Merge pull request #1937 from aahill/agents

whats new article

Author: JamesJBarnett

articles/ai-services/agents/toc.yml

@@ -12,6 +12,8 @@ items:
       href: ./concepts/model-region-support.md
     - name: Pricing
       href: https://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/details/ai-studio/
+    - name: What's new
+      href: ./whats-new.md
     - name: FAQ
       href: faq.yml
 - name: Quickstart

articles/ai-services/agents/whats-new.md

@@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
+---
+title: What's new in Azure AI Agent Service?
+titleSuffix: Azure AI services
+description: Learn about new feature updates and additions for your AI Agents.
+manager: nitinme
+author: aahill
+ms.author: aahi
+ms.service: azure
+ms.topic: overview
+ms.date: 12/11/2024
+recommendations: false
+---
+
+# What's new in Azure AI Agent Service
+
+This article provides a summary of the latest releases and major documentation updates for Azure AI Agent Service.
+
+## December 2024
+
+### Azure AI Service public preview
+
+Azure AI Service is now available in preview. The service builds off of the [Assistants API](../openai/how-to/assistant.md) in Azure OpenAI, and offers several additional features, such as:
+
+* Several [additional tools](./how-to/tools/overview.md) to enhance your AI agents' functionality, such as the ability to use Bing as a knowledge source and call function specified by the OpenAPI 3.0 spec. 
+* The ability to use non Azure OpenAI [models](./concepts/model-region-support.md#additional-models): 
+    * Llama 3.1-70B-instruct
+    * Mistral-large-2407    
+    * Cohere command R+
+* Enterprise ready security with secure data handling, keyless authentication, and no public egress.
+* The ability to either use Microsoft-managed storage, or bring your own.
+* SDK support for:
+    * [.NET](./quickstart.md?pivots=programming-language-csharp) 
+    * [The Azure Python SDK](./quickstart.md?pivots=programming-language-python-azure)  
+    * [The OpenAI Python SDK](./quickstart.md?pivots=programming-language-python-openai)   
+* Debugging support using [tracing with Application Insights](./concepts/tracing.md)
+
+## Next steps
+
+Use the [quickstart article](./quickstart.md) to get started creating a new AI Agent.