI experience is required. Start reading today to build and deploy your own production-ready AI agents.