Agent Harness Engineering: Building Governed Autonomous AI Systems with Microsoft Foundry

Building an AI agent is easy. Engineering one you can trust is the real challenge.

As AI agents evolve from simple assistants into autonomous systems that reason, use tools, and execute multi-step tasks, the real engineering challenge is no longer just model intelligence. It is controlling how agents operate, recover from failures, respect boundaries, and deliver reliable outcomes.

Join this 3-hour, architect-focused, hands-on workshop to explore Agent Harness Engineering and learn how to design the control layer around autonomous AI systems using Microsoft Foundry.

Through architectural deep dives, live implementation, and practical failure scenarios, you will explore context and state management, tool governance, execution boundaries, approval gates, observability, evaluation, and failure recovery. You will build and stress-test an enterprise-oriented agent harness, examine its execution traces, and understand the engineering decisions required to move from experimental agents to reliable, governed AI applications.

What you will take away:

Understand the architecture and principles of Agent Harness Engineering.

Design controlled execution loops and governed tool interactions.

Apply Microsoft Foundry capabilities to agent development, tracing, and evaluation.

Build a practical agent harness and test its behavior under failure conditions.

Identify the reliability, security, and operational considerations of production-grade agentic systems.

This is not just about building smarter agents. It is about engineering the systems that make autonomous agents dependable.