Ignite Recap: How Microsoft Just Unlocked AI’s Future by Looking at Its Past With Work IQ

What if the biggest announcement to come out of Ignite was something that had been building since 2014? For over a decade, Microsoft has been putting the pieces together that tie in all aspects of the work environment in the cloud, which has had a step-by-step approach to scaling a deeply valuable proposition, "What if all our enterprise data, actions, definitions, and work patterns could proactively assist and predict what is important to our specific business, and then ACT on it?"

There were many big announcements made at Ignite, from Agent 365 and autonomous agent advancements to security additions to the M365 tenant and additional dashboards and reporting around Copilot, which will all drive the next wave of working and will provide more tuning and details to a growing AI-powered workplace.

But for me, the biggest thing that caught my eye was the official release of Work IQ, which has been the quiet underpinning of everything that has powered deeply personal and rich employee experiences within the Microsoft platform for years. Now with a name and focus, this layer of information and processing, with the ability to learn and train AI models, is key to driving the success of investments in both Enterprise AI, Business Applications, and Modern Workspaces.

For years, Rightpoint’s approach to crafting tools for employees that center on solving problems and being human-centric was rooted in understanding people first. To accomplish this, we focus on:

• What content do users need access to?

• How do they get to things quickly and painlessly?

• How can we help bring experiences together to be more efficient in day-to-day tasks?

• Where do users search for knowledge within company?

• How do they find insights to help with future actions?

This all is proven to lead to rich, targeted and personal experiences that bring tools together to improve productivity and quality of life for employees. Now Microsoft is going to enhance the way we’ve looked at this ‘intelligence layer’ and make it even more actionable and flexible with Work IQ.

Here’s a review of what was announced, how it’s been used previously and how the enhancements made at Ignite provide an injection of AI-enablement to drive experiences, insights, and personalization even farther:

Comprehensive Work Graph

Let’s call this the evolution of Graph and Delve. Now Work IQ is incorporating and building on organizational data and work patterns.

It connects to the content and activity across Microsoft 365 as Graph does through emails in Outlook, files in SharePoint/OneDrive, chats and meetings in Teams, tasks and calendars, Viva Engage social posts, and more. By mapping how people collaborate across these apps, it creates a unified graph of relationships between people, communications, and content. Now instead of having these connections loosely defined, we’re moving into proactively "how work gets done" for each employee. This includes tracking not just formal org structure, but the real working relationships surfaced by data points that have powered Delve for years building a long-term memory of user preferences, habits, and workflows.

Applying this to Copilot, creates conversational memory so that personalized and relevant information about each employee is layered into the response, not something that needs to be stated. For example, Copilot can recall that you prefer summary charts in Excel or that you’re already aware of a particular document from a previous chat. Users remain in control of this memory, which can be audited or cleared, but when utilized it allows for much more personalized, continuity-rich assistance.

Contextual Knowledge Integration

Let’s call this one the resurrection of and supercharging of Viva Topics.

Easily my favorite thing about the Work IQ product is its ability to perform "structured metadata understanding" on enterprise content, most specifically within SharePoint files and content. In putting together personalization within employee experiences, the ability to search, filter, and classify data with metadata has been the most important thing in the content layer. Metadata carries weight and purpose, something that our content authors understand but previous Copilot has not been able to weigh properly.

Work IQ finally unlocks that value in the metadata. Copilot can now reason over the custom columns and taxonomy in document libraries to deliver more precise answers. For instance, if a SharePoint library has a metadata field for “Contract Expiry Date” or “Project Status,” Copilot can use that structured info to answer questions like “Which client contracts expire next quarter?” with accuracy and relevancy. Something so significant to the content value proposition that has been powering SharePoint for years is now a key driver in the AI-enablement of the organization.

Inference & Next-Best Actions

This one is new and really extends the intelligence layer into the future.

Beyond assembling data and memories, Work IQ applies AI reasoning ("inference") to generate insights and recommendations from that information. It looks for patterns, correlations, and cues in your work graph that can help anticipate what you might need next. Work IQ “combines data and memory to make valuable connections, unlock insights, and predict the next best action”.

This means taking all that intelligence on the organization, the person, the data, the metadata, AND the context on how and where a user is working. Let’s say you’re drafting a document and Work IQ can put all those puzzle pieces together, Copilot might proactively suggest inserting relevant data that it knows lives in another file or recommend bringing in a colleague for review.

What does all this mean for the employee experience going forward? Work IQ now brings data and AI into the flow of work, not adjusting your flow of work to use AI.

Importantly, Microsoft is exposing Work IQ via APIs and Copilot Studio so that organizations and developers can leverage this intelligence layer in their own solutions. Any custom AI agent built for enterprise scenarios can call into Work IQ to get grounded context about the user and the organization. This means you can create specialized assistants (e.g. a "Project Management Bot" or a "Compliance QA Agent") that can retrieve insights from Work IQ about relevant files, past decisions, or experts on a topic to perform their tasks effectively.

So now after a decade of putting in the work on data, people, and insights, Work IQ becomes the key part of your enterprise’s AI platform, proactively providing the context and data connectivity layer to all your agentic experiences.