By Frederic Lardinois
Copyright thenewstack
Microsoft has long offered a variety of marketplaces for businesses in its ecosystem. For cloud solutions, there is the Azure Marketplace, while for everything around productivity, and, more recently, AI tools, there is Microsoft AppSource. But starting today, the company is combining both of these marketplaces under the aptly named “Microsoft Marketplace” banner.
As businesses increasingly adopt AI-powered apps and agents, one of the questions that companies now often face is how to find and procure these tools. During the early days of Software as a Service (SaaS), numerous marketplace solutions popped up and it’s perhaps no surprise that we are now seeing a very similar development around AI apps and, more recently, AI agents.
Microsoft’s current marketplaces see about six million monthly visitors, so that’s a large market of potential customers for both large enterprises and small, specialized development shops.
Cyril Belikoff, Microsoft’s VP for Cloud and AI Marketing, told me that one of the reasons why Microsoft is doing this is to provide businesses with an easier way to buy trusted AI apps and agents.
“AI is not just a technology shift. It’s a business reinvigoration transformation. It’s a big platform shift,” Belikoff said. “When we talk to businesses and leaders, they’re very clear about needing help with speed, simplicity and confidence as they adopt AI. And so our approach and our vision really is to help customers move from experimentation to scale with a set of trusted tools, responsible frameworks, and, of course, our partner ecosystem to help them build out this impact and this innovation.”
In total, the Microsoft Marketplace will feature over 3,000 free and paid AI apps and agents at launch. These could be products that extend Microsoft 365 Copilot, for example, or the Azure AI Foundry, Microsoft’s platform for building and managing AI apps and agents. For many of these tools and services, provisioning them simply means integrating a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server.
Microsoft is also using a new tactic to bring potential customers to these solutions by surfacing what it calls “contextually relevant” cloud solutions, AI apps and agents from its partners directly within its own products. In the Azure AI Foundry, for example, the company may highlight specific models and tools.
The company is also making its marketplace itself available to partners who may want to integrate it into their own marketplaces. Arrow, Crayon, Ingram Micro, Pax8 and TD SYNNEX are the first partners for this program.
“There are many customers of different sizes that will buy via a channel partner, and they will get access to the Microsoft Marketplace components as part of that marketplace — and the solutions from those partners,” Belikoff explained.
And while this new marketplace now combines AI and non-AI apps and services, it appears that AI is driving a significant portion of the marketplace’s growth. Microsoft says that in this fiscal year alone, it has already seen a 2x growth in customers purchasing AI products through this channel.
