Microsoft wants every agent to learn your business once. Work IQ puts definitions and procedures in Dataverse

Most companies with more than three agents have the same contradiction. The data lives in one system of record, but the meaning of that data lives in every agent separately: in a prompt that explains what an “active customer” is, in a tool description that says which approval comes before a discount, in a retrieval index built from last year’s process manual. Change the rule and you have to find every place it was copied.

Microsoft’s announcement on October 23, ahead of the Power Platform Community Conference (October 25 to 29 in Las Vegas), is an attempt to remove that duplication for companies that run on Dynamics 365 and Power Apps. The pieces are mostly in public preview, and they fit together around one idea: describe the business once, in Dataverse, and let every agent use that description.

Before: each agent carries its own understanding

Today a typical Copilot Studio agent, a custom agent built in another framework and an automation in n8n all reach the same Dataverse tables. Each one is taught separately what the tables mean, which relationships matter and which steps a process requires. The definitions drift. The agent that was fixed in March still holds the February version in the others.

After: definitions, procedures and actions as shared services

Work IQ business applications, announced in September and now in public preview, add three layers on top of Dataverse:

• Semantic models give agents a shared understanding of the data, the relationships between records and the business terms the organization uses.
• Business Skills, also in public preview, encode reusable procedures. They are built and edited in the Power Apps maker portal, with version history and simpler ways to secure them.
• Governed actions, through Agent 365, let agents update systems of record “within each user’s permissions, while IT stays in control,” in Microsoft’s words.

Then come the ways in. The Work IQ MCP Server in Copilot Studio now understands business context. A Business Apps plugin for Cowork brings context and actions from Dynamics 365 and Power Apps. The Dataverse Ask API, in preview, answers natural-language questions over the semantic models as a Web API and a connector. The Dataverse MCP Server can invoke custom APIs, n8n gets a Dataverse node, and Microsoft lists Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and GitHub Copilot under additional extensibility, without detailing per-tool features yet.

The architectural shift is that the context an agent needs stops being part of the agent. It becomes a service the platform owns, versions and exposes over standard interfaces, including to agents Microsoft did not build.

What this does not settle

We argued that business definitions are becoming shared agent infrastructure and that the hard question is whose definition wins. Microsoft’s design answers where the definition lives, not who owns it. A semantic model that says what “net revenue” means is a business decision written as configuration. Someone in finance has to approve it, and someone has to notice when it changes.

Business Skills raise the same question for procedures. Version history is the right start. In a regulated company, a skill that tells an agent how to process a complaint or a credit exception is a procedure, and we have argued that procedures like that belong under document control: reviewed, approved, versioned and traceable to the runs that used them.

And “within each user’s permissions” needs to be tested, not read. The announcement does not describe the mechanism. Before a governed action goes near production, confirm whose identity the action runs under when the request comes from an outside agent through MCP, and what the audit trail records.

How to evaluate it now

For organizations already on Dataverse, the preview is worth a pilot on one process with clear owners:

1. Pick ten business terms that agents get wrong today and define them in a semantic model, each with a named owner.
2. Encode one procedure as a Business Skill and route two different agents (one Microsoft, one external through MCP) to it.
3. Change one definition and check that both agents pick it up, and that the change is visible in history.
4. Run one governed action as a user with restricted rights and confirm it fails the way your auditors would expect.

The idea mirrors what Workday is doing with its own rules: the system of record keeps the meaning and the authority, and agents borrow them per request. If it works, maintaining business context becomes a platform job instead of a prompt-editing job. If the ownership is not assigned, it becomes one more place where definitions drift, now at platform scale.