Why "Search" Isn't Enough AnymoreA plain RAG pipeline — embed a query, hit a vector index, stuff the top-k chunks into a prompt — works fine for a single-turn FAQ bot. It falls apart the moment you need:Multi-turn memory ("what about last quarter?" needs to know what "last quarter" refers to) A decision about whether to search at all (some questions are structured lookups, not document retrieval) Citations the caller can verifyThis post builds a small but complete grounded search agent: Azure OpenAI (via Microsoft Foundry) decides when to call a search tool versus a structured data tool, Azure AI Search handles retrieval and semantic ranking over unstructured documents, and Azure Cosmos DB stores conversation state and structured order/customer metadata. The agent uses OpenAI function calling to route between the two data sources and always returns citations.