Stanford's Use Of Microsoft Agentic Platform Leads To Better Analysis
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In the era of genetic AI, we're spending a lot of time looking at connective technologies. That means developing processes and pipelines that will connect the dots, and keep things moving in end-to-end deployment of multiple AI agents collaborating on a given project.
When you start to research why agentic AI is such a big deal, you realize that it has to do with what they used to call 'ensemble learning' in traditional ML. It's the idea that instead of one big neural network 'brain,' there are multiple smaller AIs, and each one has a job to do in providing an overall result. One of the simplest versions is a generative adversarial system, where some AIs generate things, and other AIs analyze them.
But today these systems are a lot more sophisticated, and the support technologies and tools have to be sophisticated, too.
Microsoft is pioneering this sort of work with Azure AI Foundry, which is just now becoming part of the nomenclature of today's AI world.
The essential idea of Azure AI Foundry is that it combines three key pieces of the pipeline for multi-agent collaboration.
That's a code environment, a collaboration environment, and a cloud service for hosting.
In Microsoft's case, that is provided by the connection between Microsoft Visual Studio (an IDE), GitHub as a collaboration center, and Microsoft Azure for cloud.
This setup allows over 70,000 customers to process 100 trillion tokens and generate billions of daily search queries, according to Microsoft's stats.
Microsoft shows how features like agentic retrieval, always-on observability and trust features help make this platform what it is.
One of the biggest feathers in Microsoft's cap here is its collaboration with Stanford in developing agent orchestration for tumor management.
This agent orchestration system helps clinicians to evaluate medical imaging, seek out clinical trials, and build personal timelines for patients.
When you read about the project, you learn that only one percent of patients currently have these personalized plans, which are known to promote better results in oncology.
Reporting on Stanford's use of the Azure AI Foundry agent system shows how it takes many hours of clinical work out of the equation, and automates the process of using electronic health record data to save lives.
Developers can also fine-tune models and test them, while targeting agents to their tasks. Hyperliterate users can find out more by looking in the Azure AI Foundry Agent Catalog here.
With this process, clinical tumor review boards save time identifying a patient's situation and coming up with actionable results.
'Stanford Medicine sees 4,000 tumor board patients a year, and our clinicians are already using foundation model generated summaries in tumor board meetings today,' says Stanford School of Medicine Chief Information Officer Dr. Mike Pfeffer. 'The new healthcare agent orchestrator has the power to streamline this existing workflow by reducing fragmentation … and enables surfacing new insights from data elements that were challenging to search, such as trial eligibility criteria, treatment guidelines, and real-world evidence. Stanford Health Care is excited to further research the potential of using the healthcare agent orchestrator to build the first generative AI agent solution used in a production setting for real-world care for our cancer patients.'
All of this takes place in a specific context, this month of May, where both Microsoft and Google are coming out with big announcements this week. In addition to Google's new AI Mode in search, which I've covered, Google is also touting its Gemini 2.5 model advancement.
As for Microsoft, there's news on DeepSeek for Copilot and more from the Microsoft Build 2025 event this month, and there's additional agentic news there as well. But the Azure AI Foundry agent system is really a signpost on the path toward better agentic deployment, which is likely to be a primary focus of 2025, 2026, etc.
Look for more as we move into summer and these enormous companies continue to wow the crowds with breakthrough innovations.
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