What is Foundry IQ?
Foundry IQ is an advanced knowledge layer designed by Microsoft, integrated into the Azure AI ecosystem to empower AI agents with seamless access to enterprise data. It acts as a centralized gateway that unifies multiple data sources whether company documents, SharePoint, databases, or external web sources into reusable, topic-focused knowledge bases. This intelligent layer replaces the need for organizations to build custom retrieval pipelines for every AI project, making it easier and faster to deploy agents that are context-aware and data-driven.
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Image Source: Microsoft Announcements (x.com)
How Foundry IQ Enhances AI Agents?
At its core, Foundry IQ automates the entire knowledge ingestion process by indexing, chunking, vectorizing, and enriching text, images, and complex documents. It features an “agentic retrieval engine” that treats querying as an iterative, reasoning-driven task. Instead of a simple keyword search, the engine plans how to explore diverse knowledge sources, decomposes complex questions, and synthesizes precise answers with configurable “retrieval reasoning effort” to balance speed and depth.
Foundry IQ supports both indexed data where content is ingested and prepared ahead of time, as well as remote data sources accessed in real time, allowing agents to pull current information dynamically. This flexibility ensures agents can answer even complicated, multi-part questions by connecting fragmented information spread across several repositories.
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Image Source: Microsoft Announcements
Security, Compliance, and Governance
Enterprise readiness is a key strength of Foundry IQ. It respects user identities and permissions across all knowledge sources, enforcing document-level access control and honoring data sensitivity labels through Microsoft Purview integration. This means agents only see the data a user is authorized to view, maintaining strict compliance and privacy standards.
Additionally, Foundry IQ provides observability features so organizations can monitor agent usage, audit data retrieval, and trace answers back to their original sources, increasing transparency and trust in AI-driven decisions.
Real-World Impact and Use Cases
Foundry IQ builds on proven Azure AI Search technology, already powering billions of queries daily across large organizations. Companies like AT&T have used similar retrieval-augmented generation to reduce customer resolution times by a third and scale AI solutions to thousands of employees. Ontario Power Generation leverages agentic retrieval to unlock decades of nuclear operating knowledge, helping new staff learn faster and make data-driven decisions confidently.
By centralizing knowledge management, Foundry IQ enables teams to rapidly spin up new AI agents without rebuilding complex data pipelines, accelerating innovation and improving the quality of AI-supported workflows across industries.
Getting Started with Foundry IQ
Foundry IQ is available in public preview, accessible through the Foundry portal and Azure AI Search. Developers can easily create knowledge bases by connecting diverse data sources and configure retrieval behavior using high-level controls. The layered architecture separates knowledge management from agent logic, allowing knowledge bases to be updated independently and reused by multiple agents for different business needs.
Conclusion
Foundry IQ transforms the way organizations unlock and apply enterprise knowledge in AI agents. By offering a unified, secure, and intelligent retrieval system, it simplifies agent development while delivering more accurate, context-rich responses. This innovation is a vital step toward scalable, trustworthy AI solutions that integrate deeply with an organization’s data environment, accelerating digital transformation and empowering workers with instant access to critical insights.