{"id":59873,"date":"2026-06-02T22:54:40","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T22:54:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/59873\/"},"modified":"2026-06-02T22:54:40","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T22:54:40","slug":"announcing-the-new-work-iq-apis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/59873\/","title":{"rendered":"Announcing the new Work IQ APIs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Software is moving from applications built for people to agents that can reason, retrieve context, and even act on a user\u2019s behalf. That shift calls for a different kind of API surface. Today we are announcing that the Work IQ APIs will be generally available on June 16, 2026. This new API set will be the best way for agents to interact with Microsoft 365 data and apps.<\/p>\n

Work IQ is the intelligence layer behind how work\u00a0gets\u00a0done. It builds a semantic understanding of your business\u00a0by continuously processing content from email, calendar, meetings, chats, files, people, collaboration patterns, and your line of business systems.\u00a0Work IQ provides intelligence\u00a0you\u00a0can\u2019t\u00a0get from the data alone: a real-time model of how your organization\u00a0operates.\u00a0With the Work IQ APIs, you can bring that understanding directly into your\u00a0own\u00a0agents, so they can work with business context, not just raw data, and\u00a0take\u00a0actions\u00a0across your organization.<\/p>\n

The Work IQ APIs: 5\u00a0distinct advantages<\/p>\n

Traditional interfaces were designed for human interaction, but agents work differently. They need richer context, simpler tool surfaces, lower latency, and enterprise controls built in from the start. This is what the Work IQ APIs are built for, with five core advantages: intelligence, speed, efficiency, scale, and security.\u00a0<\/p>\n

1. Intelligence<\/p>\n

The Work IQ APIs give agents higher quality results because\u00a0they\u00a0do\u00a0more than retrieve\u00a0or search\u00a0content.\u00a0Work\u00a0IQ\u00a0builds on\u00a0a semantic index with ultra-low latency,\u00a0personal\u00a0memory,\u00a0personal and organizational\u00a0skills,\u00a0structured schema on top of files, and business-specific knowledge tuning. The result is that agents can work from the most relevant and continuously updated context with a comprehensive understanding\u00a0of people, organizational structures, roles, and collaboration patterns.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

2. Speed<\/p>\n

The Work IQ APIs\u00a0operate\u00a0at the speed of agents.\u00a0They\u00a0use an agent-optimized retrieval system that\u00a0reduces round\u00a0trips to the service and lowers\u00a0access\u00a0latency to rich context. For tool calling, Work IQ APIs collapses operations into just 10 generic tools with progressive disclosure through model context protocol (MCP), so developers do not need to teach agents hundreds of data-specific tools. That simpler surface helps agents move from reasoning to action much faster, and gives agents higher throughput, accelerating response tokens per second.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

3. Efficiency<\/p>\n

The Work IQ APIs reduce the total number of tokens needed to retrieve context and use tools by moving more of the AI processing into the Work IQ runtime. Instead of returning raw data that an orchestration layer\u00a0has to\u00a0read, stitch together, and interpret, specialized large language models (LLMs) and agents within Work IQ package relevant context and data in a structure that is easier for agents to consume. It also trims file record strings, message IDs, and app IDs during tool calling to save tokens.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

4. Scale<\/p>\n

Work IQ has been\u00a0optimized\u00a0to support the scale of agent usage. When people use software or interact with systems, it can be intermittent and relatively shallow. Agents execute continuous, high-frequency, multi-step operations that are broader, deeper, and more systematic than how people use software. Work IQ is designed for that usage pattern and the much higher throughput that comes with it.\u00a0This will allow Microsoft 365 to scale as\u00a0hundreds of millions of agents come online over the next few years.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

5. Security<\/p>\n

With Work IQ, agent operations are secure by design. Data, context, and insights stay within the Microsoft 365 tenant trust boundary, and actions that an agent takes are auditable and discoverable. This gives developers and IT the controls they need to build enterprise agents without adding a separate governance layer.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Work IQ API architecture<\/p>\n

The Work IQ APIs consist of four domains that map how agents work:<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Chat. Programmatic access to the full power and intelligence of Microsoft 365 Copilot<\/a>. The Chat API returns the response\u00a0(including citations) that Copilot would return to\u00a0a user and provides programmatic access to agents\u00a0in Copilot.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Context. Programmatic access to agent-ready context and source data. The Context API aggregates the content that Copilot would use to respond to a query but instead of synthesizing\u00a0it into a\u00a0response,\u00a0it\u00a0returns the context\u00a0in a format designed for\u00a0agent consumption.<\/p>\n

Tools. Agentic access to Microsoft\u00a0365 entities and actions through a simple set of verbs\u00a0with complementary\u00a0resource paths to define work scope.\u00a0Examples include sending emails, scheduling meetings, uploading documents, and more.\u00a0This\u00a0gives agents a stable, adaptable way to work across new data and changing scenarios without expanding the API surface each time.<\/p>\n

Workspaces.\u00a0As agents work, they need\u00a0somewhere to safely stash intermediate state and\u00a0data\u00a0during its\u00a0execution. Work IQ digital workspaces are within the Microsoft 365 tenant boundary, and\u00a0store\u00a0data, files, memory, progress, and intermediate outputs as\u00a0agents\u00a0reason through work.\u00a0As we have built out Copilot Cowork<\/a>, Microsoft Scout<\/a>, and other long running agents, this has\u00a0been a\u00a0critical enabler for longer running agents.<\/p>\n

You can already start\u00a0to build with\u00a0these domains now through the public preview on GitHub<\/a>, ahead of general availability on June 16.<\/p>\n

Work IQ APIs pricing<\/p>\n

The Work IQ APIs use consumption-based pricing with a fixed component for Tools and a variable\u00a0component\u00a0for\u00a0Chat and Context. Pricing is denominated in\u00a0Copilot Credits. Learn more about Work IQ pricing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We are also launching a new cost management dashboard in\u00a0the Microsoft 365 admin center. IT admins will be able to review AI credit usage, configure Copilot Credit billing between prepaid or pay-as-you-go, set spending limits for tenants, groups, and users across agents and services, and\u00a0monitor\u00a0credit requests from users. Work IQ APIs will be the first product managed through this experience, and over\u00a0time we\u00a0will bring in\u00a0additional\u00a0products that use Copilot Credits, including Microsoft Copilot Studio<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Get started with Work IQ APIs<\/p>\n

Work IQ is a new intelligence layer for Microsoft 365, designed to understand how work gets done across your\u00a0organizations. The Work IQ APIs give developers and IT administrators a practical way to build enterprise agents with the context, tools, scale, and controls that those agents need to\u00a0operate\u00a0inside Microsoft 365. With general availability on June 16, organizations can start building on the same intelligence layer that powers Copilot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Software is moving from applications built for people to agents that can reason, retrieve context, and even act…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":59874,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[420,7853,416,8638,320,7852,11609],"class_list":["post-59873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-microsoft","tag-azure","tag-azure-copilot","tag-copilot","tag-copilot-for-work","tag-microsoft","tag-microsoft-copilot","tag-work-iq"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59873\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}