You have a chat app in a Microsoft Foundry project and an Azure AI Search...

The correct answer is agentic Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) because the requirements describe the agentic retrieval pipeline in Azure AI Search. Agentic retrieval is designed for chat and copilot scenarios where a user’s request can be complex, conversational, and dependent on prior turns. Azure AI Search agentic retrieval uses an LLM-assisted planning stage to break a complex request into focused subqueries, allowing the system to retrieve grounding information from multiple chunks rather than relying on a single query path. Microsoft’s Azure AI Search guidance describes agentic retrieval as a multi-query pipeline for complex questions in chat and agent workflows, with subqueries that can include chat history for additional context.

This also satisfies the latency requirement because agentic retrieval runs the generated subqueries in parallel and then merges and reranks the best results for use by the generative model. Classic RAG is simpler and typically sends a single query to search, making it less suitable for multi-hop or conversational retrieval planning. Chain of thought is a reasoning technique, not an Azure AI Search retrieval approach, and iterative retrieval does not specifically provide the built-in query planning, conversation-aware retrieval, and parallel execution described here. Reference topics: Azure AI Search agentic retrieval, RAG with Azure AI Search, knowledge bases, query planning, and generative AI grounding.