How do agents turn workplace data into useful action? This Microsoft Learn post describes the intelligence layer that helps agents access and reason over organizational data, context, and tools. To see how Work IQ supports faster, more efficient outcomes, read the post.
What is Work IQ and how does it fit into our AI and agent strategy?
Work IQ is a workplace intelligence layer that sits between your agents (or applications) and your organizational data, tools, and workflows. It’s designed to help agents access and reason over data across Microsoft 365 and external systems, while respecting existing permissions.
Instead of each agent having to manage its own data connections, retrieval logic, and orchestration, Work IQ:
- Continuously builds a semantic understanding of your data across Microsoft 365 and connected systems.
- Combines chat, context, tools, and workspaces so agents can handle high-volume, multistep interactions.
- Works across different frameworks and runtimes via A2A, MCP, and REST APIs, so you can plug it into existing architectures.
This gives you a foundation to reimagine how you build agents, applications, and workflows—focusing on business logic and user experience instead of low-level integration and orchestration.
How does Work IQ handle data access, security, and governance?
Work IQ is built to centralize and simplify governance while still enforcing fine-grained controls.
Key aspects of its security and governance model include:
- Centralized control point: Work IQ becomes the single place where you manage authorization and policies for agents and tools.
- Broad permissions + detailed policies: Instead of managing hundreds of static OAuth scopes, Work IQ’s MCP uses a small set of broad permissions to define high-level boundaries. A Rego-based policy engine then applies detailed, context-aware rules on every request.
- User-scoped actions: Every request runs in the context of a specific user, so agents only access what that user is allowed to see or do.
- Embedded observability: Every tool invocation is logged and evaluated, enabling audit trails, usage analytics, rate limiting, and real-time compliance checks across agents and data sources.
This approach lets you reshape how agents interact with data while keeping security, compliance, and governance aligned with your existing standards.
What APIs and pricing model does Work IQ use?
Work IQ is designed to be accessible from multiple integration points and to align with usage-based cost control.
API options
- A2A (Agent-to-Agent): For agent-to-agent collaboration and delegation.
- MCP (remote server): Provides a compact set of about 10 generic tools that collapse hundreds of Microsoft 365 operations (mail, calendar, files, people, chat, sites) into simple verbs like fetch, create, and update.
- REST API: For web applications and services that want to interact with Work IQ via standard HTTP calls.
Pricing and access
- Work IQ access is independent of Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing and is billed on a usage-based model.
- For users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, Work IQ is available in all Microsoft 365 Copilot experiences and agents, with usage-based billing applied to custom and third-party agents.
- Users without a Microsoft 365 Copilot license are also billed based on usage.
- Costs and controls can be managed in the Microsoft 365 admin center, alongside other enterprise governance and cost management tools.
This combination of standard APIs and usage-based pricing lets you scale Work IQ adoption at the pace that matches your business and technical priorities.
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