Engineers must balance speed-to-market with customizability. This ecosystem simplifies the 'build vs. buy' decision by providing pre-vetted models and agents that integrate with existing stacks while ensuring governance and cost optimization through cloud consumption commitments.
A new category of organization is emerging that embeds AI across every layer of their operations—accelerating delivery, scaling efficiently, and unlocking new business potential. These companies are leading Frontier Firm transformation, not simply adopting AI but rebuilding around it to set the pace for the next decade of innovation. Successfully adopting AI requires choosing the right strategy with tradeoffs between time-to-market and time-to-value. There is no one-size-fits-all approach—some organizations will build from scratch, buy off-the-shelf, or choose a hybrid option of custom components with ready-made tools.
Regardless of approach, Microsoft Marketplace—with the largest catalog of AI apps and agents in the industry—is the primary destination for organizations adopting AI quickly and responsibly. Thousands of pre-vetted solutions are available from Microsoft partners that seamlessly integrate with your existing Microsoft stack for faster time-to-value.
Marketplace has a single catalog that meets you where you are. Solutions can be contextually surfaced within the products employees use every day—like agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot and models in Microsoft Foundry. Additionally, with capabilities that help you balance agility and oversight, Marketplace is accelerating how organizations move from concept to production while prioritizing cloud cost and optimizing performance.
Microsoft Marketplace provides access to more than 11,000 prepackaged models, as well as over 4,000 AI apps and agents, to help you build a custom AI solution. Whether you’re doing pro-code work with programming languages, frameworks, and APIs or a low-code method with pre-built components and minimal coding, Marketplace and Microsoft products support your development.
Pro-code builds give you complete control with custom logic, custom data handling, and governance by design. You can also own your IP, which can be essential in industries like financial services or advanced manufacturing.
Marketplace provides access to thousands of models, including leading models from Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, OpenAI, and NVIDIA, that can ground custom agents with high-quality building blocks, dramatically reducing development time while preserving full ownership of logic and data. Prepackaged models available through Marketplace can accelerate building your solution with faster deployment because teams don’t have to build their stack. You can set up a specialized graphics processing unit (GPU) server, install drivers and AI runtimes, find and download the right models, and fine tune for compatibility and performance. Models are accessible in the Marketplace storefront as well as in the Azure portal and Microsoft Foundry, so teams can do what they need in the flow of work and deploy models securely in their Azure environment.
Alternatively, low-code builds can be done quickly and benefit from tight platform integration and standardization. As your organization seeks to maximize impact with Microsoft Copilot, team members can use Microsoft Copilot Studio to design, extend, and govern custom AI copilots with responses securely grounded in your company’s data. With Copilot Studio, you can build with a low-code platform using models from Anthropic and OpenAI to create agents that support orchestration, chat, and deep reasoning.
Buying your AI application or agent becomes the pragmatic choice when the solution you need already exists with proven value and capabilities. For many organizations, buying is the fastest path to production—especially if resourcing constraints make custom builds unrealistic.
Microsoft is helping organizations in the shift to agentic AI whether you’re looking for singular agents that integrate into Microsoft 365 Copilot or fully autonomous multi-agent systems. Marketplace, as an extension of the Microsoft Cloud, gives you confidence in selecting AI apps and agents from discovery through deployment.
Filter by product, category, or industry in the storefront to find the right solution for your specific needs. Then, Marketplace supports try-before-you-buy with trials or proof-of-concepts within your Microsoft environment so you can ensure the solution is right for your business.
Once you’ve made your decision, Marketplace offerings align to your existing Microsoft investments, so there is seamless provisioning for administrators in a familiar and trusted experience, whether it’s a SaaS application in Azure or an agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot. In addition, if your organization has an Azure consumption commitment, eligible solutions count toward your contract—dollar-for-dollar, no limit.
Many organizations will land somewhere in the middle of building from scratch and buying a finished AI application. A blended strategy allows you to extend partner solutions with your own IP, customize layers that drive differentiation, and leverage pre-built components to reduce engineering effort.
For example, a common scenario in the financial services industry is modernizing fraud and anti-money laundering detection systems that identify suspicious transactions or spot unusual customer behavior. Rebuilding these systems requires large rules engines and manual effort which can generate high false-positive rates and compliance fatigue.
With Marketplace, firms can deploy pre-built fraud and machine learning (ML) models and risk-scoring engines with compliant APIs in minutes—all running inside their Azure tenant using Managed Identity, so sensitive data stays secure. Once deployed, teams can immediately begin blending the models with their existing workflows, data pipelines, and case management systems. Instead of recertifying every new model or scenario, organizations can test, compare, and iterate rapidly without reopening full compliance reviews each time. This allows them to improve ML and fraud detection at a fraction of the cost and time required to rebuild systems internally, accelerating their journey to become Frontier.
As your organization moves through Frontier Firm transformation, Microsoft Marketplace provides a unified, governed, and trusted ecosystem to innovate, while streamlining discovery, purchase, and deployment. A growing catalog of AI apps, agents, and models is available in the storefront and contextually surfaced in the Microsoft products you use every day. Whether you are building bespoke agents, deploying proven partner solutions, or blending both approaches, Marketplace helps AI practitioners and technology leaders focus on delivering measurable business impact at scale.
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