Foundry IQ is now in Copilot Studio: Bring your enterprise data to every agent conversation

2026-07-08 · Source: Microsoft Foundry Blog articles · Field: Technology & Digital — Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Cloud Computing & IT Infrastructure, Cybersecurity & Data Privacy · Depth: Intermediate, short

Summary

Microsoft Copilot Studio agents now integrate with Foundry IQ, enabling enterprises to connect their AI agents directly to organizational knowledge bases with enhanced security and governance. This integration, announced on Jul 08, 2026, allows developers to leverage Foundry IQ's unified knowledge layer, which delivers a 54% average improvement in response relevance over traditional RAG approaches. Foundry IQ provides critical enterprise capabilities like Customer-Managed Keys for encryption, ACLs for access control, network isolation, and Microsoft Entra ID integration, ensuring compliance with standards such as FedRAMP and SOC2. It also features advanced retrieval methods, including agentic retrieval, iterative query planning, and semantic ranking, to provide accurate, grounded answers with inline citations for end users, respecting individual access permissions without additional configuration.

Key takeaway

For AI Architects and MLOps Engineers deploying enterprise Copilot agents, this integration simplifies connecting secure, compliant internal data. You should evaluate Foundry IQ to enhance agent accuracy and governance, especially if your organization requires FedRAMP or SOC2 compliance and fine-grained access control. This allows your agents to deliver 54% more relevant responses grounded in authorized data, reducing development overhead for secure knowledge integration. Consider updating your Copilot Studio agents to utilize this new capability.

Key insights

Foundry IQ integrates with Copilot Studio to provide secure, governed enterprise data access for AI agents, improving response relevance by 54%.

Principles

• AI agent intelligence depends on secure, governed data access.
• Advanced retrieval enhances response relevance beyond keyword matching.
• Enterprise AI deployments require built-in security and compliance.

Method

Connect an existing Foundry IQ Knowledge Base to a Copilot agent via agent settings, selecting the connection and specific Knowledge Base, then providing agent instructions.

In practice

• Implement CMK for data encryption in knowledge bases.
• Utilize ACLs for fine-grained access control in AI agents.
• Employ agentic retrieval for federated query planning across sources.

Topics

• Copilot Studio
• Foundry IQ
• Enterprise AI Agents
• Knowledge Bases
• Data Governance
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• Microsoft Entra ID

Best for: AI Engineer, MLOps Engineer, AI Architect

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• Enterprise AI agents keep creating data silos. Microsoft's Build answer is Microsoft IQ and Rayfin. — Enterprise AI agents require unified context and governed data integration to prevent silos and enhance operational intelligence.
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Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by Microsoft Foundry Blog articles.