Build, Evaluate and Deploy a RAG-Based Retail Copilot with Azure AI: Cedric Vidal and David Smith

587 views · Feb 06, 2025 · 117:57 min · Watch on YouTube ↗

Takeaway

Azure AI Search + Cosmos DB + Azure OpenAI is a workable production-RAG stack for retail copilots and Microsoft ships a turnkey workshop to build one.

Summary

Microsoft AI advocates run a 2-hour workshop building a retail-storefront chat copilot in Azure with GitHub Codespaces.
Stack: Azure OpenAI for the LLM, Azure AI Search as vector database, Cosmos DB for customer/order data; backend in Python with provided front-end code.
Copilot answers product questions ('what tent goes with the Trail Walker shoes') and personalized order-history questions ('what have I purchased') by consulting product index plus customer profile.
Workshop provides pre-provisioned Azure resources, forked repo, and a Windows VM with step-by-step instructions; participants only need a laptop and a GitHub account.
Focus is on building a production-grade RAG flow end-to-end with evaluation and deployment, not just retrieval.

ragazureretail

Original description

Building generative AI applications for production requires a paradigm shift to LLM Ops, with new tools, platforms and processes for orchestrating end-to-end development workflows. In this session, you’ll learn to build, evaluate and deploy an enterprise copilot application end-to-end, using a code-first approach with Azure AI Studio and Prompt flow. From ideating your scenario with your data, to evaluating it for quality locally and on Azure, then deploying it for real-world usage.

Recorded live in San Francisco at the AI Engineer World's Fair. See the full schedule of talks at https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair/2024/schedule & join us at the AI Engineer World's Fair in 2025! Get your tickets today at https://ai.engineer/2025

About Cedric
Cedric Vidal is a Principal AI Advocate at Microsoft, specializing in Generative AI , and the startup and research ecosystems. He is dedicated to promoting AI in startups and facilitating the transition of research and startup products to the market. Before his current role, Cedric spent 4 years as an Engineering Manager in the AI data labeling space for the self-driving industry at Argo AI (now re-spawned as Latitude AI). He also served as the CTO of the Fintech AI SAAS startup Quicksign and worked as a software engineering services consultant for major Fintech enterprises for 10 years.

About David
David has extensive product management and developer relations experience, focused on bridging the gap between technical experts and the stakeholders who rely on their expertise. He has a proven track record of growing and nurturing diverse user communities, and building products to serve their needs, in a range of companies from startups to Big Tech.
 
With a background in Data Science, David has over 20 years of experience in the applications of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to industries as diverse as pharmaceutical research, financial analysis, manufacturing and healthcare IT. He is also an experienced speaker and presenter, and an early contributor to the open-source R project.
 
After leaving his homeland of Australia for the UK to study for a PhD in Statistics, David joined Insightful Corporation in 1998. As the Director of Product Management in the Seattle headquarters, David oversaw several major software releases leading to its acquisition by TIBCO. From 2006 to 2008, David was the VP of Product Management at startup Zynchros, the pioneering provider of hosted formulary management software for health insurers and pharmacy benefit managers, until its acquisition by SXC Health Solutions. At Revolution Analytics from 2008 to 2015, David dramatically grew the worldwide community of R users and the enterprise market for open source data analysis software, leading to a successful acquisition by Microsoft in 2015.
 
David remained at Microsoft post-acquisition, where he has held roles in program management and developer relations, and is currently a Principal Cloud Advocate leading the AI and Machine Learning team in Developer Relations. He is Microsoft’s representative to the board of the non-profit R Consortium. 
 
David holds an Australian passport and a US Green Card, lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his husband of nearly 20 years, and speaks English and French.