Microsoft's Work IQ goes into preview on September 30, 2026, with rollout continuing through October and the ERP (Finance and Operations) capability following in late October, according to Microsoft's September 25 announcement. The change: Work IQ, which already grounds Copilot in email, Teams meetings and documents, will now also ground Copilot and agents in business data from Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Microsoft Dataverse, plus third-party line-of-business apps.
It is built in three layers:
- Semantic models, which pair a focused data scope with the business logic already in existing apps: what the data means and how records relate.
- Business skills, which are reusable, governed processes. Microsoft's example is a renewal-readiness workflow.
- Governed actions, which are controlled updates back to source systems, executed only within the user's own permissions and routed through approval workflows.
Governance is split across roles. The AI admin manages user access and policy in the Microsoft 365 admin center, the Power Platform admin decides which environments participate, and makers control which business data is exposed within those boundaries. Semantic models and skills are stored in Dataverse. Usage is billed in Copilot Credits, and the announcement didn't give rates.
This targets one of the most common reasons enterprise agent pilots stall: the agent doesn't understand the business it is supposed to act on. Today each team building an agent redoes the same work of explaining what an "active customer" or a "renewal" means in their systems. Work IQ's bet is that you model the business once and every agent reuses it, the way BI semantic layers let every dashboard share one definition of revenue. If it works, it turns scattered agent prompts into governed, versioned infrastructure.
The risk is concentrated in write-back. Reading CRM data wrongly produces a bad answer, but updating a record wrongly corrupts a system of record. The value of "governed actions" depends on how the approval workflows are designed, so teams should pilot on low-stakes objects first. Other things to watch: how deep third-party line-of-business support goes compared with Microsoft's own apps, what Copilot Credits actually cost at volume, and how much lock-in comes from storing the company's business model in Dataverse.
Work IQ turns business meaning -- data definitions, reusable processes, permission-bound write-backs -- into shared infrastructure every agent can use, which targets the top reason agent pilots stall, but write-back to systems of record needs careful approval design and the pricing is not yet public.