Work IQ – Microsoft’s AI intelligence layer – is spreading its wings further. The company has previously delivered or disclosed plans for Work IQ to tap business insights in Microsoft 365 productivity apps and its enterprise business apps.
Now, WorkIQ is being added to every new agent built in Copilot Studio that uses the GitHub Copilot harness, a runtime that powers multi-step work with deep reasoning requirements. That means Work IQ will be able to apply its understanding of a company’s or an individual’s work to help Copilot and agents deliver insights, recommendations, and actions aligned with the needs of the business.
The newly launched Work IQ in Copilot Studio enhances what agents can understand and actions they can take by grounding agents in real-time, shared context about the organization. Work IQ supports personalized search, advanced reasoning, and deeper semantic understanding by operating across Microsoft 365 apps and business apps including Dynamics 365 and Power Apps.
Work IQ in Copilot Studio has three functional layers that will operate as follows:
- Data: Captures how work happens by bringing together signals from files, emails, chats, and business applications.
- Memory: Builds persistent understanding of how people and teams work, keeping agents aligned with priorities and operating consistently across tasks, apps, and sessions.
- Inference: Uses Model Context Protocol (MCP) to bring together models, skills, and tools so agents can reason and take action; the Agent 365 control plane ensures those actions remain observable, governed, and compliant
Work IQ is available by default to every new agent using the GitHub Copilot harness; that means it will be configured without requiring manual addition. All available workloads are selected by default, then users can select the specific workloads their agent needs; an agent that helps prepare for meetings, for example, might use Calendar and Outlook mail. Admins manage Work IQ MCP in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
When prompted to let Work IQ connect and use services, users would select “Allow,” then review the agent’s response to confirm that it uses the expected work context.
Users can test an agent with a prompt that uses one of the workloads selected. For example, if they select Outlook mail, they can ask the agent to “Summarize unread emails from today.”
Users can turn on preview workloads in the agent’s settings to access those that aren’t generally available yet, such as business apps. Work IQ is generally available for other workloads.
Work IQ uses the GitHub Copilot harness and consumption billing based on Copilot Credits. Separate workload-specific tools such as SharePoint and Teams use the standard harness and standard Copilot Studio licensing and billing.
Additional Work IQ Insights:
- With SharePoint in Work IQ, AI Agents Work Directly in Another Core System
- How Work IQ and Autopilots Compound Corporate Intelligence
- What Work IQ Means for Dynamics 365 and Supply Chain Customers
Tom Smith
Analyst
Cloud Wars, Agent and Copilot
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