Context management
Azure AI Search (Foundry IQ)
Azure search service with agentic retrieval pipeline and permission-aware knowledge bases for agents
Commercial
What it is
Our note
Azure AI Search, now marketed as Foundry IQ, runs a multi-query agentic retrieval pipeline: query decomposition, parallel sub-queries across knowledge sources, then LLM reranking, and it underpins Foundry's managed knowledge layer. Some capabilities are generally available in the 2026-04-01 REST API while the portals remain preview-only, so buyers must check feature maturity.
At a glance
- Vendor
- Microsoft
- Business model
- Commercial
- Pricing
- Dedicated hourly tiers plus serverless (preview); agentic retrieval billed per 1M tokens (first 50M/mo free); semantic ranker per 1k requests (first 1k free) pricing page ↗
- Self-hosting
- No, hosted only
- Access
- Azure REST API, Azure SDKs, Azure and Foundry portals; knowledge bases and MCP-backed grounding
Links and sources
- Official sitelearn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/agentic-retrieval-overview
- Pricingazure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/search
Facts verified nov 10, 2026; added nov 10, 2026. Vendor facts come from the vendor’s own pages; benchmark claims are self-reported unless we say otherwise.