The full story
One workspace for the work, and a way to point their own AI at it.
The brief was to give a property development team's work a home. Projects ran across spreadsheets, inboxes and manual approvals, with useful knowledge held by individual staff rather than shared through a system.
The less obvious half came out of the audit. The team already had AI. What they did not have was any way for it to touch real work. Every task became the same round trip: download the files, upload them into a chat, explain the project from scratch, get an output, then file it back by hand. The assistant was capable and completely disconnected.
The platform brings the browser workspace, its built-in assistant and external MCP clients onto one backend. Work holds boards, items, typed fields, versioned documents, dashboards, files, sharing, activity and automations. Claude or ChatGPT can reach the same workspace and Microsoft 365 through an authenticated MCP endpoint.
The built-in Work, dashboard and Canvas assistants use Claude through the Vercel AI SDK. External MCP clients bring their own reasoning model. Both paths use the platform's identity, permission-filtered retrieval, tools, approvals and audit trail. OpenAI is used separately for voice transcription; that route receives audio and cannot operate business tools.
Retrieval is deliberately unfashionable. There is no vector database and no embedding pipeline. SharePoint discovery runs on a PostgreSQL lexical index over file metadata and the first slice of extracted text, combined with Graph search and deterministic ranking by project, document family, revision and date. Every candidate that could leak a filename, path or even the existence of a file is revalidated against live Graph for that user before it is returned, and an indeterminate result fails closed.
Browser and MCP paths converge on the same server actions and the same access checks, so an edit made by an assistant is not a second, weaker implementation of the product. Scope was held just as firmly: Microsoft 365 remains the source of truth for its files, mail and calendar; the platform adds the operating workspace and governed actions around it.