A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server exposes a reusable, centrally maintained set of tools that any agent can connect to, and Foundry Agent Service supports adding MCP servers from the tools catalogue. This is the standard pattern for connecting agents to external systems through shared tool definitions.

The Responses API is the generally available single entry point for Foundry Agent Service and supports both prompt agents and hosted agents. It is the API Microsoft directs new agentic development towards.

You should enable mask_inpainting and supply both the input image and the mask to meet all the criteria for your Microsoft Foundry image-editing workflow.
By utilizing Microsoft Foundry's built-in Image Generation Tool parameters, configuring the workflow this way ensures the desired edits are perfectly executed.
Workflow Configuration Requirements
Mask-Based Object Removal: Passing the mask parameter explicitly flags the exact background object regions targeted for removal, replacing them seamlessly.
Preserving Style and Lighting: Enabling mask_inpainting prompts the underlying built-in model (such as gpt-image-2) to inherit and maintain the exact lighting, textures, and style of the surrounding unmasked environment.
Built-In Controls Only: This is entirely handled natively via the Foundry Agent Service API variables without deploying a single line of custom code or third-party model checkpoints.
Targeted Area Enforcement: The system relies on the provided mask array to ensure pixels outside the marked coordinates are kept completely untouched and protected from VAE degradation.
Reference:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/foundry/agents/how-to/tools/image-generation

The first step should be an Azure Content Understanding analyzer within Microsoft Foundry Tools.
This specific tool is designed to handle the complexities in this scenario--scanned text, complex tables, and multi-column layouts--by converting unstructured documents into a structured Markdown format. This preserves the document's original hierarchy and structural relationships, which is critical for accurate downstream reasoning by an agent.
Incorrect:
[Not A]
Azure Language is designed for text-based natural language processing (NLP) like sentiment analysis or PII redaction on raw text strings. It cannot parse scanned images, optical character recognition (OCR), tables, or complex multi-column visual layouts.
[Not C]
The first step in this specific Microsoft Foundry agent configuration should not be an Azure OpenAI Responses API call.While multimodal models can read images, they frequently hallucinate data, fail to capture complex multi-column reading orders, and degrade table structures when processing dense, mixed-format documents.
Reference:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/content-understanding/document/elements

To deterministically force the agent to invoke your Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool on every run, you must pass tool_choice="required" into the run_create_and_process method.
The 'required' tool choice: Setting this parameter to 'required' forces the underlying Azure OpenAI model to invoke one of your available tools on every response, ensuring the agent doesn't guess answers from the base model.
Reference:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/foundry/agents/concepts/tool-best-practice