Microsoft Work IQ API Is Now Generally Available: What It Does, What It Costs, and What You Need to Do

The Work IQ API reached general availability on June 16, 2026. For developers and IT admins building agents on top of Microsoft 365, this is the official starting pistol. The preview window is closed, billing is live, and a few admin steps are now required before anything works.

Here is a clear-eyed look at what Work IQ actually is, how it is structured, what it costs, and what your team needs to do before agents can start calling it.

What Work IQ Actually Is (And Why It Exists)

Microsoft Graph has been the standard way to pull data from Microsoft 365 for years. It is a solid, well-documented data access layer. You query it, and it hands back exactly what you asked for: calendar entries, email messages, SharePoint list items, directory records. What you do with that data is entirely up to you.

Work IQ sits above that. It is an intelligence layer that continuously processes signals from email, calendar, meetings, chats, files, and people across your organisation to build a semantic model of how work actually happens. When an agent calls Work IQ, it gets back pre-assembled, relevance-filtered, permission-trimmed context rather than a raw data dump it has to reason through itself.

To put it plainly: Graph gives you the data, Work IQ gives you the understanding. If your agent needs to enumerate SharePoint list items or query structured directory data programmatically, Graph is still the right call. If your agent needs to understand what is happening in the business and act on it, Work IQ is the right layer.

This is also, notably, the same intelligence layer Microsoft uses internally to power Copilot, Microsoft Scout, and its other long-running agent products. GA means it is now programmable for everyone else.

The Four Domains

Work IQ organises its capabilities into four domains:

Chat handles conversational intelligence. Agents can delegate work to Copilot as a peer and receive fully grounded, Copilot-quality responses rather than managing their own retrieval pipelines. It supports both A2A and REST, depending on how complex your integration needs to be.

Context is the grounding engine. Instead of an agent stitching together raw signals from multiple data sources, Work IQ assembles and grounds context internally, then hands back agent-ready inputs. The orchestration overhead is handled for you.

Tools provides a stable action vocabulary for operating inside Microsoft 365. Send an email, schedule a meeting, upload a file. These are the core actions agents need, expressed as reliable, versioned interfaces rather than ad hoc API calls.

Workspaces gives agents somewhere to store intermediate state during longer-running tasks. Files, memory, progress checkpoints, and partial outputs all live within the Microsoft 365 tenant boundary, so nothing spills outside your governance perimeter while a multi-step workflow is in flight.

Three Ways to Connect

Work IQ supports three protocols, and you pick the one that fits your architecture:

A2A (Agent-to-Agent) is an open standard for cloud-hosted agent communication. Your agent treats Copilot as a peer, delegates a task, and gets back a grounded response. This is the right option for complex multi-agent workflows where you want full conversational context and rich orchestration.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the stateless tool interface. If you are working in Claude Code, VS Code, or any MCP-compatible runtime, this is how you wire Work IQ in. It is designed for tool invocation without maintaining session state.

REST is plain HTTP. No special client libraries, no protocol overhead. If you have a straightforward integration need or are just getting started, REST is the lowest-friction entry point.

How Billing Works

There is no separate Work IQ subscription or per-user licence. Consumption is billed through Copilot Credits, the same unified currency used for Copilot Studio and other Microsoft AI services.

Each API call has two cost components: a variable charge for grounding and retrieval work, and a static charge for any tools or actions invoked. Microsoft’s own scenario estimates put light agent interactions at roughly $0.20 to $0.40 per interaction, medium-complexity tasks at $0.30 to $0.75, and heavy multi-step workflows at $0.50 to $1.50.

Pricing is available two ways. Pay-as-you-go runs at $0.01 per credit. Capacity Packs are $200 per tenant per month for 25,000 credits, which makes sense if your usage volume is predictable.

For users who already have Microsoft 365 Copilot licences, Work IQ is included within standard Copilot experiences. Consumption billing kicks in for custom agents and third-party agents, regardless of whether end users hold a Copilot licence.

One important default: billing is off by default. An admin must explicitly switch it on before any charges can be incurred.

What Admins Must Do Before June 16 (or Now, If You Are Reading This After)

If your organisation was running Work IQ in preview through custom or third-party agents, you need to act. Access does not carry over automatically at GA.

The admin setup involves three steps:

Licence verification. Confirm that Microsoft 365 Copilot licences are assigned to the relevant users.
Admin consent. Grant tenant-wide consent for seven delegated Microsoft Graph API permissions and the Work IQ MCP Server resources in Microsoft Entra ID. All requests run under Entra ID delegated authentication, so agents can only see what the signed-in user is already authorised to access.
Tenant configuration. Enable consumptive billing in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, configure Copilot settings, enable audit logging, and verify that MFA is enforced via Conditional Access policies for all users who will access Work IQ.

Microsoft is also shipping a new cost management dashboard inside the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. Admins will be able to review credit usage, switch between prepaid and pay-as-you-go, set spending limits at the tenant, group, or user level, and manage credit requests. Worth setting up before usage scales.

What This Means for You

For developers building agents on Microsoft 365 data: Work IQ removes a significant amount of plumbing. You no longer need to build your own retrieval pipelines, permission enforcement logic, or context assembly. The API hands you what your agent actually needs. The choice of A2A, MCP, or REST gives you flexibility to fit your existing stack rather than restructuring around a new client.

For IT admins: the pre-GA admin steps are not optional. If billing is not enabled and consent is not granted before your agents start calling Work IQ at GA, third-party agent access will be interrupted. The new cost management dashboard gives you the controls to monitor and cap spend once you are live.

For partners and system integrators: this is the programmatic surface for agent development on Microsoft 365 that Microsoft has been building toward. The consumption model means lower friction to get started, but you will want realistic cost modelling in place before you scale anything into production.

The full API overview on Microsoft Learn and the admin setup instructions on GitHub are both worth bookmarking as reference material.