In the Day 1 keynote address at the Microsoft Ignite conference in San Francisco, the company unveiled Workforce IQ, a new AI-powered workforce sizing and compliance suite designed to “optimize headcount efficiency” by automatically disciplining or terminating employees who fail to maintain Microsoft-approved productivity levels.
At the heart of the system is the Agentic RIF Control Plane, a centralized governance layer that allows organizations to create, monitor, and “sunset” workers with the same ease and automation as cloud resources. Microsoft described it as “an end-to-end lifecycle for the modern employee object.”
For every new hire onboarded into an organization, Workforce IQ automatically provisions a unique Entra ID agent identity, a new directory type reserved specifically for worker-governance AI agents. This identity is paired with an instance of the Employee Compliance Agent, a permanent, autonomous digital monitor assigned to shadow the employee for the entire duration of their employment – however short that may become.
The Employee Compliance Agent integrates deeply with Microsoft’s growing surveillance stack, including Microsoft Teams’ new fine-grained location tracking, mandatory online/away monitoring, and the Ignite-announced Workplace IQ Eyeball Tracking Camera, which uses “high-fidelity ocular telemetry” to ensure workers maintain proper on-screen gaze behavior. All telemetry is streamed continuously through Azure Event Hubs into the Agentic RIF Control Plane, where AI models evaluate a worker’s “ongoing fitness for employment.”
In a demo that drew nervous laughter from the audience, a warning message appeared in the Microsoft Teams client after the test employee looked away from their monitor for 11 seconds. Microsoft compared the feature to Tesla’s Full Self Driving alerts:
“If you take your eyes off the screen, Workforce IQ will remind you – and if necessary, remove you.”
Organizations can configure termination thresholds directly in the Agentic RIF Control Plane, which supports both “graceful separation workflows” and what the presenter described as “instantaneous noncompliance offboarding.”
LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky took the stage to introduce the feature set, projecting a slide of an animated front loading washing machine on spin cycle. “Essentially, we want to make work as miserable as possible for non-managerial employees,” he said. He then jokingly referred to the system as ‘Workplace I Quit,’ explaining that heightened surveillance will either “whip them into shape or get them laid off or quitting – where they immediately become a revenue stream for LinkedIn Premium.”
Roslansky highlighted the long-term strategic vision:
“Once Workforce IQ is broadly adopted, every time they churn into a new job, the cycle begins again. It’s endless churn and turn. Salaries go down. Productivity goes up. Companies save millions. And Microsoft thrives in every step of the pipeline.”
Microsoft concluded the keynote by assuring the audience that these features are available now in Experimental Preview, for tenants enrolled in Frontier program.