Tom Arbuthnot: Hi everybody. This is live from Ignite. It is day two. So we've had the keynotes, we've had some of the team sessions, there's some more Teams sessions coming. Uh, I've got Ilya and Irena, and we're gonna talk about some of the things that we're covered in the sessions. There's also just some thoughts about what's going on in Teams, uh, Ilya for, well, everybody watching this is probably gonna know who you are, but you've had an expanded role more recently.

So, uh, maybe you could give a quick intro. 

Ilya Bukshteyn: Sure. Thanks Tom. Uh, my name's Ilya Bukshteyn. I'm the Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Teams calling devices and Premium experiences. So that's everything having to do with using, uh, Teams as a cloud phone system, everything having to do with our devices, work like Teams, rooms and certification.

And then our premium experiences, including events, immersive experience, and Teams Premium. Awesome. And Irena. 

Irena Andonova: Well hi everyone and thank you Tom. Uh, I am Irena Andonova. I lead the Teams devices product team that includes. Teams, rooms, panels, phones, as well as Teams device management. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome, thanks. So Ilya, maybe I can start with you.

The, the, the Teams kind of, uh, breakout session yesterday. Yeah. It's that secure, simple, smart messaging. So I really like to kind of frame what's going on with the product. Maybe you could take us through some of the highlights of those, those sessions or those sections of the session. 

Ilya Bukshteyn: Sure. Um. Uh, what I like is that we're consistent, uh, and the reason we can be so consistent is because those, uh, areas are durable in terms of what customers ask us for, whether it was through the rise of the cloud, I just read today, cloud 1.0, new new term, or remote work, or now the needs remain pretty similar, which is.

Teams has to be a rock solid. A highly reliable and secure platform. We have to help our customers use Teams, and that means making it more performant, but also simpler. As we add capabilities, we still have to simplify the overall experience, and of course, we have to integrate the best of the AI capabilities that are coming so rapidly, so Teams become smarter and smarter.

So secure. Simple, smart. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And I like that order. I mean like, obviously AI is a big conversation and a really exciting conversation at the moment, but it's nice to know so much effort goes into the fundamentals and Teams is such a big product. You know, three 20 million MAU give or take. Probably a little bit more now.

More now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you wanna give us a new number. No, no. You're so well trained now. So, um, like. Like is a, an attack surface that people are going after. And I've seen Microsoft respond to that really well with things like, uh, the extra protection around federation, the secure links, like, like that, that's a really important story to enterprise.

Ilya Bukshteyn: Yeah. Uh, the majority of our investment is in fundamentals and I don't see that changing. So the majority of folks. Hours, however you wanna put it. Working on Teams goes into making it secure, reliable, making sure it's fundamentally a great platform. Um, and as you said, it's a rapidly changing threat landscape.

Um, I mean, what we've seen is if there's something users use. Someone. And unfortunately more and more it's some entity that, that could be state actors. Uh, we'll figure out a way to try to use that surface to gain access in some way, uh, to do something malicious. So not only are we focused on. Inherent internal security in how we build Teams, but also adding capabilities that help users be secure by giving them warnings and transparency.

So for example, yesterday we showed, uh, that we're adding URL and file protection that's now fully live someone and 

Tom Arbuthnot: that's all clients. All users as well, isn't it? Correct. It's not a premium feature, which is 

Ilya Bukshteyn: really nice to see. Correct. Uh, everything around fundamentals. You may catch me here, but as far as I can remember, everything we talked about for fundamentals, uh, goes everywhere in Teams.

So URL and file protection, safe links if you will. Uh, domain impersonation detection. So we can give you a warning if you're getting, uh, you know, Ilya from Ilya Co. But we think it might be someone else. Um, features like being able to very quickly report. A user and a message that you see as potentially malicious, uh, very clearly indicating right next to the username when someone's external.

Those are all capabilities that, that help users be smarter, not just sort of inherently, uh, in Teams making a secure platform. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And on the kind of, uh, simpler threading was talked about, again, that's really interesting to me because I feel like there's a. A hardcore set of Teams that users out there that are used to the traditional format of channel messaging.

And then we've kind of got a, a new approach. So it's interesting to see where people land on that. I quite like the threading, but it's, even for me, I found it hard to adapt to a change in behavior there. 

Ilya Bukshteyn: Yeah, I mean, I think the, the thing I really appreciate about the team that works on that is that they do keep in mind that different people work different ways.

So, uh, it's simple by design, powerful on demand. You can. Configure how you want to see it. Um, one of the things I was just personally really excited about that I mentioned is the new, uh, multi-tenant, uh, activity feed. 

Yeah. 

Ilya Bukshteyn: And so the ability to have just one activity feed and see if. We, we don't share a tenant.

You haven't invited me yet, but you know, one day if you tag me and another tenant, I should be able to just see it right there. Um, I should be, yeah, 

Tom Arbuthnot: that's huge for me. Like as a, uh, MVP and consultant. I'm mean lots of customer tenants and the, the fast switching was a good step forward. Yes. But, but being able to see everything that's going on in one space is really exciting.

Ilya Bukshteyn: And then pin a tenant also to your left rail. Yeah. That, that was pretty cool also. Um, and. I do wanna say that this is a continual investment. You will see us continue to, to take efforts to simplify the meeting experience the controls in meetings, I think. What we talked about yesterday. There were so much work that's been done in the chat and channels experience.

Also how you can use Copilot and chats and channels, but just making that simpler, you're gonna see us continue to do more and push on that in meetings as well. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well that kind of, the AI kind of brings us into the smart conversation. Yes, and it's exciting. I feel like there's a few different ways.

We're looking at AI in Teams and there's the new channel agents, which is really interesting. There's bringing, uh, the kind of Copilot into chat, almost like as a person. Um, but for me, the, the, the kind of, the bigger story is. This what Microsoft now kind of frames as work iq. Like the idea that Copilot can get to all this information across Microsoft 365, and particularly your chat, your channels, your, your meeting kind of, uh, transcripts.

That's super powerful for me that we can bring that data into workflows and into content. 

Ilya Bukshteyn: Yeah, I think the, the way I think about the value of anything that's AI powered, it's, it's directly related to what it knows about what. I have done and what I'm trying to do, and whether that's personal, if I'm using Copilot as a personal assistant or as a teammate and it's trying to help us complete a project, have a great meeting.

Uh, of course these models started with knowing the internet, um, and it's amazingly powerful if you're like, I was shopping for a gaming laptop for my son. Great. When you're at work, the internet is at best, some portion of the story. It's, it's actually hopefully 

Tom Arbuthnot: not too much in a lot of cases. 

Ilya Bukshteyn: Yeah, I mean, it's great.

It's a resource to look up broad information, but it's a lot less relevant than what we talked about at the last meeting and what we talked about in chat and channels and what we have stored on SharePoint. So I do think for our customers Teams and SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint are this bedrock foundation that actually make AI useful, uh, for work, for getting stuff done.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah and in a much frictionless way than. I will grab these documents and I will I first I have to find them right. Then I have to put them in the right place. Then the AI can do its thing, right? That's not the reality of how we work like it. Right? Some of it was in a call, some of it was in a meeting, some of it was in chat, some of it was in the channel.

The fact the AI can bring that together for you. 

Ilya Bukshteyn: Yeah. What are you gonna do with all of the richness of a meeting chat and trying to turn that into something that's an attachment. Like, that's actually more work. Yeah. That's not the point of what you're trying to do. I was, Irena and I were just in a meeting, uh, right before recording this, where a ton of great points were made in chat.

It was actually about how we simplify, uh, audio and video enrollment, and we were having active debates on what would users prefer, how do we measure that, and then to think that that would be all gone if I were to ask. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. 

Ilya Bukshteyn: Another product that's not grounded, you know, to help me understand what was discussed.

That, like I said, that seems like it's taking us backwards. So to bring it back to your point, I, I am super, uh, excited about, grateful for the fact that we now have both personal assistance and group productivity and really, like I said, a, a teammate. That does have all the same knowledge that you would expect a teammate to have.

Yeah. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. I want to get into, uh, the kind of AI on the Admin side and, and I are on the devices as well. Um, so like, lets see, let's see who starts. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I, I guess it would be, it would be good to kind of, um, start on, there's a lot of AI conversation, like facilitator is really exciting for me.

Uh, facilitator in the room as well, which I wanna talk about. But AI on the kind of Admin side, yes. There's a lot of work being done there across tech and pro portal. 

Ilya Bukshteyn: Yeah. I, I first of all just want to acknowledge that we, um. Maybe even need to talk about this more because many of us live sort of both lives.

We're we're productivity workers and we do administrative tasks. And I think it's easier for sort of most people to understand the how I use Copilot as an information worker or facilitator. But it's in many ways even more important from a time saving and productivity perspective to have those capabilities as an Admin.

Because a lot of what we do as admins is. Sort of taking a workflow and repeating it. Let me look at the health of all of my rooms. Let me look at my Teams deployment and try to understand what policies have been applied and if any need changed. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Well, and the surface of the product, it's so big now. Yes, it does.

So much across, like we, events was another big area for the, for the conference. Yes. Like there's. New policies. There's new capabilities. Like I work with some customers that have FTEs or meetings FTEs on like different parts of the world. Yeah. They're hundreds of thousands of users, but for your typical organization, they can't have a person dedicated to the fact the AI can start to make sense of some of those capabilities.

These Yeah, 

Ilya Bukshteyn: I, I was saying, one of the customers I met with here said, um, we've got one and a half people on managing Teams, and I'm one of 'em, and I was like, I, I don't know the half. Uh, but, but you know, it really emphasized. The need for multiplying that person's time with agents. And uh, that is one of the things we talked about, uh, yesterday, is that we now do have a Teams Admin agent that can take.

Tasks that are repetitive, but super important, like analyze the policies applied to all of my users and tell me if anyone is out of compliance with just natural language. This is what I'm trying to do. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, that's gold. 'cause doing that before was a super Yeah, yeah. Like a weird PowerShell script or eyeballing it.

Yes. 

Ilya Bukshteyn: Yeah. Yeah. So, um, we're going to do more and more of that. I think the, the opportunity to have agents work on your behalf is just as important for Admin as, as it is for users in, in some cases more so. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And Irena on the same thing, on the kind of propo and devices side. Like there's a big, you know, there's a lot of rooms out there.

Now. Again, no new numbers on this, on this recording, but like, it, it's a big number and we, 

Ilya Bukshteyn: we said a million publicly and I just keep saying well, north of that. Good. Good, good. There you go. 

Tom Arbuthnot: There you go. Um, but like. Uh, part of that story is making it easier to scale the deployments and manage the deployments.

Irena Andonova: Yeah, definitely. Kinda Ilya spoke about the one and a half persons, uh, managing, uh, it, it's very often, uh, people have large estates of room that they need to deploy, manage, make sure they're healthy and. Their users are happy. So, uh, how do you do that when you have very small crew of people for a company which oftentimes could be globally distributed?

I mean, we see that at Microsoft. We have very small number of it people that have to scale, scale globally. Um, so in pro management portal, uh, we have had, um, an AI assistant for, um, sometime now. Um, and I really encourage folks to try it because if you are looking to deploy a room. And you wanna figure out how to, let's say, get a one time passcode for to a technician.

What do you do? Like you're gonna go scour the internet. Yes. It's documented. You can go and learn and find it. However, you can just ask within the pro management portal and you get the answer right there. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. And that, and that's grounding over. Your corporate data about your environment Exactly. And your devices and also the docs.

So it's exactly up to date from the docs side and it knows your, your particular environments. Yeah, 

Irena Andonova: absolutely. Um, and then, um, alio was saying, I might wanna ask and get the insight on what's going on across my state. Say, Hey, I wanna see, um. How many rooms with Logitech tap have been deployed, um, in let's say the last 30 days?

And I can ask the question in just that way. I don't have to write a query of some kind. I can just ask the question conversationally and I get my answer there and I can categorize it and see, uh, the report right there in the pro management . Portal and you can see how we are building insights based on, again, grounded on the data of the customer.

And then we can use these insights to offer, um, actions to, to the admins and, and help them scale. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I was really, uh, we've, uh, on the Empowering.Cloud site, we've got a, uh, a recording with the team talking about that and some of the kind of challenges of doing that at scale and the futures, but I'm really excited about the futures of that.

Microsoft obviously have visibility of what's going on in the, the wider world of, of Teams rooms and know where there could be issues and where there could be remedies. And actually the AI is perfectly placed to be able to be looking at logs and activity and events and, and helping people highlight what to do.

Irena Andonova: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, that's where people would usually have to humanly go. Logs are great example, like, who likes to read a text file with a whole bunch of, I'll give, give that the ai, so yes. Awesome. And 

Tom Arbuthnot: Arian, what more generally around rooms and devices, uh, kind of from, from this show and in general, what are you, what's top of mind for you?

What are you excited about? 

Irena Andonova: Uh, Ilya kinda mentioned just because this morning we're having this conversation about, uh, recognition. So, um, we have all gotten used to using AI summaries and recap or action items from the, uh, from the meeting. But what if there was a room. Involved in the meeting then recognizing.

What happens in the room and actually recognizing the people and properly attributing the people is very, very important because seeing that speaker one said something, I don't know who speaker one, how do I know? Do I assign an action item to speaker one? Okay, well, good luck. 

Yeah, 

Irena Andonova: so recognizing people and recognizing the environment in the room will become paramount for us.

It's a very, very hard problem to actually solve. Um, it involves science challenges on the AI side and some human challenges because people feel uncomfortable rolling their voice, and we have to, of course, be very grounded and compliant, which is. What Microsoft does. Um, so it's a very, very interesting and very, um, hard problem.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. I think I, I'm certainly seeing as, as, as enterprises get their head around the idea of using Copilot to generate documents and generate content, then they understand the gap. 'cause they're like, oh, all the project meetings are missing a bunch of the important data about the project there.

Absolutely. Awesome. Well, I, I don't wanna keep you too long, especially 'cause you're about to go out to a session, but Yeah. 

But, but wait. Yeah. Yeah. 

Ilya Bukshteyn: I would be remiss. I, I wanna build on top of what Irena said. Please, once you have that foundational, critical, uh, capability of knowing who said what, the thing I am so excited about is using that brain in the room.

Um, and it just opens so many capabilities. So we now have NGA, what I would call, uh, super powerful, but then the most basic capability, which is taking notes. Um, if we had a Teams room here, if we only had a brain, uh, you know, we would have a complete set of notes from this conversation, even though there wasn't an online meeting.

But then we can build on that because that brain also has eyes and ears that it can use all the time. So I love the ability to that, that we'll be able to have of counting how many people walk into the room. Even outside of meetings, knowing if the room is cluttered or messy, uh, knowing if there's a chair in front of the camera, I always bring that on up.

Knowing if someone got up and started whiteboarding, uh, just being able to jump in and say, Hey, you, you guys were wondering what this acronym meant. Let me tell you because I have knowledge of the internet and of your organization. So I, I, I think that ambient intelligence in every physical space. To your question about where we are, we're just at the beginning of that, but it's moving so quickly and Irena and I get to experience it, it internally every day, that having a teammate that can hear you, see you talk with you in every space you walk into at work.

It's pretty amazing. Awesome. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And then, uh, on the devices as well, I'm talking to the md e team later. Ah. Um, and there were two more partners, announcers coming down. Md. I'm interested Irena, from your point of view that because MDEP are a different team, but obviously working closely with you guys, it's a shorter 

Ilya Bukshteyn: list of who has an announced Well, yeah, 

Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, it really is.

Irena Andonova: Um. MDEP is a great partner for us, um, and what they bring to the table. I mean, we have, uh, two platforms. We have Windows and we have Android. Uh, it has been a bit of a challenge for some time with Android because there are different versions. Uh, there could be security concerns, uh, how these devices are managed and so forth.

So MDEP, what it does it first. Ilya spoke about security paramount. So that's what MDEP will focus and bring to, uh, to the table. But they also help and bring, reduce the complexity on the Android side and help enable scenarios which have not been possible on Android, like zero dash provisioning, for example, uh, and remote access.

These are scenarios where we will have dependency on the platform so they can help cater to that. So they make Android more secure, easier to deploy, easier to manage at scale. So that is the benefit that we see and we partner closely with the mtap team. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And there's been a lot of work, you came on the pod a couple of months ago and you talked about like, uh, leveling up some of the Android feature.

I think on my last monthly update there were like 10 new M-T-R-O-A mm-hmm. Features. It feels like that story is sort of leveling up between MTR that we got M-T-R-O-A. 

Irena Andonova: Yeah. We are. I mean, uh, continuing to, uh, add. And, uh, build up the Android platform. A big effort on our site is on the management side, where we are moving all, uh, device management to pro, uh, pro management portal, uh, and enabling capabilities like updates through the, uh, ring system that we currently have.

Uh, settings. Uh, signals, more signals, uh, and so forth. So as well as on the client side, uh, we just, uh, releasing Cloud Intelli frame, um, uh, face recognition. It's about to roll out. It's available on Windows. It's about to roll out on, on Android, uh, and looking forward additional features we expect digital signage and others to bring to the Android platform.

So we will definitely continue adding to the. Uh, Android platform. Awesome. And do 

Tom Arbuthnot: you think that MDEP story will help you in Teams kind of keep that motion of, of adding features to Android and, and doing that platform mean that that is the goal because it better 

Irena Andonova: Yes. That, that is good. The goal, and as, as I mentioned, there's certain features which have a platform dependency and MDEP makes that easier, uh, for us, uh, compared to, uh, the current situation.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, Ilya, Irena, thanks so much for joining the conversation. Uh, I know you've got to run off to a session in a minute. Um, for people listening in on social, uh, lots of the sessions are going on demand as well. And we've got Ilya coming on the fireside chat in December. Um, so yeah, sure. It's in your diary can set out.

Uh, so, uh, yeah, think about, uh, questions from all this content and the sessions and bring them to the, the fireside chat. Thanks so much.