Microsoft 3 6 5 AI Workplace Update February, 2026. Many thanks to NEAT two are the benefactor this month. Really appreciate all their support, everything we're doing in the community. Neat. Have a new pad, pro 10. It's a new M depth device. We'll talk about that more in the ISE update. We are just off the back of ISEI got back last week.
There is so much news both in the Copilot space and the AI workplace space. Changes to licensing, express voice enrollment, live events, retiring. Multiple phone numbers on teams' phone, so let's get straight into the update. Over on Empowering.Cloud, we've got new briefings. We have a real AI case study. We have an update with Lou, where we talked about AI in the real world, and not just all the kind of theoreticals, but the actual costs, the risks, and some of the benefits and what real customers are doing.
There are some big changes coming to Microsoft places, both in terms of licensing and in capabilities. I did a session with Brennan, which is looking at the year ahead. We also did a session with Pure IP throughout their new platform for enterprise communications. That's with Aden on the new Chief Strategy Officer and also the session on voice AI agents.
We've had some great podcasts. Jenny Hicks took us through her perspective on distribution in 2026. Great session with Henry at Logitech on their new rally AI cameras and really enjoyed having JT on the pod from Toyota Financial Services talking about his teams and teams dreams rollout. Microsoft 3 6 5 and Copilot news.
The pressure in the AI space with all the innovation competition is showing through and a lot of updates are coming to Microsoft. 3 6 5 Copilot Copilot chat's got GPT 5.2. We saw quite a lot of extensibility improvements in the AI agent space. This slide here is just some of the updates In January.
There are even more as well. I'm excited for this one. Personally. MCP based agents are getting a rich interactive widget in Copilot chat to connect to third party services, and this would render the output of those MTP connections. Microsoft 3 6 5 Copilot memory. This is part of that work IQ story. We're seeing some improvements, that memory capability and how you control that capability coming in March, increasing value is being pushed into the Copilot chat free tier and in Outlook.
Copilot chat is now going to reason over your whole inbox and your whole calendar much more usability at the free tier. Really exciting to see that coming along. And that's due to rollout March. This is an interesting one, API access to Copilot retrieval. This is API access to workplace data for non Copilot license users.
So think about a Copilot chat user and they want to use an age agent scenario that needs access to the enterprise data. You can use this on a pay as you go. Currently in preview, this won't give them user access to their own data, so not their own OneDrive or their own email. So it's not exactly the same as work IQ for an M 365 Copilot user.
But for certain users that need to access, say centralized SharePoint data of the workplace, you can go to a Pay As You Go model. For some scenarios. This is off by default and it does require pay as you go set up. But there's the MCID for more details. Two new, very exciting, very impactful models. Opus 4.6 and Codex five three from Anthropic and open AI respectively came out in relatively quick succession.
It's really competitive on that frontier model space at the moment. Both already integrated to GitHub Copilot, so are available to developers using that platform. I've been playing with Opus 4.6 in particular, and I'm really, really impressed with the results. Talking of Opus, it feels like Anthropic are increasingly putting a lot of pressure on Microsoft 3 6 5 Copilot Anthropic is a partner of Microsoft's.
The models are coming into M 3 6 5 Copilot, but at the same time, anthropic have launched plugins for Excel and PowerPoint that have been very well received. They launched Claude Cowork at the start of the year. This is Mac only, but this is essentially similar to Claude Code. But for knowledge workers, it'll be interesting to see if Microsoft 3 6 5 Copilot has to look at having a more engaging desktop based application, similar to this cowork scenario, or if all the data can stay on OneDrive and SharePoint and more in the cloud model.
It's just amazing to see the innovation between OpenAI and their integrations, anthropic and their integrations, and what Microsoft's doing with Microsoft 3 6 5 Copilot onto the Microsoft Teams and AI powered workplace updates. We're just back from ISE. I sat in on Ilya's keynote session. There some themes were around thinking of teams as a person to person and person to agent type scenario as well.
So it could be human to agent agent's, human, the place where we collaborate, work IQ being a huge foundation of that story. And all your meeting data, your chat data. All your transcripts being available as part of your work IQ data. All securely managed and accessed, unified Copilot across chat threads and channel AI powered communication in real time.
Think facilitator, engaging in meetings, interpreter voice agents in the future, facilitator, taking a step forward, increasing capabilities across meetings and rooms. Express enrollment was a big theme of the show. Streamlining and scaling teams, rooms, rollouts, and the pro management portal AI integration.
There's a link for my full breakdown of the keynote as well. Some of the biggest news this month is changes in licensing, really positive changes in licensing. Essentially some capabilities that were previously premium. So places, capabilities and advanced webinar and town hall features are coming into teams core places moves to a model where user features are in the.
Teams core license, and if you want spaces or desks available to places you're paying for, what was the shared device? License is now a shared space license and advanced town hall and webinar up to 3000 users in the box, and then you can pay for capacity add-ons. There's a lot more detail to that. I did a blog breakdown, which you can get on the link there and also talk to Brandon at ISE.
And we drove through all the licensing changes and what it means for customers. So you can check that video out a few places. Map items, map-based room booking is in development and a profile card for buildings, rooms, and desks to give additional data about those spaces, their capabilities, their location, et cetera.
Feels like a really neat way to integrate the places experience to Outlook and teams. Express voice enrollment was one of the key points from ISE. This is the idea that if your Admin allows it and you agree to it as well, you do have to step into both those agreements. Teams will listen to your speech in a meeting, and when it has enough content, it will say, I have enough to make a voice profile for you.
Is that okay? And it'll make a voice profile. And that voice profile is for voice isolation and recognition in teams, room scenarios. A lot of people don't go through the settings to proactively enroll, so this is just nudging them that the feature's available. Taking away the need to manually enroll and just saying, yes, I agree, but it does still require the user to agree.
Another one from ISE. The Meet app in teams is becoming the events app. Not just meetings, but also for webinar in town hall. Bringing that whole experience together, that change will begin rolling out early Feb for preview and around April for ga. So maybe some user comms needed there to understand that change more details in the message center teams.
Live events are ly and being replaced with town hall. We kind of knew this was coming, but now we have an official date, so they will retire on 30th of June, 2026. Town Hall now has all the capabilities really to replace that scenario. The graph APIs for scheduling broadcast will be going to, there is a beta endpoint that will be going at the end of March.
That's fair enough, but the 1.0 endpoint will be going June 30th, 2026. This was announced in a blog post that is quite tight. It's supposed to be the anything in graph 1.0, which is the GA of graph should get 24 months depreciation. So interesting to see how tight Microsoft have made that. Obviously Microsoft have the data, they know who's using it.
They probably know that maybe it's not getting that much use, and those customers are happy to move across to Town Hall Still. Interesting to see Microsoft break their standard SLA of 24 months before removing something from Microsoft Graph. That's a little bit worrying if you're a developer and you're relying on that capability and that agreement of depreciation before removing APIs.
But generally, town Hall has all the capabilities and more now. Customers seem happy that it is a valid replacement with new capabilities. There's some links in the slide to learn more about the transition and town hall interpreter we know from meetings is coming for one-to-one call scenarios and teams phone, PSDN calling Microsoft have increased the amount of included interpretation hours.
From two hours per user, two 20 hours per user per month. We talked about this a few months ago. Two hours seemed quite tight and there was no ability to then go into a consumption model or to roll over. Check out that mc item for more details on the changes to the included interpretation hours. A big one that a lot of people have been waiting for.
The queues app is going to get shared History of calls and voicemail. This has been a long time coming. A big unlocking capability for the queues app communities is coming into teams in public preview previously Yammer. Veeva Engage Now integrated into Microsoft Teams experience. Also, there's going to be an agent in communities to help draft responses and manage communities, which is gonna be interesting if you are a Veeva Engage or YAMA user in particular.
This is worth having a look at, or if you haven't used that, because it's such a separate property, might be worth looking at it. Again, this is due in April, 2026. A few more items on the roadmap. Audio recap is getting an additional eight languages. This is audio summaries of your meetings. A big one for team's phone.
That's just hit the roadmap. So this is the ability to have multiple phone numbers assigned to the same user account and the same team's IP phone as well. That is due April. Onto rooms and devices. Obviously a lot from ISE. I did a lot of video interviews there. The links are below and also the whole deck and links are available.
Over on Empowering.Cloud. I spoke to Kalan MedU at Jabra. They've released a new modular teams room system with Hudley cameras and a new speaker mic using Jabra audio technology. Great session with Crestron who released new. Teams rooms compute and one beyond cameras and the new mic system, so a whole new ecosystem of devices.
I talked to Albert and Microsoft and Natia audio codes about their relationship, A new phone. The C four fifty six HD is considered for education and government, so it's an M depth phone and it has a interesting panic button for education scenarios that integrates tightly into teams and talk to Richard Cisco about their new developments.
The New Desk Pro, which is their new MD depth device and some other new devices from them. And also critique over at Cisco on Workplace Designer improvements. That tool is going from strength to strength. Sure. Formally announced their new MD depth bar with unique camera capabilities. It has cameras on the outside edge of the bar as well as the middle of the bar, giving some interesting framing capabilities.
As I mentioned at the top, just before ISE Logic announced their new Rally AI and rally AI pro cameras. Really nice cameras, quite a, a slim profile for mounting on the wall, but they can also be mounted in the wall and think that the rally ball 65 camera, but mounted in a wall with a flush fabric cover.
Nathan gave us a tour of all the different mounting options I caught up with Graham at Neat. We talked about the new Neat Pad Pro and the board 32, both M Depth devices. Nice to see those devices coming through. In terms of teams, rooms, news, we now have direct guests join between Google Meet and Teams rooms on both sides of the fence.
Initially, windows only. We'll see when the Android option drops. Microsoft will give them formal dates for Android device management coming through from the teams Admin enter to the pro management portal. We knew this was coming, that all the device management is aiming to go through to the pro management portal.
That's where all the development is. This will be happening in public preview around April time and will finally be happening around June time. So quite a lot of warning there, but be aware that's going to change some of your operational procedures and move all that room and device management over to the pro portal.
Not necessarily a headline grabber, but a really big improvement. Passwordless resource accounts for teams rooms. Matt Slomka did a good session at ISC. This is moving from passwords on resource accounts, which can be a problem 'cause some organization ought to cycle those passwords. Obviously, theoretically, someone could get hold of that password.
Moving to true Passwordless accounts, which used kind of a key based Exchange rather than a password, they automatically rotate. A much more secure capability to roll out teams rooms and increasingly important as we have AI in the room as well. That will start public preview in March for intra ID Cloud accounts, April for on-prem accounts, and the target is June for general availability.
A nice true up on the Microsoft Teams Rooms, Android platform digital signage, which is rolling out in early March, similar to what we've had on Windows App space. Zy go. Specific customer you are. We are now fully into event season. After ISE, there is a lot coming up looking forward to teams fireside chat with Michelle Full ISE debriefing his perspective, regular Microsoft Teams devices ask us anything.
Of course the Copilot five side chats and our new Microsoft three six five change community call as well. That covers all the big changes in the whole of Microsoft 3 6 5. Looking a bit further out for in person. Late Feb. We have the Microsoft UC user group, London. We have Andrew from BAE, talking about his team's experience.
Great conversation, amazing scale teams, phone and teams rooms. We have a new in-person Copilot user group in London in March. And looking a bit further forward, we have a new format we're trying out this year, which is Insider live sessions. This is a, a live session on teams where we have Microsoft product experts and experts from the community.
Talking through a product, talking through roadmap, hopefully some customer guests as well. The first one will be Microsoft Places. We've got Brennan and Chris Fitzsimmons. Brennan is the strategy lead for places you no doubt will have seen him on the podcast before. There's a lot going on in places this year with those new licensing changes, with desk booking with a new shared space license.
So looking forward to getting into that with some demos and some roadmap. And that is a live session, so you can absolutely come along and bring your questions and get engaged as well. That's it for this month. Hope the update was useful. Thanks to NEAT for being the sponsor this month. If the update was useful for you, appreciate any comments or sharing of the update.
Get that word out there and look forward to seeing you at one of the events. Seen.