Microsoft announced Work IQ at Ignite as the intelligence layer that makes Copilot "know you, your job, and your company inside and out." APIs are live now. Some features already power Copilot enhancements. Others arrive in preview early 2026.
Here's what the launch materials gloss over: this only works if proper permissions, data quality, and governance already exist in your Microsoft 365 environment. Work IQ's value fundamentally requires the data hygiene you've been postponing for years.
At scale, you're not deploying AI. You're auditing every SharePoint permission, cleaning metadata, establishing governance protocols that should have existed before cloud migration. Microsoft is selling the engine while assuming you've already built the road. Most enterprises are discovering they haven't.