Pinecone announced a new integration between Pinecone Nexus and Microsoft OneLake at Microsoft Build, introducing a new approach to enterprise AI knowledge retrieval and agent performance optimization. The integration is designed to help organizations improve how AI agents access, structure and retrieve enterprise data within the Microsoft ecosystem.
The announcement positions Pinecone Nexus as a knowledge engine purpose-built for AI agents, helping enterprises reduce token consumption, accelerate task execution and improve AI agent completion rates through structured, task-specific knowledge retrieval.
Traditional AI agents often rely on retrieving large volumes of raw enterprise data and sending it to large language models for interpretation. As organizations scale AI deployments, this process becomes increasingly inefficient, leading to unpredictable token costs, slower task completion and declining operational performance.
According to Pinecone, production-scale AI systems can experience task completion rate declines of up to 60% when relying on traditional retrieval methods.
Pinecone Nexus is designed to address these challenges by building structured, task-optimized contexts known as artifacts before runtime. Instead of requiring AI agents to assemble raw data dynamically, Nexus prepares and organizes relevant information in advance based on the specific task and user permissions.
The Nexus platform introduces KnowQL, a query language purpose-built for AI knowledge retrieval. Through KnowQL, AI agents can specify the information required, output formatting, citation standards and latency expectations while Nexus handles data retrieval and orchestration automatically.
The system dynamically queries Microsoft OneLake, gathers the appropriate enterprise data and assembles artifacts tailored to the specific task and access permissions of the user.
Pinecone reported early performance results showing more than 95% reduction in frontier LLM token usage, task execution speeds up to 30 times faster and AI agent completion rates exceeding 90%.
Organizations using Microsoft Fabric already centralize enterprise data, including documents, tables and Power BI semantic models, within OneLake. The new Nexus integration connects directly to OneLake without requiring manual imports or additional data pipeline management.
When AI agents execute tasks, Nexus retrieves data from OneLake, applies RBAC permissions, assembles task-specific artifacts and returns structured responses with source citations through KnowQL.
The integration also supports enterprise governance requirements through centralized PII tagging, version-controlled artifacts and unified token consumption monitoring across workloads and users.
For enterprise AI teams, the integration offers a way to move from raw data retrieval models to structured AI knowledge systems without rebuilding existing infrastructure.
"The data enterprises need to power their AI agents already live in Microsoft OneLake," said Ash Ashutosh, CEO, Pinecone. "Nexus builds task-specific artifacts from this data, and gives AI agents a clean, structured, cited interface through KnowQL, 30x+ faster and at a fraction of what traditional retrieval approaches cost."
Pinecone also highlighted the growing fragmentation in AI retrieval systems, where organizations build separate retrieval interfaces across different platforms and workflows. KnowQL is intended to standardize how AI agents request and retrieve knowledge across enterprise systems.
"Microsoft OneLake offers a unified data foundation for AI applications and Agents," said Dipti Borkar, VP and GM, Microsoft OneLake and Fabric Ecosystem. "Pinecone Nexus does the hard work of fetching, assembling, and reasoning over OneLake data up front, so our customers' agents spend less time making tool calls, burn fewer tokens, and get accurate answers faster."
Nexus is designed with enterprise governance and compliance requirements in mind, supporting RBAC and ABAC permissions, centralized policy enforcement and source-level citation tracking for AI-generated responses.
Pinecone stated that early access to Pinecone Nexus with Microsoft OneLake integration is now available for enterprise users.
About Pinecone
Pinecone is the trusted knowledge infrastructure for AI at scale. Its vector database and knowledge engine, Pinecone Nexus, power accurate, performant AI applications for more than 9,000 customers and 800,000 developers worldwide. Pinecone's mission is to make AI knowledgeable.
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