Agentic AI is moving quickly from demo-driven novelty to a practical application architecture. In this session, I will show how to design and build real AI agents with Microsoft Foundry Agent Service, focusing on the pieces that matter in production including tool execution, memory, grounding, orchestration, approvals, and observability.

Rather than treating agents like fancy chatbots, we will model them as software systems with explicit responsibilities, secure tool access, and clear operational boundaries. Attendees will see how .NET services, enterprise APIs, and Azure-hosted components can be exposed to agents in a way that is useful, governable, and maintainable.