Enterprise AI agents keep creating data silos. Microsoft's Build answer is Microsoft IQ and Rayfin.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Every new AI agent your team deploys starts from scratch: no memory of how the business works, where data lives, or what rules apply. And as agentic coding tools spin up applications faster than anyone can govern them, each one risks becoming another silo outside your data layer entirely. Microsoft is addressing both problems directly at Build 2026.According to Venture Beat's VB Pulse's Q1 2026 RAG Infrastructure Market Tracker, hybrid retrieval intent among 100-plus employee organizations tripled from 10.3% in January to 33.3% in March, a signal that enterprises have moved past expanding RAG coverage and are now focused on the architecture underneath it. Shared business context is the part retrieval does not solve.On the context side, Microsoft is expanding Fabric IQ, its existing business data context layer, into a broader unified system called Microsoft IQ, adding three additional context sources covering how the organization works, what it knows and real-time global signals from the web, so any agent can tap all four as a single foundation. On the application side, Rayfin, a new open-source SDK and CLI, deploys agent-built applications directly to Fabric as a governed production backend, routing application data into the same platform rather than spinning up new silos.Amir Netz, CTO of Microsoft Fabric, reached for a film analogy to explain where the data platform fits. The green screen of cascading code in "The Matrix" wasn't atmosphere, it was the layer that built the world Agent Smith operated in."Our job in the world of data is creating reality for agents based on data," Netz told VentureBeat.Microsoft IQ unifies four context sources into a single agent foundationMicrosoft IQ brings together four context sources that until now existed separately, designed so a developer can connect a new agent to all four in a single integration step.Work IQ. Captures how the organization operates day to day, drawing on email, documents, meetings and schedules