Announcing the IQ Series: Foundry IQ

AI agents are rapidly becoming a new way to build applications. But for agents to be truly useful, they need access to the knowledge and context that helps them reason about the world they operate in.

That’s where Foundry IQ comes in.

Today we’re announcing the IQ Series: Foundry IQ, a new set of developer-focused episodes exploring how to build knowledge-centric AI systems using Foundry IQ.

The series focuses on the core ideas behind how modern AI systems work with knowledge, how they retrieve information, reason across sources, synthesize answers, and orchestrate multi-step interactions.

Instead of treating retrieval as a single step in a pipeline, Foundry IQ approaches knowledge as something that AI systems actively work with throughout the reasoning process. The IQ Series breaks down these concepts and shows how they come together when building real AI applications.

You can explore the series and all the accompanying samples here:

👉 https://aka.ms/iq-series

What is Foundry IQ?

Foundry IQ helps AI systems work with knowledge in a more structured and intentional way.

Rather than wiring retrieval logic directly into every application, developers can define knowledge bases that connect to documents, data sources, and other information systems. AI agents can then query these knowledge bases to gather the context they need to generate responses, make decisions, or complete tasks.

This model allows knowledge to be organized, reused, and combined across applications, instead of being rebuilt for each new scenario.

What's covered in the IQ Series?

The Foundry IQ episodes in the IQ Series explore the key building blocks behind knowledge-driven AI systems from how knowledge enters the system to how agents ultimately query and use it.

The series is released as three weekly episodes:

• Foundry IQ: Unlocking Knowledge for Your Agents — March 18, 2026: Introduces Foundry IQ and the core ideas behind it. The episode explains how AI agents work with knowledge and walks through the main components of the Foundry IQ that support knowledge-driven applications.

• Foundry IQ: Building the Data Pipeline with Knowledge Sources — March 25, 2026: Focuses on Knowledge Sources and how different types of content flow into Foundry IQ. It explores how systems such as SharePoint, Fabric, OneLake, Azure Blob Storage, Azure AI Search, and the web contribute information that AI systems can later retrieve and use.

• Foundry IQ: Querying the Multi-Source AI Knowledge Bases — April 1, 2026: Dives into the Knowledge Bases and how multiple knowledge sources can be organized behind a single endpoint. The episode demonstrates how AI systems query across these sources and synthesize information to answer complex questions. 

Each episode includes a short executive introduction, a tech talk exploring the topic in depth, and a visual recap with doodle summaries of the key ideas.

Alongside the episodes, the GitHub repository provides cookbooks with sample code, summary of the episodes, and additinal learning resources, so developers can explore the concepts and apply them in their own projects.

Explore the Repo

All episodes and supporting materials live in the IQ Series repository:

👉 https://aka.ms/iq-series

Inside the repository you’ll find:

• The Foundry IQ episode links
• Cookbooks for each episode
• Links to documentation and additional resources

If you're building AI agents or exploring how AI systems can work with knowledge, the IQ Series is a great place to start.

Watch the episodes and explore the cookbooks! We’re excited to see what you build and welcome your feedback & ideas as the series evolves.