I hosted and presented a session Building Context-Aware Agents with Microsoft IQ: Foundry, Web, Work & Fabric at our Nashua Cloud .NET User Group, and I wanted to jot down a few thoughts here while it’s still fresh.
The topic was Microsoft IQ. I picked it because I keep running into the same wall on agent projects: everyone wants their agent to actually know things about the business, but that knowledge is scattered all over the place — documents, Microsoft 365, databases, the web. Getting an agent to pull from all of that, without turning into a mess, is the hard part. Microsoft IQ is Microsoft’s answer to that, and it’s really four pieces working together.
I spent the session going through each one. Foundry IQ is the heart of it — it plans the search, looks across your sources, ranks what comes back, and gives you one answer with citations you can trust. Web IQ brings in the open web, but built for agents instead of people clicking around. Work IQ sits on top of your Microsoft 365 world, and I spent a bit of time on how it’s different from Microsoft Graph, because that question always comes up. And Fabric IQ ties your business data together over OneLake — ontology, graph, semantic models, the whole thing, with no ETL headaches.
The part I enjoy most is showing how the four snap together: Foundry IQ as the brain, and the others as sources you can add or drop without rebuilding your agent. Once that clicks for people, you can see it land.
If you couldn’t make it, here’s everything:
Watch the session: https://youtu.be/ROWzf19hzRE
Presentation: https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/microsoft-iq-foundry-work-fabric-web-udaiappa-ramachandran/289210449
Thanks to everyone who came out and asked good questions. We record all our sessions on the NH Cloud YouTube channel, so subscribe if you want to catch the next ones. As always, if you have questions, reach out — happy to talk shop.