Today, SharePoint tools in Work IQ enter public preview, helping agents complete more SharePoint work with higher success rates and fewer tokens. The preview adds more than 60 native SharePoint operations through the Work IQ MCP server, extending Work IQ’s broad Microsoft 365 capabilities so Copilots and agents can find, understand, create, organize and share SharePoint content.

In September, we announced the GA of Copilot in SharePoint. The same tools that power Copilot in SharePoint are now available to your agents via Work IQ. These tools are also rolling out to Microsoft Copilot Studio supporting scenarios across low-code, pro-dev, and makers. In our internal evals, adding SharePoint tools raised Work IQ’s task pass rate from 70.1% to 84.6% while using 16% fewer tokens in our testing. When compared against directly accessing Graph, we see a lift in success rate up to 77% depending on task. Agents finish more SharePoint work, for less!

When we celebrated SharePoint’s 25th birthday back in March, our big theme was activating knowledge: content that doesn’t just sit in a library but gets put to work by Copilot & agents. Since then, we’ve watched the conversation with customers and partners shift again. People aren’t only asking agents questions about their content anymore. They’re delegating real work: build a tracker, update a list, answer from a policy library, generate a deliverable from an entire document library.

So, we asked a simple question: what if the SharePoint expertise lived in the tool, instead of in the prompt?

What are SharePoint Tools in Work IQ?

SharePoint Tools in Work IQ package 25 years of content management know-how into purpose-built operations for agents, delivered through Work IQ, the intelligence layer behind Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents. If you’ve used Copilot in SharePoint, Cowork, Copilot Chat, or any of our evolving AI experiences, you’ve already seen these tools at work. They’re the same tools, and now they’re available to ANY agent: GitHub Copilot CLI, VS Code, or the agent you’re building yourself.

The preview includes more than 60 SharePoint operations spanning lists and libraries, files and folders, search, approvals, rules, Quick Steps, the recycle bin and versioning. A few highlights:

• Find and understand content without brute force. Agents can search a site and pull file and folder metadata, bringing only what the task needs into the model’s context.
• Work with lists at enterprise scale. Agents can discover lists and their schemas, query large lists (including in natural language) and add, update or delete items.
• Go from intent to finished work. Agents can create or update lists and columns, define views and apply column and view formatting, so the user gets a working tracker instead of a set of instructions.
• Keep governed processes moving. Agents can work with approvals, eSignature requests, Quick Steps, sharing, version history and the recycle bin, right where the content lives.

Built for Agents

These tools are more than a thin layer over a general-purpose API. Each one carries SharePoint expertise, so the model doesn’t have to work out how to accomplish every action on its own. They also follow Work IQ’s design principle of fewer tools, more paths.

SharePoint operations appear as /sharepoint/ paths behind the same small set of Work IQ verbs the agent already uses, rather than as dozens of separate tools loaded into its context. At runtime, the agent discovers the available path, inspects its schema and makes the call. Work IQ then routes the request to SharePoint in a single hop - without a second model in the middle - and returns structured results.

This design reflects an important shift in how platform capabilities are delivered: a tool and an API make different promises. An API provides developers with a stable, versioned contract for deterministic code. A tool is optimized for an agent, so its interface can evolve as agent behavior and evaluation results improve.

Secure by Design

As agents move from reading content to acting on it, the stakes go up. That’s why secure-by-design governance is a prerequisite for every Copilot & agent deployment, never an afterthought. SharePoint Tools build on three layers of control:

• Every call runs as the signed-in user. Permissions are delegated, so an agent can only see and do what that person is already allowed to see and do in SharePoint.
• Two new scopes support least-privilege access. Grant WorkIQ.Read when an agent only needs to search, read and summarize SharePoint content; add WorkIQ.Act when it needs to create, update or move content. SharePoint tools are the first Work IQ provider to support these permissions.
• Admins stay in control. An admin enables Work IQ for the tenant, consents to the app and uses Work IQ tenant policy to choose exactly which SharePoint paths and actions are allowed.

To opt in to the preview, add WorkIQ.Read or WorkIQ.Act to the agent. Agents that rely only on the existing WorkIQAgent.Ask permission won’t see SharePoint paths because SharePoint tools are the first Work IQ provider to use the new scopes.

Get started today

Four steps take an agent from tenant configuration to a measured SharePoint tools rollout:

1. Prepare your tenant. An admin enables Work IQ, consents to WorkIQ.Read (plus WorkIQ.Act for actions) for your app, and allows the SharePoint actions you need in tenant policy.
2. Connect your agent. Point any MCP client at https://workiq.svc.cloud.microsoft/mcp, or install the Work IQ plugin for GitHub Copilot CLI.
3. Let the agent discover and act. It finds SharePoint paths at runtime, checks their schemas and calls them, with the Work IQ skill guiding tool choice.
4. Measure your scenario evals. Compare outcomes before you roll out and tell us what you find.

And yes, people always ask about pricing: SharePoint tools are billed through Work IQ using a consumption-based model with Copilot Credits, independent of Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing. Admins can connect a billing method, set spending policies and monitor consumption in the Microsoft 365 admin center; see Usage-based billing and cost management for Copilot Credits for current details.

Learn more

• Work IQ MCP overview
• Work IQ plugin and skills on GitHub
• SharePoint Tools in Work IQ documentation

What’s next

The team is working hard, and there’s plenty more coming. Here’s where we’re headed (as always, details may change):

• More SharePoint tools, shipped faster.
• Richer skills and guidance that help agents choose the right tool for common SharePoint scenarios.
• A standards-based way for MCP clients to move large files, which we’re working on with the MCP community.
• The same SharePoint toolset showing up across more Copilot & agent experiences.

We’ll share more about this evolving roadmap at Microsoft Ignite in San Francisco, November 17–20, 2026. We hope to see you there.

Onwards to agents that get real work done with SharePoint!