What is Microsoft Discovery?
Microsoft Discovery is an extensible, agentic AI platform on Azure that brings together agentic orchestration, advanced reasoning, a graph-based knowledge foundation, and high-performance computing for scientific research and R&D workflows. The platform supports the full discovery journey: from scientific insight to enterprise-scale execution. Because it is built on Azure’s enterprise cloud infrastructure, Microsoft Discovery operates within the security, compliance, transparency, and governance frameworks required to manage sensitive, real-world R&D environments.
At its heart sits the Discovery Engine, a cognitive orchestrator that mirrors the scientific method: specialized Discovery agents reason over large amounts of knowledge, generate hypotheses, and validate them in a search tree across a vast solution space. The Discovery Engine connects proprietary research data with external scientific literature and reasons across conflicting theories, experimental results, and domain-specific assumptions. Results are explainable and stored in a long-lived knowledge graph that acts as long-term memory, so the knowledge produced in the discovery loop stays reusable across iterations and teams.
Core Features
- Discovery Engine: Persistent, goal-driven multi-agent orchestration decomposes complex research objectives into tasks, dynamically selects the right agents and tools, and runs autonomous workflows that can span hours or days (literature reasoning, hypothesis generation, experiment design, validation, iterative learning loop).
- Graph-based knowledge and Bookshelf: Enterprise documents (PDFs, presentations, spreadsheets, technical reports) and external literature are converted into structured, queryable knowledge graphs that enable deeper reasoning than traditional RAG; insights are captured in a long-term knowledge graph.
- High-performance computing: The platform integrates HPC and GPU clusters along with specialized Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) for in-silico experimentation and large-scale simulation; jobs can run on the Microsoft Discovery Supercomputer.
- Enterprise governance and integration: Centralized management, audit trails, and checkpoints support operations; the platform integrates with Microsoft 365, Microsoft Foundry, and Microsoft Fabric, as well as Microsoft Entra ID, private networking, and role-based access control.
Typical Use Cases
Materials research: Research teams use the Discovery Engine to screen new materials, predict properties through simulation, and prioritize promising candidates. Internal measurement data and external literature feed a shared knowledge graph that grounds the next set of experiments.
Life sciences: In drug discovery, the platform combines genomics and cohort data with literature, generates hypotheses, and runs compute-intensive analyses such as feature selection on HPC resources. Bench scientists receive clear recommendations on which experiments to run next.
Energy and manufacturing: For catalyst and process development, the Discovery Engine orchestrates simulations and models across teams. Computational engineers cut the effort spent on one-off pipelines, while governance and audit capabilities keep research decisions traceable.
Benefits
- Faster path from question to reliable insight through autonomous discovery workflows
- Deeper reasoning over proprietary data and external literature via a graph-based knowledge foundation
- Scalable compute across HPC, GPU, and Large Quantitative Models directly on Azure
- Enterprise security, governance, and auditability for sensitive R&D data
Integration with innFactory
As a Microsoft Solutions Partner, innFactory supports you with the adoption and operation of this service.
Typical Use Cases
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Microsoft Discovery?
Microsoft Discovery is an extensible, agentic AI platform on Azure for scientific research and R&D. It combines agentic orchestration (the Discovery Engine), a graph-based knowledge foundation, and high-performance computing. Specialized Discovery agents break research goals into tasks, generate hypotheses, and validate them in autonomous workflows.
When should I use Microsoft Discovery?
Use Microsoft Discovery when you want to accelerate scientific R&D processes, for example in materials research, life sciences, energy, or manufacturing. It fits scenarios that combine internal research data with external literature, test hypotheses systematically, and run compute-intensive simulations on HPC clusters.
How much does Microsoft Discovery cost?
The enterprise service (Azure-hosted) is billed on a consumption basis: usage-based billing for the underlying compute and storage Azure resources, plus message-based billing for agent-driven runtime operations tracked as User Messages. One User Message is counted per billable action (create, update, delete, run, send, cancel) and Microsoft's reference price is $0.20 per message (adjusted per region); read-only calls such as status checks are not billable. The separate Microsoft Discovery app relies only on a GitHub Copilot subscription with no additional platform fee.
Is Microsoft Discovery available in the EU and GDPR compliant?
Microsoft Discovery runs on Azure infrastructure and is available in multiple regions including EU regions. The platform is designed for the security, compliance, and governance requirements of sensitive R&D environments and integrates Microsoft Entra ID, private networking, role-based access control, encryption at rest, and customer-managed keys. Using European regions keeps data processing within the EU.
Note: All product information on this page has been compiled with care, but is provided without guarantee and may be outdated or incomplete. Cloud services evolve rapidly — features, pricing, SLAs, and availability change frequently. Authoritative and up-to-date information can only be found on the official product page of Azure (official documentation). This page does not represent an offer by Azure.
