Azure AI Series: Why Your AI Keeps Lying to You And How to Fix It in Azure

Description

Azure AI Series: Why Your AI Keeps Lying to You And How to Fix It in Azure Welcome to the Azure AI Series! In this 51-minute enterprise training session, we go deep into two of the most critical — and most misunderstood — areas of working with Azure OpenAI: Advanced Prompting Techniques and Hallucination Mitigation. Whether you are a developer, a solution architect, or an enterprise decision-maker, this session will transform how you interact with AI models and how you build reliable, production-grade AI applications on Azure. 🎯 What You Will Learn in This Session This session is built entirely on official documentation from Microsoft Learn (learn.microsoft.com) and the OpenAI Platform (platform.openai.com), so everything you learn here is directly aligned with how Microsoft and OpenAI intend you to build AI solutions. By the end of this video, you will be able to: ✅ Understand and apply Zero-Shot, One-Shot, and Few-Shot prompting techniques ✅ Use Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to dramatically improve AI accuracy on complex tasks ✅ Understand what hallucinations are, why they happen, and the exact strategies to mitigate them ✅ Know how to use Azure AI Content Safety's Groundedness Detection feature ✅ Build grounded, enterprise-ready prompts using Microsoft's recommended patterns 🔍 Section 1: Prompting Techniques — From Basics to Advanced We start with a quick recap of what prompting really means. As Microsoft's official documentation puts it, when you give a model a prompt, it is predicting the most logical continuation of your text. Your job as a prompt engineer is to set up that prompt so the most logical continuation is ALSO the most useful answer. From there, we cover: Zero-Shot Prompting — Give the model a task with no examples and rely entirely on its pre-trained knowledge. Works brilliantly for general tasks, but can struggle with domain-specific formats. OpenAI's own guidance says: try Zero-Shot first, and only escalate if you need more precision. One-Shot Prompting — Provide exactly one example to guide the model's behaviour. It is a bridge between pure Zero-Shot and the power of Few-Shot. Critically, this is NOT permanent learning — the model forgets your example the moment the conversation ends. Few-Shot Prompting — Provide 2 to 10 carefully chosen examples. This is the most commonly used prompting technique in enterprise AI. According to Microsoft's documentation, without examples the model is essentially guessing at the desired behaviour, while well-chosen examples cleanly show the model how to operate. We also cover why the ORDER and DIVERSITY of examples matters — a detail most practitioners overlook. 🧠 Section 2: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting This is where things get really powerful. Chain-of-Thought prompting instructs the model to show its intermediate reasoning steps before giving a final answer. Think of it like a maths teacher who does not just want the answer — they want you to show your work. We cover: Zero-Shot CoT — Simply adding "Let's think step by step" to your prompt. This single phrase, backed by academic research (Kojima et al. 2022) and OpenAI's own guidance, can dramatically improve accuracy on multi-step reasoning tasks — with zero additional examples required. Few-Shot CoT — Combining Few-Shot prompting WITH Chain-of-Thought reasoning. You provide example questions with their complete step-by-step reasoning chains, teaching the model both the domain knowledge AND the reasoning structure simultaneously. We also share the optimal temperature settings Microsoft recommends for enterprise reasoning tasks — a small technical detail that makes a very large practical difference. ⚠️ Section 3: Hallucination Mitigation — The Enterprise AI Safety Layer This is the section that every enterprise AI team needs to watch. AI hallucinations are not a fringe problem — they are a fundamental characteristic of how large language models work. The model predicts what is most LIKELY, not what is most TRUE. 🛠️ Live Demos Included This session includes four hands-on demonstrations in Azure AI Foundry and Azure OpenAI Studio: 🔹 Demo 1: Zero-Shot vs Few-Shot Prompting — see the difference live 🔹 Demo 2: Chain-of-Thought — side-by-side comparison of wrong vs correct answers 🔹 Demo 3: Hallucination Detection using Grounding prompts 🔹 Demo 4: Azure AI Foundry Prompt Flow walkthrough #AzureAI #AzureOpenAI #PromptEngineering #FewShotPrompting #ChainOfThought #HallucinationMitigation #RAG #AzureAIFoundry #MicrosoftAzure #GenerativeAI #EnterpriseAI #AzureAISeries