Overview
- Microsoft announced a layered context system called Microsoft IQ that links Work IQ (Microsoft 365 signals), Fabric IQ (structured data), Foundry IQ (internal knowledge) and Web IQ (live web grounding) to give agents persistent access to company data and live information.
- At Build 2026 on June 2, Microsoft introduced the Foundry Agent Service as a hosted, stateful runtime for long‑running agents and said it expects general availability around early July 2026.
- The company previewed first‑party MAI models, including MAI‑Thinking‑1 for reasoning and models for code, image and speech tasks, but those models and Microsoft’s efficiency claims are in private or limited previews and await external benchmarking.
- Foundry’s release emphasizes enterprise controls: new tooling includes ASSERT for policy‑driven testing, the Agent Control Specification for deterministic safety checkpoints, durable memory types, tracing for audits, and Toolboxes to govern agent tools.
- If customers adopt the stack, the likely effects are tighter vendor control for Microsoft over the AI layer and easier paths to production for agents, though real‑world reliability, cost gains, and performance must be validated by outside tests and customer experience.