Work IQ: Microsoft’s bet on agent-first enterprise IT — and the concerns

Microsoft's Work IQ rethinks enterprise software around AI agents that decide in real time which tools to use across systems. The company positions the product as a complete redesign of how enterprise IT operates, shifting from human-coded integrations to agents that can query and act across an environment.

A key capability, getSchema, lets agents discover how data is structured at runtime so they can ask a resource to "tell me about yourself" and then pull only what they need. Microsoft says it has collapsed thousands of operations into ten generic tools with simple functions such as fetch, create and update, enabling agents to assemble actions dynamically without changing APIs.

Work IQ sits beneath Copilot: Microsoft likens Copilot to the living space and Work IQ to the plumbing. New Ask APIs expose the full M365 Copilot Chat experience as a single service, while custom instructions and saved memories let agents tune responses and follow up without repeating prior context.

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