Microsoft launches "Microsoft IQ" at Build 2026: a context layer for AI agents on Copilot, Foundry and Copilot Studio

At the opening keynote of Microsoft Build 2026 (02/06/2026, San Francisco), Microsoft introduced Microsoft IQ — a "context layer" that helps AI agents understand both world knowledge and a company's internal knowledge. Microsoft said Microsoft IQ was generally available (GA) on day one across three products: GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio.

What is Microsoft IQ?

According to Microsoft, Microsoft IQ is a context layer that helps AI agents "understand" two kinds of knowledge: world knowledge and a company's internal knowledge (the knowledge that lives inside an organization — people, email, documents, meetings). This is the core problem for every agent: to be useful, an agent has to grasp the context it is working in, rather than simply answering from generic knowledge.

Microsoft said Microsoft IQ was generally available on the day of the keynote across three products — GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio — meaning developers and businesses can start building context-aware agents from the day of the announcement.

The four "IQ" families

Microsoft IQ is split into several "IQ" families, each responsible for a type of context:

• Work IQ — work context drawn from Microsoft 365 (people, email, documents, meetings).
• Web IQ — AI-first, model-agnostic and MCP-native web search. According to Microsoft, Web IQ is about ~2.5x faster than the next-best option.
• Foundry IQ — retrieval planning for agents.
• Fabric IQ — context from structured data.

This breakdown reveals Microsoft's direction: instead of pooling everything into a single "brain," it separates context by source — work, web, retrieval, data — so an agent can pull the right kind of context for each task.

Work IQ APIs for developers

Microsoft said Work IQ APIs went GA on 16/06/2026. This is a notable point for engineering teams: rather than only using it through the Copilot interface, developers can gain programmatic access to organizational context — people, email, documents, meetings — to build custom agents around their own company's real data.

The accompanying agent infrastructure

According to roundup coverage of Build 2026, Microsoft also announced a series of agent infrastructure components reaching GA: Foundry Hosted Agents, Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0, Agent 365 SDK, along with a new billing mechanism called "Copilot Credits". (This is based on roundup coverage rather than a direct quote from the keynote — so cross-check official sources when high accuracy is required.)

A perspective for Vietnamese businesses

What stands out about Microsoft IQ is its focus on "internal context": an AI agent is only truly useful when it understands an organization's own data, documents and processes. This is exactly the problem that internal AI solves — RAG over enterprise documents and data running on-premises.

The difference: with the internal-AI approach, context and data sit on the company's own infrastructure — instead of sending all documents up to a foreign cloud platform. Vietnamese businesses can capture the real value of an "agent that understands their work" while still retaining control of their data.

Frequently asked questions

Note: This article is compiled from public sources as of 22/06/2026; the performance claims are Microsoft's. Information is for reference and subject to change.