Emily Kirby George, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Teams Engineering, discusses the latest developments and future direction for Microsoft Teams Phone.

• Multi-line calling: a multi-year effort now shipped, allowing multiple phone numbers on a single account across geographies

• Consult and merge in meetings: dial out to an external party, navigate an IVR, and merge them back into the call - a big win for financial services and similar industries

• Call transfer improvements: presence visibility for transfer destinations, blind handoff, and streamlined control bar buttons for faster workflows

• Teams Phone Agent: an intelligent AI frontline to answer and route customer calls for your organisation

• Intelligent call delegation: a personal AI delegate that screens calls, communicates on your behalf, and helps you stay focused

• Automatic recording for call queues: now on the public roadmap, decoupling recordings from individual agents and centralising them in SharePoint

• Making Copilot intelligence seamless: efforts to simplify turning on transcription, recaps, and other AI features in everyday phone workflows

• Teams Phone Community: a quarterly initiative from the Microsoft calling team — join to connect with product managers and shape future topics

Thanks to AudioCodes, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support of Empowering.Cloud.

Javed Khan, CEO at Neat, discusses his return to the industry and his vision for simple, open, intelligent collaboration experiences.

• How advances in edge computing and smaller AI models are enabling a new wave of innovation in conference room experiences

• The benefits of running AI locally on devices, including reduced latency, enhanced privacy, and real-time transcription and translation

• Neat's vision for simplifying room setup and device management through Neat Pulse and their new MCP server integration

• Supporting multiple platforms as the "Switzerland" of the devices industry, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google

• The partnership with Microsoft on MDEP and what it means for manageability, security, and standardisation across devices

Thanks to Neat, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support of Empowering.Cloud

MVP Tom Arbuthnot shares all the latest Microsoft Teams and Copilot news and announcements in less than 15 minutes for August 2026

Link to the deck: Microsoft 365 Enterprise Update - August 2026.pptx

Fresh on Empowering.Cloud

AudioCodes: Multi-Camera Teams Rooms on Android - with Alex Tan

Teams Insider Podcast

Microsoft Places Updates Explained - with Martin Boam, Microsoft. Desk booking, room booking and where AI fits.

Dynamics 365 Contact Center Explained - with Alpana Bajaj, Product Lead, Microsoft. A great walk through where D365 Contact Center sits.

Why Microsoft Is Quietly Winning with Enterprise AI - with Rishi Kumar, Logitech. A really interesting take on Microsoft's enterprise AI position.

Thanks to Landis for their support of Empowering.Cloud

Graham Hosking, Senior AI Solutions Engineer at Microsoft, breaks down Agent 365, Microsoft's approach to observing, governing, and securing AI agents across multi-platform environments.

• How Agent 365 builds on existing Entra, Defender, and Purview capabilities to provide full visibility over AI agents

• Live demo of a fully autonomous LangChain agent automatically flagged for risky behaviour by Defender

• How third-party agents from Amazon, Google, Databricks, and Salesforce can be brought into a central registry

• The Agent 365 SDK and how partners like Adobe, Atlassian, and Lovable are already baking in observability

• Shadow IT monitoring for local AI agents via Defender for Endpoint

• MCP tools and plugin management for controlling end-user access

• Licensing breakdown: end-user based, one seat lights everything up, and the E5 to E7 step-up path

• Bonus demo of Morgan, a fully autonomous digital CFO with voice and avatar interaction built on LangChain

Thanks to Crestron, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support of Empowering.Cloud

Martin Boam, Architect - Centre of Excellence at Microsoft, walks through Microsoft Places, the AI-powered workplace solution for coordinating hybrid work, booking rooms and desks, and optimising space management.

• The licensing shake-up: key Places user features now included in Microsoft Teams Enterprise licences from April 2025, plus a new Shared Spaces licence for desk and room booking at four desks per licence

• Room reservations with Places Finder and Places Explorer, featuring enriched search with room images, occupancy details, and Microsoft Teams Rooms device information

• Desk booking with map-based reservation, multi-day booking, desk pools, finding desks near colleagues, and ad hoc check-in via USB-C peripherals

• Automatic work location updates using corporate Wi-Fi, now generally available with admin and user opt-in

• Microsoft 365 Copilot integration for natural language scheduling, room finding, and conflict rescheduling via Work IQ

• The new Places admin portal replacing PowerShell for managing buildings, floors, desks, auto-release policies, and space analytics

• Upcoming investments including deeper Copilot alignment, enhanced location intelligence, and expanded extensibility

Thanks to AudioCodes, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support of Empowering.Cloud

Alpana Bajaj, Partner Group Product Manager at Microsoft, discusses how Microsoft is reimagining the contact centre with AI-first design and agentic capabilities.

• How Dynamics 365 Contact Center evolved from Omnichannel to a standalone, CRM-agnostic platform born in the AI era

• The five out-of-the-box AI agents: Customer Assist, Quality Assurance, Case Management, Knowledge Management, and ServiceOps

• Real-world customer stories, including double-digit improvements in call deflection, wrap-up time, and CSAT scores

• How Microsoft uses its own contact centre as a testing ground, serving over a billion customers across 40+ languages

• Licensing simplified: per-seat for human agents, consumption-based Copilot Studio credits for AI capabilities

• A practical ROI framework covering customer experience, operational efficiency, and revenue generation

Link to the deck: Agentify Your Contact Center Alpana Bajaj

Link to the Commonwealth Bank case study

Thanks to Ribbon, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support of Empowering.Cloud

Rishi Kumar, Director of Alliances and Go-to-Market at Logitech, discusses how Microsoft is positioning itself as the enterprise AI leader, the growing role of edge computing in meeting rooms, and what it all means for IT professionals.

• Why Microsoft's enterprise-first AI approach with Work IQ and trusted data boundaries is resonating with IT teams

• How meeting recaps have become the top AI use case, including new video and custom recap features

• Microsoft's multi-model strategy and the new E7 Frontier suite for enterprise AI deployment

• Logitech's work on AI at the edge, from beamforming microphones to the Logitech Spot sensor for room intelligence

• The evolving role of the meeting room, including facilitator room skills and camera-based room management

Thanks to Logitech, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support of Empowering.Cloud.

Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder at The Collab Collective, discusses his revised five-year video conferencing device market forecast and why he has taken his compound annual growth rate prediction down from roughly 6% to just under 3%.

• The "triple replacement wave": Windows 10 to 11, Android 10 to 12, and ageing BYOD devices are driving room refresh priorities across enterprises

• Budget compression: rising DRAM costs are pushing device prices up, meaning IT teams can refresh fewer rooms with the same budget (for example, 85 rooms instead of 100)

• How the Mythos AI model creates an unexpected new variable. Cisco reviewed over a billion lines of code, and upcoming network infrastructure refreshes could pull budget away from collaboration devices

• Regional outlook: North America stays competitive, EMEA remains strong, and Asia Pacific (including India) emerges as a key growth opportunity

• AI in the room: the "brain in the room" concept is driving excitement, but feature velocity continues to outpace adoption

• OEM competition: with more vendors entering a slower-growing market, management platforms and support models are becoming key differentiators

Thanks to Nuwave, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support of Empowering.Cloud