Many thanks to Ribbon who are the benefactor this month. Really appreciate all their support of the Community. Ribbon have announced an expanded relationship with Amazon AWS to bring all the ribbon enterprise and carrier grade voice infrastructure into Amazon Public Cloud, also in the Amazon marketplace, and things like Acumen and the operations tools and the SEC op tools and the whole deployment pipeline.

Really exciting capabilities to scale voice in the cloud. If you wanna find out more, check out Ribbon's website

for this month, hot off the press are Copilot Wave three announcements, some really meaningful capabilities coming with anthropic models in M365 Copilot, including cowork, which we'll get into. We also got the E7 announcement from Microsoft. We long rumored, and finally here we'll talk about what's in E7 and what's not in E7.

Then we've got some AI workplace roadmap items, some new teams, [00:01:00] devices, roadmap items, and some exciting upcoming events.

If you haven't been on Empowering.Cloud lately, we've got some excellent briefings up there. We talked AI in the contact center with Luware, where we got into the costs and some of the pros and cons. Great insights from Marcel talking Microsoft Places with Brennan. We've got an event coming up with the PLACES team as well.

And also Tony at NWE digs into how they're using NuWave iPilot to deploy UCAS at scale. And on the podcast, we've had some great guests lately, Andrew at BAE, talking about their Microsoft Teams journey. Also, Jeff Teper talking about SharePoint at 25, and giving us someinsight into where SharePoint is going in an AI future.

Adam Jacobs digging into behind the scenes at Microsoft Teams and IC3 and how all the infrastructure's working and some of the stuff he's working on. 

and we talked to Mike, who's the CTO of lab net, about his team's phone journey. And that was particularly interesting 'cause they're out in South Africa with people all over the country, 

[00:02:00] how they went to Teams' phone and also how they're using Landis Contact Center to really maximize their efficiency and delivery to their customers.

First up, Microsoft 365 and Copilot News.

As I said in the intro, we did get the wave three Copilot announcements. GA was November, 2023. September, 2024 was what Microsoft called wave two, and that was Copilot pages Copilot, kind of getting integrated into the office apps, And now wave three is March, 2026.

And here we're seeing Microsoft deliver on the multi-model story. Claude, in Copilot chat. Copilot cowork, which I'm really excited about. agent 365. We finally got the GA date in the pricing and the big announcement, Microsoft 365 E7. 

We've been hearing for a while from Microsoft. They want to be model agnostic. Obviously there's a deep relationship with open AI and investment in open ai, but on AI Foundry, Microsoft are offering thousands of models from all the different model houses, [00:03:00] even some of the Chinese open source models on there.

And we've seen an increasing relationship now with Anthropic. 

Microsoft brought the models into GitHub Copilot, and now they are in M365 Copilot. So you can see on the dropdown there you will have the option to choose Sonnet. Really interesting that Microsoft are using the word Claude in Copilot a lot rather than sonnet the model,

I think that's just because of the positive brand awareness of the Claude brand and Claude experience. The Anthropic team have been getting a really good reputation around knowledge work and tool use. A really strong reputation in coding as well. 

This will be rolling out in March to all licensed users, provided you have enabled the anthropic models on your tenants

Copilot Cowork also got announced. Initially, I was quite surprised this was the same brand that Anthropic are using for their cowork experience, but it turns out it's been developed with Anthropic and essentially it's using the same model, same harness, but bringing it to Microsoft Cloud .

So the [00:04:00] idea here of Cowork is that it will take actions on your behalf. It will do multiple steps. It will come up with a plan, it will execute a plan. And we've seen this announced in January from Anthropic, and I've been playing with that on the desktop. We have an Anthropic account, and essentially you can give it.

PowerPoint, Excel. You can say, reach into HubSpot with MCP, gather the information, put it in the Excel, produce a PowerPoint, and this is that same model, but running in the cloud with Microsoft. The difference here from a Microsoft point of view is they're bringing all the enterprise grade audit and control, and they're also bringing the Work IQ Foundation layer.

So all that information about. You and your environment, obviously all secure and you have the right access to it. That comes into the cowork experience, and also it can work with documents in the cloud, not on your desktop, which is how Anthropic cowork works.

This will be coming to Frontier enabled tenants in March. no dates yet available for when it'll be [00:05:00] coming out to rest of world 

Here's some examples Microsoft gave of the experience I haven't had hands on yet, rescheduling meetings and protecting focus time. So going into cowork and saying, Hey, I need more time. Sort my diary out. And cowork moving meetings, canceling meetings, like doing things for you.

meeting prep, so bringing together documents, previous conversations, emails, teams, messages, and putting a deck together for a meeting, researching a company. Microsoft already have researcher agent, but they're giving an example of cowork going out to the internet, pulling various documents, putting together information, and a product launch plan where again, it pulls together.

Excel pulls different documents together and generates a pitch deck. , The idea is it will chug along doing tasks and you can keep engaging with it as you go and steer it as it's producing those documents.

Say, oh, I've just remembered add this, or, oh, can I have that in CSV format or Excel format, 

this does require the tenant to enable the anthropic models. [00:06:00] So we talked about a couple of months ago, anthropic are now assigned on AI sub-process of Microsoft. so for lots of organizations, that's fine.

But it's worth noting these models are not running in Azure. They are outside of Azure. They're running by Anthropic as a subprocess. So some organizations are nervous about enabling Anthropic models, which run outside of the Microsoft infrastructure. We have heard that the anthropic models will be coming to Azure, but we've got no timelines and it doesn't feel like anytime soon.

And it feels like the open AI Microsoft relationship is getting a little bit frostier Microsoft putting a lot of effort into this anthropic model. But Microsoft and OpenAI did put a joint statement out at the end of February saying, we're still friends, we're still working very closely together, 

Interesting to see OpenAI come out with their own enterprise platform called Frontier. but Microsoft continued to have that investment in OpenAI. They can still have access to all the open air models as well. So we're seeing Microsoft just hedge their bets with Anthropic and I think really be impressed with what Anthropic are doing with their [00:07:00] harness.

their plugins for PowerPoint and Excel being very impressive as well.

Another part of the Wave three announcement was a date for general availability for Agent 365. It'll be coming on the 1st of May, 2026, and it'll be $15 per user per month. 

For customers who were testing this early in the Frontier program, they'll continue to get access and get early features. But this will be coming to general regular tenants and we'll also get trial and paid options in May.

I took this feature page from Microsoft Learn, it talks about an agent registry, access control, visualization, interop and security of agents. So visualization of what's going on with the agents, access control, using Entra and Entra IDs, a registry, so a central source of manageability. What's interesting here is.

They proposed Agent 365 as a user license. So maybe we were expecting something around licensing based on number of agents or active agents, but it looks like this license, the $15 [00:08:00] per user a month, is related to a user creating agents, and therefore, those agents being able to be on behalf of the user 

So maybe more to come on the licensing and how that will work, but for now, this sounds like it's a per user license and it's for that user to then create their own agents and leverage the advanced features of Agent 365 for those agents.

And along with the Agent 365 date, we also got the Microsoft 365 E7, which will also be coming in May and will be $99 per user per month. So we've heard a long time rumors around E7, would it bundle? All the capabilities of Microsoft 365, that's not the case. So for example, this doesn't include teams premium.

This is adding E5 and everything that's in E5. Some Entra capabilities, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Agent 365. So Microsoft are positioning this as the frontier suite, and if you stack all those up, you're saving 10 bucks or so Be [00:09:00] interesting to see how this lands in the market. 

I think a lot will depend on the perceived value of the Agent 365 platform.

Also this month we got SharePoint's 25th birthday. I was really pleased to have Jeff Teer on the podcast. Really great conversation about the SharePoint journey way back into the beginning, going into the cloud, scaling. Some of the numbers are incredible, a billion users each year. 2 billion files uploaded, 2 million SharePoint sites created every day, and Jeff took us through not just the journey story, but some of the new stuff that's coming, including the new SharePoint layout.

You can see on the slide here, the new layout with a new icon for build experiences as well as publish and the intranet, and also your OneDrive.

and we talked a lot about the role AI plays in SharePoint's future. I think it was a really great conversation. You can check it out on the Teams Insider Podcast feed or on YouTube.

Let's have a look at the AI powered workplace roadmap. First up, one that a lot of people have been hoping for identifying bots that are joining teams [00:10:00] meetings.

This is third party meeting bots, joining teams meetings. What will now happen is it will be very clear in the lobby if it's a bot trying to join or if it's a regular person trying to join, So you will need lobby enabled for this capability, but it will make it much clearer that.

Third party meeting bots are, join the meeting. Do you want to accept them or reject them? And that is coming in May. We also have multiple phone numbers assigned to a single user in teams phone. We talked a little bit about this last month, but now we see the roadmap items specifically for user accounts.

So it will be up to 10. Phone numbers for a single user, that can be a mix of operator connect, direct routing calling plan. So you can mix and match different technologies. You can mix and match different locations. Obviously you'll have to hit the regulatory requirements of the different locations and that'll be a conversation.

but a great capability for things like a person that, part-time in London, part-time in a different country, or for [00:11:00] users Taking on an additional phone number for a period of time. Say they're covering maternity for somebody. They just wanna bring that number to them and use it, make calls, receive calls, and then give it back at the end.

We got some channel agent updates channel agents will now be able to ground over the data in the channel IE over the SharePoint data. this was a big gap for me in channel agents. 

You really want those channel agents to be able to read the files. They're also improving the welcome message experience and the ability to create channels without the agent, if you prefer, onto rooms and devices. we have enhanced issue detection in teams rooms on windows, and key here auto remediation is the teams rooms management portal.

This is moving from the prop or just alerting to you, to taking proactive steps to fix issues. So there's loads more information in the Message Central article there, but it's picking up things like camera not working and deciding to take actions to try and remediate that experience.

This is the first step on a journey of Teams Dreams Pro Portal, getting more [00:12:00] proactive. A couple of months ago we had a podcast talking about the AI experience in Teams rooms, pro Portal, and the potential for the AI to get cleverer about remediation. And this is the first step on that path coming in April.

A nice addition coming to teams panels, the ability to book meetings directly from the teams panel, so walk up to a room ad hoc and book a meeting on the outside panel. That's nice to see. And again, that will be coming April.

And for new certified devices, we got the Cisco Desk Pro G2 notable because that is their first MDEP device on Android 15.They've also added a wider camera, positioning that as more of a huddle experience as well as a personal device and the Jabra Evolve 3 75 and 85 headsets.

I've got the 75. Been really impressed so far, putting that through its paces.

Lastly, let's have a look at events. We have our usual events this month. Microsoft Teams, devices ask us anything. We're doing something new. With that, we're bringing in technical people from the teams, rooms, partners to [00:13:00] come in and talk about their portfolio and ask questions. So on the 17th, we will have Josh at shure talking about their new MDEP bar and their whole teams rooms portfolio.

We have the regular change community call that's getting quite a following now. We talked through all the big changes. No doubt we'll be talking about agent 3, 6 5 and E7 and also some of the anthropic changes, the regular fireside chat. Looking forward to that, Kevin and Zoe doing that. Live from MVP Summit

and a new format for us Insider Live we're bringing together. Product leadership and the community on those calls. We're talking Microsoft places on that call with Brennan and we have Chris Fitzsimmons from AVI-SPL. We also hoping to have some customers on there talking about places, the capability, the places journey into April.

We have teams fireside chat. We're doing deep dive on teams phone and hopefully some new teams phone capabilities. And looking a little bit further out, we have the Microsoft 365 community conference as well. Really looking forward to that. I [00:14:00] know there's gonna be some announcements there. And just be great to catch up with everybody in the community.

That's the Microsoft 365 AI Workplace update for this month. thanks to Ribbon for being the sponsor. Really appreciate all their support. Hope this update was useful for you. If you've got any questions, comments, or feedback, please do leave them below. Thanks a lot.