Microsoft's AI Agents for Beginners is a free course on Microsoft Learn teaching how to build AI agents using Azure AI and Microsoft tools. You learn agent architectures, planning, tool use, and deployment. The course is free on GitHub and the Microsoft Learn platform. After finishing, you understand how AI agents work and can build agents using Microsoft's ecosystem. The main limitation: this course is Azure-centric. If you work with AWS or GCP, some patterns transfer but the tools differ.
Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI and is embedding AI agents across their product suite, making Azure AI skills increasingly valuable (source: Microsoft investor reports).
About This Course
Microsoft's open-source 11-lesson course on building AI agents. Covers agentic design patterns, tool use, RAG, multi-agent workflows, and production deployment. Hands-on with code samples in every lesson.
Course Details
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this course free?
Yes, completely free on GitHub and Microsoft Learn.
Do I need Azure experience?
Helpful but not required. The course guides you through Azure setup.
Is this for beginners or experienced developers?
Intermediate developers. Some programming experience is assumed, but agent experience is not.
What tools does it use?
Azure OpenAI Service, Semantic Kernel, and AutoGen.
After this, what should I build?
An agent that solves a real problem in your work: automate a research task, build a customer support bot, or create a code assistant.
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