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. 

Tom: Microsoft 365 AI Workplace Update June 2026. Many thanks to Pure IP who are this month's sponsor. Really appreciate all their support. Catch them later this month at Commsverse in the UK. Lots to talk about this month. We've just had Microsoft Build, so tons of news. Build's a developer focus show, but there are some really important impacts on Microsoft 365, and it gives us the general direction of travel for all the AI and Copilot stuff as well.

So let's get stuck in If you have been on

If you haven't been onto Empowering Cloud lately, lots going on there. We just posted a webinar we had with the Microsoft Change team around the new release process. That's Frontier, Standard, and Deferred. .

We also, I've also posted a I've also posted a blog around containerization of voice and Kubernetes and where that's all going with Ribbon.

. On the podcast, we've had some great shows. I had Brian from the change team again talking about Microsoft 365 change. Really deep dive on CQD, some of the new features, intelligent classifiers, silent test call, and some new Power BI Reports

And Graham took us through a great customer example of choosing between pro code, low code, or Copilot Cowork when building out agent, when building out agentic and AI scenarios

At Microsoft Build, we got some official word that there is a Copilot Super App coming. So if you've been following the other AI houses, Anthropic and Open AI, they've started merging their products, different scenarios into one desktop super app that has the different capabilities So it's gonna bring together Chat, Cowork, Code, and Autopilot into one desktop app experience. No timeline on this yet, but it's great to see these worlds coming together,

At Microsoft Build, we also got the general availability of a desktop app for GitHub Copilot. Again, following a bit of a trend that we've seen these apps moving from web-based to command line to actually having their own dedicated desktop apps. So you can set off your agent scenarios in here. You can obviously reach all your GitHub Copilot models. You can commit changes, et cetera Nice to see different options to

Nice to see another option to make GitHub Copilot a little bit more accessible for certain users

The biggest news in Microsoft 365 from Microsoft Build was Microsoft Scout. This is Microsoft's first desktop-based agent, so this is actually a, a fork of OpenClaw that Microsoft have built and productized and secured in their own way. A really great inf- Microsoft are framing this new type of agent as autopilot, so they will be part of Copilot, like a feature of Copilot, if you like, and they are processes that are constantly running.

They can use multiple different models. They're still using models in the cloud, but they're running locally. So if you followed any of the OpenClaw or Hermes type conversations around agents, this is that same experience, but the Microsoft variant of that experience. So what can Scout do? It can read and write files, it can do coding, it can do scripts, it can get to all your workplace data, your Work IQ.

You can engage with it in Teams. It can obviously get to your OneDrive. It is a desktop app that is It can create files, but the key thing is it's a constantly running process on your machine. So you do need your machine on all the time, but at that point, you can have scheduled tasks, you can have recurring tasks, it can have a heartbeat to keep It can have a heartbeat going to keep processing different tasks.

This is what it looks like. This is Kevin McDonald. This is a screenshot from Kevin McDonald. He has installed it. You do have to be on Frontier. You do have to have early access. You have to tick some additional security boxes, and you have to have a GitHub Copilot subscription for the compute. Seems like the version we're getting is the very early version in terms of all those capabilities and abilities.

For example, Satya talked about it having its own Entra identity. I think that is coming. And this is all from a team in Microsoft called Project Lobster. Omar, Omar, Omar Shahine is behind this team. Uh, he's been giving some really great information out there. Check out his blog and his Substack, and he says it's OpenClaw running in Microsoft 365, have its own Entra ID, have its own mailbox, int- interact with it with Teams.

So it really is that OpenClaw experience, but secured for Microsoft. We'll see how enterprises think about that. Cowork running in the cloud in a container versus the Scout running on the desktop. Obviously, the desktop needs to always be running, but nice to see Microsoft so quick to innovate in this area.

And if you're interested to find out more, we've done two really great podcasts recently with different people at Microsoft who've been using this early. And if you want to find out more, we've done two great podcasts with people inside of Microsoft who've been using this early. They gave us some great insights and demos, so look at, so look out for those on the Teams Insider Podcast soon

Along with that Scout announcement, we got a really extensive demo of OpenClaw running on Windows, and the Windows team have been doing a lot of work with the open source OpenClaw project to make Windows a great platform for these on, a great platform for these on-device agents. They've done a lot of security work around Microso- they've done a lot of security and containerization work on Windows to make sure those agents can be controlled, to make sure you've got the visibility, and eventually to tie it into the Agent 365 system, and also to allow potentially in the future local models to be used as well as the cloud models.

So Microsoft are working hard to make Win... When those desktop agents came out, Mac really had the mind share in terms of those agents running. Microsoft are working hard to make Windows a

Microsoft are working hard to make Windows a great platform for local agents

At Microsoft Build, we also got some interesting hardware announcements. NVIDIA are going to be producing their own laptop chips. These are gonna be very high-end machines, and they're really all around loads of RAM, loads of bandwidth, loads of compute for running local models. So think expensive. The, the picture there is the Surface Ultra.

That'll be Microsoft's version, but all the major OEMs seem to be involved as well. So these will be very high-end for running local models. And Satya talks about it as unmetered. Satya talked about it at Build as unmetered intelligence. So basically, the inference there is that if you're paying for cloud usage, obviously you're paying for consumption of those AI models.

If you buy one of these beefy machines, you can have the option to run local models and not pay for consumption because you're paying for your local hardware. So again, nice to see Microsoft putting different options on the table. These are gonna be really expensive. I suspect often it will make more sense to use cloud models.

But if you do have that use case, again, nice to have an option in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Work IQ APIs are GA as of the 16th of June. I've talked about these before. It's really interesting to have an API surface to get to your Work IQ data. So this could be via A2A, agent to agent, MCP, or directly via REST API. I've been experimenting with these in different interfaces, and it's really handy to be able to programmatically hit the Work IQ data

An important thing to consider is these are consumption APIs. There's no Work IQ subscription or SKU. You don't buy them per user. If you're using Work IQ in the first-party experiences, so using it in Copilot, you're using it in Cowork, I hope in Scout as well, I would assume so, then your consumption of Work IQ data is included in your Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

But if you're using it in any other surface third-party apps, your own processes, or potentially other AI tools like, uh, or potentially other AI tools like Claude or like Open AI, ChatGPT, then you will be paying on consumption, and it's not that cheap. If you look at Microsoft's own examples of scenarios of light, medium, and heavy,

Even the Lite scenario is between 20 and 40 cents per call, up to $1.50 per call for the heavy scenario. . So if I want to do some really heavy querying on Work IQ on a regular schedule, or I've got a third-party agent hitting Work IQ pretty heavily, this could get really expensive per user I would have liked to have seen some kind of allowance if I bought the Microsoft 365 Copilot license, maybe I'll get some kind of allowance of Work IQ usage before I hit a threshold and I pay for consumption.

But as it stands now, included in the first party applications, but consumption anytime you want to hit that API directly from third party systems

Six Microsoft 365 Copilot updates for June. First one is not really Copilot, but it's targeted organizational adoption messages. We've had adoption messages for a while in the content of Microsoft 365. What's new here is you can target them based on usage data. So you can target, say, people who haven't used Copilot in 28 days, send them this particular message.

Microsoft have now included the ability to use email as a transport method. Previously, it was d- uh, previously it was desktop pop-ups or Teams messages, and they've included a whole bunch of templates. So it's all around driving AI adoption and driving AI change in a very targeted way. Federated connectors are now generally available.

These are Microsoft's term for MCPs with third parties. So think Google Calendar, think Notion, think Moody's, No- uh, any other third-party data sources. And

With Copilot, you can't directly connect any old MCP. You have to go through Copilot Studio. These federated connectors are a blessed experience with those organisations. Copilot in Word is going to edit documents by default, exactly what we want. You don't want to go to Copilot in Word and say, "Can you standardise all the headings?" And it to say, "Nope, here's how you can do it yourself." That's why I have Copilot. So now rather than having to go into a specific agent mode, it will default to what was previously called agent mode and allow you to edit the document On the builder side, we've got...

On the builder side, we've got Copilot integrated. On the builder side, we've got Copilot integrating into model-driven apps. These are power apps that you can build inside your organizations. We use model-driven apps for ChangePilot, our Microsoft 365 change product. So really great to see the ability to tightly integrate Copilot there, so you can have it in a pane, and it can interact with the data in your model-driven app and drive that data as well.

Some new agent evaluation capabilities in Copilot Studio this allows you to audit responses to agents, check they're responding the way you want them to, and also see which models are working best for your agentic scenarios, and also policy-based agent automation. So think that this is agent management, so this is auto-rolling out agents to certain users,

but also managing abandoned agents or agents without owners and reassigning them. So this is lining up for managing agents at scale in organisations

Project Solara was one of the most interesting announcements at Microsoft Build. So we saw two pieces of hardware, a kind of desk-based unit with, uh, Hello for Business on, very much kind of Amazon Echoey if you like, and a compute-based badge with a display on and also a camera. So these are These are not intended to be production devices.

They're not intended to be devices from Microsoft. These are proof of concept example devices to highlight this whole new approach to agentic hardware

So the idea with Project Solara is it's a new platform for agent-first experiences. So particularly in scenarios where you don't have a traditional compute or where you might want to pair this up with traditional compute. And the idea is it's a chip to cloud platform. It's actually built on Microsoft MDEP, the Microsoft Devices Ecosystem Platform.

So that's the Android AOSP platform that Microsoft have built for enterprise that we've already seen on Teams devices on the Teams side. So interesting to see that get a bit more airtime, and hopefully some of this cross-pollinates into what we can do on Teams devices as well. And the idea is this is a whole stack, so it is MDEP, an agent shell, Intune integration, Entra ID, that Hello for Business and Access to Work IQ as well

Microsoft have an interesting history with devices. Lots of things have been attempted at different times, so it'll be interesting to see if this lands. They already have They already are-- They're already trialing with various organizations, and the idea is that OEMs will pick up this platform and build different solutions.

So while those first two example devices were shown, you know, this could be any form factor potentially. It could be watch, it could be glasses, it could be anything you can think of. The idea is it's not the device, it's a new platform that is thinking first for agentic scenarios, lightweight OS on the endpoint, dynamic user experience, and it's really nice to see Microsoft pushing into this space and thinking about how there might be new ways of working with devices which are agent first.

Microsoft announced seven new AI models at Microsoft Build. Some of these we've seen before, and these are new versions of those models. They're starting to get more competitive. They, they said that their image model is up there with NanoBanana now. But the most interesting announcement was the Microsoft AI Thinking One model.

This is the first time Microsoft have presented a reasoning model, and this is off the back of the renewed agreement with Open AI, where Microsoft are now allowed to build their own models. So previously, part of the agreement was they would use Open AI models, and they wouldn't build competing models.

When that agreement got renegotiated, Microsoft are now fully free to develop their own models. So Microsoft want to have their own options in-house. They want to be seen as a top frontier model creator. Of course, they're going to offer the different models to their customers, so they're very tight with Anthropic at the moment.

They obviously have access to all the Open AI models until 2032 as part of their Open AI agreement. But they are using this time to build their own first-party models and starting to drop those models into the Microsoft 365 experience where it makes sense. So when we talked about things like Scout and we talk about Cowork,

Initially, Cowork started as being purely Anthropic, but internally at Microsoft, they already have the option to use some of the ChatGPT models there. You can see a future where whether we're in Copilot, Cowork, or things like Scout, we'll be able to pick and choose models across the stack. And interesting from a commercial perspective, will there be different commercials or consumptions based on using Microsoft's models versus Anthropic versus Open AI, or using the deeper models versus the lighter models?

We'll see how that pans out, but nice to have Microsoft and Mustafa Suleyman's team pushing pretty aggressively on being a first-party frontier model house

On the Teams devices side, we had a bit of news as well as build. We had Cisco Live and Cisco announced and is now certified the Cisco Board G3 55 55 and 75 inch variants 55 and 75 inch variants. That's looking really nice. We've got the upcoming Microsoft UC User Group London, hosted by Cisco's office in London, so looking forward to seeing those.

Barco announced another bundle, this time with a Logitech MeetUp 2, and also Q-SYS announced their first bar, which is actually a Windows bar. It'll be a Microsoft Teams Rooms bar on Windows. They've also got an 11-inch scheduling panel, which has already been certified in the last few days for MDEP. So interesting to see them coming into the bar game as well

A quick look at what's coming up event-wise. Really excited to have Han Yi on the

A quick look at what's coming up events wise. Really excited to have Han Ye on the Teams Fireside Chat. We have our regular Microsoft Teams devices Ask Us Anything. And also we'll be talking Cowork and Multimodal on Copilot Fireside Chat. We have our usual Microsoft 365 Change Roundup And I'm really excited for this one, 10 ways to use Microsoft 365 Cowork.

And for in-person events, we've got Infocomm going on later this month. There'll be some devices news there. I've already started pulling that together. Look out for a special Teams report on all the Teams devices news. Ilya will be doing a keynote there as well. And not to forget, we've got Commsverse coming up at the end of the month in the UK. Really great show, two-day event. I've got various panels and roundtables and bits and pieces there.

Many thanks to Pure IP for being the sponsor this month. Again, catch them at Commsverse, Thanks again and hope to see you at one of the events this month