Work IQ
A grounding layer that lets Copilot and agents read live business records — and write back through approvals.
A grounding layer that lets Copilot and agents read your company’s live business records — CRM entries, cases, pipeline — and write changes back through an approval step. It is the plumbing between a language model and the systems where your real data actually lives.
What you build with it
- A Copilot that answers from current CRM state rather than a stale export
- Agents that update records under the user’s own permissions
- Natural-language edits to business data with a human approval gate
- Exposing business context to your own agents over MCP
What it gets you
- Writes route through approvals instead of going straight to the database
- The agent acts as the user, inside their existing permissions
- Reachable over MCP, so it is not locked to one client
- Usage is auditable to IT under Agent 365
- Status
- Public preview
- Components
- Semantic model · skills · governed actions
- Reached via
- Copilot Studio · Work IQ MCP server
- Runs under
- Microsoft Agent 365
- Billing
- Copilot Credits (usage-based)
Straight from the source
Watch instead of reading
The fast version, if you do not have time for the whole write-up.
Why it matters
Reading company data into an agent is the easy half. The hard half is letting it change something without handing a language model write access to your CRM. Work IQ ships an answer to that — and the shape of the answer transfers to any agent you build, on any stack.
Governed actions: the pattern worth copying
Governed actions let Copilot propose a change, route it through required approvals, and update source records within the user's permissions.
Read that last clause twice, because it is the part most home-grown agents get wrong. The agent acts as the user, inside the user's existing permissions — not through a service account that can do everything. If the user cannot edit that record, neither can their agent.
Propose, approve, then act is the correct shape for any agent with write access. It keeps a human on the irreversible step while leaving everything reversible fully automatic.
It is exposed over MCP
Work IQ is reachable through Copilot Studio or a natural-language chat experience powered by the Work IQ MCP server.
That is the detail to notice. MCP is quietly becoming the standard way enterprise data reaches agents, and a vendor the size of Microsoft shipping its business-data layer as an MCP server is a strong signal about which integration surface is going to matter.
Agents run under Microsoft Agent 365, which Microsoft says makes their use of business data observable to IT — the audit story that usually decides whether an agent project survives review.
The semantic model inherits your mess
The model is built largely from existing Dynamics configuration, so its accuracy depends on how well that configuration has been maintained. Stale views and dead relationships get learned along with the good ones.
This is the unglamorous truth of every grounding layer: it is a mirror. Point one at a tidy schema and it looks brilliant; point it at fifteen years of accumulated custom fields and it confidently reports nonsense.
Also preview software, with the usual caveats — Microsoft's docs say preview features are not meant for production. Finance and Operations coverage was still rolling out in late October, and one Message Center post says it is enabled by default in new environments with the right licences, so check your tenant settings rather than assuming it is off.
Reach for it when
- You run Dynamics or Power Platform and want agents grounded in live records
- Agent writes need to go through approvals and stay inside user permissions
- You are building on MCP and want to see how a large vendor models it
Watch out for
- Preview software — Microsoft says it is not for production use
- Accuracy inherits the quality of your existing configuration
- May be enabled by default in new environments; verify tenant settings
- Usage-based Copilot Credits billing — model the cost before rollout