Building 3IQ Retail Assistant Demo – Part 1

Introduction

Recently I received a request from one of our GSI partners to demonstrate them 4IQs on a retail industry scenario. Unfortunately, Web IQ is still not in public preview. Hence, I promised them to come back with an example later with Web IQ. But even with the remaining Fabric IQ, Foundry IQ and Work IQ, the issue is finding the right set of data and then build a story around it to demonstrate an agentic solution addressing some practical real-life scenario.

After doing some research with available data, I formulated a plan to prepare an assistant for customer reps to address incoming questions and requests from customers. This article describes how to build such an environment to demonstrate the capability of 3IQs together.

First, we need an Azure subscription with option to provision Fabric capacity, need Foundry, M365, and Copilot Studio access. Once you have those, let’s move to set up our environment.

Environment Set Up

I have limited time in hand. So, I went ahead with existing templates to implement Foundry and surrounding services on Azure. I used this Bicep template: foundry-samples/infrastructure/infrastructure-setup-bicep/16-private-network-standard-agent-apim-setup at main · microsoft-foundry/foundry-samples. There are several other templates available on that page. You can choose any one of those based on your preference. This template puts all resources including Foundry behind private endpoints with no public internet access. You can add a jumpbox as a Bastion host to connect to all these services. Or time to time you can make those services public to complete your work.

Setting up Fabric

We will start with data layer which is Fabric. It is not provisioned yet. I provisioned a Fabric capacity with minimum size/SKU (F2) within the Resource Group generated by the Bicep template earlier. Fabric is an expensive service, especially the higher SKUs are. So, we need to be careful not spend too much and surpass our monthly Azure quota. Once provisioned, go to https://app.fabric.microsoft.com/ and create a Workspace using the same Fabric Capacity we provisioned earlier.

Here “Fabric3IQ” is the name of my Fabric capacity.  As the workspace is created now, let’s create a Lakehouse inside the Workspace and start loading data into the Lakehouse. But prior to that, let’s go to the Fabric capacity on Azure Portal and increase the size to a bigger SKU such as F64. We will load AdventureWorks sales data into the Lakehouse. There is a detail description here showing how to do it: Quickstart: Create Your First Graph in Microsoft Fabric - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn. Only follow the “Load Sample Data” section. One done, it should look like this:

Now is the time to create our Ontology. People who are not familiar can find a guide in this tutorial: Tutorial Part 1: Create an Ontology - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn. We added each table from Lakehouse as entities and build relationship within those entities. Here is how it looks like now:

Next is adding a Data Agent to the Fabric Workspace. Once added, now add a data source and select the Ontology you created earlier.

Now, as your Data Agent is ready ask few complex questions like: “What are the top 5 categories sold?”, “Give me the seller's name who handled most orders in numbers and not in total sale amount?”, “List those customers who didn't purchase anything” and see the result. Once, satisfied, let’s pause the Fabric Capacity from Azure Portal and reduce the size of the capacity to F2. We will resume and rescale it once everything is ready.