Overview
- At Build 2026 on June 2, Microsoft introduced Microsoft IQ, a four‑engine intelligence layer that gives agents access to Microsoft 365 signals, Fabric data, Foundry knowledge, and live web grounding.
- Microsoft also unveiled the Foundry Agent Service, a hosted runtime for long‑running, stateful agents with durable memory and tracing that the company targets for general availability in early July.
- The company previewed its MAI family of models including MAI‑Thinking‑1 for reasoning, with some MAI models in public preview and MAI‑Thinking‑1 in private preview through Foundry.
- New governance and evaluation tools include ASSERT, an open framework for policy‑driven testing, and the Agent Control Specification (ACS), a portable YAML spec for auditable safety and security checks.
- Availability is staged: Work IQ APIs are scheduled to launch on June 16, many features are in public or private preview, and Microsoft’s benchmark and efficiency claims come from its own tests and await independent validation.