The short version: Microsoft announced several AI agent capabilities at Build 2026 — and on 16 June, the Work IQ APIs that underpin them reached general availability. Work IQ gives AI agents and automated workflows the organisational context they need to work effectively in a real business: who is on the team, what documents exist, how work flows. Combined with Copilot going permanent on 1 July, the next 12 days are a genuine window for any M365 business to get ahead.
What are the Work IQ APIs?
Work IQ is Microsoft's intelligence layer that gives AI agents context about how your organisation actually works. Rather than treating every prompt as a standalone request, agents with Work IQ access can understand the relationship between your team members, the documents in your SharePoint, the emails in your Outlook, the tasks in your Planner — and use that context to take more intelligent, appropriate action. Programmatic access via the Work IQ APIs means this intelligence layer can be built into custom workflows, not just Copilot's chat interface.
Alongside Work IQ, Microsoft announced Web IQ — a model-agnostic web search layer that returns relevant passages for agents at nearly 2.5× the speed of the next best alternative. For businesses building AI agents that need to look things up — pricing, regulations, market data, customer information — Web IQ handles the grounding without the agent needing to rely on potentially outdated training data.
Microsoft Scout: your personal agent for work
Microsoft Scout is a new personal agent for work, now available for Frontier plan customers. Scout is described as proactive — it monitors your M365 activity, identifies actions you might want to take, and suggests or executes them on your behalf. This is materially different from Copilot-as-chatbot: Scout is designed to anticipate work, not just respond to prompts.
Scout builds on the Work IQ context layer — it understands enough about your business and working patterns to make meaningful, relevant suggestions rather than generic ones. This is the direction Microsoft is building: agents that know your business well enough to work inside it, not just alongside it.
The 1 July deadline matters more now
This is not a trial extension or a paid add-on. From 1 July, Copilot is a standard feature of the plans that most UK small businesses already pay for. That means email drafting, meeting summaries, spreadsheet analysis, and document generation — all inside Outlook, Teams, Excel, and Word — become available without any additional subscription. Businesses that have their top three Copilot use cases ready on 1 July will measure real value from week one. Businesses that discover it months later will have months of lost productivity to account for.
What this means for UK M365 businesses
The cumulative effect of Work IQ (GA 16 June), Scout (live on Frontier), and Copilot (permanent 1 July) is that the AI agent era for Microsoft 365 businesses is not coming — it is here, right now, ahead of the formal 1 July date. UK businesses on M365 Business Standard or Premium are two weeks away from a meaningful AI capability upgrade at no additional cost. The Work IQ APIs mean that developers and forward-looking businesses can already build on top of this intelligence layer.
For businesses that do not have a developer resource, the practical action is simpler: identify the three M365 tasks that consume the most time each week, and have those ready to test with Copilot from 1 July. Email triage, meeting prep, report drafting, and customer communication are the most common high-ROI starting points.
What to do before 1 July
Step 1: Confirm your M365 plan. Business Standard and Premium both get permanent Copilot. Basic does not.
Step 2: Identify three specific, repetitive tasks you do in Outlook, Teams, Word, or Excel. Be specific — "summarise meeting notes" is better than "communication stuff."
Step 3: On 1 July, test those three tasks with Copilot before doing them manually. Measure the time difference over four weeks.
If you are already on Copilot: Look at the Work IQ API docs if you have a developer resource — building organisational context into your workflows is now possible without expensive enterprise integrations.