Access Microsoft 365 data with Work IQ
Unit 5 of 8 · Module 11: Integrate your agent with Microsoft 365
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A courier for workplace data
An agent that helps with everyday work gets far more useful when it can see the work itself. Picture a big office tower. The mailroom, the meeting rooms, the file archive, the team chat rooms, and the staff directory are all behind locked doors. Microsoft Work IQ is a courier who can fetch from every one of them for your AI assistant. Under the hood, it's two things in one, a command line tool and an MCP server, and both give your AI assistant the Microsoft 365 data that Copilot can reach. It covers email, meetings, documents in SharePoint and OneDrive, Teams messages, people, and even business apps. So you can ask things like: what did Priya say about the launch date? Find the slides I edited yesterday. Sum up this morning's chat in the design channel. Or, who else is on the Falcon project?
Built on MCP, two modes
Work IQ speaks the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, the open standard you met earlier for plugging tools into AI assistants. An MCP server can offer three kinds of things. Tools are actions, like searching documents. Resources are data the agent can read. And prompts are ready-made templates for common questions. When you connect a server, the assistant discovers what's on offer and uses it when a question calls for it. Work IQ runs in two modes. In CLI mode, you ask from your terminal: workiq ask, dash q, then your question in quotes. That's handy for quick checks and scripts. In MCP server mode, started with workiq mcp, an assistant like GitHub Copilot in VS Code pulls in workplace context by itself. Say you're building a feature that came up in last week's meeting: it can read that meeting's notes and suggest code that matches what the team decided.
Installing it
To install it, run npm install dash g at microsoft slash workiq, or skip installing and run it through npx. GitHub Copilot CLI users can install it as a plugin in two commands instead. In VS Code, you add a workiq entry to your MCP settings that starts the MCP command. Before the first use, run workiq accept dash eula to accept the license agreement. You'll also need Node dot js, Microsoft 365 Copilot access set up for your account, and admin consent for the Work IQ app in Microsoft Entra. That consent is needed because it reads data from across the organization. If you're not an admin, ask your IT team.
The courier has no master key
The courier never gets a master key. Work IQ follows the same security as Microsoft 365 Copilot. It only sees what you're already allowed to see, because it asks Microsoft Graph using your own identity. It doesn't keep copies of your data; it fetches what it needs, when it's needed. Every query follows your organization's policies and can be audited, and admins can see and control how Work IQ is used. Both modes reach the same data with the same permissions. Use the CLI for scripts and quick questions in the terminal. Use the MCP server when you want your AI assistant to decide for itself when to look something up.
Facts from Microsoft's documentation: Microsoft Work IQ CLI (CC BY 4.0), rewritten in Loop's own words and examples. Narration, animation, and quiz by Loop. Microsoft, Azure, and Microsoft Foundry are trademarks of Microsoft. Loop is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.