Integrate agents with enterprise knowledge and Microsoft 365

Level ▰▰▰▱▱ L300 (L100 beginner → L500 expert)

An agent becomes genuinely useful to a business when it answers from the company’s own knowledge and shows up where employees already work. In this lab you’ll build a grounded enterprise-knowledge agent and then deliver it through Microsoft 365.

Meet Anton, your AI guide.
You’ll spot Ask Anton tips throughout this lab. Want more interactive, hands-on help? Chat with Anton in the Ask Anton app.

About the Ask Anton app

Ask Anton is a generative AI agent that can answer questions about AI concepts and Microsoft Foundry technologies. It's available in two versions at https://aka.ms/choose-anton:

Azure-based: Best experience (requires an Azure subscription and deployment of a model in a Foundry project).
Browser-based: Use a small language model in your browser (reduced functionality - may be slow or work only in "basic" mode in older/lower-spec devices).

Ask Anton is not a supported Microsoft product or a component of Microsoft Learn or AI Skills Navigator.

What is enterprise knowledge grounding?

Grounding an agent on enterprise knowledge means connecting it to your organization’s own documents — policies, catalogs, procedures — so it answers from that trusted material instead of guessing. Foundry IQ does this at scale: it indexes a knowledge base and performs agentic retrieval, and it can require an approval step before each lookup so your app stays in control.

Learn more →

Your scenario: you work at Tailwind Traders, an outdoor-gear retailer that also runs guided trips. Store staff constantly field questions about products, store operations, returns, rentals, and suppliers — and the answers all live in internal documents. In this lab you’ll build the Tailwind Traders staff knowledge assistant: first grounding it on those enterprise docs with Foundry IQ, then publishing it to Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot so staff can use it where they already work, and finally exploring Work IQ to bring live Microsoft 365 signals into an agent.

You’ll start with the Core task that gets you to a working, grounded enterprise-knowledge agent. From there, a set of Optional tasks lets you deliver and extend it.

Note: Some of the technologies used in this exercise are in preview or in active development. You may experience some unexpected behavior, warnings, or errors.

What you’ll learn

By completing the Core task of this exercise, you’ll be able to:

Create and ground an enterprise-knowledge agent with Foundry IQ in the Microsoft Foundry portal, and require approval before it searches the knowledge base.
Connect to the agent from code and handle the knowledge-tool approval flow yourself.

The Optional tasks let you additionally:

Publish the agent to Microsoft Teams so staff can chat with it in Teams.
Publish the agent to Microsoft 365 Copilot as a Copilot agent.
Bring Microsoft 365 workplace signals into an agent with Work IQ over MCP.

How this lab is organized

This lab is modular. Each task is written to be completed on its own, starting fresh — so you can pick a single task and do just that one. Every code task also shares one starter folder, one virtual environment, and one .env, so if you’d rather work straight through, you can.

Start with Getting started — create your Microsoft Foundry project (in the portal or with one azd up command), get the starter code, and set up your .env. Every task begins from here; if you’re doing the whole lab in one sitting, you only need to do this once.
Do any task. Each task lists the setup it needs so you can start it independently. If you’re moving straight from the previous task, a short “Continuing from a previous task?” note at the top lets you skip the repeated setup and keep going.

Lab at a glance

Complete the Core task first (about 35 minutes) — it ends with a working, grounded enterprise-knowledge agent you can call from code. Then expand any Optional tasks that interest you. The full lab, including all optional tasks, takes about 1 hour 50 minutes.

Section	Task	Level	Time
Core	Task 1 – Create a Foundry IQ knowledge agent and connect from code	▰▰▰▱▱ L300	~35 min
Optional	Task 2 – Publish your agent to Microsoft Teams	▰▰▱▱▱ L200	~20 min
Optional	Task 3 – Publish your agent to Microsoft 365 Copilot	▰▰▱▱▱ L200	~15 min
Optional	Task 4 – Work IQ: bring Microsoft 365 signals into an agent	▰▰▰▰▱ L400	~40 min

Choosing your path — pick the tasks that fit the time you have:

Core only (~35 min): do Task 1.
Core + delivery (~1h 10m): also do Task 2 and Task 3 to publish the agent to M365.
Everything (~1h 50m): add Task 4 (Work IQ) for live workplace intelligence.

One assistant, delivered everywhere: Tasks 1–3 all revolve around the same grounded agent (tailwind-knowledge-agent). You build and ground it once (Task 1), then Tasks 2 and 3 simply publish that same agent to Teams and Copilot — no new code. Task 4 explores a different Microsoft 365 capability (Work IQ) with its own agent.

Summary

Across this lab you:

Created and grounded an enterprise-knowledge agent with Foundry IQ in the Foundry portal, requiring approval before each knowledge lookup.
Connected to the agent from code and handled the approval flow yourself.
(Optionally) published the agent to Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot, and explored Work IQ to bring live Microsoft 365 signals into an agent.

Together these show how to take an agent from a grounded knowledge base all the way to the Microsoft 365 surfaces your organization uses every day.

Clean up

If you’re finished, delete the resources you created to avoid unnecessary Azure costs.

In the Azure portal, navigate to the resource group that contains your Foundry and Azure AI Search resources.
On the toolbar, select Delete resource group, enter the resource group name, and confirm.

The code you run in Task 4 already deletes the agent version it creates. Portal agents are removed when you delete the resource group. If you provisioned with azd, run azd down instead to remove everything it created.