AI is becoming a core part of modern application development, and .NET offers a practical, incremental way to get started. In this session, you'll learn how to build intelligent .NET applications by adding useful AI capabilities—well beyond the chatbot—using Microsoft.Extensions.AI and .NET’s unified AI abstractions.

We'll start with the essentials: integrating large language models, adding features like summarization, classification, and semantic search, and working with both cloud hosted and local models in a maintainable, production ready way. You'll see concrete patterns for introducing AI into existing applications with minimal friction. You'll also learn how to ensure quality and governance as you integrate AI into your enterprise.

From there, we'll look at how these same foundations scale into more advanced, agentic solutions. You'll get an introduction to agentic development and see how the Microsoft Agent Framework enables applications to reason, plan, and take action using tools and workflows.

Whether you're just beginning with AI in .NET or preparing for more autonomous, agent driven systems, this session provides a clear roadmap from practical AI features to agentic architectures.