AI-103: Developing AI Apps and Agents on Azure

Azure Content Understanding in Foundry Tools is purpose-built to convert mixed-format documents — including scanned text, tables, and multicolumn layouts — into structured, layout-preserving Markdown output that downstream agents and reasoning models can consume. It is the recommended first step in a document-processing pipeline because it produces structure-aware output before any generative reasoning happens. An Azure Language text-analysis deployment performs text analytics (not structural extraction), a generic chat-completion request has no document-parsing capability of its own, and calling the Responses API with a multimodal model reasons over content but does not itself perform structure-preserving OCR and Markdown conversion.