By Microsoft’s Work IQ APIs go generally available on June 16 — six days from today. That date is not a soft launch milestone; it’s the point at which preview-mode free access ends and Copilot Credits billing starts. If you’re already building agents against Work IQ in preview, you need to know what changes. If you’ve been watching from the sidelines, this is the moment to pay attention.
What Work IQ Actually Is
Work IQ is the intelligence layer Microsoft built into Microsoft 365 to give AI agents a real understanding of how an organization works. It continuously processes content from email, calendar, meetings, chats, files, and people — then serves that context to agents through a clean, permission-aware API surface. The relevant framing: this is not Graph API v2. Graph API gives you raw data. Work IQ gives agents the same relevance filtering and permission enforcement that M365 Copilot uses internally — but now programmable. That distinction matters when you’re building agents that need grounded, trustworthy context rather than raw data dumps they have to reason about on their own.
Three Ways to Connect
Three protocols go GA on June 16. Pick the one that fits your stack:
- A2A v1.0 — Agent-to-Agent over JSON-RPC at
https://workiq.svc.cloud.microsoft/a2a/. Use this for multi-agent orchestration and async workflows where agents need to hand off tasks to the Work IQ gateway. - Remote MCP server — The redesigned Model Context Protocol server. This is the fastest on-ramp if you’re already using Claude, Cursor, or VS Code Copilot. One npm install, one config block, and your coding environment has live access to your M365 data.
- REST API — Standard HTTP endpoints for agents that don’t need A2A or MCP complexity. If you have a simple integration need, start here.
What Agents Can Do: The Four Domains
The Work IQ API is organized around four capability areas that define what agents can see and do inside Microsoft 365:
- Chat — Invoke M365 Copilot programmatically and get responses with citations. Useful when you want to delegate complex Q&A to Copilot from an orchestrator agent rather than handle reasoning yourself.
- Context — Get the raw grounded context chunks Copilot would use, without the synthesis step. Feed this directly to your own LLM when you want M365-grounded data but your own reasoning model on top.
- Tools and Skills — Take real actions inside Microsoft 365. Send email, create calendar events, run specialized skill sets for things like meeting follow-ups. This is where agents stop reading and start doing.
- Workspaces — Scoped storage within the M365 tenant boundary for agent intermediate state. No external database needed for multi-step workflows; agent state stays inside your compliance perimeter.
The MCP Path: Two Minutes to Live Context
If you’re using any MCP-aware development tool, the quickest path to Work IQ is the @microsoft/workiq npm package:
npm install -g @microsoft/workiq
workiq mcpAdd it to your agent or IDE config:
{
"workiq": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "@microsoft/workiq@latest", "mcp"],
"tools": ["*"]
}
}Or test from the CLI before wiring anything up:
workiq ask -q "What meetings do I have tomorrow?"The work-iq-samples repository on GitHub has quickstarts for A2A in .NET, and Microsoft has published an A2A quickstart on Microsoft Learn for deeper integrations.
Billing: No New SKU, But the Meter Starts June 16
Work IQ uses Copilot Credits — the same consumption currency already used by Copilot Studio. There is no separate Work IQ license or subscription. Chat and Context calls carry a variable cost; Tools calls have a fixed per-invocation component. Microsoft hasn’t published per-credit rate cards for Work IQ specifically yet, but pay-as-you-go and prepurchase plans are available through the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Admins get per-tenant, per-group, and per-user spending controls from day one — a meaningful improvement over the GitHub Copilot Credits rollout, which delivered billing surprises before controls were in place. On the security side: all M365 data stays within your tenant boundary, and every tool invocation is logged for Microsoft Defender audit trails. You can allow or block specific MCP servers org-wide from the admin center.
What to Do Before June 16
If you’re in preview now, review your usage and estimate credit consumption before the billing switch. If you’re starting fresh, the Work IQ API overview on Microsoft Learn is the right starting point — it covers all three protocols with links to each quickstart. The official Microsoft 365 Blog announcement has the full domain breakdown.
Work IQ is the most consequential enterprise developer release from Build 2026 that isn’t named after an AI model. The organizations building vertical agents — HR, finance, IT helpdesk — on top of a shared M365 context layer are going to look very different from the ones building isolated LLM wrappers. June 16 is when that gap starts to open.
