From IDE Agents to Operational Systems: Building Production-Ready Agents

By now, many of you have built your own agents in Copilot or Claude. You've learned what works, what doesn't, and you're starting to see the bigger picture: what if agents could help your entire team or company move faster? An agent that automatically gathers context the moment an incident is reported. An agent that checks your work against compliance requirements before you even open a PR.

Or maybe you're already thinking further ahead: using agents for core features in your product itself.

There is, however, a real difference between an agent you call from your IDE and an agent running with minimal supervision in a production environment, connected to all your company's systems.

This session uses real agent system implementations to walk through the key architectural concepts that bridge that gap.

First, why internal productivity tooling is the ideal first step. It's a low-risk environment where you can build experience fast, because you use these systems yourself every day and can iterate quickly.

Second, how to build operational trust from there. Through good observability, structured agent evaluation, and clear guardrails, you develop the confidence to eventually apply these patterns to your core business processes.

Third, how to build your first operational agent yourself, using Microsoft Agent Framework and Azure AI Foundry, following the same engineering standards you'd apply to production customer-facing software.

You'll leave with a clear picture of where you are today, what the next step looks like, and the concrete patterns to take it.