18–22 November 2024, McCormick Place, Chicago (hybrid). Roughly 14,000 in-person, 200,000+ registrants. The conference where Microsoft reorganised its AI app platform under one umbrella and stopped pretending agents were a side project.
What we took away
- Azure AI Foundry. New umbrella platform/SDK (replacing Azure AI Studio) for building, evaluating, observing, and governing AI apps and agents. Integrates with Visual Studio and GitHub. Big inflection for German/European partners building regulated AI workloads — finally a single platform with explicit eval and observability primitives.
- Copilot Actions & Autonomous Agents in Copilot Studio (preview). First wave of agentic workflows that summarise meetings, compile reports, and act across M365 — the practical workshop of where 2025's "agentic web" stories would come from.
- Microsoft Sentinel data lake / SIEM migration tooling. Guided migrations from Splunk (and QRadar coming), MDE data flowing directly into the lake. Useful for MSSPs running EMEA SOCs that need to cut Splunk bills without losing retention.
- Windows 365 Link — new thin-client device for Cloud PCs (preview, GA April 2025) with hardware-rooted security; Windows Server 2025 GA had landed weeks earlier and was a major Ignite session focus.
- Microsoft Purview updates around DSPM for AI; Defender for Cloud AI-aware posture/runtime protection extending to Foundry workloads.
Why it mattered for us
Foundry was the we hear you moment for everyone trying to operationalise GenAI inside a regulated tenant. Sentinel-to-data-lake matters for the MSP work we do — log retention costs are the silent line item that kills a security upgrade.
"Nearly 70% of the Fortune 500 now use Microsoft 365 Copilot." — Satya Nadella, Ignite 2024 opening.
That number is the entire story of the year in one sentence.
Microsoft Ignite
Azure AI Foundry
Copilot Actions
Sentinel