7.7. Deriving Insights with Work IQ and Validating Against Business Goals
💡 First Principle: An insight is a pattern that changes a decision, and a pattern needs enough context to be visible. Work IQ gives Copilot that context: your projects, collaborators, meetings and priorities. But a fluent insight isn't automatically a true or useful one. The last step is always yours: check the output against the goal it was meant to serve.
Deriving insights across Work IQ. With Work IQ on (2.2.3), Copilot can reason across your emails, files, meetings, calendar, chats and organizational relationships, plus Dynamics 365 and Power Platform data where it's connected. That makes cross-source questions possible:
- "Across my email and meetings this month, which customer commitments haven't been followed up?"
- "Which projects have I spent the most meeting time on, and do they match my stated priorities?"
- "Summarize the open risks on Project Atlas from the last three status meetings and related email."
For a deeper, cited report across work and web sources, use Researcher. For number-heavy analysis, use Analyst (6.1). Add connectors (7.5) when the evidence lives outside Microsoft 365.
Interpreting and validating AI-generated content. Before you act on or share an AI-generated insight, check it on five dimensions:
| Check | Question to ask | How |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Does this answer the business question I actually have? | Re-read your prompt's goal and compare |
| Audience | Is the level, tone and length right for who will read it? | Ask Copilot "Does the tone match an executive audience?" (4.4) |
| Accuracy | Are the facts and numbers right? | Compare key figures against the source files |
| Citations | Can each claim be traced to a real source I can open? | Open the inline citations or Sources |
| Completeness | Is anything important missing or overstated? | Ask Copilot to highlight unsupported claims, then review yourself |
⚠️ Exam Trap: An insight drawn from Work IQ reflects your permissions and your data. It can be accurate for what you can see and still be incomplete for the business question, because a colleague's emails or another team's files aren't in it. "Copilot didn't mention a risk, so there is no risk" is over-reliance. Validate against the goal and confirm with the people who own the other evidence.
Reflection Question: Copilot tells a manager, based on her email and meetings, that "the vendor rollout is on track." The rollout goal is go-live by month end. What should she check before reporting this to leadership, and why might the insight be incomplete even if every cited source is accurate?
