The enterprise platform for AI — inside your Azure environment.
Azure AI Foundry unifies thousands of models, Azure AI Agent Service, fine-tuning and enterprise governance in a single platform — with Swiss data residency.
Formerly Azure AI Studio. Now Azure AI Foundry — rebuilt from the ground up for the agentic era.
More than a model marketplace.
Azure AI Foundry (formerly Azure AI Studio) is Microsoft's central platform for building enterprise AI. It unifies the model catalogue, Azure AI Agent Service, Prompt Flow for orchestration, fine-tuning infrastructure and integrated safety tools.
Everything runs in your Azure tenant — with the security, compliance and governance tools that Swiss enterprises and the public sector require.
Everything in one platform.
Model catalogue
Access thousands of models — OpenAI GPT-4o, Meta Llama, Mistral, Phi-4, Cohere and more. Compare, evaluate and deploy directly.
Azure AI Agent Service
Autonomous agents that call tools, process files and execute multi-step tasks inside your Azure environment — with full governance.
Fine-tuning & evaluation
Fine-tune custom models on your own data. Automated evaluation with quality, safety and relevance metrics.
Prompt Flow
Visual low-code designer for LLM orchestration pipelines. Versioned, testable, deployable directly to Azure.
Safety & responsible AI
Content filters, groundedness detection, jailbreak protection and red-teaming tools built right into the platform.
Monitoring & observability
Real-time metrics for latency, cost, error rates and content safety across all deployed models.
What Swiss enterprises build with it.
Enterprise chatbots
- Internal knowledge management
- Customer self-service
- HR & IT helpdesk
- Multilingual support DE/FR/IT/EN
Document intelligence
- Contract review & analysis
- Invoice processing
- Compliance documentation
- Automatic summarisation
Code generation
- Internal dev assistants
- API documentation
- Code review automation
- Test generation
Data analysis & insights
- Natural language BI queries
- Anomaly detection
- Forecast narratives
- Report automation
We build your AI stack on Azure AI Foundry.
Foundry onboarding
We set up your Azure AI Foundry environment: hubs, projects, permissions, model deployments and network policies.
Build agents & pipelines
We build agents with Azure AI Agent Service and Prompt Flow — from specification to production deployment.
Fine-tuning projects
Prepare data, select base model, fine-tune, evaluate and deploy into your Azure infrastructure.
Governance & compliance
Content policy setup, audit logging, private endpoints, FADP/GDPR-compliant configuration for Swiss enterprises.
Azure AI Foundry — now also local.
Foundry Local brings the Azure AI Foundry infrastructure to your own machine — with the same models, the same API and the same developer experience as in the cloud.
Microsoft Docs →Local inference
Models like Phi-4, Llama 3.3 and Mistral run directly on your device — GPU, NPU or CPU.
Same API as the cloud
OpenAI-compatible endpoint: no code changes needed. Switch between local and Azure in one config line.
Hardware acceleration
DirectML (Windows), Metal (Mac) and CUDA (Linux/NVIDIA) — automatically detected and used.
Offline & air-gapped
Ideal for development environments without internet access, strictly regulated networks and privacy prototyping.
CNEXT recommends Foundry Local for development & prototyping and Azure AI Foundry Cloud for production and high-volume workloads.
Swiss compliance
Azure AI Foundry meets the strictest Swiss and European data protection requirements.
Data processing in Swiss/EU Azure datacentres (Switzerland North, West Europe)
Private endpoints — no traffic over the public internet
Azure Active Directory & RBAC for granular permissions
Full Purview integration for data catalogue and governance
Swiss FADP and GDPR-compliant with clear data processing agreements
ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, CSA STAR through Azure certifications
Azure Foundry + OpenClaw + Copilot Studio
Combine Azure AI Foundry with our OpenClaw agents and Copilot Studio for complete enterprise AI architectures.
Abacus Copilot — Foundry agent for Abacus ERP
A real-world example of Foundry Agent Service: HR and payroll mutations by conversation — with human-in-the-loop approval.
Ollama — open-source LLMs fully local
When Foundry Local isn't enough: Ollama brings Llama, Mistral & more to your own server infrastructure — without any Microsoft dependency.
What is Azure AI Foundry (formerly Azure OpenAI Service)?
Azure AI Foundry (formerly Azure OpenAI Service) is Microsoft's enterprise AI platform on Azure – with OpenAI models (GPT-4o, o3, DALL-E), Microsoft's own models, and models from Anthropic, Meta and Mistral. CNEXT implements Azure AI Foundry for Swiss organisations seeking to use OpenAI models with Swiss data residency, enterprise security and Microsoft support.
Azure region in Zurich – Azure AI Foundry with Swiss data residency for nDSG-compliant enterprise AI deployments
Microsoft AzureSLA uptime for Azure AI Foundry – with enterprise support and SLA directly from Microsoft
Microsoft Azure SLAmodels in Azure AI Foundry: GPT-4o, o3, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Llama 3, Mistral and many more frontier models
Microsoft Azure“Azure AI Foundry is the right platform for Swiss organisations wanting to use OpenAI models in a privacy-compliant way. With Swiss data residency in Zurich, Microsoft SLA and enterprise support, it clearly outperforms direct OpenAI API access.”
Marcel Haas— CEO & Solution Architect, CNEXT
Last updated: July 2026
Ready for Azure AI Foundry?
We guide you from the first hub setup to a production AI solution — securely inside your Azure environment.