If you’re learning to build AI agents, you’ve probably hit a familiar wall: your agent can generate text, but it doesn’t actually know anything about your data. It can’t look up your documents, search across your files, or pull facts from multiple sources to answer a real question.
That’s the gap Foundry IQ fills. It gives your AI agents structured access to knowledge, so they can retrieve, reason over, and synthesize information from real data sources instead of relying on what’s baked into the model.
Why Should You Care?
As a student or early-career developer, understanding how AI systems work with external knowledge is one of the most valuable skills you can build right now. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), knowledge bases, and multi-source querying are at the core of every production AI application, from customer support bots to research assistants to enterprise copilots.
Foundry IQ gives you a hands-on way to learn these patterns without having to build all the plumbing yourself. You define knowledge bases, connect data sources, and let your agents query them. The concepts you learn here transfer directly to real-world AI engineering roles.
What is Foundry IQ?
Foundry IQ is a service within Azure AI Foundry that lets you create knowledge bases, collections of connected data sources that your AI agents can query through a single endpoint.
Instead of writing custom retrieval logic for every app you build, you:
- Define knowledge sources — connect documents, data stores, or web content (SharePoint, Azure Blob Storage, Azure AI Search, Fabric OneLake, and more).
- Organize them into a knowledge base — group multiple sources behind one queryable endpoint.
- Query from your agent — your AI agent calls the knowledge base to get the context it needs before generating a response.
This approach means the knowledge layer is reusable. Build it once, and any agent or app in your project can tap into it.
The IQ Series: A Three-Part Learning Path
The IQ Series is a set of three weekly episodes that walk you through Foundry IQ from concept to code. Each episode includes a tech talk, visual doodle summaries, and a companion cookbook with sample code you can run yourself.
👉 Get started: https://aka.ms/iq-series
Episode 1: Unlocking Knowledge for Your Agents (March 18, 2026)
Start here. This episode introduces the core architecture of Foundry IQ and explains how AI agents interact with knowledge. You’ll learn what knowledge bases are, why they matter, and how the key components fit together.
What you’ll learn:
- The difference between model knowledge and retrieved knowledge
- How Foundry IQ structures the retrieval layer
- The building blocks: knowledge sources, knowledge bases, and agent queries
Episode 2: Building the Data Pipeline with Knowledge Sources (March 25, 2026)
This episode goes deeper into knowledge sources, the connectors that bring data into Foundry IQ. You’ll see how different content types flow into the system and how to wire up sources from services you may already be using.
What you’ll learn:
- How to connect sources like Azure Blob Storage, Azure AI Search, SharePoint, Fabric OneLake, and the web
- How content is ingested and indexed for retrieval
- Patterns for combining multiple source types
Episode 3: Querying Multi-Source Knowledge Bases (April 1, 2026)
The final episode shows you how to bring it all together. You’ll learn how agents query across multiple knowledge sources through a single knowledge base endpoint and how to synthesize answers from diverse data.
What you’ll learn:
- How to query a knowledge base from your agent code
- How retrieval works across multiple connected sources
- Techniques for synthesizing information to answer complex questions
Get Hands-On with the Cookbooks
Every episode comes with a companion cookbook in the GitHub repo, complete with sample code you can clone, run, and modify. This is the fastest way to go from watching to building.
👉 Explore the repo: https://aka.ms/iq-series
Inside you’ll find:
- Episode links — watch the tech talks and doodle recaps
- Cookbooks — step-by-step code samples for each episode
- Documentation links — official Foundry IQ docs and additional learning resources
What to Build Next
Once you’ve worked through the series, try applying what you’ve learned:
- Study assistant — connect your course materials as knowledge sources and build an agent that can answer questions across all your notes and readings.
- Project documentation bot — index your team’s project docs and READMEs into a knowledge base so everyone can query them naturally.
- Research synthesizer — connect multiple data sources (papers, web content, datasets) and build an agent that can cross-reference and summarize findings.
Start Learning
The IQ Series is designed to take you from zero to building knowledge-driven AI agents. Watch the episodes, run the cookbooks, and start experimenting with your own knowledge bases.
Microsoft