Work IQ now grounds Microsoft Copilot and agents in your core business data from Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. Work IQ reasons across the productivity and business data that matters to your business. It’s available in preview starting September 30, 2026, with rollout continuing throughout October 2026.
By connecting and modeling your business once, you create a shared foundation for Copilot and agents: what your data means, how records relate, and which business rules guide the next step. You can then reuse that understanding and governed actions across Copilot and agent experiences without rebuilding context for every agent.
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Business applications data and workflows in Work IQ shift the starting point from navigating apps to expressing what you need to accomplish. Your business applications remain the systems of record, but their data and processes are modelled into valuable, reusable business understanding and context made available through Copilot and agents.
Consider a sales lead preparing for a customer renewal. The opportunity looks healthy in the sales system, but Work IQ can bring additional business context to the picture. An unresolved service issue and recent customer email communications reveal that resolving the issue is critical to the renewal. Instead of simply retrieving records, Copilot can use that shared business understanding to help the sales lead determine what needs attention and what to do next.
The same pattern extends far beyond sales. Work IQ can bring business understanding and action to scenarios that span sales, service, finance, operations, and supply chain.
Users can ask about the business in Copilot and agents
The sales lead starts in Copilot Home, where Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, the company’s contract management apps, and Microsoft 365 context are all available. Instead of choosing an app or assembling reports, they begin with a simple business question: “Which upcoming renewals need my attention, and what should I do next?”
Copilot Home connects the opportunity across three separate systems of record and returns a clear, actionable response.
- Copilot identifies a renewal that appears healthy in Dynamics 365 Sales but needs attention when viewed across the business.
- Dynamics 365 Customer Service shows an unresolved equipment issue, and the custom equipment app links that issue to a site covered by the renewing contract.
- Recent customer emails and a Microsoft Teams meeting indicate that resolving the issue is a condition of renewal. The conversation continues but there’s no clear action plan.
The response brings data together and links to the underlying sources. Although the opportunity remains open, the customer’s commitment depends on a service improvement plan. The business understanding connects the account, equipment, and contract definitions rather than simply matching words across records.
How does this work?
The semantic model brings business context together by combining a focused data scope and semantic indexing with knowledge from your existing business applications. and organization-specific terminology. That means:
- Faster responses:Give agents a focused starting point with scenario-based table and column scope, combined with semantic indexing, helping them find relevant information faster.
- More accurate answers: Help agents understand what users mean—not just what the schema says—by drawing on business logic in views, forms, and relationships, plus a business glossary.
- Faster time to value: Build on the knowledge already captured in Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Apps. The model automatically derives context from existing configuration, reducing the need to write instructions from scratch for each agent.
- Consistent answers across experiences: Every agent using the same semantic model shares a common understanding of your business, so users get the more consistent answers across channel and experience.
You stay in control: You can refine what agents learn by enabling or disabling signals, excluding outdated views or relationships, and adding business vocabulary the system cannot infer. The result is a reusable foundation grounded in your business definitions and data.
Apply the business’s playbook as a business skill
Finding the right information is only the first step. To carry out a business task, an agent also needs to understand how your organization works: which criteria matter, what evidence to consider, and when approval is required. Today, that knowledge is spread across experts, documents, and applications—or copied into individual agents as instructions that become harder to maintain over time (shown below is the “recommend supplier skill”).
Let’s go back to our sales lead preparing for the customer renewal. His organization has created a reusable business skill that comes with the company’s step-by-step instructions for successful account renewal:
- Check unresolved critical cases.
- Confirm a service improvement plan owner.
- Document customer commitment.
- Obtain approval before offering a concession.
The sales lead simply asks “Use our renewal readiness process to recommend the next steps” and the skill is invoked. The sales lead didn’t have to call a separate agent because business skills are an inherent part of the Work IQ across your Copilot experiences, so it’s already there and available for you to use. Copilot applies that guidance to the account and recommends a full-length, joint sales and service improvement plan.
Business skills turn that know-how into a reusable asset. A business skill combines instructions for a business task with the context and supporting resources an agent needs to follow them. Instead of recreating the process for each agent, teams can define it once and reuse it across all agents connected to Work IQ model context protocol (MCP) including agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio.
This results in business expertise that teams can maintain and reuse across agents, rather than another set of prompts to keep in sync.
Turn the recommendation into a governed action
Through governed actions built into Work IQ, the Copilot and agents present the proposed changes, follow any required approval, and update the source records within the user’s permissions. For example, the sales lead asks “add the service improvement plan to the renewal opportunity and create a follow-up task for the account owner.” Our sales lead can use a set of business apps domain of tools (integrated as part of Work IQ APIs) to accomplish a wide range of task across any Dynamics 365 or Power Platform application.
Here are just a few other governed actions:
- Reassign ownership: “Create a follow-up task for the account owner and assign the equipment issue to the regional service manager.”
- Escalate the service issue: “Escalate the unresolved equipment case, set its priority to Critical, and link it to the renewing contract and affected equipment.”
- Update the contract record: “Record resolution of the equipment issue as a renewal condition and add the agreed service commitments to the contract.”
Earlier, the sales lead was able to invoke a skill directly in their Copilot experience. The same is true for governed actions which are new business apps tools that we’re adding to the Work IQ APIs. For the sales lead, he can stay in the flow of work while making updates to the sources systems of record.
Make the approach reusable anywhere
The sales lead can continue to extend the same scenario.
- In Agent Builder, they create a focused renewal assistant grounded in selected business apps.
- In Copilot Studio, they add a guided service improvement process with actions and approvals. With custom code, developers bring the experience into their existing account workspace.
- In any custom agent or third-party agent building platform, you can create teams of agents that oversee end-to-end processes and recommend process improvement.
Each extension builds on shared business understanding and, where supported, reusable business skills—rather than creating another disconnected interpretation of the customer. This is all backed by Microsoft Dataverse, the trusted data storage layer for Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Copilot Studio. Dataverse acts as the secure business store for semantic models and skills in Work IQ and enables the new Dataverse Ask API.
The Work IQ MCP Server, Work IQ command line interface (CLI), and Work IQ plugin for coding agents now also bring approved business context directly into the coding environment. You begin with the intended business outcome. The coding agent determines which skills, tools, and sequence to use, while the developer remains responsible for architecture, validation, testing, and user experience. You can build governed agent experiences faster because connected experiences use the same approved business context and reusable process definitions.
See it in action
Business apps in Work IQ can rationalize across an expanding range of data: Dynamics 365 CRM apps (Sales and Service), Dynamics 365 ERP apps (Finance and Operations*), Power Apps, and third-party line of business (LoB) apps.
Business applications in Work IQ connects business understanding across sales, service, finance and operations, and supply chain—unlocking scenarios that no single app can deliver alone. This shared customer view brings account activity, orders, and financial context together newly enabling cross-platform insights. For business users, the result is less time spent piecing together information across disparate systems and more coordinated action across the business.
See how PowerApps911 prioritizes account engagement by connecting customer signals using Work IQ
IT governance: Secure, governable, observable
Work IQ enables your organizations to create intelligent, observable agents under the purview of Microsoft Agent 365. Observable means understanding how AI uses that data and evaluating the value it creates. As an IT admin, you choose the business context those agents use and control which users, agents, and applications can access business data. Governable means that the IT admin is in full control deciding what business data becomes available to AI experiences.
But a single coordinated control plane does not mean one new portal—it means connected decisions across familiar experiences.
- The AI admin manages who can use AI and the organization’s AI policies in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
- The Power Platform admin governs which business environments participate and who has access.
- Makers and developers shape how specific business data is exposed, within those admin boundaries.
Get started with business applications in Work IQ
For years the promise has been AI that understands your work. It now understands your business too—the records, the processes, and the way your organization actually gets things done. Try the public preview and see what you can build.
Read more Copilot announcements on the Official Microsoft Blog.
*Rolling out in late October 2026.
