In a significant move to accelerate AI adoption in the .NET ecosystem, Microsoft has announced the preview of two new packages, Microsoft.Extensions.AI.Abstractions and Microsoft.Extensions.AI, designed to integrate generative AI services into .NET applications.

These unified AI building blocks provide essential abstractions and middleware for .NET developers to seamlessly incorporate AI capabilities into their apps and libraries, regardless of the underlying provider. The packages offer a consistent set of APIs and conventions, enabling developers to experiment with different AI services while maintaining a single API throughout their application.

The Microsoft.Extensions.AI libraries, developed in collaboration with .NET ecosystem developers, provide a unified layer of C# abstractions for interacting with AI services such as large language models, embeddings, and middleware. This move is expected to simplify the addition of new capabilities, facilitate componentization and testing, and promote collaboration across the .NET ecosystem.