You are building an Azure AI Foundry agent that answers employee benefits questions from an HR policy PDF set. Legal requires that every response cite the exact source page, and that unsupported answers are refused. You must maximize groundedness while keeping the existing PDFs unchanged. Which approach should you implement?
An Azure AI Search index with integrated vectorization and semantic ranker returns the most relevant policy chunks, which the agent can ground on and cite by source page. Because the PDFs stay in Blob Storage and are chunked and embedded during indexing, no source modification is required, and citation instructions keep answers tied to retrieved evidence.
Why this answer
Grounding an Azure AI Foundry agent on an Azure AI Search index with integrated vectorization and semantic ranking supplies the retrieved evidence needed for accurate, page-level citations without altering the source PDFs. Combining that retrieval tool with explicit citation instructions also enables the refusal behavior legal requires when no supporting chunk is found.
Exam trap
The trap here is assuming that attaching files or fine-tuning automatically yields page-accurate citations, when only a retrieval index with controlled chunking and semantic ranking provides verifiable source grounding.