Foundry IQ: Know Your Risks

• Foundry IQ addresses the challenge of harnessing fragmented, inconsistent, and ungoverned enterprise data so that it can be used by AI agents effectively.
• Foundry IQ requires Azure AI Search to function, bringing additional costs and management requirements.
• Foundry IQ uses a combination of capacity plus consumption billing but lacks transparency and effective cost controls to control surprise spending.
• Foundry IQ adoption requires clear lines of ownership to keep risks in check.

Foundry IQ is a management layer that gives agents access to consistent, governed enterprise information by compiling scattered enterprise data into reusable knowledge bases aligned to business domains. Foundry IQ comes with several dependencies, the most important of which is Azure AI Search, which provides the core indexing and retrieval of data but also adds costs. Foundry IQ brings new levels of risk requiring clear executive and operational ownership, and additional data quality, cost management, and governance controls.