Microsoft Agent Framework — Multi-Agent (local)

Microsoft Agent Framework is Microsoft’s open-source SDK for building production AI agents in Python and .NET — single agents, multi-agent workflows, and hosted-agent deployment. Neo4j is the graph database and knowledge layer that grounds those agents in connected enterprise data.

This example wires them together as a multi-agent investment-research assistant: a Coordinator delegates graph retrieval to a Neo4j Database Agent, then passes the grounded results to an Analyst. One uv-runnable file. Reads microsoft-foundry/.env for the Foundry endpoint and Neo4j credentials.

Tool names and return shapes follow the EXAMPLE_AGENT.md spec ("Industry Research Agent").

When to pick this path

  • You want to see how Agent Framework composes multiple agents.

  • You want the repo-wide EXAMPLE_AGENT.md architecture: coordinator, database agent, analyst.

  • Function tools talk to Neo4j directly via the Bolt driver — no MCP server, no extra hop.

Quick start

az login
cd microsoft-foundry/infra && ./deploy.sh    # one-time, opt in to Foundry
cd ../../microsoft-agent-framework/examples/multi-agent && uv run multi_agent_neo4j.py

uv reads the inline # /// script deps at the top of multi_agent_neo4j.py and runs. The script reads microsoft-foundry/.env for the Foundry endpoint, Azure tenant, and Neo4j credentials.

Architecture

Diagram
Agent Tools Job

Coordinator

database_agent.as_tool(), analyst.as_tool()

Orchestrates the request: gather graph data first, then ask the analyst to synthesize.

Database Agent

Neo4j function tools

Queries company profile, industry context, news, relationships, and people. Returns grounded JSON blocks with IDs preserved.

Analyst

none

Reads the Database Agent output and produces the final structured report.

Composition uses Agent Framework’s agents-as-tools pattern, matching EXAMPLE_AGENT.md. The script is intentionally self-contained; ../foundry-hosted/main.py is a parallel near-identical file packaged for the Foundry hosted-agent runtime.

Function tools (Neo4j)

Ten read-only functions over the public companies demo graph, organised the way the agent picks them — same set as microsoft-foundry/examples/foundry-sdk/:

Discovery — search_companies, list_industries, companies_in_industry Profile — query_company Network — analyze_relationships, people_at_company News — search_news(company_name, query) (vector — embeds query via OpenAIEmbeddingClient against the Foundry text-embedding-3-small deployment, hits the demo graph’s 1536-dim news index), articles_in_month, get_article, companies_in_article

Plain Python functions with type hints and docstrings. Agent Framework auto-converts them to function tools — no decorator, no schema boilerplate.

Anti-hallucination contract

The agent graph keeps retrieval and synthesis separate. Three guarantees in the instructions:

  1. Database Agent emits fenced json blocks per tool call (tool, args, rows) and preserves IDs.

  2. Coordinator passes the complete Database Agent output to the Analyst.

  3. Analyst Agent must cite every company_id, article_id, title, and relationship type from the rows. Real IDs look like EIsFKrN_ZNLSWsvxdQfWutQ / ART11195006745 — short placeholders ("101", "AWS partnership") are flagged in the prompt as hallucination.

Result: every value in the report appears verbatim in a tool result.

How it authenticates

  • You → Foundry: AzureCliCredential pinned to AZURE_TENANT_ID from .env so it works when az login is logged into multiple tenants.

  • You → Neo4j: the neo4j Python driver with username/password from .env. Defaults to companies / companies against the public demo graph.

No Foundry tokens or Neo4j credentials are passed through the model — it sees only the tool schemas and the rows you return.

Override knobs

Set these in microsoft-foundry/.env:

Variable Default Purpose

FOUNDRY_QUESTION

"Research Microsoft’s position…"

The single user question. Pick something that exercises both database and analyst.

FOUNDRY_MODEL_DEPLOYMENT_NAME

gpt-5-mini

Model to run the coordinator, database agent, and analyst on.

NEO4J_URI / NEO4J_DATABASE / NEO4J_USERNAME / NEO4J_PASSWORD

demo graph

Point at your own Aura or self-managed Neo4j.