Microsoft IQ: Look at the Details, Not the Branding

• Microsoft IQ is a marketing term, not a product.
• It encompasses a combination of new features and applies new names to existing capabilities.
• The individual components could be valuable, even if the overall IQ brand turns out to be mere keynote rhetoric.

At its annual conference for IT professionals, Microsoft introduced yet another term for some of its AI initiatives. Microsoft IQ is a new brand used for a set of three initiatives that aim to apply AI to three areas of business: Microsoft 365, Fabric, and Agentic application development. Although the initiatives are tied together by a brand, they aim to solve different problems, do not share any architectural underpinnings, and apply to different parts of the IT stack.

Customers should look past the branding distraction and evaluate each on their merits. This report looks at the overall IQ initiative and its possible path forward. Other reports dig into each of the three initiatives and what they mean for enterprise customers: