Plan and manage an Azure AI solution 1.1 Choose the appropriate Foundry services for generative AI and agents
A finance agent uses Foundry Agent Service memory (preview).
Study guide skill: Choose appropriate memory, tool, and knowledge integration services for agent solutions
Question B4-004
A finance agent uses Foundry Agent Service memory (preview). Users often ask it to 'run the month-end reconciliation the way we did last time', and the agent should reuse the routine it worked out in earlier sessions. Which memory type holds this, and when does the guidance say to retrieve it?
Select one answer.
Answer: A
Procedural memory stores reusable how-to routines and operating patterns inferred from prior interactions, and the guidance is to retrieve it when the user asks for a recurring workflow the agent has handled before. User profile memory holds durable preferences and personal context, and chat summary memory holds summaries of prior conversation topics. Short-term memory covers only the current session, while Foundry memory is long-term.
Deep dive
How it works
Agents have two kinds of memory:
- Short-term memory tracks the current session's conversation. Agent orchestration frameworks typically manage it as part of the session context.
- Long-term memory retains distilled knowledge across sessions and needs a persistent store. Memory in Foundry Agent Service is long-term memory.
Foundry Agent Service memory (preview) extracts and stores three types of long-term memory, each with its own retrieval guidance:
- User profile memory: durable preferences and personal context (language, product defaults, accessibility needs). Retrieve near the beginning of each conversation.
- Chat summary memory: distilled summaries of prior conversation topics and threads. Retrieve per turn by using the current conversation messages.
- Procedural memory: reusable how-to routines and operating patterns inferred from prior interactions. Retrieve when the user asks for a recurring workflow or task the agent has handled before.
"Run the month-end reconciliation the way we did last time" is a request for a recurring workflow, and the thing to reuse is a routine. That's procedural memory. All three types are enabled by default and can be configured or disabled when you create a memory store.
The other options, and when you'd use them
- Short-term memory: It only covers the current session, and the routine was worked out in earlier sessions.
- User profile memory: It holds stable preferences and personal context, retrieved near the start of each conversation, not how-to routines.
- Chat summary memory: It holds summaries of what earlier conversations were about, retrieved per turn for continuity, not the reusable steps of a task.
Exam tip
Who the user is = user profile. What we talked about = chat summary. How we do a task = procedural.
References
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