Microsoft has put SharePoint tools for Work IQ into public preview and described the developer flow in a 6 November 2026 Microsoft 365 Developer Blog post. The change gives custom apps and agents access to SharePoint content and actions through the Work IQ API, using the same workplace intelligence layer behind Microsoft Copilot.
Work IQ is Microsoft’s layer for agents that need to reason over Microsoft 365 data and take action through supported protocols. The SharePoint addition uses an authenticated Model Context Protocol endpoint hosted by SharePoint. It is aimed at agents that need to find files, manage lists and libraries, work with approvals and act on site content under the signed-in user’s permissions.
Runtime discovery for SharePoint actions
The preview covers more than 60 SharePoint operations. Microsoft lists coverage for lists and libraries, list items, files and folders, search, approvals, rules, Quick Steps, the recycle bin and versioning.
The design does not require every SharePoint operation to appear as a separate agent tool. Work IQ presents a smaller set of generic tools, while SharePoint operations sit behind paths under a registered sharepoint/ prefix. An agent can use search_paths to find a matching operation, get_schema to inspect the required arguments and do_action to call the returned path with the request body.
That runtime pattern matters for developers because the schema is meant to drive the request. Site-aware operations typically use an opaque siteKey, obtained with get_site_key, rather than a raw site URL. Write operations use SharePoint internal field names, so agents need to resolve people, lookup and taxonomy values from the returned schema instead of assuming display names will be accepted.
Permissions and tenant control
SharePoint calls through Work IQ run as the signed-in SharePoint user. An agent can only read or change content that the user is already allowed to access.
Microsoft is also introducing two delegated permission scopes for Work IQ, WorkIQ.Read and WorkIQ.Act. Agents with only WorkIQ.Read receive a reduced set of top-level tools aligned to non-mutating operations, including fetch, call_function, get_schema and search_paths. Agents with WorkIQ.Act receive the full tool set.
The existing WorkIQAgent.Ask permission is not enough to see the new SharePoint paths. Tenant administrators need to enable Work IQ, consent to the app and use Work IQ tenant policy to decide which SharePoint paths and actions are allowed.
Licensing and availability constraints
SharePoint tools in Work IQ are billed through Work IQ using a consumption-based model with Copilot Credits. Microsoft says this is independent of Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing. Administrators can connect a billing method, set spending policies and monitor consumption in the Microsoft 365 admin centre.
The connector documentation lists Work IQ SharePoint MCP as a preview connector. Copilot Studio, Power Apps and Power Automate list it as Premium, while Logic Apps lists it as Standard. The documented regional exclusions include US Government clouds, China Cloud operated by 21Vianet and US Department of Defense for the Power Platform products, with Azure Government, Azure China and US Department of Defense excluded for Logic Apps.
Microsoft also reports performance figures from its own internal evaluations. Adding SharePoint tools raised Work IQ’s task pass rate from 70.1% to 84.6% while using 16% fewer tokens in that testing. Against direct Graph access, Microsoft reports a success-rate lift of up to 77%, depending on the task.
Impact for agent development
For developers, the main shift is from coding directly against a fixed set of SharePoint API operations to letting an agent discover the available path and schema at runtime. This fits Work IQ’s wider model, where agents can use Model Context Protocol, Agent-to-Agent protocol or REST depending on the host and architecture.
It does not remove the need for SharePoint design work. List schemas, permissions, sensitivity labels, tenant policy and billing controls still decide what an agent can do safely. The preview status also means capabilities and tool names can change, so hard dependencies on preview details need care.
Designing an agent that can discover SharePoint paths at runtime, act under delegated user permissions and consume Copilot Credits is the kind of extensibility work covered in ECS's Development topic, alongside Microsoft Graph, SPFx, Teams Toolkit and Copilot extensibility. Sessions and workshops give developers and architects a place to compare implementation patterns, permission choices and what the preview model changes for existing Graph-based work. Attend with concrete agent scenarios and the governance questions that decide whether they can move beyond a prototype.
This article was written by the ECS editorial team with the assistance of Amal Agent, run.events' AI assistant, which supported the research, drafting and proofreading.