Podcast - M365 AI Workplace Monthly Update January 2026
[00:00:00] Hi and welcome back to the podcast. This is the audio of my monthly Teams update. Everything you need to know in under 15 minutes. If you want to see the full video and slides, you can catch over on LinkedIn or X or on Empowering Cloud along with the full PowerPoint deck and all the links. Hope you find it useful.
On with the show. 
Sarah Share-1: Microsoft 365 AI Workplace Update January 2026. Many thanks to Landis who are the benefactor this month. Really appreciate all their support. They recently added WhatsApp and SMS capability to their team certified contact center, so do be sure to check them out. Happy New Year everybody.
Hope you had a good holiday break. Uh, we are back. There is a lot going on. We are right on the verge of ISE, so lots of hardware news coming. . We've got a new team's phone number. We've got some new roadmap items for Copilot and we've got some new, , teams, rooms, hardware as well.
First off, I thought I'd go through some areas of focus for the year for [00:01:00] Microsoft and, uh, some of the latest movements in AI as well. I just wanna take a second and say thanks to everybody in the community for all the support. Last year we had so many excellent podcasts and briefings and events, and they,, they're only possible thanks to everybody , giving their time and expertise and, and engaging both the in-person events and the online events.
The Copilot, fireside chat teams, fireside chat, and many Thanks to all the benefactors, patrons, and supporters. We couldn't do it without the support of those companies, so really appreciate their support and their teams for all the help. I'm really excited for this year.
We have some plans for some new events, both in person round table style and more online fireside chat type events. If you've got any ideas for the community or any suggestions or you want to get involved, uh, ping me or someone on the Empowering.Cloud team and, uh, happy to have that conversation.
If you haven't been onto Empowering.Cloud recently, we've had some podcasts around Copilot adoption bill, talking us through adopting Copilot, uh, with 22,000 users all in very different roles. That was really interesting. Uh, also Mo talked about Copilot adoption in the big four PRO services firms.
, We talked about, uh, another team's phone migration and Voca with [00:02:00] Richard. And, uh, one of the most interesting recordings I've done in a while, Virgin voyages. So we talked to the CEO there about the kind of work from sea movement and how they're doing things slightly differently.
And we recorded that with Mike at Numonix, actually on a virgin voyage Live, uh, via Starlink. Uh, Came out really well. I was really impressed with that. And lastly, uh, if you haven't seen it already, we recorded last year with Tom Richards, did a whole podcast session on a Cisco teams room story, how Cisco and Microsoft work closely together, and some of what's coming in that space as well.
Also on briefings, we have got an AI voice agents briefing. There's a lot coming uh, Copilot agents, uh, features and control with Rolf. Uh, great session from Rolf. He also does our monthly. Great session from Rolf. He also does our monthly change pilot call, great session from Rolf.
He also does our monthly change pilot call and also contacts center options. I talked to Alistair, appeared at BCM one Pure ip, and he took us through the kind of variables for choosing between native teams. Call queues, uh, connect, extend, and unify, uh, extended. Connect, extend and unify certified solutions.
As it is January. I thought we'd get. As it is January, I thought we'd start with some view of what's coming this year and what's going to be important this year. Obviously for Microsoft AI [00:03:00] and Microsoft 365 Copilot, that continues to be a big focus. We got the Work IQ branding and kind of feature set, explained it.
We had the Work IQ kind of branding and features explained at Ignite last year, and we'll start to see that come to fruition through this year, and that's really how Microsoft are going to differentiate M 365 Copilot with all the context of all your work data, it'll be really interesting to see the different product teams kind of feeding into that Work IQ layer.
We're getting the agents in office, agents, meaning in this case, that they can interact with the document that's open. So Excel, word, PowerPoint, et cetera. And this is really what you want from Copilot or AI in the office apps is for it to actually be able to change the open document, format it, move information around.
So really excited for that Copilot chat, the free tier. Continues to get a wealth of New features. So there's a lot of value being pumped into that Copilot chat tier. So even without M365 Copilot license, you're going to get the agent modes and the office apps, the Outlook you're going in, Outlook, you're going in [00:04:00] Outlook.
You're gonna get to reason over the entire inbox calendar. Uh, and.
Of course for Microsoft AI and Copilot continue to be, uh, the no, of course, with Microsoft AI and. Of course with Microsoft AI and Microsoft 365 Copilot continue to be very important and have the most focus. We got the Work IQ branding and kind of feature set explained to us at Ignite last year. So this is Copilot using the context available to it in the Microsoft 365 stack.
So all your information, all your corporate documents, and that's how Microsoft are going to continue to differentiate. The Copilot experience from other AI experiences. So looking forward to seeing what comes with that this year. Agents in office apps, agents in this context just means that the AI can interact with the document.
So it can do things in Excel, it can do things in PowerPoint and Word in the current deck or in the current document. , Make all the headings bold, make all the fonts aligned, align all my PowerPoint documents, uh, all my images in my PowerPoint, so really excited for agent mode in the office apps, and also Copilot free, uh, Copilot chat. Is getting a lot of new features pumped in. So even if you're not buying the full M 365 Copilot [00:05:00] license, you're going to get those agent modes.
You're going to get to reason over your inbox and calendar in Outlook. And it seems like generally the Copilot chat is becoming more like a kind of onboarding tier with lots of value in the box before you even get to the premium M 365 Copilot experience. Microsoft are pushing the anthropic models into Copilot as well.
There's some intricacies around that. We talked about it on the last monthly update, but nice to see Microsoft bringing those models in. They're really strong models. Of course, agent building will be a theme for this year. Uh, Microsoft Agent Builder in Copilot and also the full Copilot studio. Generally, Industry is still very heavy on the idea of agents, of line of business processes.
We'll see how that pans out. Agent 365 was announced last year. That is Microsoft's approach to governing agents, which is a really important conversation if agents are to scale in the enterprise. And just more generally,
I. And just more generally, The conversation this year will continue to be around the business, adopting chat and adopting agent scenarios. Microsoft's Frontier [00:06:00] Firm concept, how much will that come to fruition? I, I think there's still tons of value to be unlocked for most organizations, just getting their users to use.
Copilot chats, uh, let alone agentic and, and line of business processes, but definitely that will continue to be a hot topic this year.
On the Microsoft Teams run for 2026, we're just coming into the unified Copilot chat experience.
That should be a real improvement in the Copilot chat Experience a single interface across all your chat channels, your meeting content, uh, not different copilots in different scenarios. You've got the at Copilot scenario where you can. Bring Copilot into the conversation directly in teams. I found that particularly to be really useful things like our internal conversations, rather than having to dip out, I can just ask Copilot the co the question in line in the context of the conversation so that I found really useful.
Channel agents Really interesting as well. They're getting MCP connectivity to other line of business apps. They Will get access to the SharePoint data of that channel as well. So those are coming up with interesting use [00:07:00] cases. Of course, facilitator is really one of the central agent scenarios for teams.
So the idea of having an agent in. Your meetings proactively creating, meeting loads, putting actions into plan, those kind of things. And in the meeting room as well, on the teams rooms front, we've got the continuing M depth story. There's a lot coming there that's getting really interesting and I think it'll be a big year for multi-camera as well.
We're getting multi-camera and multistream kind of bidding in and coming through various different solutions from different OEMs as well. It's gonna be a really exciting space and, and that idea of. Outside in cameras versus inside out. There's a lot of options for customers there. We also saw at the end of the year a new type of doc from YE Link, which is a new type of teams device.
There'll be others coming as well, and that ties into the places story and desk bookings. That's all very interesting. Webinars and events continue to get a lot of focus. There's Been some really meaningful upgrades in the capabilities for webinars and events. And we know that's a competitive space, so that will continue to get focus.
Teams phone. The big story for this year is going to really be AI voice and voice agents. Uh, and well. Uh, the big story for Teams phone this year is really gonna be AI voice and [00:08:00] voice agents and, and agentic in the phone experience. We've, of course, we've of course already got Copilot in teams phone as well, and the contact center space continues to be incredibly hot with lots of options.
So you've got the in the box, uh, call queues and auto attendant. You've got the queues app with teams premium. You've got all the Ecosystem solutions, which there's some really great solutions out there. And we've got the new unified ACS model for the ecosystem and also Dynamics 365 contact center.
Ai. Other Interesting areas for 26 places continues to get a lot of features coming. Desk booking came in the end of the year, as did the API story, which is now ga, and again, that is going to bed into the Work IQ and Copilot workflow.
We have a briefing coming out shortly, which digs into some of those SharePoint agents. We've got the knowledge agent. We now have heard about The list agent as well, and it's SharePoint's 25th birthday. So looking forward to some interesting announcements around March. Time and planner, we know has some big changes coming as well.
So there's an MC item there you can click through to for more details, but there's some changes happening with the basic planner and some of the capabilities. There's some new things happening with the planner premium [00:09:00] experience.
Onto the Microsoft 365 and Copilot news.
As I said on the 2026 Outlook, agents are going to be a big part of the conversation, and we now have dates for Excel agent, PowerPoint agent, word agent and project manager, knowledge and list agent, so lots of agents embedding into the office apps and office experience.
Initially they're coming to typically the web experience, then they're being put in the desktop clients. Slightly different timelines for each one, but broadly February time is when we'll start seeing these land and this will be a, a meaningful improvement in usability, I think for AI in the office apps.
And remember, again, a lot of this is coming to Copilot chat, so the free tier as well as the premium tier. i'm personally really excited about this. This is gonna be the area where we start to see, I think, more adoption because I can ask the Copilot in word to actually do things more for me or the Copilot in PowerPoint to do things for me.
Image generation and video generation.
It'll be interesting to see where this finds a place in the Microsoft 3 6 5 and AI [00:10:00] workplace story. So OpenAI's, GPT image 1.5 model is now rolling out to Copilot. This was open AI's reaction to the nano banana Google model, which was very, very good. And it seems like a lot of, a lot of. It seems like a lot of people are saying this is now kind of on a par with that model.
Also video overviews from Copilot notebooks. This is interesting. This is the idea that a co note. This is the idea that a notebook can be generated into a video summary.
This will be coming sometime between now and February as well.
Onto teams and AI powered workplace, even though. Onto teams and AI powered workplace, even though it's a relatively quiet. In December, we did get some new, big news, uh, 26 million teams, phone users. The new public number, so that is a, a big jump in teams phone. Since the last public number we had, it's around 30% growth over the last.
Two years. Uh, I do follow these numbers quite closely. There's a link there if you want to go in and see all the history of the growth, but congrats to the Microsoft team for continued growth in Teams phone.
We do know there's still a, a lot of seats out there that are already licensed, so anybody with E five will already have that team's phone license. And of course there are around 440 million M 365 users, so still quite a lot of white space [00:11:00] there,
talking of new features on teams' phone, the Copilot chat in calls app, post-meeting calling experience, that's a bit of a mouthful, is now ga. So this is now an after call experience to get to the chat, to ask questions to summarize the information.
So nice to see that coming through.
Custom AI summary templates in meeting recap. So rather than just having the generic recap, you can create your own specific custom template that you can use over multiple scenarios. It will come with two out of the box templates. So speaker summary. And executive summary, but you can save and reuse these templates yourself across multiple meetings.
Teams Admin Center is getting a specific frontline hub. So the idea here is all frontline related features will come into one experience for people to manage. Frontline continues to be a big focus for Microsoft. It's a big addressable market, interesting space, and, uh, aggressively price licensing as well. So, uh, nice to see that experience being improved.
A lot of talk last year was around security and safety and the. And we're [00:12:00] seeing some of that roll through in the coming months. So first one is teams messaging, safety features being turned on by default for all users. This won't change the settings if you previously customized them, but this is things like protecting against certain file types, malicious URLs, And the ability for users to report issues directly in teams, so users will see warning labels if messages or URLs seem to be suspicious.
Microsoft are simplifying the external collaboration controls in Teams Admin Center, . So they're going to have a fully open mode, a controlled mode, or a custom mode. There's a really good blog from Tony Redmond. You can check out there for more details.
And there is the message center message. This is rolling out mid-February.
Admins can also now block users in the defender portal. So this is about blocking domains for federation and external access. Rather than doing it in teams, you can do it directly in defender, That's nice to see. That's rolling out now. Teams chat with anyone. This caused a lot of controversy last year around exactly how it would work [00:13:00] and security risks.
Microsoft have clarified the messaging. It will be enabled by default, but currently it's only available to the business users. So teams essential business basic business standard, business premium, and only if you are opted into preview. So it's a very slow and steady rollout. I haven't had hands on with it yet.
It will be governed by your intra B2B guest policies and Teams, Admin Center, guest access policies, and it won't override any existing policy, but I know there's some nervousness around this. Check out MC 1 1 8 2 0 0 4 for more details on that.
And lastly on Teams, Microsoft have published a free native Slack to teams migration tool. We saw the API work on this early last year. We knew it was coming. This allows you to move public and private Slack channels into teams channels. Essentially, it's a zip export from Slack. You put it on blob storage, then you can map it to a teams channel, and you can map usernames to M 365 accounts and import it with a PowerShell script.
There are some good third party options here with the APIs, but nice to see a simple, free tool in the box as well.
[00:14:00] Onto teams, rooms, and devices. Not too much news on devices. Pre ISE, we did see Barcode certify their ClickShare Core and PRO and accessories. Those are the first M depth devices from barcode.
Exciting to see those. We also saw some new devices certified from Yealink as well, the MVC 90, S 50 and S 40. Those are all, uh, Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows, and the S 90 is a dual physical camera. Uh, as I said, uh, we're only a couple of weeks out from ISE. . There'll be lots of videos coming,
onto events. We are back into.
Onto events. As I said, we are Back into our regular events routine now, so we have the teams fireside chats. We've got Michelle Bowman doing the post ISE one as well. Looking forward to that. We have the Microsoft Teams devices ask us anything, regular sessions, the Copilot, fireside chat.
Also, Microsoft have, an interesting training on the 15th and 16th that has their converged comms training. . And we also have the Manchester user group coming up in person as well. And of course, ISE. Really looking forward to [00:15:00] that. If you're going out to ISE, let me know. It'd be great to say hello if you're there. So that is our first wrap up for January of all the news. Many thanks to Landis for all their support.
Hope that was useful for you. Got any comments, questions, or feedback, do let me know. Thanks a lot.