Azure AI Search
Azure AI Search is Foundry IQ. Unlock and activate knowledge from everywhere with Foundry IQ.
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Overview
Build agents that action your unified enterprise context
- Deliver agents faster with point-and-click knowledge bases, reusable across agents.
- Unlock better results with agentic retrieval that finds relevant data automatically.
- Every answer respects your organization’s security, identity, and compliance policies automatically
FEATURES
Deliver relevant responses with search for AI
Fuel agents with enterprise-wide knowledge from everywhere
Seamlessly connect to multiple knowledge sources like Fabric IQ, Work IQ, M365 SharePoint, Microsoft OneLake, Azure Blob Storage, data lakes, enterprise data sources, MCP and the web.
Reuse knowledge across agents and applications
Build a knowledge base for a topic once, then plug it into multiple agents and applications to eliminate duplicate data wiring and maintain development velocity
Streamline and automate data transformation
Use the import wizard in the Azure portal to automate your RAG pipeline with built-in parsing, chunking, enrichment, and embedding—all in one flow.
Use agentic AI to deliver superior context
Ground agents and optimize answers with capabilities like retrieval steering, reasoning effort, and answer synthesis.
Maintain data and user protection
Honor user access with document-level access control lists (ACL) synchronization, indexed sources, and precise query time trimming aligned with each user’s permissions.
USE CASES
Explore common applications to get started
Ground your agent with Foundry IQ
Build an agent with knowledge bases directly from the Foundry portal.
Agentic RAG and knowledge retrieval
Use Foundry IQ knowledge bases and agentic retrieval for iterative steering, query planning, reranking, and answer synthesis.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
Ground your generative AI application with proprietary data.
80K
Foundry is used by developers at more than 80,000 enterprises and digital natives, including 80% of Fortune 500 companies.
11K+
Foundry Models to choose from—see why Microsoft Phi on Foundry Models has over 60 million downloads.
Pricing
Foundry IQ pricing
Foundry IQ enables agents to access, process and act on knowledge from anywhere, with serverless plans for agent workloads.
RELATED PRODUCTS
Foundry IQ fuels agents with knowledge from everywhere
Get started with Microsoft Foundry
Build an agent that delivers answers with full context from Microsoft’s intelligence layer.
CUSTOMER STORIES
See how customers innovate with Foundry IQ
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
- Azure AI Search (Foundry IQ) is an enterprise knowledge system that powers sophisticated retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications and enterprise search engines. With advanced AI and search technology, and platform integrations, it delivers end-to-end RAG systems built for app excellence, enterprise-readiness, and speed to market.
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- RAG excellence: Set the bar for app excellence with the latest rigorously tested AI technology, delivered ahead of the market.
- Velocity: Built for end-to-end RAG development, move from idea to production fast with integrations and features across the toolchain.
- Enterprise scale: Deliver high-performance RAG applications without compromising scale or cost.
- Hybrid search executes a query for both text search (or keyword search) and vector search in one request. The results are then merged together using Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF). Hybrid search is useful for RAG scenarios—vector search is effective at finding information from queries posed in natural language and full text search is able to find specific data like someone’s name or a product code.
- RAG is an AI technique that combines retrieval-based techniques with generative models to produce accurate and contextually relevant responses. It retrieves information from external sources like databases, documents, or the web to enhance the generation of results. This ensures that responses generated by large language models are accurate, relevant, and enriched with the most up-to-date information. Learn more about RAG and RAG in Foundry IQ.
- Read the Azure Service Level Agreements (SLA).
- Foundry IQ (Azure AI Search) is available in more than 30 countries and regions worldwide, with new locations added regularly.
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Built-in indexers are available for Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database, Azure Blob Storage, and Microsoft SQL Server hosted in Azure Virtual Machines. Use Azure Data Factory, with more than 80 connectors, or Azure Logic Apps to connect to your data source. Alternatively, push data into an Azure AI Search index, which has no restrictions on data source type.
Azure AI Search also supports data connections in knowledge bases, including SharePoint, the public web, and Azure Blob storage.
Refer to the docs for the latest supported knowledge sources.
Knowledge sources and knowledge bases are available in the Microsoft Foundry portal and Azure AI Search.
- Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel; Adobe PDF; and PNG, RTF, JSON, HTML, and XML are supported.
- Foundry IQ (Azure AI Search) and Azure OpenAI are two different services.
Foundry IQ is a knowledge base and retrieval system built for RAG and enterprise search applications. Azure OpenAI provides AI models and agent development tools for enterprise applications.
Both are used together for AI agents that rely on private, enterprise data. - Foundry IQ (Azure AI Search) supports vector search, keyword search, and hybrid search, combining vector and non-vector fields in the same search corpus. It stores the data you query over, allowing it to function as a vector store for applications that require long-term memory, a knowledge base, or grounding data for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architecture. This makes Azure AI Search a versatile tool that can be used as a vector database when needed.
- Foundry IQ (Azure AI Search) uses advanced algorithms like exhaustive k-nearest neighbors (KNN) and Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) for approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search, enabling vector similarity queries to find semantically similar information. It also employs BM25 relevance scoring for full-text search, computing search scores based on the strength of the match.
- Foundry IQ (Azure AI Search) supports indexed and remote sources via knowledge sources. With a knowledge base, you can multi-select the sources you wish to include. You can also add multiple knowledge sources from the same service (e.g., multiple search indexes).
- Azure Cognitive Search is now Foundry IQ ( Azure AI Search). All existing deployments, configurations, and integrations continue to function as they previously did. There are no changes to pricing and no breaking changes to APIs or SDKs.
- Foundry IQ is Azure AI Search. All capabilities available in Foundry IQ are available in Azure AI Search. Existing customers have access to all of the latest features, and do not have to migrate to any new surface or experience.
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