Azure Blog, read from an operations desk

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Microsoft puts a managed agent harness into Foundry preview

Microsoft has opened a public preview of the Copilot harness in Foundry Agent Service, a managed runtime that handles the agent loop, sandbox, skills and subagents. Recovery for long-running hosted agents is now generally available. Runtime is free until December 1, 2026, then billed per vCPU-hour and GiB-hour.

What changes for operators — If you run sales, support or operations at a 10-200 person company and have a pilot agent that stalls on multi-step work, this lowers the engineering cost of keeping it running, because you stop maintaining the loop and sandbox yourself. The catch is that skills, approvals and tool permissions are still yours to define. Use the free period to test one workflow, such as a weekly account research brief, and log how many sandbox hours it uses. Any agent that writes to a CRM or helpdesk needs a check for existing records so a restart does not create duplicates, and commercial decisions should stay with a person.

Microsoft brings Foundry Local to disconnected Azure Local

If you run operations at a 10-200 person B2B company, you will probably not deploy Azure Local yourself, and nothing here changes your tooling today. It matters if your buyers are in government, critical infrastructure or regulated industries and ask where models run and who can touch the data. Microsoft is now describing a packaged route for local AI over internal documents, which could shape procurement questions and security questionnaires. Keep a short answer ready on where your automations run and what data they see.

Microsoft Foundry Adds Two Cheaper GPT-6 Tiers for Production Agents

For a company running support or ops agents on Azure, this is a direct cost lever: instead of sending every ticket-classification or data-extraction step through an expensive reasoning model, teams can now put GPT-6 Luna behind routine, high-volume steps and reserve Sol or Astra for the parts of a workflow that actually need judgment. At Global Standard short-context pricing, Luna runs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 output versus Sol's $2/$10 and Astra's $10/$50, which changes the math on cost-per-task for anyone running thousands of routine agent calls a day. The practical move is to map an existing agent workflow, identify which steps are classification/routing/summarization versus multi-step reasoning, and split the model assignment accordingly rather than defaulting to one model for everything.

Claude Opus 5.5 lands in Microsoft Foundry with cheaper tokens

For a 10-200 person B2B company running agents on Microsoft Foundry to draft reports, triage support tickets, or refactor internal tooling, the practical change is twofold: lower cache and token costs make longer agent sessions cheaper to run in production, and the model's new habit of surfacing what it did, what it found, and where it needs input reduces the amount of manual review needed before trusting an agent's output. Adaptive thinking also removes a configuration step - teams no longer need to hand-tune reasoning budgets per task, which matters for lean ops teams without dedicated AI engineers.