Explore Microsoft IQ grounding services
Most useful agents need to reason over organizational data, not just general knowledge. This unit covers the Microsoft IQ services: the managed grounding layer that gives agents reliable, permission-aware access to your organization's data.
What grounding actually requires
Managing grounding infrastructure per agent adds up fast: Indexing, freshness management, access controls, and source connections all need to be built and maintained for every agent individually. Microsoft IQ provides these capabilities as a managed platform service. When an agent grounds through an IQ service, it inherits the permission model of the source system automatically, so the agent surfaces only content the requesting user is authorized to see. Your team doesn't build access control logic into the agent.
Explore the Microsoft IQ services
The Microsoft IQ family currently includes three generally available services, each addressing a distinct category of organizational data. A fourth service, Web IQ (for grounding agents in external web content), is available in limited access at time of authoring.
| IQ service | Data domain | Key capability |
|---|---|---|
| Work IQ | Microsoft 365 content: Email, calendar, Teams chats and channels, SharePoint documents and sites, OneDrive files, user profiles | Permission-aware grounding across the Microsoft 365 surface—scoped to what the requesting user is authorized to access. Connects agents to the information that flows through daily work. Supports A2A, MCP, and REST endpoints. |
| Foundry IQ | Enterprise content and structured data | Managed knowledge layer over enterprise documents, SharePoint, Azure data sources, and the web. Handles indexing, freshness, and retrieval so your team doesn't have to build that infrastructure. |
| Fabric IQ | Analytical and operational data with business semantics | Semantic layer over Microsoft Fabric OneLake. Lets agents reason over structured data in terms of business concepts—products, customers, KPIs—rather than raw tables. |
These services are complementary, not competing. Depending on your development approach, an agent can draw on multiple IQ services for different kinds of questions: Foundry IQ for a product policy, Work IQ when the question involves a recent conversation or shared document, and Fabric IQ when the answer lives in structured operational data. The agent doesn't need a separate implementation for each one; it queries the appropriate service per sub-question.
Note
Multi-IQ support varies by development platform. Foundry agents support all four IQ services. Copilot Studio supports Work IQ; support for Foundry IQ and Fabric IQ in Copilot Studio continues to expand. Check the official documentation for the latest platform availability. Work IQ MCP tools are also in preview at time of authoring.
Match your data to the right IQ service
The right IQ service depends on the type of data your agent will reason over:
- Microsoft 365 content (email, calendar, Teams messages, SharePoint documents across sites you can access, OneDrive files, user profiles): Work IQ
- Enterprise documents (product documentation, policy guides, knowledge bases): Foundry IQ
- Analytical and operational data (structured records, relational business data, organizational data platform content): Fabric IQ
Consider an agent that needs to answer questions about products and policies, provide context from communication history in Microsoft 365, and reason over structured customer account data. For a Foundry-built agent, that scenario can involve all three IQ services: Foundry IQ for product and policy documentation, Work IQ for Microsoft 365 communication history and documents the user can access, and Fabric IQ for structured operational data.
Guiding question: Think about the data your agent will need to reason over. Which IQ service or combination of services fits your scenario?