Published
What if the biggest announcement to come out of Ignite wasn’t new – but something that’s been building since 2014?
For more than a decade, Microsoft has been laying the foundation to connect every aspect of work in the cloud – bringing together enterprise data, actions, and patterns into a single, evolving system.
The result is a powerful idea: what if your organization’s data could not only surface what matters most, but proactively predict it – and act on it?
Comprehensive work graph
Let’s call this the evolution of Graph and Delve. Now Work IQ is incorporating and building on organizational data and work patterns.
It connects to the content and activity across Microsoft 365 as Graph does through emails in Outlook, files in SharePoint/OneDrive, chats and meetings in Teams, tasks and calendars, Viva Engage social posts, and more. By mapping how people collaborate across these apps, it creates a unified graph of relationships between people, communications, and content. Now instead of having these connections loosely defined, we’re moving into proactively how work gets done for each employee. This includes tracking not just formal org structure, but the real working relationships surfaced by data points that have powered Delve for years building a long-term memory of user preferences, habits, and workflows.
Applying this to Copilot, creates conversational memory so that personalized and relevant information about each employee is layered into the response, not something that needs to be stated. For example, Copilot can recall that you prefer summary charts in Excel or that you’re already aware of a particular document from a previous chat. Users remain in control of this memory, which can be audited or cleared, but when utilized it allows for much more personalized, continuity-rich assistance.
Contextual knowledge integration
Let’s call this one the resurrection of and supercharging of Viva Topics.
Easily my favorite thing about the Work IQ product is its ability to perform structured metadata understanding on enterprise content, most specifically within SharePoint files and content. In putting together personalization within employee experiences, the ability to search, filter, and classify data with metadata has been the most important thing in the content layer. Metadata carries weight and purpose, something that our content authors understand but previous Copilot has not been able to weigh properly.
Work IQ finally unlocks that value in the metadata. Copilot can now reason over the custom columns and taxonomy in document libraries to deliver more precise answers. For instance, if a SharePoint library has a metadata field for “Contract Expiry Date” or “Project Status,” Copilot can use that structured info to answer questions like, “Which client contracts expire next quarter?” with accuracy and relevancy. Something so significant to the content value proposition that has been powering SharePoint for years is now a key driver in the AI-enablement of the organization.
Inference & next-best actions
This one is new and really extends the intelligence layer into the future.
Beyond assembling data and memories, Work IQ applies AI reasoning ("inference") to generate insights and recommendations from that information. It looks for patterns, correlations, and cues in your work graph that can help anticipate what you might need next. Work IQ combines data and memory to make valuable connections, unlock insights, and predict the next best action.
This means taking all that intelligence on the organization, the person, the data, the metadata, AND the context on how and where a user is working. Let’s say you’re drafting a document and Work IQ can put all those puzzle pieces together, Copilot might proactively suggest inserting relevant data that it knows lives in another file or recommend bringing in a colleague for review.
What does all this mean for the employee experience going forward?
Work IQ now brings data and AI into the flow of work, not adjusting your flow of work to use AI.
Importantly, Microsoft is exposing Work IQ via APIs and Copilot Studio so that organizations and developers can leverage this intelligence layer in their own solutions. Any custom AI agent built for enterprise scenarios can call into Work IQ to get grounded context about the user and the organization. This means you can create specialized assistants (e.g. a "Project Management Bot" or a "Compliance QA Agent") that can retrieve insights from Work IQ about relevant files, past decisions, or experts on a topic to perform their tasks effectively.
So now after a decade of putting in the work on data, people, and insights, Work IQ becomes the key part of your enterprise’s AI platform, proactively providing the context and data connectivity layer to all your agentic experiences.
