What Work IQ is
Work IQ is the intelligence layer behind how work gets done in a Microsoft 365 tenant. It continuously builds a semantic understanding of the organisation from email, calendar, meetings, chats, files, people, collaboration patterns and connected line-of-business systems — who works with whom, what matters, what's in flight and what needs to happen next. It sits in Microsoft's wider 'IQ' family announced at Build 2026 (alongside Fabric IQ, Foundry IQ and Web IQ), and it is the successor idea to the Semantic Index that grounded the first generation of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
What it grounds
Three things. First, Microsoft 365 Copilot — Work IQ is the context that makes Copilot's answers specific to your organisation rather than generic. Second, agents: the Work IQ APIs reached general availability on 16 June 2026, letting agents built in Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry or third-party AI platforms ground in Microsoft 365 context and take actions with business understanding — billed on consumption through Copilot Credits. Third, Scout: Microsoft's always-on Autopilot builds its picture of how you work on Work IQ. In short, every agentic product Microsoft now ships stands on this layer.
Why it matters for data governance
Work IQ is permission-aware — it respects the asking identity's access, with Purview governance built in. That's the same promise Semantic Index made, and the same trap applies at larger scale: it surfaces everything an identity technically can reach, including the over-permissioned SharePoint sprawl nobody remembered. Two things are new. Agents and third-party platforms can now reach your tenant's work context through a supported API, so the audience for your oversharing is no longer just your own staff. And always-on agents query continuously, not when a human happens to ask. Before anything grounds in Work IQ: run an oversharing audit, get sensitivity labels and DLP in place, and put Agent 365 governance around every agent identity. Work IQ amplifies whatever data hygiene you already have — in both directions.