Work IQ actions for Power Automate

September 25, 2026

Microsoft ships nine certified Work IQ connectors, and every one of them is a raw MCP passthrough. They work well in Copilot Studio, where the agent composes the calls. In a flow you compose them yourself. Work IQ for Power Automate adds the missing layer: named actions with typed inputs and outputs over Microsoft Work IQ — Outlook mail, calendar, and contacts; Teams chats and channels; OneDrive and SharePoint files; people, groups, and Planner.

Every call is permission-trimmed to the signed-in user. Work IQ returns only data that person can already open.

What the difference looks like in a flow

Work IQ MCP does show up in the Power Automate designer — it declares capabilities: actions. Its one usable operation takes an untyped queryRequest body and returns an untyped object. Sending a single email means composing the envelope by hand:

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":"...","method":"tools/call",
 "params":{"name":"do_action","arguments":{"actionUrl":"/me/sendMail","jsonBody":{...}}}}

Then you add a Parse JSON action with a schema you wrote, and handle the Server-Sent Events framing and the content versus structuredContent split yourself.

This connector exposes the same capability as a Do action step with named fields, and returns a flattened result you bind to as dynamic content.

When to use something else

Use the first-party options where they fit. This connector complements them.

The typed surface costs an Entra app registration and admin consent, which the first-party connectors don’t require. That’s a one-time setup cost against a per-flow authoring cost that recurs in every flow you build. The break-even is roughly two flows.

You gain no licensing advantage. Custom connectors are premium in Power Automate, as are eight of the nine first-party connectors. This connector doesn’t expose an MCP endpoint — the first-party connectors already do that nine times over.

Eleven operations

Ask Work IQ and Ask a Copilot agent differ in transport. Ask Work IQ uses the A2A endpoint and returns a Context ID you pass into a later step to continue the same conversation. Ask a Copilot agent uses the MCP ask tool, which targets a specific agent and attaches files.

Work with entities in the order Search entity paths → Get operation schema → read or write. Paths aren’t memorable and writes reject unexpected fields, so guessing tends to fail.

fetch_blob isn’t exposed. It returns base64 file bytes up to 4 MB, which a dedicated file connector handles better.

Write access is gated

Work IQ enforces a per-tenant policy allowlist over which paths a caller may write to. This is separate from the signed-in user’s own permissions and from Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing — a user who can create an event in Outlook may still be refused by Work IQ.

Where writes aren’t permitted, Create entity, Update entity, Delete entity, and Do action return Is Error true with:

Access denied for POST /me/events. Path is not in the policy allowlist.

Check before you build. Run Search entity paths and look at the operations array for each path. In a tenant with no write entitlement, every path lists fetch and nothing else, and all four write actions are unusable.

The read actions — Ask Work IQ, Ask a Copilot agent, List Copilot agents, Search entity paths, Fetch entities, and Call function — are unaffected.

Prerequisites

• A Microsoft 365 Copilot license for every user who connects. Work IQ runs on the Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat API and returns 403 without one.
• A tenant administrator who can grant admin consent. The required permission is admin-consent only.
• Work IQ MCP not blocked in your tenant.
• For the write actions, a tenant whose Work IQ policy allowlist permits writes.

Set up the Entra app registration

Work IQ requires the delegated permission WorkIQAgent.Ask. Power Platform needs a confidential client, so you can’t reuse the public client ID shipped with the workiq CLI — register your own app.

1. In the Azure portal, go to Microsoft Entra ID > App registrations > New registration.
2. Name it, choose Accounts in this organizational directory only, and register it.
3. Under Certificates & secrets, create a client secret and copy the value.
4. Under API permissions, select Add a permission > APIs my organization uses, search for Work IQ, choose Delegated permissions, and select WorkIQAgent.Ask.
5. Select Grant admin consent.

The Work IQ API is a Microsoft first-party multitenant application, so it appears under APIs my organization uses rather than Microsoft APIs. From the CLI:

az ad app permission add --id <your-app-id> `
    --api fdcc1f02-fc51-4226-8753-f668596af7f7 `
    --api-permissions 0b1715fd-f4bf-4c63-b16d-5be31f9847c2=Scope

az ad app permission admin-consent --id <your-app-id>

Leave the redirect URI alone for now. Power Platform generates one during deployment, and you register it afterwards.

Deploy the connector

Fill in your client ID and secret in a temporary copy of apiProperties.json rather than editing the committed file, which ships with placeholders:

pac auth create --environment <your-environment-id>
pac connector create `
    --api-definition-file "./apiDefinition.swagger.json" `
    --api-properties-file "./apiProperties.temp.json" `
    --script-file "./script.csx" `
    --environment <your-environment-id>

The --script-file argument is required. Every operation is implemented by the script — the /tools/* paths exist only there and have no counterpart on the Work IQ service. Deploy without it and the connector is created successfully but every action fails.

Register the generated redirect URI

Power Platform generates a redirect URI unique to this connector and environment, and OAuth consent fails until that exact URI is registered on your app. Read it back after deployment:

pac connector download --connector-id <connector-id> `
    --environment <your-environment-id> `
    --outputDirectory ./verify
# properties.connectionParameters.token.oAuthSettings.redirectUrl

Add it to the app registration, keeping the global redirect alongside it:

az ad app update --id <your-app-id> --web-redirect-uris `
    "https://global.consent.azure-apim.net/redirect" "<per-connector-url>"

Deploying the same connector to another environment produces a different redirect URI. Register each one.

Use it from a flow

Add Ask Work IQ, supply a Question, and read Answer from the output. Pass the returned Context ID into a later Ask Work IQ step to continue the same conversation.

For deterministic reads, use Fetch entities with a path such as /me/messages?$select=subject,from&$top=25. Keep reads small — entity paths accept OData, and a bare collection path can return very large responses.

To write, confirm the path is writable first:

1. Search entity paths with a filter such as events. Check the operations listed for the path you want.
2. Get operation schema for that path to discover the fields it accepts.
3. Create entity, Update entity, Delete entity, or Do action with a body matching that schema.

Why a script rather than policy templates

The /mcp endpoint won’t return JSON. It rejects any request that doesn’t accept Server-Sent Events, and always answers with them:

Every tool response arrives as data: lines wrapping a JSON-RPC message. Inside that message the payload is either content[0].text — a JSON-encoded string, not an object — or structuredContent, depending on the tool. search_paths and fetch use the latter.

No policy template decodes SSE or parses a JSON string into an object. Without the script, each action returns raw event-stream text and every flow repeats the same unwrapping by hand. Policies can solve the routing — routerequesttoendpoint maps the /tools/* paths onto /mcp — but not the response handling.

The A2A endpoint is different: /a2a returns application/json and needs no Accept header. Ask Work IQ is scripted only to flatten the artifact tree into Answer, Context ID, Task ID, and State.

Application Insights logging is present but disabled. Set APP_INSIGHTS_ENABLED to true and supply an instrumentation key to turn it on.

Troubleshooting

Preview status

Work IQ is in public preview, and Microsoft documents it as a proprietary service whose features and APIs may change. Treat this connector as preview-grade and expect breaking changes.

Microsoft is expanding this area quickly. If first-party typed actions ship for Power Automate, they’ll likely be the better choice and this connector becomes unnecessary.

The Work IQ API also exposes WorkIQSettings.Read.All and WorkIQSettings.ReadWrite.All. Those back the administrative settings in the Microsoft 365 admin center and the Power Platform admin center, and there’s no documented HTTP endpoint for them, so this connector doesn’t use them. Manage those settings through the admin centers.

Resources

• Work IQ for Power Automate source
• Work IQ API overview
• Work IQ MCP first-party connector
• Add Work IQ to a Copilot Studio agent
• Manage AI experience access to Business Applications in Work IQ