{"id":23773,"date":"2026-05-21T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=23773"},"modified":"2026-06-17T10:04:40","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T17:04:40","slug":"how-work-iq-is-supercharging-our-ai-usage-at-microsoft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/how-work-iq-is-supercharging-our-ai-usage-at-microsoft\/","title":{"rendered":"How Work IQ is supercharging our AI usage at Microsoft"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

At Microsoft, we\u2019re constantly thinking about the future of work\u2014how the power of AI and agents is transforming the way knowledge workers do their jobs, streamlining workflows, and boosting employee productivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These innovations have come in many different forms across every group and function at the company. It\u2019s impossible to capture them all in a single concept or story, but one of the ways that we\u2019ve activated the power of AI for our workforce is Work IQ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Work IQ isn\u2019t a product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a shared intelligence layer that enables Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI agents to reason over and understand your organization\u2019s work data, then use that context to generate more relevant responses and actions. This means that the entire Microsoft Graph\u2014including rich unstructured data from your Teams chats and meetings, Outlook emails, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and more\u2014is now part of your AI-powered work experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s not really a brand-new capability, but more an evolution of what users already know, which is access to the grounding data in their Microsoft tenant. The difference is that Work IQ adds an additional layer to provide more context, allowing for richer and more relevant results.\u201d<\/p>\nAisha Hasan, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Work IQ enables Copilot to not only tailor answers to your role and responsibilities, but also to understand who your most frequent collaborators are, comprehend details about your latest projects, surface deliverables and deadlines, and intuit next steps. Additionally, Work IQ makes it easy for any AI agent to take advantage of the same rich enterprise data to return and act on more contextual results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not really a brand-new capability, but more an evolution of what users already know, which is access to the grounding data in their Microsoft tenant,\u201d says Aisha Hasan, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital. \u201cThe difference is that Work IQ adds an additional layer to provide more context, allowing for richer and more relevant results.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Microsoft\u202fDigital, the company\u2019s IT organization, we\u2019ve seen firsthand how this intelligence layer is accelerating employee adoption of Copilot and agentic AI as outputs become more perceptive and valuable. Work\u202fIQ is a foundational step toward a future where AI has moved beyond isolated assistance and become a trusted professional helper\u2014sometimes described as a digital colleague\u2014that carries out tasks and anticipates needs in every aspect of daily work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Work IQ impacts everyday work<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

One of the most instructive aspects of Work IQ\u2019s impact across our organization is that it happened without a traditional deployment. There was no enablement event for employees or operational playbook distributed to administrators. It didn\u2019t require any changes to the application interfaces. Yet over time, our employee Copilot interactions improved in measurable ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cThere was a period where we weren\u2019t adding new content to Copilot, and yet I noticed our metrics for quality and user satisfaction kept going up. Why was that? It was because of all these incremental improvements that we refer to as Work IQ.\u201d<\/p>\nDodd Willingham, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This was a direct consequence of introducing a shared intelligence layer into a Microsoft environment that was already rich in work signals. Those work signals are extremely valuable data that was difficult to extract meaning from before the advent of AI. As the technology advanced, we could take full advantage of this data to inform and improve agentic responses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Customer Zero for the company, Microsoft Digital was at the forefront of measuring the impact of Work IQ. Our employees saw significant gains in relevance, grounding, and answer coherence in Copilot that were visible in the metrics, even during times when the underlying content remained relatively static. That\u2019s the Work IQ difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere was a period where we weren\u2019t adding new content to Copilot, and yet I noticed our metrics for quality and user satisfaction kept going up,\u201d says Dodd Willingham, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital. \u201cWhy was that? It was because of all these incremental improvements that we refer to as Work IQ.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a systems level, Work IQ reasons across a broad cross-section of Microsoft 365 data, including:<\/p>\n\n\n\n