Cedric Vidal

Agentic Excellence: Mastering AI Agent Evals w/ Azure AI Evaluation SDK — Cedric Vidal, Microsoft

Jun 27, 2025 · 20:01

Cedric Vidal, Principal AI Advocate at Microsoft, demonstrates how to systematically evaluate AI agents using the Azure AI Evaluation SDK and AI Toolkit. He argues that evaluation must start early, covering four layers: model/safety system, system message, grounding, and user experience. He shows spot-checking models side-by-side in VS Code, building a web-scraping agent with Playwright MCP, and running batch evaluations with built-in quality and safety metrics like groundedness and fluency. Vidal also covers multi-turn and multimodal evaluation, using a violent image example where the SDK returned a score of 4 out of 5, allowing teams to set custom thresholds based on application context.

Building Code First AI Agents with Azure AI Agent Service — Cedric Vidal, Microsoft

Jun 27, 2025 · 1:54:06

Cedric Vidal, Principal AI Advocate at Microsoft, demonstrates building code-first AI agents with Azure AI Agent Service, using function calling, code interpreter, file search, and Bing grounding for a sales analysis use case. He creates a conversational agent that queries SQLite, generates pie charts from Python code, and blends product PDF data with relational data. The workshop explains stateful agents, tool routing (LLM generates JSON to call functions), and the limits of single-step agents versus multi-agent orchestration with AutoGen. Cedric addresses when to use Agent Service (managed persistence and tools) versus raw LLM endpoints, and covers MCP servers as a tool lifecycle manager. Key insights include using instructions to ground agent behavior and the need for eval frameworks for agent quality.

Build, Evaluate and Deploy a RAG-Based Retail Copilot with Azure AI: Cedric Vidal and David Smith

Feb 6, 2025 · 1:57:58

David Smith, Cedric Vidal, and Miguel Martinez lead a hands-on workshop on building a production-level RAG-based retail copilot using Azure AI. They demonstrate how to build a chatbot backend that retrieves product information from Azure AI Search via vector embeddings and customer history from Cosmos DB, then augments the LLM prompt to generate grounded answers. The session covers using Azure AI Studio and Prompt flow to orchestrate the RAG workflow, deploying the flow as a managed endpoint, and evaluating quality with GPT-4 as a judge on metrics like relevance and groundedness. The speakers also explain the LLM Ops lifecycle for iterative improvement and compare Prompt flow with Semantic Kernel and AutoGen.

Multi model multimodal and multi agent innovations in Azure AI: Cedric Vidal

Feb 6, 2025 · 28:56

Cedric Vidal, Principal AI Advocate at Microsoft, demonstrates Azure AI's multi-model, multimodal, and multi-agent capabilities in a session packed with live demos. He shows how GPT-4 Omni mixes text and vision to read handwritten French menus and translate them, and diagnoses infrastructure damage from photos for energy and insurance industries. A new video translation service lets him speak German, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese in his own voice while preserving tone, such as whispering or yelling. The Azure AI model catalog now offers 1,600 models, including serverless deployment options, and Phi-3 Vision, a small 3.8B parameter model running locally in a browser via WebGPU. He also demonstrates code interpreter analyzing a GPX file from a kitesurfing session, plotting a map with turn markers, and GitHub Workspaces preview generating a Java GUI from Python code.