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. 

Microsoft 365 AI Workplace Update July 2026. It's the start of the new Microsoft financial year. There is a lot to talk about. We haven't had the end of year results yet, but we will soon. But a lot has already been announced, including a new Microsoft Frontier company. Cowork has now gone GA, and we better understand the cost model.

There's some Copilot updates. There are lots of Teams calling and meetings and devices updates from Infocomm. So let's get stuck straight in

Many thanks to this month's benefactor, Neat. Really appreciate all their support to the community. They've recently announced an MCP server for their management platform. Really excited about this. Lots of people are talking about how we could have MCP and API connectivity to the OEM tooling, and Neat are first out with that.

I think there'll be more coming. They also announced their intelligent framing beta. More details of that, how it follows the conversation in bigger rooms on the Neat blog there. , And also check out Graham's video on the Neat MCP server as well

new one Empowering.Cloud, we had a great session on Copilot Cowork with Alev and Femke full of demos and use cases. Really enjoyed that. And also an overview of Barco and their capabilities in Microsoft Teams Rooms. And on the podcast, we had a Copilot Cowork versus Scout session with Alev and Chris.

That's . Kevin was on the podcast talking about how Microsoft, Zoom, and Cisco are all approaching AI in different ways. , We talked about Interesting conversation with Ben Richardson

Interesting conversation with Ben Richardson about how they're doing Teams recording and not just recording, but they've integrated into the Numonix API to do some really clever line of business stuff,. And Microsoft Scout explained, loved this session with Michelle.

He's been using Scout for quite a long time internally at Microsoft, and he took us through how he's using

Awesome Commsverse this year. It was a proper heatwave in the UK, but still a really well-attended event with great sessions and great sponsors. Sadly, we found out this is gonna be the last Commsverse. Mark, Randy, Martin, and the team are gonna step back from doing it now. that has had a massive impact on the community over the last seven years.. So thanks to Mark and the team for that and, uh, thanks for all the opportunities to speak and be involved. We had a really great customer roundtable there. Really enjoyed that. We're gonna be doing another roundtable at UCExpo, so if you're interested in joining a private session that's end users only, that should be really good.

Had a great session with some enterprises around their Copilot adoption,. And I had a great catch-up with some of the team's ecosystem partners, and there's plenty of videos there that are on the Empowering.Cloud YouTube and all on my LinkedIn as well.

A quick look at Microsoft and the new financial year. We heard mostly in May there's been various reorgs in Microsoft and all focused around, you know, driving AI, driving Copilot. I won't go through every single one. You can see them on the slides, and for those listening on the audio on the podcast, the slides will be available in the show notes.

Um, but we've got new leadership roles pretty much across the board, including Ryan Renansey, who's coming in from LinkedIn, who's the LinkedIn CEO. I think they've announced a new CEO there, so that might be changing. Charles Lamanna is taking over Copilot Agents and Platform,

on the team side, Lan Ye is president of Teamwork Experience Group, so that includes Teams, uh, Engage and Planner. Ilya, we know now, is CVP of Teams Calling, Meeting & Devices, reporting into Lan Ye. And you've got Lamanna, Duvall, Clark... And you've got Lamanna, Duvall

and you've got all the key roles around Copilot and AI reporting directly into Satya Nadella. It'll be really interesting this year to see that continued focus with Microsoft AI and the Microsoft models, and Microsoft continuing to push that Copilot, M365 Copilot adoption in particular

Talking of adoption, Microsoft have established, uh, the Microsoft Frontier company. So this is a new, uh, 2.5 billion company is the headline, 600,000 embedded engi- So this is a new $2.5 billion company, 6,000 embedded engineers.

These are kind of what some people call forward deployed engineers. So these are engineers that Microsoft will place in customers to help customers change and adopt AI. So they're kind of engineers, SEs, change makers kind of all in one. And we're seeing the other big frontier houses also spark up similar partnerships with different consulting firms.

It's really becoming clear that to get enterprises to adopt new ways of working, new tooling, you do need that consultative engineering approach to help drive the change and help them understand the new processes.

We've talked about this before, but the new price rises for M365 are live. So various plans going up by different levels of percentage. The business plans, the frontline plans, and the enterprise plans going up anywhere between kind of 8 and 15%, depending on the plan. The frontline plans going up substantially more, 33% and 25%.

And Microsoft have also announced that they will be doing annual local currency pricing changes in January. So we didn't really have this on a regular schedule before, but obviously as currencies change around the world, Microsoft are making more or less depending on the current currency against the dollar.

So now we can expect in January time every year, some adjustments to , local pricing, based on the changes in currency as well.

Microsoft 365 Copilot updates. Cowork is now generally available, and we better understand the cost model. It is fully consumption, meaning you're paying in Copilot credits every time you use Cowork. How many credits will depend on the model, the... How many credits will depend on the model, the scenario, the, the amount of tokens that are consumed,

Microsoft have some example use cases laid out. They're anywhere from a dollar to three dollars to seven dollar plus for their heavier use cases, and it is seven dollar plus. You can get into the tens and the hundreds really, really fast, particularly when you're using Opus and maybe when Fable comes in or GPT-5.6 as well.

This is a new world for AI in the enterprise. Developers have been dealing with this for a little while now. That's all moved to consumption. And now in the enterprise side, on the business side, we're gonna have to think about how much budget do we give people for Cowork, for their consumption, what's a good spend, what's a bad spend?

Um, as I mentioned, GPT-5.5 is in the model family now for Cowork. So if you're not ready to allow the Anthropic models, you can still use the GPT-5.5 models in the EU data boundary if you want to. And we had a really great session with Alev and Femke going through examples and use cases and cost models. So check that out on Empowering Cloud.

And if you want more information, the two MC items are linked in the slides and the notes. On the Copilot side, we've now got Sonnet Five as a selectable model. Uh, Work IQ is now reasoning over Power BI reports and semantic models. We've got new vision capabilities coming into Copilot as well. Copilot Notebooks is now rolling out to Copilot Chat and

And we're excited to see Fable is now back in Claude as of last week. We did have Fable available in the Microsoft stack. That got taken away. It hasn't come back yet, so we'll see if and when Fable comes back to Copilot and to Foundry. I'm sure it will. And GPT-5.6 is rumored to be coming. . So I'm sure with Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI, we'll see GPT-5.6 coming through to Microsoft fairly quickly. Also, interestingly, uh, Bloomberg reported Microsoft are using more of their native first-party AI models, the Microsoft AI models, in Microsoft 365 Copilot scenarios.

We knew this was coming. Uh, Microsoft has talked about it before in Microsoft Build. They've talked about the idea of having their own models in Cowork as well, and they're looking to both be more efficient, uh, in terms of token cost for themselves, obviously, on those non-consumption scenarios, but also looking to be, you know, resilient and independent and have another model option in-house, as well as Anthropic, as well as OpenAI.

And we know they're looking at other models as well, particularly for Cowork. You know, potentially there are rumors of would they allow, you know, a DeepSeek model in there? Would they use Minstrel models in there potentially? And again, this is just part of the new world. We will see multiple models, also in Teams, we've heard Microsoft are gonna use their native transcription model.

and they Said that their image model is competitive with NanoBanana 2, so I no doubt we'll see that image model pop up at some point. On agents and governance, we've got the Planner agent is now generally available.

A lot of work is going into Planner at the moment. Great podcast with Howard recently who... I had a great podcast with Howard recently who talked about Planner and the roadmap. Custom fields are coming, better API coverage is coming. MCP and Planner really being a more established platform for humans and agents to work together.

Sales agent is now generally available. That's part of your M365 Copilot license. Service agent has also been announced, part of the Dynamics Service Agent has also been announced part of the Dynamics ecosystem and the Dynamics 365 Contact Center .

And AI content will com- and AI content was And watermarking AI content is now coming through as well. Again, we talked about this a few months ago. Part of the EU rules around AI are being very clear when you're using AI. So org policies to control AI-generated audio or video being watermarked and being clear We've talked before about the Copilot Super App that is now due to be coming in August.

This merges Copilot Chat, Cowork, and GitHub Copilot all into one space. We'll also see the new autopilots, things like Scout coming through into this.

They wanna bring coding and building through to a single surface. So expect more Copilot UI changes in August. I wanted to mention Claude Tag. This is really interesting. This is m- this is Anthropic building a kind of plugin @mention model initially for Slack, um, but I fully expect them to build this for Teams as well.

So Claude Tag is really Claude at mention, uh, in Slack, so you can at mention Claude as an agent, and it has the context of the chat, and it can go off and do things and connect via your MCPs. Similar to what we've been seeing in Microsoft Teams with at mentioning Copilot. You can at mention Copilot in chats or in channels,

and we've seen a lot of work going on with the Teams SDK and the Teams Bot SDK.

But Microsoft have this awesome surface in Teams, and I fully expect that to get more agentic. And when we see th- and when we see things like autopilots and scouts potentially having their own Entra identities, we'll be able to talk to those agents as first party users in the M365 ecosystem, bring them into meetings, bring them into chats, bring them into channels.

So always interesting to see what Anthropic are doing 'cause Microsoft are usually pretty hot on their heels

Onto the Microsoft Teams updates. We've had Infocom, lots of good announcements there. You should really check out the Ilya keynote. I did a speed edit there, link in the description if you wanna see a fast version of all the big announcements. He talked about Work IQ, some Teams Phones announcements, multi-line, Queues app.

Teams Phone Agent was the big new announcement. We'll talk about that in a minute. New meetings layout, AI recaps, consecutive interpreter, lots of conversation about third-party agents. So we just talked about Teams being an agentic service, not just for Microsoft first party agents, but bringing third party agents in as well.

Events updates, rooms updates, one point five million active rooms now, and the improvements to voice and face enrollment as well. Teams Phone Agent was definitely the biggest announcement, and this is Microsoft's AI auto attendant or mainline attendant.

This will tie into Copilot Studio, and you'll be able to customize it. And again, there's a great demo video that you can check out in the links. I'll be doing a webinar with some colleagues at Pure IP and also at Microsoft talking about Teams Phone Agent, Copilot call delegation, and Copilot Studio voice agents, so we can help understand what each of them is, how they work, and what the different use cases are.

That's on twenty-third of July On Teams calling and meeting updates, we know that the mainline On Teams calling a meeting, we know that the multi-line... On Teams calling a meetings, we know that multi-line is now generally available. So you can have multiple numbers from around the world on a single account.

Queues app is now generally available on mobile. The recap app is coming, so this is going to be a dedicated app on the left rail of Teams that will have all your meeting recaps, which is really nice because I think sometimes it's hard to discover where those recaps are. So having a dedicated space for that will be really good.

Uh, Facilitator, Ilya announces that

Facilitator, Ilya announced this at Infocomm, and we also had Han Ye on Teams Fireside Chat talking about it. Facilitator in meetings will now be able to reach out to the internet and answer questions if you want it to, and it will even have a voice mode where you can talk with it and it can answer back and generate content.

That's really, really impressive. I've been playing with that

On the admin side, we're getting further controls to manage On the admin side, we're getting further controls to manage transcript access and also the ability to auto block bots. This is really nice. Uh, phase one was the bots going into the lobby, so you can dismiss them, and that's mostly working really well.

On Fireside Chat yesterday, we still had a few sneak through. Uh, the Fireflies one got through, and I think some of the Zoom ones got through, but it did block tens of bots. We always have 1 or 200 people on those sessions, and lots of bots turn up, and that has been a massive help for us. This is a policy to actually not even have them hit the lobby, to just auto block them.

So lots of organizations excited about that. And

And we also know we have some retirements coming through, so Teams Live Events is retiring and Together mode is retiring as well. Just hasn't had the adoption Microsoft need to see for that Together mode.

A key theme for Infocomm was AI in the room, a brain in the room, and Facilitator was really the central-- and Facilitator was the center of that conversation. So this is the idea that you can have ambient AI always in the room. I went through it in my latest newsletter. You can check out the details there.

We also saw IntelliFrame People Labels. So this is the next generation of people labeling using intelligence in the camera, working with Microsoft in the cloud to have floating people labels in the room. Huddly are the first to announce that. I've got one of their cameras on the way to check that out, so look forward to some demos of that soon.

Express Enrollment we've talked about, and the one point five million active Teams Rooms, adding more than a thousand rooms a day at the moment. And also, I don't think it got enough press, but Microsoft are working with AVIXA to do a whole new Teams Rooms training, uh, set of content that will be available on the AVIXA training platform.

So look out for more details on that soon. On the devices side, big announcements are the-- On the Microsoft devices side, the big news is the-- On the Microsoft devices side, the big news is the Android devices are coming into the Pro Management portal. That is starting to roll out now to the earliest customers.

There's a really good Learn page linked here which has details and the MC item.

Um, at Infocomm, we saw At Infocom, we saw Cisco announce they're going to do native Zoom Rooms as well. So as well as popping up Zoom in their Room OS mode, they're going to do native Zoom Rooms, and those are beta at the moment. Crestron have generally made-- Crestron have made their Compute generally available, and Jabra have announced their new service plans and their new portal, and are in test now, coming out early 2027.

Lastly, let's have a quick look at events. We've got plenty happening in July. 21st of July, we have the Teams Devices AMA, and this time At The End AudioCodes are jumping in to give us a briefing on all their Teams related device news. We've got the Microsoft 365 Community Change Roundup as usual. I mentioned on the 23rd of July I have that Teams Phone Agent webinar.

Towards the end of July, we have Copilot Fireside Chat. And don't forget, Microsoft have their partner kickoff on the 22nd of July, so I'll be tuning in and listening to that and giving you all a summary.

Thanks for listening to or watching the update. I hope it's been useful for you. Many thanks to Neat for being an amazing supporter of the community. If you want more details

Be sure to check out the content at Empowering.Cloud, and if you want more details of the events, they're all listed there as well