Most "RAG tutorials" stop at a single embedding query against a single index. That works for a demo and falls over the moment a real user asks something like "compare our Q3 and Q4 vendor contracts and flag anything that changed" — a question that needs multiple sub-queries, reasoning about what's still missing, and synthesis across documents.Microsoft Foundry's answer to this is Foundry IQ: an agentic retrieval layer built on Azure AI Search that treats retrieval as a reasoning task rather than a single keyword or vector lookup. This is a from-scratch build of a semantic search pipeline using GPT-5 for query planning/synthesis and Foundry IQ for retrieval.