Ground Scout in your work with Work IQ

Tool: Microsoft Scout

Scout can already reach your mail, calendar, Teams, files, and org chart. There's nothing to connect. The skill is asking for the right slice, in a shape you can reuse.

Steps

1. Start a new Scout session.
2. Ask for one source at a time. Mixing sources in a single request tends to produce a summary of everything and evidence of nothing.
3. Tell it not to summarize before returning. Summaries throw away exactly the detail you need.
4. Name the shape you want back – a table, a list of rows, specific fields.
5. Keep the prompt that worked. You'll want to run it again next month.

You'll know it worked when... what comes back is specific enough that you could paste it straight into a file without editing it by hand.

Prompts that return usable evidence

For how someone writes:

Find my last 10 sent emails. Return one row per email with: date, recipient,
subject, the exact greeting, the exact signoff, and three verbatim phrases.
Do not summarize before returning the table.

For how someone actually spends time:

Summarize my calendar for the last 30 days. Give me time by category, the
percentage I marked tentative, the percentage I organized myself, and my
typical response time by sender. Use percentages.

For what's landing on someone:

Find the threads from the last two weeks where someone was waiting on me.
For each: who, what they asked for, how long it sat, and whether I replied.

The part self-report can't reach

Ask a person how they work and you get their intent. The signals below give you their behavior, and the two rarely match:

Signal	What it actually tells you
Response latency by sender	The real stakeholder ranking, whatever the org chart says
Accept / decline / tentative ratio	Whether they decide or defer
Self-organized vs. invited	Whether they drive or react
Time by category vs. stated priorities	Where the gap between intent and reality sits

That gap is usually the most useful thing you'll find, and it's the part nobody can tell you about themselves.

Snapshot, don't stream

You don't need a live connection. How someone works changes over months, not hours.

Pull the evidence once, write it into a file, and regenerate it monthly or after a role change. That keeps it inspectable, reviewable, and portable – none of which is true of an inference you can't see.

Don't build a Graph integration for this

Azure AD app registration plus MSAL is 30–60 minutes and it will eat your session. Scout already has the access. Use it.

Apply it to your scenario

Decide what evidence your scenario needs, ask Scout for that and nothing else, and write the result to a file your agents can read. Facts in a file beat vibes in a prompt.