How Work IQ + Autopilots Compound Corporate Intelligence and Amplify Humans

Microsoft leaders, customers, and a major partner outlined high-impact AI use cases in which the Work IQ intelligence layer and newly renamed Autopilot autonomous agents are applying shared corporate knowledge and productivity insights for organizational and personal productivity.

Executives from the software/AI leader, its partner C5 Insight, and roughly a dozen customers gathered at the “Microsoft Work IQ as the AI Intelligence Layer” roundtable at Community Summit NA on Tuesday. Their shared experiences brought to life the power of Work IQ in tapping corporate knowledge from the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform business apps and of Autopilot in initiating and completing tasks.

While not everyone in attendance has deployed both technologies, early results and feedback indicated those that have are seeing a payoff.

One Autopilot customer said that her personal agent tracks and understands her projects, reviews her emails, and reminds her of things that need to get done each day. “I am way more productive than I’ve ever been,” said Sheila Sprouse, Business Analyst at conveyor belt manufacturer Beltservice Corp., who also shared her journey in using Copilot tech in Dynamics 365 F&SCM to drive performance in her finance organization. “This is what I’m trying to engage my folks with: This is a game changer if you just let it in.”

‘Shared IQ’ Use Cases

Microsoft applications and AI leaders shared their own use of Work IQ and Autopilots and how the technologies are enabling new automation and streamlining functions ranging from developing a keynote address for Community Summit to a technology infrastructure migration.

Leveraging what she refers to as “shared IQ” – the collective corporate intelligence accessed from productivity apps, business apps, meetings, and more – Dona Sarkar explained how she and her colleague Leon Welicki developed the keynote address they delivered one day earlier, with a significant boost from their agents.

Sarkar is Microsoft’s Chief Troublemaker, Enterprise AI Advocacy, and Welicki is the company’s Vice President and General Manager, Power Platform.

Their personal autopilots prompted them to start work on their keynote, then went to work mining conversations the two had conducted as a starting point for their presentation. Those autopilots used only relevant data they each had permissions to access, and they worked together to start building the presentation.

“That keynote was a result of the combined work of four different entities: two humans, two AI agents,” Sarkar said, while also addressing the fears many employees feel about losing their jobs due to functions like this that AI can drive. “When people say, ‘I’m scared of losing my job,’ I’m like, that’s not the question. The question is, what are you doing with the shared IQ that you have?”

Welicki detailed how agents enabled a major infrastructure migration project that previously was difficult to execute since the infrastructure required to run continuously. His examples, too, carry implications for the future of jobs, he noted. “Great technology gives you superpowers to do things that you could not do before,” he said. “It amplifies us.”

James Oleinik, Partner Director of Product Management at Microsoft, said the ability for agents to access business apps data represents a major leap over the intelligence layer’s existing focus on productivity apps. “We live in this messy, shared world, right? When you have the business context, that of course is like the business-critical processes, it opens up a huge amount of possibilities.”

For their part, C5 Insight leaders referred to Work IQ as a layer that represents “compounding corporate intelligence.” Having that intelligence accessible to agents means that when a key employee leaves an organization, their loss causes a smaller hit in terms of knowledge retention.

“The other big problem we hear in organizations is that handoffs between organizations within companies are challenging, and this compounding organizational intelligence is bridging that gap. It’s making the handoff smoother, more succinct, easier,” said Malcolm McAuley, Operations Director at C5 Insight.

Recommendations

Microsoft executives advised those attending to develop agents targeting current business problems but not to expect instant or complete success on day one. Their experiences and those of leading-edge customers show iteration and solving pieces of problems will ultimately compound into bigger wins.

There were cautionary tales as well that reinforced the need for clear-cut business objectives when launching an AI agent. The healthcare company VGM Group rolled out Copilot to a few hundred users and later began investigating – through Agent 365 — the extent of agents that employees had created.

The result: far more agents than expected – many multiples of the user count — with high numbers that were abandoned or not in use. The agent proliferation raises new issues around data privacy regulations and data classification that the company now needs to tackle, said Sam Yim, System Admin at VGM Group.