What You Should Know About Azure AI Studio

Microsoft Azure AI Studio home screen. Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-studio/media/explore/ai-studio-home.png

With the spotlight currently on Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Studio, I thought it would be important to make you aware of another AI studio – Azure AI Studio. You may or may not have heard of it, but, according to Microsoft, Azure AI Studio is “your platform for developing generative AI solutions and custom copilots.”

If this sounds like a similar definition to Copilot Studio, you aren’t alone. That’s why this post will help you know the difference, understand the pros and cons, learn about the costs, and help you decide which option is best for your needs.

The Pros and Cons of Azure AI Studio, Copilot Studio

Alright, let’s dig in. First, let’s start with the pros:

Azure AI Studio is a hub that provides developers and AI engineers with a centralized place to explore all the Azure AI services. It allows users to test, deploy, and evaluate pre-trained large language models (LLMs) available in a catalog and build innovative solutions with them. It also provides greater control over the LLM used by the copilot, including the ability to evaluate and compare different model versions and design the model prompts.
Copilot Studio, on the other hand, gives businesses more control over their AI experience. It provides access to a broader range of applications, with over 1,000 pre-built connectors for tools like SAP and Workday. It includes access to conversational capabilities and solutions, from custom GPTs to generative AI plugins and beyond.

Okay, now for the cons:

Azure AI Studio might be overwhelming for beginners who are not familiar with the Azure OpenAI service or the OpenAI playground and might require more time and effort to learn and use it effectively.
Copilot Studio might not provide as much control over the LLM used by the copilot as Azure AI Studio does and might not be as suitable for developers who prefer a more code-heavy and extensible option.

So, what does this mean? Let’s take this a bit further and ask a question that I stumbled upon recently in a LinkedIn post from Doug Ware. He posed, “Why would I choose to start in Copilot Studio instead of Azure AI Studio?” To which he responded, “The only answers I have are:

A Copilot connected to Azure Open AI costs more because you pay for the service separately
You have access to Microsoft 365, but not to Azure Open AI”

The reason for bringing this up is that for you to get started with Azure AI Studio, you need to be sure it’s the right tool to use in the first place. As part of this consideration, Doug shared another tidbit, “You can start in Azure AI Studio, publish to Copilot Studio, and extend from there which opens the door to a wide range of options with Power Platform.”

What Is Azure AI Studio?

Now that you know more about Azure AI Studio at a high level, let’s look at the capabilities and cost.

Capabilities

Azure AI Studio comes with a full set of capabilities such as speech analysis, the ability to create your own copilot, enterprise chat, and multi-modality. Further, you can build what you need on top of existing large AI models from Microsoft (Azure OpenAI), OpenAI, Meta, Hugging Face, and Databricks.

As you build your custom solutions, you can incorporate specific AI capabilities tailored to what you need. Speech, Vision, and Language are all built on Microsoft Responsible AI principles.

Price/Cost

Price/cost is a big consideration for a company of any size looking to utilize Azure AI Studio. This is why I’m starting with this instead of the functionality. Further, as I was digging into this, I found that there are several things to factor into when considering the costs.

There are Azure Services that have different purposes and pricing. Below are the costs I found and brought them together in a single location from Microsoft’s various sites.