GPT-5.6, a new Asia-Pacific Data Zone, and production-ready hosted agents just went generally available in Microsoft Foundry. John & Ty break down exactly what shipped, what it costs, and why this is the update that finally takes agents from "great demo" to "in production".
⏱️ In this episode:
• The GPT-5.6 family — Sol, Terra & Luna — and how to match the model to the job
• Real pricing, and why routing to Luna can slash your bill
• The Asia-Pacific Data Zone and Global / Data Zone / Regional deployments
• Hosted agents GA — one runtime for any framework, VNet-isolated
• Foundry IQ, Toolboxes, Memory, Routines & Voice Live
• Publishing agents straight into Microsoft Teams & Microsoft 365 Copilot
• Govern it: tracing, evaluation, the agent optimizer & ROI for agents
• How Adobe, Telefónica and Tata Consultancy Services run this in production
🔗 Resources & links
• Announcement (Microsoft Azure Blog): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/frontier-models-and-production-agents-advancing-microsoft-foundry-for-the-agentic-era/
• Microsoft Foundry: https://ai.azure.com/
• Hosted-agent quickstart: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/foundry/agents/quickstarts/quickstart-hosted-agent?pivots=azd
• What is Foundry IQ: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/foundry/agents/concepts/what-is-foundry-iq?tabs=portal
• AI Agents for Beginners (free 12-lesson course): https://github.com/microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners