Foundry Local for .NET Developers

Building AI applications usually means relying heavily on cloud-hosted models, which introduces high token costs (COGs), unpredictable latency, and strict data privacy boundaries. While tools like Ollama or LM Studio offer local alternatives, they require your end-users to install heavy, external background dependencies, complicating the app distribution and installation pipeline

Enter Microsoft Foundry Local, a lightweight, 20-megabyte, on-device AI runtime that solves these challenges. It packages a highly optimised local AI stack directly inside your process, eliminating the need for self-hosting setups, Docker containers, or external software installations

In this session, we will deep-dive into how Foundry Local leverages the performance of ONNX Runtime and WinML to automatically select and run the absolute best variant of a model for your user's specific hardware, whether they have an NVIDIA GPU, Intel/Qualcomm NPU, Apple Silicon, or a standard CPU