Last time I made a promise: that if you can build a Power Automate flow, you're most of the way to building an AI agent. This time we start proving it, and we do it the only way that really counts: by actually building something.

This is a hands-on walkthrough, not concepts. We're going to stand up a real Claude model inside Microsoft Foundry, say hello to it, and get a reply back. That's it. One small, complete, working thing. Everything else in this series stacks on top of this one step, so it's worth doing slowly and getting right.

Before you start

Nothing to install on your machine yet. But there are a few boxes to tick on the Azure side, and it's less painful to know them up front than to hit a wall halfway through.

A paid Azure subscription with pay-as-you-go billing. This is the one that trips people up: a free trial, student credits, or a sponsored "Azure credits only" subscription won't work for Claude.…