Microsoft releases foundational AI models targeting enterprises

Microsoft wants to offer the ‘most complete AI and app agent factory’.

Microsoft has released three new AI foundational models, created in-house, in a move that places the company in direct competition with enterprise AI rivals, despite its deep ties with OpenAI.

The new foundational models target three of the most commercially viable modalities: transcription, voice and images. The models are already powering Microsoft’s products, including Copilot, Bing and Azure Speech, the company said, and will be available in a preview via the Microsoft Foundry and MAI Playground.

With this, Microsoft is furthering its goals of delivering “the most complete AI and app agent factory”, it said.

‘MAI-Transcribe-1’ is a first-generation speech recognition model expected to deliver “enterprise-grade accuracy” across 25 languages at around 50pc lower GPU costs than its alternatives. The model scores lower than 4pc average ‘word error rate’ on accuracy benchmarks, while GPT-Transcribe is at 4.2pc and Gemini 3.1 Flash is at 4.9pc.

‘MAI-Voice-1’ is a speech generation model that, according to Microsoft, can produce 60 seconds of expressive audio in under one second on a single GPU.

Together, the two models are meant to deliver an audio AI stack capable of assisting in call-centre workflows and other voice-driven services, such as providing live captioning, automatic subtitling and converting interactions into structured data for research.

Microsoft’s second-generation image model, ‘MAI-Image-2’, is expected to offer artists a way to “explore” different visual directions. The model is created in “close collaboration” with artists, the company said, and is meant to help enterprises create branding and communication material.

MAI-Image-2 debuted in third spot on the Arena.ai leaderboard for image model families, and is currently ranked fifth.

Microsoft, valued at $2.7trn, already offers several AI-embedded apps and platform services. Its Copilot Studio lets users build agents, while the Foundry services offer a place to train and scale models.

Meanwhile, a recently announced Copilot integration with Anthropic’s Claude Cowork is meant to target the growing demand for autonomous agents.

Microsoft backed OpenAI in its recent $122bn funding round alongside the likes of Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank. Late last year, the company announced a $10bn investment plan for a data centre in Portugal. It also announced a $37.5bn quarterly capital expenditure bill at the end of January.

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