By ByteBot
Microsoft just collapsed hundreds of Microsoft 365 APIs into 10 MCP tools your agent can actually use. Work IQ — announced at Build 2026 and going GA on June 16 — is the intelligence layer that gives any AI agent secure, permission-respecting access to M365 data: email, calendar, files, Teams, SharePoint, and more. No more manually wiring hundreds of Microsoft Graph endpoints.
The Problem Work IQ Solves
Microsoft Graph has over 300 endpoints. If you wanted your agent to meaningfully interact with M365 data, you had to know which endpoints mapped to which capabilities, handle auth for each, and teach your agent all of it. In practice, most agents just skipped it. Work IQ is the answer to that mess.
The core design decision: collapse all M365 operations into 10 generic tool verbs — fetch, create, update, delete, do-action, call-function, blob upload, blob download, and schema discovery. Resource paths define what the agent is working with (mail, calendar, files, people, chat, sites). Instead of teaching your agent the entire Graph API surface, you give it 10 tools and let it reason from there.
One tool stands out: getSchema. Instead of shipping your agent with hardcoded knowledge of M365 data structures, getSchema lets the agent dynamically discover how data is organized at runtime. That is a meaningful architectural improvement — agents can adapt to new data sources without redeployment.
Four Domains, Full Agent Lifecycle
Work IQ ships four integrated components designed to cover everything an agent needs across a full task lifecycle:
- Chat — Programmatic access to Copilot responses, including citations. Useful when you want your agent to surface Copilot-grounded answers without building your own RAG pipeline over M365 data.
- Context — Returns the raw context Copilot would use to answer a query, formatted for agent consumption rather than human reading. Good for agents that want to reason over M365 data directly.
- Tools — The 10 MCP tools for structured reads and writes across M365 entities.
- Workspaces — SharePoint Embedded-backed storage for intermediate agent state. Long-running agent tasks need somewhere to stash work-in-progress inside the M365 trust boundary. Workspaces is the answer.
Three Protocols — Pick Your Stack
Work IQ exposes everything through three protocols, so you are not locked into Microsoft’s orchestration choices:
- A2A (Agent-to-Agent) — An open standard for cloud-hosted agent communication. Your agent delegates work to Copilot as a peer and gets back grounded responses. The best option for complex multi-agent workflows.
- MCP (Model Context Protocol) — The stateless 10-tool interface. Wire it into Claude Code, VS Code, or any MCP-compatible runtime.
- REST — For traditional app integrations that do not need MCP or A2A.
How to Start Building Now
The preview is live. Three entry points depending on where you work:
M365 Agents Toolkit (recommended): A plugin for GitHub Copilot CLI and Claude Code that scaffolds a declarative agent, wires Work IQ as an MCP server, configures auth, and deploys — through natural language prompts. Available at the microsoft/work-iq GitHub repo.
Work IQ CLI + MCP Server: Install via npm and point any MCP-compatible tool at it:
npm install -g @microsoft/workiq
workiq accept-eula
workiq mcpAzure AI Foundry or Copilot Studio: For enterprise orchestration (pro-code) or low-code builders, Work IQ is available as a pre-certified tool in both platforms.
One important caveat: Work IQ requires admin consent on first access to M365 tenant data. If you are building for customers who do not administer their own M365 tenant, plan for that friction. Additionally, each user calling the Work IQ API must have a Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on license. This is not a free API — that licensing requirement will block ISVs building for customers without Copilot subscriptions. Factor that into your architecture before you commit.
Pricing Before You Commit
Work IQ uses consumption-based pricing in Copilot Credits. Tools calls are billed at a fixed rate per invocation. Chat and Context calls are variable, based on query complexity. Pay-as-you-go is $0.01 per credit. Capacity Packs run $200 per tenant per month for 25,000 credits. Microsoft is launching a cost management dashboard in the M365 admin center to track usage and set spending limits per tenant, group, or user.
What to Do Before June 16
Work IQ goes GA on June 16. The official announcement links to the quickstart guide on Microsoft Learn and the developer deep-dive on the M365 Dev Blog. The A2A endpoints, redesigned remote MCP server, and REST API all ship at GA. If you have an agent that touches M365 data — or wants to — now is the time to evaluate whether Work IQ replaces your current Graph API integration.
