Microsoft’s multi-agent framework, AutoGen, acts as the backbone for many enterprise projects, particularly with the release of AutoGen v0.4 in January. However, the company aims to harmonize all of its agent framework offerings and bring more observability capabilities to the forefront as well. Microsoft released the Agent Framework on public preview, which will now essentially be the company’s sole orchestration and agent framework.Microsoft said AutoGen and Semantic Kernel will “remain in maintenance mode, which means they will not receive new feature investments but will continue to receive bug fixes, security patches and stability updates.”“For future-facing work, however, the roadmap is centered on Microsoft Agent Framework, and customers should plan migration to capture the benefits of open standards, durability and Azure AI Foundry Integration,” the company said in an email to VentureBeat. The company assured existing workloads on AutoGen or Semantic Kernel will be safe because “no breaking changes are planned.”Microsoft’s move to consolidate agent frameworks into one shows the company’s strategy in agentic AI. By closely tying observability and data protection to the framework for building agents, the company aims to enable the creation of agents through post-deployment, all in one place.Agent Framework and FoundryThe Agent Framework consolidates AI workloads into a single SDK, combining the capabilities of both Semantic Kernel and AutoGen, allowing users to build AI agents, manage multi-agent deployments, and set up observability systems. Sarah Bird, chief product officer for Responsible AI at Microsoft, told VentureBeat in an interview that so many developers and businesses have been rapidly experimenting and adopting AI agents, but needed a way to bring a lot of capabilities together. “What’s really exciting about what we’re releasing this week is a lot of capabilities to help people more successfully build and manage agents in a way that, of cour …
