Select the Right AI Model

This e-book provides a practical, end-to-end guide for selecting the right AI model using Microsoft Foundry. It addresses the growing complexity of today’s AI landscape—where thousands of foundation, frontier, open-source, and task-specific models exist—and shows how organizations can confidently choose, evaluate, and operationalize models that best fit their use cases, performance needs, and budgets.

• Model selection should start with the use case, mapping required inputs, outputs, reasoning complexity, latency, and accuracy to the right class of models.
• An iterative approach—benchmarking, prototyping, and optimizing—helps balance quality, cost, performance, and safety rather than relying on benchmarks alone.
• Foundry centralizes discovery, comparison, evaluation, and switching between more than 11,000 models, enabling experimentation without lock-in or rework.

The guide explores key decision factors including performance and accuracy, resource management, cost optimization, flexibility through fine-tuning and RAG, safety and compliance, and long-term consistency versus innovation. Real-world examples from the NBA, Mars Science & Diagnostics, and DraftWise illustrate how organizations tailor model choices to domain-specific needs. Positioned as an enterprise-grade platform, Microsoft Foundry enables teams to experiment in controlled environments, deploy responsibly at scale, and continuously adapt as models and requirements evolve.