Foundry IQ with D365F&O and Fabric IQ

Business Scenario

A retail organization runs multiple promotional sales events across its store network in different cities, featuring various product categories where Data is captured from third-party systems (products, stores, sales events) and D365 Finance and Operations (customer data)

Customers are linked to stores based on city, and each store hosts specific sales events.

To figure out the store generating highest revenue, store event driving the best outcome, majority customer footprint, the organization has implemented copilot studio agent using Fabric IQ, Ontology and ERP MCP.

 

New Business Challenge

Beyond understanding past performance, the retailer wants the system to answer:

• Are there procurement risks impacting promotional sales?
• Which cities should receive additional marketing spend?

 

Solution

Create a foundry agent using Foundry IQ including Fabric IQ, Web IQ, Web IQ as knowledge source.

Foundry IQ is not the source of data. Its primary role is the reasoning, orchestration, and decision-making layer that connects insights from Fabric IQ, Work IQ, and Web IQ , sharepoint, blob, custom agents etc and generates business recommendations. It is backed by Azure AI search to get an indexed search with accurate result.

 

A. Prerequisite:

Data Sources & Relationships Overview

• Product, store, and sales event data are sourced from third-party systems .
• Customer data is sourced from the ERP (Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations) system through Fabric.

How the data is connected:

• Customers are linked to stores based on city alignment (customer city = store location).
• Sales events are associated with:

o   The products being sold, and

o   The stores where the events are conducted.

 

• Country specific marketing policy documents stored in sharepoint

 

 

• WebIQ Setup for getting real time information from web (Web IQ is the key enabler for the supplier-news scenario. It can help with Real-time supplier news, market disruptions, geopolitical events, regulatory changes, competitor activity)

 

Ref: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/foundry/agents/how-to/tools/web-iq

 

• Finance and Operations data connected toFabric Lakehouse

Ref: Link your Dataverse environment to Microsoft Fabric and unlock deep insights - Power Apps | Microsoft Learn

 

• Store, event , Product data ingested to lakehouse using any of the methods as outlined in the documentation below

Ref: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-engineering/load-data-lakehouse

• Fabric Ontology created combining the F&O customer, store, product and event data (sample screenshot below)

 

• A Microsoft Foundry project with an LLM deployment, such as gpt-4.1-mini.
• Authentication and permissions on your search service and project.

 

B. Architecture Pattern

 

 

C. Step by Step Configuration 

 

1. Goto Azure portal and add a search service (as that runs in the background of foundry IQ for an indexed search)

 

 

Ref: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/search-create-service-portal

 

2. Goto Azure foundry portal (https://ai.azure.com/) and add an agent with ERP MCP as a tool:

 

 

 

3. Goto knowledge (Foundry IQ) and select the AI Search

 

 

 

4. Create a knowledgebase and add the following options: Fabric IQ , Web , SharePoint. Use the knowledge base for the Retail growth Intelligence agent

 

 

 

 

5. Working with the agent

 

The agent can be published in the channel of choice (M365, teams, copilot studio using A2A  etc).

Ref: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/foundry/agents/how-to/publish-copilot

 

The question "Are there procurement timeline or any other risks impacting promotional sales?"

is exactly the type of cross-domain reasoning scenario where the agent combines:

 

• Fabric IQ Ontology → understands relationships between Store, Product, SaleEvent, Customer.
• F&O ERP MCP → retrieves operational procurement data such as PO status, Confirmed Delivery Date, Vendor performance, Inventory levels.
• SharePoint Policy Repository → validates country-specific marketing investment rules and campaign approval constraints.
• Foundry IQ/Web Intelligence (if enabled) → checks supplier news, disruptions, external market events.