With SharePoint in Work IQ, AI Agents Work Directly Inside Another Core System

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Microsoft’s SharePoint Tools in Work IQ, its AI intelligence layer, entered public preview. With the new functions, first detailed last month, Copilots and AI agents can efficiently complete SharePoint work from inside the content management platform.

Copilots and agents will be able to create, organize, share, and find SharePoint content using SharePoint Tools in Work IQ. In total, the tools support more than 60 SharePoint operations. In so doing, they extend Work IQ’s broad Microsoft 365 and business apps capabilities, which we’ve covered extensively.

The tools also extend the integration of Microsoft’s AI tools and SharePoint; in September, the company shipped Copilot in SharePoint; those same tools powering Copilot in SharePoint are available to AI agents through Work IQ.

Functional Impact

Users are moving their AI work beyond asking questions about their SharePoint content; they’re using agents to initiate complex work such as updating lists, building project trackers, or answering questions from a policy library.

Newly supported SharePoint operations include lists and libraries, files and folders, search, approvals, rules, and versioning. Microsoft cited these examples of what users can do with SharePoint Tools in Work IQ:

• Find and understand content. Agents can search a SharePoint site and gather metadata on files and folders to provide context to an AI model.
• Work with enterprise-scale lists. Agents can discover lists and their schemas, query large lists in natural language and then add, update, or delete items.
• Go beyond intent to finish work. Agents can create or update lists and columns, define views and apply column and view formatting. In one example, a user could get a working tracker instead of a set of instructions.
• Keep governed processes on track. Agents can work with approvals, eSignature requests, sharing, version history and the recycle bin directly where the relevant content is stored.

SharePoint operations appear as SharePoint paths among Work IQ verbs that an AI agent already uses, rather than as separate tools. At runtime, the agent discovers the available path, inspects its schema, then Work IQ routes the request to SharePoint directly and returns structured results.

Unlike APIs that provide developers with a versioned “contract” for deterministic code, tools such as SharePoint Tools for Work IQ are optimized for an agent, so their interface can evolve as agent behavior and evaluation results improve.

SharePoint Tools in Work IQ make SharePoint’s knowledge available in agents built in the GitHub Copilot CLI, VS Code, or agents that developers build themselves. The functions are supported through Work IQ’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) server.

SharePoint Tools in Work IQ build on three layers of control and governance:

• Every agent runs as the signed-in user. Permissions are delegated, so an agent can only do what that person is already allowed to do in SharePoint.
• New permissions support least-privilege access for two scenarios: 1) when an agent only needs to search, read and summarize SharePoint content and 2) when an agent needs to create, update or move content.
• Admins retain control. An admin enables Work IQ for a tenant, consents to the app, and uses Work IQ tenant policy to choose which SharePoint paths and actions are allowed.