For the past two years, enterprises have focused on grounding AI systems in internal documents, databases and knowledge repositories. Microsoft now contends that the next challenge is giving those systems reliable access to the outside world as they move into production.
At its ongoing annual Build conference, Microsoft unveiled Web IQ, a new suite of AI-native APIs designed to connect AI agents and applications to real-time information from across the web, including web pages, news, images and videos.
The goal is to help developers build more accurate and context-aware AI systems while reducing the complexity of integrating web search, retrieval and grounding capabilities into enterprise applications, the company wrote in a blog post.
The APIs already underpins grounding for Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT, and unlike traditional search APIs are designed to retrieve highly relevant information while minimizing token consumption, helping reduce both inference costs and response latency, Microsoft said.
Reducing the cost and complexity of web grounding
