Customers often face challenges deploying AI agents that can handle complex, real-world scenarios due to limited tool access. To empower AI agents with more capabilities, Azure AI Foundry Agent Service now supports a growing set of integrated tools: Grounding with Bing Custom Search (preview), SharePoint (coming soon), Azure Logic Apps (preview), Triggers (preview), and third-party tools, enabling agents to retrieve richer information, take more meaningful actions, and deliver intelligent, goal-driven results. This expansion helps organizations build smarter, more adaptable agents that can better align with dynamic business needs.  

Today, we are thrilled to announce Azure AI Foundry Agent Service is now Generally Available including following tools: Azure AI Search, Azure Functions, Code Interpreter, File Search, Function Calling, Grounding with Bing Search and OpenAPI Specification and more capabilities available in public preview. This blog explores how new capabilities enable your AI agent to become more knowledge-driven and better equipped to power autonomous workflows with greater efficiency and intelligence. 

Expansion of Knowledge Tools 

Enhanced Web Grounding Capabilities 

To keep your AI agents informed with real-time information — while maintaining full control over content sources — Grounding with Bing Custom Search lets you define exactly which trusted websites your agents can access. This means you get all the benefits of dynamic web data without the noise or risk of irrelevant content. Whether you're pulling insights from your own websites, industry publications or partner sites, your AI agents stay accurate, focused, and aligned with your business standards. With Grounding with Bing Custom Search, your agents become smarter, more reliable, and a truly trustworthy extension of your organization. 

With the public preview of Grounding with Bing Custom Search and general availability of Grounding with Bing Search, you can further control the behavior of your tools with additional parameters: 

• freshness: Filter search results by how recent or which specific timeframe you want to get the public information, such as days, weeks, etc.
• count: The number of search results to return in the tool outputs for the AI model to process.
• market: The market where the results come from, usually the country of your end users.  
• set_lang: The language to use for the tool outputs to AI models to process. 

Connect Private Data Securely with SharePoint 

One of the top requests from enterprise customers is the ability to ground AI-generated responses in SharePoint data, ensuring AI agents to provide accurate, context-aware answers based on business content. The SharePoint tool makes it possible by enabling seamless integrations between AI agents and business documents stored in SharePoint empowered by Microsoft 365 Copilot API. To ground with your SharePoint documents, you can simply enter the sites or folders to connect with, and SharePoint tool will leverage built-in indexing capabilities to enhance search and retrieval experience, including intelligent indexing, query processing, and content chunking. Once the SharePoint tool is released, this capability will be available to every user with a Microsoft 365 Copilot License.  

Instead of requiring developers to export SharePoint content, build a custom semantic index, manage governance controls, and configure refresh logic, this capability automates the entire retrieval pipeline. It dynamically indexes documents, breaks content into meaningful chunks, and applies advanced query processing to surface the most relevant information. By leveraging the same enterprise-grade retrieval stack that powers Microsoft 365 Copilot, it ensures AI agent responses are grounded in the most up-to-date and contextually relevant content. 

Customers rely on data security in SharePoint to access, create, and share documents with flexible document-level access control. Enterprise features such as Identity Passthrough/On-Behalf-Of (OBO) authentication ensure proper access control, allowing end users to receive responses generated from SharePoint documents they have permission to access. With OBO authentication, the Foundry Agent service uses the end user’s identity to authorize and retrieve relevant SharePoint documents, generating responses tailored towards specific end users. 

Extending Foundry Agent Service with Third-Party Tools

To give your AI agent the flexibility and power it needs to solve real business problems, Foundry Agent Service brings together a rich ecosystem of third-party tools tailored to your industry—whether it’s travel, finance, HR, legal, insurance, or beyond. By partnering with leading providers across sectors, Foundry Agent Service enables your AI agents to tap into specialized capabilities and data sources with ease. Combined with Microsoft’s built-in tools, this open ecosystem allows your AI agent to seamlessly orchestrate complex, multi-step workflows across systems—helping your business move faster, work smarter, and deliver more value at scale. 

We are thrilled to announce the new third-party tools available in Foundry Agent Service: 

Auquan:  AI-powered workflow automation for institutional finance

"Institutional financial professionals are under intense pressure to move faster, but spend most of their time on tedious manual tasks rather than high value strategic work. Using Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, we're deploying AI agents that autonomously complete entire workflows end-to-end—from risk analysis to due diligence—all grounded in our customers' proprietary data. We've chosen Microsoft as our partner because their enterprise-grade infrastructure provides the security and scale our financial services customers demand, while their flexible platform enables us to responsibly transform how work gets done in institutional finance, freeing brilliant minds to focus on what truly matters." Shub Jain, Co-Founder & CTO, Auquan 

Celonis: Celonis delivers Process Intelligence to accelerate enterprise AI at scale 

“At Celonis, we are focused on helping organizations unlock value by making processes work across systems, teams, and departments. By allowing agents developed in Azure AI Foundry Agent Service to leverage our Process Intelligence via OpenAPI spec tools, we expand AI’s playing field — from individual efficiency and productivity to holistic business performance. This integration brings together the power of Process Intelligence and generative AI, creating process-aware agents that can orchestrate business processes at scale and autonomously, across many roles and systems.” Dan Brown, CPO, Celonis 

InsureMO : Action APIs for insurance quotations for Car, Home, and Travel

“Insurance decisions often hinge on timely, accurate and contextually relevant information—especially when it comes to quoting across products like car, home, and travel. By making our action APIs available to agents built in Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, we’re helping customers embed the insurance intelligence directly into their workflows. We’re working with Microsoft on this integration because we see real potential in how AI agents can simplify complex processes and support faster, more effective outcomes for insurers and their customers.” Augustine Tay, Corporate Senior Vice President, InsureMO 

LEGALFLY: Legal insights grounded by trusted sources from your jurisdiction 

“For most people, legal matters are confusing and overwhelming. Expertise is expensive and difficult to access. Our integration with Azure AI Foundry Agent Service opens up access to legal advice. Customers can build products that tap directly into LEGALFLY’s trusted legal intelligence, tailored to the relevant jurisdiction. Whether it’s simplifying the language of a contract or navigating regulatory nuance, LEGALFLY delivers trusted legal answers to your customers in seconds. Getting started is easy— simply request an API key from https://www.legalfly.com/ai-foundry-agents.” Kasper Verbeeck, CTO and Co-Founder, LEGALFLY 

Lexis API Solutions: Seamless access to LexisNexis content 

“Legal professionals are increasingly looking to AI to help them work more efficiently without compromising on accuracy. By making Lexis API Solutions available to agents built in Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, we’re enabling a new level of automation in legal content retrieval—grounded in trusted sources and tailored to specific jurisdictions. We’re excited to work with Microsoft to support this innovation, because we believe responsible AI can meaningfully enhance how legal work gets done.” Serena Wellen, Vice President, LexisNexis 

MiHCM: Talk to your HR data and automate workflows with ease 

“As HR teams adapt to increasingly dynamic workforce needs, automating routine processes like leave management and work tracking is essential. By integrating MiHCM’s action APIs into Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, we enable HR workflows to be powered by Agentic AI. This collaboration offers both tools and agent code samples, helping organizations create more intelligent, responsive, and human-centered HR systems.” Harsha Purasinghe, CEO, MiHCM 

Morningstar:  Access up-to-date investment research and data such as analyst research, expert commentary, and essential Morningstar data  
"At Morningstar, we’re committed to empowering investors with intelligent, actionable insights. By enabling Morningstar’s AI-ready investment data and research—powered by the Morningstar Intelligence Engine—to be called as a tool by agents developed in Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, we’re unlocking new levels of interoperability and scale. This integration allows our joint customers to seamlessly embed Morningstar’s financial expertise into their own AI workflows, accelerating innovation and delivering more personalized, data-driven experiences." Adam Wheat, CTO, Direct Platform, Morningstar   

Trademo: Provide latest duties and past shipment data for trade between multiple countries 

"Navigating global tariffs is a complex challenge for importers and exporters. By integrating Trademo’s Trade and Tariff data with agents built in Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, customers can automate access to real-time tariff data across 140+ countries. We’re working with Microsoft to make this possible because we believe AI agents should be able to help businesses make faster, more informed decisions with less manual effort.” Shalabh Singhal, Founder & CEO, Trademo

Autonomizing Agentic Workflows

Azure Logic Apps as Tools 

A common challenge with AI agents is their limited ability to interact directly with enterprise systems, which restricts their impact on real business processes. Azure Logic Apps as tools allows AI agents to tap into hundreds of prebuilt connectors—ranging from Microsoft 365 and Salesforce to SAP and ServiceNow—enabling them to trigger workflows, retrieve data, and automate actions across enterprise environments. To accelerate adoption, we’re also offering a library of prebuilt workflow templates tailored for common use cases like creating bugs, sending emails, and updating SQL tables. These templates let teams get started quickly, while still offering flexibility to customize and scale automation with ease. With no custom code required, organizations can now deploy intelligent agents that operate securely and at scale, driving smarter automation and faster outcomes. 

Trigger Your AI Agents 

In today’s fast-paced environment, businesses need AI agents that don’t just respond—they anticipate and act. That’s where triggers come in. With the ability to automatically launch agents based on real-time events—like a new lead in CRM, a spike in website traffic, or a system alert—triggers empower AI agents to drive timely, intelligent actions without human intervention. This means faster responses, smarter automation, and more streamlined operations. By turning passive agents into proactive problem-solvers, the trigger feature helps businesses stay agile, efficient, and one step ahead. Today, we are thrilled to announce the release of Azure AI Foundry Agent Service connectors in Azure Logic Apps, invokable by hundreds of triggers available. When triggered by an event, your AI agent intelligently selects and uses the right tools you’ve added—automating the task from end to end with speed, accuracy, and context.  

Learn More

• Azure AI Foundry Agent Service is now Generally Available
• Join the sessions at Microsoft Build to learn more:
  • Azure AI Agent Service: Transforming workflows with Azure AI Foundry
  • Building the digital workforce: Multi-agent apps with Azure AI Foundry
  • Best practices for building agentic apps with Azure AI Foundry
• Check out the documentation to get started