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M365 Perspective

Work IQ - M365 Copilot vs ChatGPT, and manage Agents like users?

Tom Arbuthnot unpacks the biggest Microsoft Ignite news: Work IQ, the new intelligence layer behind M365 Copilot that Microsoft pitched head-to-head against ChatGPT four times in one session, plus Agent 365's plan to give every agent an Entra ID and treat it like a user.

Work IQ - M365 Copilot vs ChatGPT, and manage Agents like users?

Many thanks to Landis, this month's community Benefactor.

I recently recorded a briefing with Preston Martin and Shannon Martin at Landis about AI for Microsoft Teams Contact Centers and Attendant Console. Take a look.

Microsoft Ignite News

It's been a week since Microsoft Ignite, and immediately afterwards, we held our London User Group and our first Manchester User Group, thanks to everyone who came. It's been busy!

Work IQ

This was the most significant announcement for me. Work IQ is a new name for the intelligence layer behind Microsoft 365 Copilot. It's part tech changes, part marketing, but I think the marketing is a strong way to explain how M365 Copilot differentiates from the competition.

Work IQ combines existing capabilities (Context IQ, semantic index, data access) under one umbrella. Microsoft outlines three components: data access, memory, and AI inference.

The data piece is the real story here. Copilot can now more easily access all your work content - Office files, Teams chats and transcripts, Loop, OneNote, SharePoint with metadata, and external systems through connectors.

The key differentiator? Unlike connector-based tools (think ChatGPT, Claude) that can connect to Graph on a per-query basis, Work IQ provides pre-indexed semantic understanding of your org's content.

It was encouraging to see Microsoft be much more aggressive in its comparisons to ChatGPT, showing 4 times in one session that Copilot with Work IQ provides a more comprehensive response than the same query in ChatGPT with its M365 connector.

Work IQ will also be accessible through Copilot Studio and Foundry.

Agent 365 - "The control plane for AI agents"

The idea here is a central governance layer for managing AI agents across your organisation. Think of it as the admin center for AI agents, giving IT a single place to discover, secure, and monitor every agent in your tenant. Apparently, not just Microsoft agents, but all agents on all platforms (I think that will be challenging). Microsoft make some comparisons to managing agents like we manage users today.

Agent 365 creates a unified registry of all agents in your environment, whether they're from SharePoint, Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, or third-party platforms. Each agent is assigned an Agent ID and appears in Microsoft Entra, enabling you to apply consistent identity and governance policies across all agents.

The core capabilities break down to five areas: discovery (including "shadow" agents that makers deployed without IT knowing), access control to fence in what agents can touch, visualisation showing how agents are wired and what they connect to, interoperability with Microsoft 365 apps and Work IQ, and security integration with Defender, Entra, and Purview.

Available through Microsoft's Frontier early access program. This is Microsoft's answer to the governance gap that'll hit when agents become ubiquitous. Pricing still TBC.

For Teams, we have Secure, Simple, Smart messaging, with highlights including Unified Copilot, Channel Agents (which will soon support MCP connectors and SharePoint file data), and Facilitator.

Want to hear more on the Ignite news? Join me on Wednesday with Logi's MVP's Randy and Neil on Microsoft Teams Ignite News and Logitech Teams Devices Updates

Key Teams News

  • Shared call history in Queues app (MC1188999)
  • Enhancements to Interpreter and multilingual meeting experience (MC1188227)
  • Four Microsoft 365 Copilot for admin skills in the Teams admin center (MC1182708)
  • Protection against tenant-owned domain impersonation in Teams chat (MC1187679)
  • Retirement of the TeamworkDevice (beta) API in Microsoft Graph (MC1183294)
  • Microsoft Teams town halls: Full HD (1080p and ULL (MC1178507)

Microsoft Ignite Interviews

I caught up with many people at the show, including a great overview of key Teams news from Ilya and Irena, the latest from the MDEP team, and updates from Landis, AudioCodes, Cisco, and more.

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Teams Insider Podcast

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Events

Online events:

In-Person events:

  • New Manchester M365 User Group - 11th February - Brand-new user group; hope to see some of you there!
  • Microsoft UC User Group London - 26th February - covering all the latest Microsoft Teams and AI Workplace news and key insights from ISE, with Adam Jacobs at Microsoft and MVPs Graham Walsh and Tom Arbuthnot

More on our events page.

As always, if you have questions, corrections, thoughts, or feedback, please reply and let me know. I read all the replies.

Thanks

Tom

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