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ZDnet’s most important take -away restaurants
- Microsoft Marketplace offers more than 3,000 AI apps and agents.
- It is a merger of Azure Marketplace and AppSource.
- The idea is to make it easier for companies to shop for AI tools.
Microsoft goes in the AI dealer industry.
On Thursday, the company announced the launch of Van Microsoft MarketplaceA virtual shopping center built on Microsoft Cloud where companies can shop for cloud services, as well as more than 3,000 AI apps and agents.
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“Microsoft Marketplace gives you access to thousands of AI apps and agents from our rich partner ecosystem that is designed to automate tasks, speed up decision-making and to unlock value in your company,” wrote Alysa Taylor, Chief Marketing Officer at Microsoft’s Commercial Cloud and AI Division, in a company Blog post.
The new marketplace is a merger of Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace, which was launched in 2014 as an online directory for cloud services, and Microsoft AppSource, which made his debut two years later as a virtual marketplace for business apps. It is now available in the US and, according to the Taylor blog post, will soon be available in more global markets.
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Although Microsoft wants to become a trusted provider of AI services for his huge customer base of Cloud Services, it works at the same time to expand his AI offers via Copilot through a partnership with Anthropic. It is too Reportedly Building a friendly marketplace in the first place where publishers can sell their content to give a permit for use by Copilot and ultimately other AI products.
Finding the AI -ranking in the haystack
The core idea behind Microsoft Marketplace is the streamlining of shopping and implementing AI solutions for company customers at a time when new AI-driven apps and agents are expanding with a lightning speed.
All apps and agents now offered via the market are compatible with Microsoft Cloud, which means that every company that is already dependent on the Microsoft cloud computing services can quickly and easily integrate the new tools in their workflow on platforms such as Azure, Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Security.
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This also means that customers who use the new marketplace do not have to worry about cyber security risks that the onboarding of a new AI tool could otherwise wear it differently.
“By integrating Market Place directly into the Microsoft Cloud, it is equipped with management and control tools that make both innovation and governance possible,” Taylor wrote. “When you acquire a Copilot agent or an app on Azure from Microsoft Marketplace, it will be provided and distributed to team members who are tailored to your safety and administrative standards.”
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Microsoft is not the only company that bets that it can benefit by serving as an intermediary between AI developers and companies who want to make the technology on board (and that may also be a bit stunned by the enormous variety of new apps and agents that are available).
Amazon Web Services has recently launched its own virtual marketplace with which customers can shop for agents from developers such as Anthropic, IBM and Perplexity. Software company Crowdstrike and Meta have also developed a series of benchmarks that are intended to help companies search a growing selection of AI-driven cyber security tools.
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