Microsoft’s reimagined Marketplace, announced on September 25, 2025, combines Azure Marketplace and AppSource in one commercial catalog. It now covers AI agents, AI applications, models, SaaS, infrastructure and industry software. The United States launch was followed by Microsoft’s description of the service as globally available in its Ignite 2025 materials.
The practical change is a more centralized way to discover, evaluate, buy and sometimes deploy an agent—not a universal one-click store. Identity, Azure subscriptions, permissions, vendor activation, security review and offer-specific charges still determine how simple a purchase is.
What Microsoft launched
Microsoft Marketplace is a commercial catalog and transaction layer, not a marketplace reserved for autonomous agents. Microsoft says it unified Azure Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource so customers can find cloud solutions, AI apps and agents in one destination.
The catalog includes:
- Prebuilt AI applications and business agents
- Microsoft 365 Copilot agents
- Models, tools and connectors for custom development
- SaaS applications
- Azure applications, virtual machines and managed infrastructure
- Industry and business software
Microsoft announced more than 3,000 AI apps and agents at launch. A January 2026 Microsoft strategy article later cited more than 4,000 AI apps and agents and more than 11,000 packaged models; catalog totals change, so those figures are time-stamped Microsoft claims. The catalog is available at Microsoft Marketplace.
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- AI-Powered Raspberry Pi Robot Dog — PiDog: Powered by Raspberry Pi (5/4B/3B+/3B/Zero 2W), OpenClaw, and multi-LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen & Ollama. With 12 servos, camera, gyroscope, hearing & touch sensors, PiDog can see, listen, talk, move, and interact intelligently. Supports OpenCV, MediaPipe, TTS & STT, app control, FPV & Python. A great STEM robotics gift for students, makers & tech enthusiasts—perfect for birthdays and holidays. (Raspberry Pi not included)
- Realistic Dog-like Movements: PiDog's 12 powerful servos enable 32 dog-like actions, including walking, sitting, standing, shaking its head, wagging its tail, and performing playful tricks, closely mimicking a real dog and providing an engaging experience. This is an AI development robot product designed for engineers, suitable for ages 15 and above
- Rich Sensor Suite for Interactive Experiences: PiDog features ultrasonic, touch, gyroscope, sound, camera, speaker and microphone. These provide it with advanced hearing, vision, and touch, enabling it to see, detect obstacles, respond to touch, and recognize sounds, making interactions highly engaging
- AI-Powered Interactions with OpenClaw & Multi-LLMs. PiDog combines voice, vision, and gesture recognition for immersive AI experiences. Powered by OpenClaw and multi-LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen, Doubao, and Ollama (local LLMs), it can understand questions, respond naturally through TTS & STT, recognize math problems, interpret hand gestures, and hold smart conversations. OpenClaw also enables customizable AI behaviors and personalized robotics development, helping users create their own intelligent robotic companion
- Comprehensive Learning Resources and Support: PiDog offers detailed online documentation, video tutorials, prompt technical support, and an active forum community, ensuring beginners can easily complete all projects and enjoy a great experience
What is new for AI agents
The AI Apps and Agents category gives buyers a focused way to browse partner-built software and the components used to create custom systems. It serves two different needs:
Ready-made agents
A company can purchase a partner’s agent for a defined task, such as answering internal questions, automating a workflow or extending Microsoft 365 Copilot. The listing should explain the systems it can access and whether it recommends actions, executes them or does both.
Building blocks
Models, connectors, tools and applications can be combined in Azure AI Foundry or another development architecture. Buying a component is not the same as buying a complete autonomous agent.
Microsoft says these offerings can surface in products including Microsoft 365 Copilot and Azure AI Foundry. Availability and integration depend on the individual offer.
What “simpler purchasing” means in practice
One catalog and assisted discovery
Customers can search and filter by use case, industry, Microsoft product, pricing model and other attributes. Microsoft also documents a natural-language discovery assistant that can refine a request, apply filters, open listings and create comparisons. The assistant is anonymous: it does not know the user’s identity, organization or purchase history, and it does not hand the conversation to a human agent. Details are in Microsoft’s solution-discovery documentation.
More ways to evaluate
Individual listings may provide free trials, test drives, proofs of concept, reviews, documentation and plan information. A Marketplace presence does not guarantee any of these. Trial length, feature limits and support are set by the offer.
Rank #2
- Optimized AI Arm Kit for LeRobot & Hugging Face Projects – The SO-ARM101 is an upgraded low-cost robotic arm servo motor kit designed for AI robotics enthusiasts and developers. Fully compatible with LeRobot and Hugging Face frameworks, it supports imitation learning and reinforcement learning, making it ideal for real-world robotics applications. (3D-printed parts not included.)
- Enhanced Wiring & Performance – Compared to the SO-ARM100, the SO-ARM101 features improved wiring to prevent disconnection at joint 3 and eliminates range-of-motion limitations. The leader arm uses optimized gear ratio motors for smoother performance—no external gearboxes required.
- Real-Time Leader-Follower Functionality – New real-time tracking allows the leader arm to follow the follower arm, enabling human intervention and correction during reinforcement learning (RL) training. Perfect for hands-on AI robotics development and research.
- Open-Source, DIY-Friendly & Nvidia-Compatible – Developed by TheRobotStudio, this open-source AI Arm kit integrates seamlessly with the LeRobot platform, offering PyTorch-based datasets, simulation, training, and deployment tools. Fully compatible with Nvidia Jetson edge devices, including reComputer Mini J4012 Orin NX 16 GB.
- Comprehensive Learning Resources – Includes detailed open-source assembly and calibration guides, testing tutorials, and deployment instructions. From wiring to AI training, get everything you need to start building, teaching, and optimizing your robotic arm for grasping and placing tasks.
Centralized commercial options
An offer is the product listing; a plan sets its scope, limits and price. Depending on the offer, buyers may use a free plan, usage pricing, monthly or annual SaaS licensing, per-user seats, Azure consumption billing, a negotiated private offer or a cloud solution provider (CSP).
Eligible purchases can use credit card, invoicing or Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) credits. MACC eligibility is offer-specific and does not make a product free; the buyer still pays under the selected pricing model. Check the listing’s Azure-benefit designation.
Provisioning and governance
Microsoft says some Copilot agents and Azure-hosted applications can be provisioned in a customer’s Microsoft environment and distributed under administrative controls. The exact flow differs among Azure applications, SaaS, Teams applications and Microsoft 365 Copilot agents.
How an enterprise purchase works
There is no single checkout sequence for every listing. Use this conditional path:
- Open marketplace.microsoft.com and search for an AI app or agent.
- Filter by use case, industry, Microsoft product, pricing model, trial availability or Azure-benefit eligibility.
- Read the listing for supported products, deployment model, regions, identity and data requirements, pricing unit, trial terms, required subscriptions, vendor terms and security information.
- Select Get it now, a trial or the available purchase action.
- Choose a plan when the offer has multiple plans.
- Provide an Azure subscription, resource group, billing arrangement or tenant context when the offer requires one.
- Complete Microsoft or partner checkout. Public Azure offers generally require the relevant Azure permissions; private offers require negotiation with the vendor before acceptance.
- For SaaS, activate the service on the vendor’s website when instructed.
- Assign licenses, approve the application or agent, configure permissions and test data access.
- Monitor usage, renewals, costs and support responsibilities.
Microsoft’s purchasing and procurement guidance covers the offer-specific differences at Purchasing overview and Procurement best practices.
Prerequisites that can stop a purchase
- Microsoft Entra ID: Microsoft requires an Entra ID account for Marketplace purchases.
- Azure subscription: Azure-provisioned products, such as virtual machines and managed applications, require an active subscription.
- Permissions: The person who discovers an agent may not be authorized to buy, deploy, assign or approve it. Billing, subscription, Marketplace and security administrators may all have a role.
- Billing setup: The organization needs a supported billing account and payment arrangement.
- Tenant policy: Enterprise controls can block third-party applications or Marketplace transactions even when the listing is technically available.
Microsoft’s try-and-buy FAQ explains when the flow prompts for accounts or subscriptions.
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Rank #3
- Raspberry Pi AI Robot: powered by Raspberry Pi (5/4B/3B+/3B/Zero 2W), features 12 servos and sensors for vision, hearing, and touch. Integrated with ChatGPT-4o, it responds to complex queries. With app control and FPV, users can manage and see its view in real-time. It supports Python programming
- Realistic Movements: 12 powerful servos enable 32 actions, including walking, sitting, standing, shaking its head, wagging its tail, and performing playful tricks, closely mimicking a real and providing an engaging experience
- Rich Sensor Suite for Interactive Experiences: features ultrasonic, touch, gyroscope, sound, camera, speaker and microphone. These provide it with advanced hearing, vision, and touch, enabling it to see, detect obstacles, respond to touch, and recognize sounds, making interactions highly engaging
- Engaging Interactions with ChatGPT-4o: with ChatGPT-4o enables voice interactions and visual recognition, making it smarter and more responsive. Users can have natural conversations, solve math problems via the camera, and interpret gestures, creating diverse and fun interactions
- Comprehensive Learning Resources and Support: offers detailed online documentation, video tutorials, prompt technical support, and an active forum community, ensuring beginners can easily complete all projects and enjoy a great experience
Marketplace, Agent Store and Azure AI Foundry are different
| Surface | Primary purpose | Typical user |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Marketplace | Discover and transact for partner offerings, including SaaS, agents, models and infrastructure | Procurement, IT and business buyers |
| Agent Store | Discover agents in the flow of Microsoft 365 work | Employees and Microsoft 365 users |
| Azure AI Foundry | Build, evaluate, deploy, observe and govern AI applications and agents | Developers, architects and AI-platform teams |
Agent Store and Marketplace are complementary discovery surfaces, while Foundry is a development and management platform. See Azure AI Foundry for the platform scope.
Private offers, CSP and channel buying
List pricing is not always the enterprise price. Private offers allow a vendor and customer to negotiate price, duration, terms or a proof-of-concept arrangement. Microsoft also supports multiparty private offers, CSP private offers, resale-enabled offers and partner-led procurement.
These routes can accommodate volume, implementation, data-residency or support requirements, but they add participants. A transaction may involve Microsoft, the software vendor, a distributor and a CSP, with different responsibilities for billing, activation and support.
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Marketplace is especially attractive when a buyer already has a Microsoft enterprise agreement or Azure commitment, wants consolidated invoicing and spend visibility, needs Microsoft-environment governance, or can apply an eligible purchase to MACC. It also provides a common place to compare partner offerings.
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- Marketplace software or seat fee
- Azure infrastructure or consumption
- Model-token or inference usage
- Microsoft 365 or Copilot licensing
- Implementation, managed-service or support fees
For SaaS, Marketplace may handle the commercial transaction while activation, seat administration and support remain on the vendor’s site. That can create a second account, admin console and renewal workflow.
Rank #4
- 【End-to-End Imitation Learning】Hiwonder SO-ARM101 robot arm is an embodied intelligent hardware platform compatible with the Lerobot open-source framework. It provides developers with streamlined access to shared code, templates, and pre-trained models to explore the latest advancements in AI research.
- 【Dual-Camera Vision System】Equipped with both a gripper-mounted camera and an external camera, the system supports both precise manipulation and environmental awareness for accurate imitation learning.
- 【Hiwonder High-Performance Bus Servos】Featuring 12 high-torque bus servo motors with magnetic feedback, the Hiwonder SO-Arm101 robotic arm delivers smooth, stable motion, eliminating issues like power deficiency and jitter.
- 【Professional Control & Debugging】Integrated with the Hiwonder BusLinker V3.0 debugging board, the system supports servo scanning, real-time status monitoring, and trajectory control. The professional PC software simplifies device calibration and debugging, making it accessible for both researchers and hobbyists.
- 【Open-Source Compatibility】The SO-ARM101 robotic arm is designed to be fully compatible with the LeRobot open-source project. We acknowledge the contributions of the open-source community; all trademarks and copyrights belong to their respective owners.
When direct purchase is better
Buying directly from a vendor can be preferable when the product is primarily SaaS, the vendor offers better terms or support outside Marketplace, the organization does not use Azure, or the required geography, currency, tax or licensing model is unavailable in Marketplace. Direct contracting may also be necessary for bespoke implementation work that the listing excludes.
Marketplace participation does not replace due diligence. Review data retention and training policies, identity controls, prompt-injection defenses, audit logs, model and tool dependencies, data residency, service levels, regulatory obligations and the vendor’s operational stability.
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Buy
A mature partner agent is usually fastest when the use case is well defined and standard integration is acceptable.
Build
Custom development offers more control over data, logic, intellectual property and governance, but requires engineering, evaluation, operations and ongoing maintenance. Azure AI Foundry is designed for this work.
Hybrid
A team can buy models, connectors or specialist agents from Marketplace while retaining custom orchestration and business logic. This often balances speed with control.
Buyer checklist before selecting “Get it now”
- What data can the agent read, write or export?
- Can it take actions, or only generate recommendations?
- Which Entra ID roles, Azure subscriptions and Microsoft 365 licenses are required?
- What is the pricing unit, and are there overage, model or infrastructure charges?
- What does the trial exclude, and what happens at conversion?
- Is the offer Azure-benefit or MACC eligible?
- Where is data stored, and what are retention and training policies?
- Who provides support and the service-level commitment?
- How are renewals, cancellation and seat changes handled?
- Are logging, audit, human override and failure controls sufficient?
Bottom line for enterprise buyers
Microsoft has made the commercial route to AI agents more centralized, particularly for organizations already using Azure, Microsoft 365 or a Microsoft enterprise agreement. The benefits are unified discovery, more consistent procurement options, potential MACC use, and tighter links to Microsoft administration. The purchase is not automatically frictionless: offer type, permissions, vendor activation, security review and the full cost stack still determine the real effort and price.
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