Announcing the new Work IQ APIs

What happened

Microsoft made Work IQ APIs available June 16, 2026, with consumption-based billing in Copilot Credits. Work IQ is the workplace intelligence layer that gives Copilot and agents context about people, emails, documents, and meetings in M365. Microsoft also announced Web IQ — a model-agnostic, MCP-native live web grounding stack.

Context and impact

Work IQ APIs are architecturally equivalent to OpenAI's Apps SDK and Anthropic's MCP — giving third parties access to the M365 context layer. That's critical for Microsoft to keep the agentic ecosystem around M365 instead of having it routed around. Consumption pricing (fixed Chat + variable Tools/Context) signals a shift from license to usage-based.

Details

• 4 API domains: Chat, Context, Tools, plus Copilot UX
• Pricing in Copilot Credits (consumption-based)
• Web IQ is model-agnostic and MCP-native
• Web IQ available across GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Foundry, Copilot Studio
• Billing effective date: June 16, 2026
• Part of the Microsoft Build 2026 intelligence layer unification