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Your AI agents are only as smart as the data they can access

Enterprise teams building Copilot agents face a familiar challenge: connecting agents to organizational knowledge without compromising security, governance, or answer quality. Foundry IQ solves this by providing a unified knowledge layer that sits between your data sources and your agent—delivering 54% better response relevance while keeping enterprise compliance built in.

What Foundry IQ Brings to Your Copilot Agent

Enterprise organizations need a specific set of capabilities to safely deploy AI agents in production, security, compliance, governance, and operational reliability. Foundry IQ is built to meet exactly those requirements. With Foundry IQ, you can create Knowledge Bases. These Knowledge Bases come with enterprise readiness built in, such as Customer-Managed Keys (CMK) for data encryption, ACLs for fine-grained access control, network isolation, Microsoft Entra ID integration, compliance with standards such as FedRAMP and SOC2 and others, the full set of capabilities any organization needs to deploy AI agents safely in production. Learn more about Foundry IQ (Azure AI Search) security capabilities → https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/search-security-overview

When you connect a Knowledge Base to your Copilot agent, it leverages the advanced retrieval capabilities that Foundry IQ brings, including agentic retrieval (automatic query planning that federates across multiple knowledge sources in parallel), iterative query planning and semantic ranking (relevance scoring that goes far beyond keyword matching). The result is a 54% average improvement in response relevance compared to traditional RAG approaches, more accurate, grounded answers for your users (For more details: Foundry IQ: Improve recall by up to 54% with knowledge bases | Microsoft Community Hub)

For Developers & End Users

For Developers

Today, developers can select one of their existing Foundry IQ Knowledge Bases to connect to a Copilot agent, giving their organization’s users access to enterprise data safely, with permissions and governance already built in. This ensures that each user only sees the data they are authorized to access, and that every answer returned is grounded in the right, relevant content, no additional configuration needed on the user side

For End Users

End users get access to their organization’s enterprise data safely and without any extra work on their end, no need to worry about permissions, data sources, or configurations. Just ask, and your Copilot agent returns accurate, grounded answers with inline citations, from the right sources, respecting what each user is allowed to see.

What Do I Need to Do? Step-by-Step

Prerequisites

Before getting started, make sure you have:

• An active Microsoft Foundry connection


• At least one Knowledge Base already created in Foundry IQ


• An agent created in the new experience. Learn more in Create an agent

1.- Select Microsoft IQ in your Copilot agent settings

• 
  
  
  
  • Open your agent in Copilot Studio.
  
  
  • Select the Build tab.
  
  
  • In the components panel, select Microsoft IQ to open the Add Microsoft IQ dialog.
  
  
  • Navigate to your Copilot agent configuration and select the Microsoft IQ option.
  
  
  
  

2.- Select Foundry IQ

3.- Select your Foundry IQ connection

Choose the Foundry IQ connection you want to use for this agent.

4.- Select a Knowledge Base

Pick the Knowledge Base you want your agent to use as its knowledge source.

5.- Get your agent ready with instructions

6.- Chat with your data

Your agent is now grounded in your enterprise Knowledge Base. Now you can start a conversation and explore your data!

Get Started: Try Foundry IQ in Copilot Studio: Connect to Foundry IQ from an agent (preview) – Microsoft Copilot Studio (new experience) | Microsoft Learn. Learn more about Foundry IQ retrieval capabilities: https://aka.ms/FoundryIQ