| name | project-foundry-operations |
| description | Coordinates on-need adoption of Microsoft Foundry capabilities (IQ family, Toolboxes, Tool Search, Routines, autopilot agents, Agent Optimizer, Memory, Claude, SDKs) for a project building on Foundry Agent Service. Use when evaluating or adopting a Foundry hosted-agent capability. |
| lastReviewed | 2026-07-08T00:00:00.000Z |
Project Foundry Operations
Use this skill when a project builds on Microsoft Foundry — hosted agents,
Foundry Agent Service, Toolboxes, or the IQ context family — and needs to pull
the right capability on need.
Runtime note: Foundry capabilities are not Agency MCP profiles. They run
on Microsoft Foundry / Foundry Agent Service, a different runtime than the
Agency-CLI profiles in agency.toml. Nothing here is
wired into a starter profile. This skill routes adoption; it does not
enable a tool in an Agency session. The catalogued inventory lives in the
Foundry Capability Catalog (On-Need) section of
agency-mcp-capabilities.md.
Status note (2026-07-08): most Foundry agent capabilities are preview.
Preview labels move fast — confirm current status against Microsoft's docs
before a project depends on any of them. Source:
What's New in Microsoft Foundry, June 2026.
Route The Request
| Request | Default route | Status |
|---|
| Ground an agent in Fabric analytics / business ontology | Fabric IQ (pairs with project-fabric* templates and the fabriciq-ontology-* skills) | Preview |
| Give an agent M365 collaboration-signal context | Work IQ (same consent boundaries as the workiq MCP) | Family |
| Permission-aware enterprise retrieval across mixed sources | Foundry IQ | Preview |
| Governed, versioned runtime tool access for a hosted agent | Toolboxes | Preview |
| A toolbox has grown past a handful of tools and is burning tokens / picking wrong tools | Tool Search (describe intent → discover; pin/auto-pin critical tools) | Preview |
| Scheduled / triggered / on-demand agent runs | Routines (azure-ai-projects>=2.2.0) | Preview |
| Publish an agent into Teams / M365 Copilot without per-surface rebuilds | Publish to M365 Copilot & Teams | GA |
| An ongoing shared-space responsibility (group-chat task tracking, follow-ups) | Autopilot agents (start from the Workstream Manager sample) | Public preview |
| Systematically tune a production hosted agent | Agent Optimizer (needs azd ai agent init scaffolding) | Private preview |
| Make an agent reapply an org procedure consistently, or control retention | Memory (procedural memory + TTL) | Preview |
| Know whether a production agent is still behaving correctly | Cross-framework observability / Agent ROI (wire tracing first) | Available |
| Use Claude as an agent reasoning core on Azure identity/billing | Claude in Foundry (Messages API, prompt caching, extended thinking) | GA |
Adoption Order
Wire the low-risk foundations before the write-capable or identity-bearing
pieces:
- Observability first. OpenTelemetry tracing is framework-agnostic and is
the prerequisite for evaluation, Agent Optimizer, and ROI. Start here.
- Tool Search when a toolbox grows. At 200+ tools, sending every schema per
turn burns input tokens and raises wrong-tool-selection odds — this is the
same problem this starter's narrow-profile
Governing Principle
exists for, solved natively.
- Routines only once you have an agent that must run on a schedule/trigger.
- Optimizer / post-training last — after tracing and an eval suite exist.
Safety Rules
- Autopilot agents get a real identity — their own Entra Agent ID,
productivity license, mailbox, calendar, OneDrive, and Teams presence. Treat
adoption like provisioning a user account: it is governance-sensitive, not a
tool toggle.
- Fabric IQ ontology writes are consequential. Use the
fabriciq-ontology-* skills' mandatory Preview & Confirm gate before any
ontology write, and do not confuse the Fabric IQ product with the fabriciq
Power BI Q&A skill in skills-for-fabric.
- Preview means no SLA. Do not put a preview capability on a critical path
without a fallback and an explicit owner decision.
- Data-egress awareness. Connecting agents to Fabric IQ / Foundry IQ may
send data outside the Azure compliance boundary per the applicable service
terms; confirm boundaries before wiring production data.
- Memory retention. Review TTL for anything touching personal or
time-sensitive data. Note the current
MemoryStoreDefaultOptions constructor
sets unspecified fields to False rather than documented defaults.
- Run the
plugin adoption checklist
discipline even though these are product capabilities, not Agency plugins.
Would Revise If
Revisit by 2026-09-30, or sooner when the next monthly Foundry "What's New"
ships. Update the status column as preview items reach GA, and revise the
adoption order if a project actually exercises this path and finds a better
sequence. Delete the runtime-distinction caveats only once Foundry capabilities
are reachable from an Agency profile (they are not today).
