Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This is an audio version of my monthly update. If you want to see the full video version, head over to empowering.cloud and you can see it there and you can also grab the PowerPoint deck as well. Hope you find it useful. Any comments, questions, or feedback? Do let me know. 

Tom Arbuthnot: 

Hi, welcome to my Microsoft 365 AI workplace update for April, 2026. As usual, there has been a lot going on. Many thanks to AudioCodes who are the benefactor for Empowering.Cloud this month. Really appreciate all their support. Catch them next week at M365 Comp. I will be out there too. Looking forward to that.

Also at Comms V next and at Comms verse later in the year. Some great events if you can get to them. We've got some updates on places. We've got updates on cowork. Really impressed with that so far, including the new Opus 4.7 model. More news about anthropic models coming into Copilot, including researcher and some news about AI data processing in and outside the eu.

New SharePoint experience. Lots of teams, news, lots of roadmap, some new teams devices as well. So let's jump right in.

First up, we haven't been on Empowering.Cloud lately. We have,

if you haven't been on Empowering.Cloud lately, we have some great updates. We had a really good Insider session. We had a really good Insider live session on Microsoft places with.

We had a really good. Inside a live session on Microsoft places, helping everybody understand it, what you get in the box. Now with the new licencing changes with Chris, Brennan and Craig, and Craig gave us a really good customer perspective on what it's like to roll out places. So do check that out if you're interested in Microsoft Places.

There's a new blog on multi-platform ucas with New Wave,

and I talked to Gordon Eddie at Ribbon about their latest, and I talked to Gordon Eddie at Ribbon about their latest on moving their SBC portfolio into the cloud, including some big news for them on an AWS partnership. And on the podcast, we've had some great shows recently. Uh, frontline Workers was a big conversation with Spectralink and Patrick at Cavell.

. Some updates on the Teams queues app with Sean. Look out for the whole teams phone team on Teams fireside chat in May.

Onto the Microsoft 365, and Copilot news. We talked about this last month, but just a bit more detail now. Microsoft 365 E7 Frontier Suite. We have pricing. We have some understanding of what the bundle is. I hear Microsoft are already talking to customers about stepping up to E7 and what that means for them.

Copilot Cowork is now out in Frontier. You can see the message end to message there. Only Frontier and only if you, um, have only Frontier and only if you have the Anthropic models enabled. It is really, really impressive. Uh, this is the Copilot I feel like we wanted when Copilot was first launched. This can send emails, it can book meetings, it can create PowerPoint files.

Built on Microsoft Cloud in containers, running on Microsoft Cloud, tightly connected into graph, and obviously auditable and controllable. I'm really, really excited for this. It's got some growing pains at the moment. It's definitely at its limits.

. And I think we'll be seeing more and more advances coming in Cowork over the coming weeks. I had an awesome conversation with Bas on the podcast,

should be coming out in the next couple of weeks. Uh, he's one of the engineers behind Cowork actually started on the Cowork project and he gave us some real insight into what Microsoft had been doing. Their approach to being multi-model and where they're going with Cowork and beyond. So look out for that podcast soon.

We are now past April 15th, so we talked about this last month,

If you have the full M365 Copilot licence, nothing changes for you. If you're in an organisation greater than 2000 seats and you don't have. The M365 Copilot licence, you will get a basic Copilot chat experience. You won't get the office apps integration. And if you're below 2000 seats and you don't have a licence, you'll get a bit more functionality, albeit kind of rate limited.

There's a diagram there to give you an idea of what's what, and these are the two message and to messages to take a look at. But this has now gone live. I don't have any tenants, uh.

And the documentation has been updated on the link below to reflect the M365 chat basic, the Copilot, basic, and Copilot premium labels in the product as well.

Multimodel is something I'm really excited about. In Copilot, we've now seen more multi-model options coming in, so we have, uh, anthropics claw models coming into Copilot chat. Uh, we also have auto model selection coming where you'll be able to automatically toggle from an Admin perspective which groups get which models.

That's really interesting. I wonder if at any point in time we'll see admins being able to say. This group of users are using these models and this provider and this group models using these providers are not just on where they are or who they are, but maybe even cost. Like does everybody get the absolute opus four, seven codex, five, four superpower models or do different people get access to different tooling?

, I'm really excited about anthropic models, but we have to acknowledge that not all of this is gonna be available in the EU compute region. And therefore lots of organisations in Europe won't be able to turn on the anthropic capabilities 'cause they don't want their data process outside the EU data boundary and also not applicable to government clouds as well.

And here's a. And here's a deeper look at that auto critique and model council and researcher. This is a really exciting capability. Again, if you are in frontier, have a look at this, but this is where Microsoft being multi-model really shows a lot of power is they can bring the right models to the right use case, but they can also play the models off each other.

We've seen a lot of this happening in coding. Even to the point where in Claude Code OpenAI have written a plugin for Claude Code to let you use Code X in Claude code. And kind of the same concept here. We can take the best of both models to challenge each other, revise the content, and provide the best.

And provide the best output possible.

There is a new setting coming in, Copilot to make the Anthropic models the default for word, Excel and PowerPoint. We've seen Anthropic beyond an absolute tear in terms of the level of. In terms of the level of capability, their models have to use tools and to interact with tools, and that seems to be coming through in the office.

Integrations both in their first party plugins for office and also when you're using aaro models in Copilot in the office apps. Um, again, data processing considerations here, EU data boundary..

And this is something. This is something I talked about earlier on the intro. Quite an important capability for some organisations, particularly if you are multinational. This is the ability to allow third party AI models aka anthropic at the moment for a subset of users in your tenants or a group. So rather than having them all on or all off, you might have a set of users that you are happy to use anthropic 'cause you're not so worried about the data.

They work with going outside the EU data boundary, but other sets of users can't. You might have certain countries that want to allow it, but not other countries.

And this really feels like the, uh, EU ai anthropic update this month. Uh, but this is a really important one. Microsoft are introducing new flex routing that allows the LLM inferencing. To burst outside the EU data boundary on demand to help the Copilot experience. So there's clearly very limited compute inside of Europe, not just with Microsoft, with all the models.

Uh, Microsoft want to have a default where they will be able to burst outside that region. Uh, that will be fine for some customers. Uh, they might be able to accept that risk. Some other customers definitely won't be able to because of commitments inside their organisation or inside their country. Um, so watch out for this one.

And just to keep an eye, keeping an eye on the competitive landscape.

Keeping an eye on the highly competitive landscape of AI in Microsoft 3 6, 5, and knowledge work. Claude continue to be on a bit of a run. They have now added a plugin for Word to join their Excel and PowerPoint plugins.

And Claude have also opened up their Microsoft 365 connector to all tiers of their licencing.

This is a super fast evolving space and really exciting to see this level of competition. Lastly on M365 news, I just wanted to call this out, quite a meaningful experience update for SharePoint. Jeff Teer talked about this on the podcast recently and gave us a lot of detail. This is the official message and the message that gives you full details of the, the redesign, the new bar on the left, the kind of, uh, the.

This gives us details of the redesign, the new bar on the left. Also, which features are gated by the Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, and which features are in the box as well.

Onto Microsoft Teams and AI Workplace News. So first up, just a reminder that the new licencing changes have now landed. We are in April. So those places licences come into Teams core. All the extra events capabilities coming into Teams core as well. This was a really meaningful, good news story for Teams licencing and really unlocks lots of organisations getting into Microsoft places and really taking much more advantage of Microsoft Teams as an events platform as well.

Without needing that premium licence.

Lots of quality of life, updates on teams, on chat and collaboration, and also some great new security features. I won't run through every single one. You can check out the message center links and slides there. Uh, but multi t uh, multi-tenant, multi account is a really big one. Microsoft are really working hard on the capability to streamline life.

Microsoft are working really hard on streamlining the experience for those that live across multiple tenants, enter key control. So deciding whether enter is send or whether enter is new line.

That's a hot debate. See which one you prefer There. Um, various UI experience improvements. Mark all has read improved image light boxes, et cetera. Um, big one that lots of people are excited about is third party AI bot detection. In the meeting lobby. So having those bots identified differently in the lobby and making it easier not to accept those bots into meetings as well.

On meetings. Lots of work. On recap, we've got audio recap in seven new languages. We also have video based recaps coming through, which are really interesting concept. The idea that it can mix together a video summary of a meeting, interpreter improvements, adding traditional Chinese

and a new concept, a long-term Copilot. Recall beyond transcripts for meetings. This is AI generated meeting archive policy. This is only just hit the roadmap, so it's early days for this, but this is the idea that there will be a. Memory built or an archive built across multiple meetings that potentially is different to the transcripts.

Really excited for that from a functionality point of view. Really interested to see how that works from a compliance and data point of view as well. And another,

and another usability one, testing your mic and speakers before joining the meeting. So at the pre groin at. So at the pre joinin screen, being able to click a button, record a message, hear it back to check your mic, and speakers are working before you join the meeting

uh.

On Teams phone. We have Copilot in teams phone interconnecting to Copilot chat and work IQ data. Bringing that data together into main Work iq, which is really nice. Multi-line support. We talked about this last month, but that is a really exciting capability. So one user or one phone. Being able to have multiple phone numbers, including from different regions or different countries as long as your regulations support that.

Uh, a note on legacy phone retirement. So there's certain phones from Poly, Yealink and Crestron that are now well end of life that you will need to replace or they will be disconnected from the service. And also a report call option to report suspicious calls that is ga ing in April

I wanted to call this one out. This is AI meeting recap without transcript. So this has been an ask from various organisations that aren't ready to transcribe calls, but are happy to have an AI summary.

I'm a little bit worried about what do you double check the AI summary against if you haven't got the transcript. But I do definitely know there are organisations that don't want to enable transcription that are happy to have AI summary that's coming in June.

Teams, PowerShell module. Got an update. Seven. Seven. Oh. This is interesting because it gives us some insight into what Microsoft are doing with AI agents and mainline attendance. We haven't got full details of that yet, but you can see Microsoft are clearly heading in a direction where they're seeing teams as more and more of an agent platform, and we can see that there's some voice AI coming as well.

So excited to hear more about that from the team's phone team in due course.

A couple of roadmap items, facilitator detecting and answering questions proactively. This is really exciting for me. This is facilitator moving from a. Passively taking notes to actually listening through the content of the meeting and being able to offer up answers to questions. Be interesting to see how this is implemented.

Uh, essentially it will constantly be listening and saying, Hey, I can provide an answer for this. It will go and do some searching. How's the search work? So there'll be lots of questions that's coming in June, so we will get more detail soon.

Microsoft Attendant agent, we talked about this in the PowerShell. This is Microsoft having a voice agent for attendance scenarios. That is roadmap for May. Some other, we've seen this in some other platforms, the ability to have an AI answer the call and route the call and looks like we'll be getting that around May time for Microsoft Teams.

Onto rooms and devices. Uh, two new notable certifications. The Cisco room Kit Pro G2 is now certified for Microsoft Teams, notably certified for large rooms, and this is an M depth based device with lots of connectivity, lots of extensibility, and also the teams rooms. Barco bundle developed together with Hudley is now certified, so this gives barcode another option in terms of bundles and cameras and capabilities.

On the teams and rooms and on teams, rooms and devices, roadmap. We have on the teams rooms and devices roadmap. We have one that are, lots of customers have been really excited to see enhanced cross platforms sip, join from Android. Uh, this is what we've had in Windows for a while. The ability to use one of the third party providers, Cisco and Pexip being the two

to connect to a SIP based meeting from my team's room. We can do that on Windows today. That will be coming for Android in June. And look out for a session I'm doing with the CTO of Pexip on what that is, how it works, what the options are, both kind of technical and commercial

booking meetings from teams, panels directly. Booking meetings from teams panels directly coming May, and also digital signage, support of a teams panels, and also digital signage, support of a teams panels coming in May as well. So some nice additions to the panel story there. Lastly, let's have a quick look at events next week.

And lastly, let's have a quick look at events. There's plenty going on.

We've got Teams fireside chat. We've got Copilot Fireside chat. Looking forward to interesting webinars as well. We have a Insider live session on Dynamics 365 contact centre. We have the teams phone team coming on Fireside chat as well. Looking forward to that. And we have our in-person Copilot session in London as well.

A bit further out with M-T-D-A-M-A. Our usual M365 change roundup call and next week I will be at M365 comp. Really looking forward to that.

Lastly, if you're able to get to one of these locations, Microsoft is doing an AI powered workplace tour. You'll see me at the London one on May the eighth. These are gonna be really, really good. I would definitely recommend it.

So that's it for this month. That's all your Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI Workplace News. Hope that update was really useful for you. If you're at M365 conf and you see me, please do say hello. Look out for all the news on LinkedIn from there, and if I don't see you before, hopefully I'll see you at one of the online events or see you next month for the next update.

Thanks again to audio codes for all the support and look out for them at the. And look out for them at M365 Comp Comms V Next, and Commsverse in the next few months. Thanks very much.