Thain: The Beginning

This chapter introduces Thain, a support-triage agent that evolves from a simple complaint-analysis assistant into a production-ready agentic system. It explains the shift from single-response LLM calls to agent runtimes built around reasoning, memory, tools, observability, governance, and resilience. It establishes the Microsoft Foundry workspace and deploys GPT-4o as the model foundation for the implementation chapters that follow.