Microsoft Launches Foundry IQ Series: Building Knowledge-Centric AI Agents

Microsoft has announced the IQ Series: Foundry IQ, a new developer education program launching March 18, 2026, designed to help developers build knowledge-centric AI agents using Microsoft's Foundry IQ platform. The series represents Microsoft's latest effort to provide structured guidance for developers navigating the rapidly evolving AI agent landscape.

What is Foundry IQ?

Foundry IQ is Microsoft's approach to helping AI systems work with knowledge in a more structured and intentional way. Rather than wiring retrieval logic directly into every application, Foundry IQ allows developers to 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. The platform essentially provides a knowledge management layer that sits between raw data sources and AI agents, enabling more sophisticated reasoning and multi-step interactions.

The Three-Part IQ Series

The IQ Series breaks down these concepts into three weekly episodes:

Episode 1: 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 Foundry IQ that support knowledge-driven applications.

Episode 2: 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.

Episode 3: 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.

Educational Format and Resources

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, summaries of the episodes, and additional learning resources, so developers can explore the concepts and apply them in their own projects.

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

The series takes a practical approach, focusing 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.

Why This Matters

As AI agents become increasingly central to application development, the ability to ground them in accurate, relevant knowledge becomes critical. Foundry IQ represents Microsoft's vision for how enterprises can build more reliable, context-aware AI systems without rebuilding knowledge infrastructure for every new application.

For developers building AI agents or exploring how AI systems can work with knowledge, the IQ Series provides a structured entry point into these concepts. The combination of video content, practical code samples, and documentation aims to accelerate the learning curve for teams adopting knowledge-centric AI approaches.

The series launches just as enterprises are grappling with how to scale AI agent deployments beyond simple chatbots to more sophisticated applications that can reason across multiple data sources and maintain context throughout complex interactions.

Microsoft invites developers to watch the episodes, explore the cookbooks, and provide feedback as the series evolves. The company is positioning Foundry IQ as a foundational technology for the next generation of AI applications, where knowledge management becomes as important as model selection and prompt engineering.