Work IQ explained: what Copilot reads, and how to make your knowledge part of it
What Microsoft's Work IQ is, what it reads, how permissions apply to its answers, and what a knowledge base needs so that Copilot reads it well.
Work IQ is the layer of Microsoft 365 that gives Copilot and AI agents context about your organisation. It reads your emails, meetings, chats and files, it knows who works with whom, and it gives agents tools to search and act on that content. Every request runs as the person who is signed in, so an answer only uses what that person can already open. Microsoft announced Work IQ in November 2025. Developers can also connect their own agents to it, through a server that other AI tools can use.
What matters most for a knowledge manager is that Work IQ reads what your organisation has written. It does not decide whether that content is correct, current or approved.
What Microsoft means by Work IQ
Microsoft describes Work IQ in different ways, depending on who it is writing for. The descriptions do not contradict each other. Read in date order, they show how a feature of Copilot became a platform that other agents can use.
| When | Where | How Microsoft describes it |
|---|---|---|
| November 2025 | Ignite announcement | three layers: your work data, memory of how you work, and inference that connects the two |
| March 2026 | "A closer look at Work IQ" | three layers: data, context, and skills and tools |
| September 2026 | Work IQ overview for developers | four parts: chat, context, tools and workspaces, open to other agents through standard protocols |
In plain words, Work IQ does three jobs. It finds the content that is relevant to a question, by meaning rather than by keyword. It remembers how people work: their projects, their contacts, the instructions they gave Copilot. And it gives agents a small set of tools to read and change content in Microsoft 365.
Copilot is the assistant you talk to. Work IQ is what tells it who you are and where your work is. Developers can also use Work IQ without the Copilot app: through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, an API, or a command-line tool that Microsoft publishes on GitHub. MCP is an open standard that lets an AI assistant connect to an outside system and use its tools.
What Work IQ reads, and what it does not
Microsoft's developer documentation lists the content that Work IQ can use:
- emails;
- meetings and calendars;
- documents in OneDrive and SharePoint;
- Teams messages;
- people and how the organisation is structured;
- Microsoft Planner plans;
- enterprise search results.
The overview adds business data from Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. Microsoft's closer look adds the signals around that content: who works with whom, how often, and on what.
Two kinds of content stay out of reach. The first is anything the signed-in person cannot open. The second is content in systems outside Microsoft 365, unless your organisation connects them. Microsoft offers two kinds of Copilot connector, and Copilot Studio adds a third route: an agent can connect to an MCP server. The three behave differently:
| Where the content stays | Whose permissions apply | Who provides it | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Synced connector | copied into your Microsoft 365 index | each item carries the permissions of its source | Microsoft, a partner, or your own developers |
| Federated connector | in the source system, read live over MCP | the user signs in to the source with their own account | Microsoft, or a partner that Microsoft has approved |
| MCP server added to a Copilot Studio agent | in the source system | it depends on the server; with OAuth, the user's own account | whoever builds the agent |
The third route works only for the agent it was added to. The first two work in Copilot Chat and elsewhere in Copilot, for the users an administrator enables them for.
There is one more limit. The Microsoft pages we read explain how Work IQ finds relevant content. None of them describes how it decides whether that content is still true. A 2019 procedure that nobody withdrew can still appear next to the one that replaced it.
How permissions apply to an answer
Work IQ uses the identity of the person who asks. Microsoft's API documentation is explicit: requests run in the context of the signed-in user, and an application cannot call Work IQ with an identity of its own. A policy engine checks every request, and Microsoft says Work IQ respects existing permissions, sensitivity labels and data loss prevention policies.
So Work IQ never goes beyond the access that already exists. If a SharePoint site is open to the whole company by mistake, few people notice it in search results, but an agent that answers questions will use its content. Microsoft is also releasing tools for SharePoint administrators alongside its AI features, including insights on which agents reach SharePoint content.
When teams connect a Copilot agent to their knowledge base, the first question they ask us is whether SharePoint permissions still apply. They do. Microsoft 365 content is filtered by Microsoft 365 permissions. Content from a connected system is filtered by the permissions of that system, as the table above shows. In Copilot Studio, Work IQ is also read-only by default: an administrator has to turn on write operations.
What knowledge compilation does to a team's documents
On 14 October 2026, Microsoft announced a team knowledge base in SharePoint, available in Frontier preview, an early-access programme. Team members add content to it: emails, messages, meetings, files. Copilot then writes and organises a library of linked Markdown pages on a SharePoint site. Microsoft calls the engine behind it Work IQ's knowledge compilation engine. Our article on Microsoft's team knowledge base explains the feature itself.
The research behind it is public. In a paper published on 29 September 2026, researchers from Microsoft and KAIST, a university in South Korea, describe a "corpus map", a map of a whole collection of documents. In their design, the map is built once, before anyone asks a question. For each entity that appears in at least two documents, such as a person or a project, it holds one page that summarises the facts and links to every source document. An agent then follows these links instead of searching the raw documents again for each question. On three public test sets, the authors report better answers, with less text read, than when the agent searched the raw documents.
For a knowledge manager, compilation changes three things.
- A compiled page is a new document. Nobody wrote it line by line, so someone has to own it: check it, and correct it when it is wrong.
- Sources change after compilation. Microsoft lists automated, ongoing curation as coming soon. Until then, people keep the pages current, with Copilot's help.
- A compiled page gathers what was spread out. The authors themselves warn that a corpus map can collect private or sensitive information that was spread across many documents, and suggests building one map per permission level. Before you add a source, check who can read the site where the compiled pages live.
What a knowledge base needs for Copilot to read it well
Microsoft's own announcement puts it in one sentence: "Copilot and agents perform best on well-governed content." Here is what that means in practice, whether your knowledge lives in SharePoint or in another tool.
- One subject per page. The corpus map follows this rule: each page is about one thing and links to the others. A 40-page manual that covers 10 procedures is hard for an agent to quote correctly. Ten short pages with clear titles are easy.
- A named owner on every page. An agent can only tell a user who to ask if the page says who is responsible for it. The owner should be a field the agent can read, not a name in the footer.
- A review date. An agent cannot know that a procedure is out of date unless the page says so. A review date, or an expiry date, gives it something to check.
- Text an agent can read. Microsoft's knowledge base is made of what it calls "agent-friendly" Markdown files: plain text with headings, lists and links. A scanned PDF or a slide deck often loses that structure on the way to the agent.
- Permissions that match the content. Clean up sites that are open to everyone before you connect anything. When content is combined, the combined page should not be readable by more people than its sources.
- A connection that keeps your rules. For content in Microsoft 365, there is nothing to connect. For content in another tool, choose one of the three routes above, and check that the owner and review date travel with the text.
A worked example: procedures in a governed knowledge base
Take an IT support team that keeps its procedures in Elium, the European knowledge management platform we build. The team creates an agent in Copilot Studio. It adds Work IQ, so the agent can read the ticket emails and meeting notes. It also adds Elium as an MCP server, with OAuth sign-in, so the agent can read the procedures. Our page on connecting Microsoft 365 agents to Elium describes the setup.
A technician asks how to restore a mailbox. The agent searches the procedures by meaning, then reads the best match. Elium returns it as Markdown, with its owner, its review or expiry date and its approval status, as our MCP documentation explains. Every request runs with the technician's own Elium permissions.
If the review date has passed, the agent can say so in its answer and name the owner. The technician still gets the steps, and also knows whether to trust them. Microsoft 365 content keeps its Microsoft 365 permissions, and Elium content keeps its Elium permissions. If you are deciding how SharePoint and a dedicated knowledge platform work together, our SharePoint comparison covers the differences.
Common questions
Work IQ is the layer of Microsoft 365 that gives Copilot and AI agents context about your work: your emails, meetings, chats, files and colleagues. It finds relevant content by meaning, remembers how people work, and gives agents tools to act. Every request runs with the permissions of the signed-in user.
When you ask Copilot a question, Work IQ searches the Microsoft 365 content you can access, by meaning rather than by keyword. It adds what it knows about your work, such as your projects and contacts, and passes the result to the AI model that writes the answer. Agents can also call Work IQ directly, through its MCP server or its API.
Copilot is the assistant you talk to, in Copilot Chat, Word, Outlook or Teams. Work IQ is the layer behind it that knows your work context. Developers can use Work IQ without the Copilot app, to give their own agents the same context.
Yes. For licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot users, Microsoft says Work IQ is available in all Copilot experiences: in Copilot Chat when the Work option is on, and in Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Teams. To use it in an agent you build, add Work IQ as a tool in Copilot Studio, where it is in preview. Custom agents reach it through usage-based billing, which administrators manage in Microsoft 365.
Yes. Requests run as the signed-in user, so an answer only uses content that person can already open. Work IQ also respects sensitivity labels and data loss prevention policies. It does not fix permissions that are too open: an agent will find content that a site shares with everyone.
Only if your organisation connects it. A synced connector copies the content into your Microsoft 365 index. A federated connector reads it live over MCP. An agent built in Copilot Studio can also connect to an MCP server, such as the one a knowledge base provides.
Where to start
Pick one question your team answers every week. Find the page that answers it and check three things: who owns it, when it was last reviewed, and who can read it. Then ask Copilot the same question and compare its answer with the page. The differences between the two are the first thing to fix.
Sources
- Microsoft, Microsoft Ignite 2025: Copilot and agents built to power the Frontier Firm, 18 November 2025.
- Microsoft Tech Community, A closer look at Work IQ, 9 March 2026.
- Microsoft Learn, Work IQ overview (25 September 2026), Microsoft Work IQ API (20 August 2026) and Work IQ MCP overview (5 October 2026).
- Microsoft Learn, Work IQ in Microsoft Copilot Studio (28 September 2026) and Connect your agent to an existing MCP server (28 May 2026).
- Microsoft Learn, Copilot connectors overview (6 October 2026) and Federated connectors overview (30 September 2026).
- Microsoft, microsoft/work-iq, MCP server and command-line tool, public preview.
- Microsoft SharePoint blog, Introducing a team knowledge base curated by Copilot and agents, 14 October 2026.
- S. Jeong, S. K. Jauhar, S. J. Hwang and A. J. Nam, Follow the Entities: A Corpus Map for Agentic Search, arXiv, 29 September 2026.