Tristan Gayford, Microsoft Teams Product Manager at EY, discusses managing Microsoft Teams across one of the world's largest organisations and the challenge of shifting from predictable per-user licensing to consumption-based AI costs.

• Tristan's journey through the unified communications evolution, from Office Communications Server in 2008 through Lync and Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams at enterprise scale

• Running Microsoft Teams across 400,000+ employees in over 100 countries, and how professional services firms navigate data residency and regulatory complexity

• How EY has adopted Microsoft Copilot for meeting recaps, transcription and notes, balancing retained and transient transcription across different regulatory environments

• The fundamental shift from fixed per-user-per-month licensing to consumption-based AI billing, and why IT funding models need to evolve

• Why AI consumption costs should be owned by the business rather than IT, treating AI as an employee whose output must be justified up the management chain

• The challenge of model selection and cost transparency when business users lack guidance on which AI model to choose and cannot predict costs before running a prompt

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

Pratik Chanda, WW Partner Sales Lead - Devices, GCPS GTM at Cisco, discusses Cisco's record-breaking growth in the devices market and why the company is uniquely positioned for Microsoft Teams Rooms deployments.

• Cisco's journey to becoming one of the fastest-growing Microsoft Teams Rooms OEMs, crossing almost a billion dollars in devices revenue

• What sets Cisco apart: the intelligent workplace experience, combining AV, networking, security and AI observability across the entire stack

• The management story: ProPortal, Control Hub (soon to be Cloud Control) and dual registration for a single pane of glass across all endpoints

• Cisco's open platform philosophy: native support for Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google, and the rebrand from Webex Devices to Cisco Devices

• How customers and partners can get started with Cisco for Microsoft Teams Rooms

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

Chandra Chivukula, Vice President of Engineering at Microsoft Teams, discusses the evolution of Microsoft Teams into a platform for human and agentic interaction.

• Microsoft Teams is being positioned as a secure, compliant enterprise surface for AI agents, bringing agentic infrastructure within the Microsoft 365 compliance boundary

• Microsoft Scout demonstrates the power of enterprise-safe AI, running within the corporate boundary with full access to organisational data for real productive workflows

• Facilitator, the meetings agent, is already delivering real value by automating meeting follow-ups and enabling voice-driven task creation in real time

• Channel agent brings durable, searchable AI-ready knowledge to Microsoft Teams channels, offering better discoverability and long-term institutional memory than group chats

• Copilot in chat enables multiplayer AI collaboration, acting as a virtual coworker within existing group conversations

• Engineering teams at Microsoft are seeing significant productivity gains through coding harnesses built on Copilot CLI, with access to multiple AI models for cross-verification

• Catch Up on mobile provides a card-based, one-handed way to triage important messages, pulling users back into channels with AI-curated relevance

• Structuring work in channels rather than group chats builds an accruing knowledge base that AI agents can reason over, benefiting the entire organisation

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

Victor Guzman, Senior Technical Program Manager at Microsoft, and Siunie Sutjahjo, Principal Product Manager, Microsoft Teams Meeting, walk through the exact quality review process from Microsoft's Get to Green programme, giving every Microsoft Teams admin the tools to diagnose and resolve call quality issues.

• Victor shares the seven-step quality and reliability checklist that resolved 99% of escalated customer issues

• A full walkthrough of the CQD QER 5.3 templates, covering usage summaries, media health dashboards, transport reports and VPN analysis

• How to identify whether issues stem from proxy configurations, VPN tunnelling, DNS resolution or network congestion

• Using weekly metrics and drill-down reports to pinpoint problems by country, subnet, hour and individual meeting

• The per-user search experience for troubleshooting specific complaints and meeting IDs

• How to present CQD data to network and security teams to drive action

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

Gidi Adlersberg, Voca CIC Business Line Manager at AudioCodes, discusses the new Microsoft Teams Voice Agent Certification Program, with AudioCodes being the first vendor to achieve certification.

• How the certification builds on Microsoft's Unify integration model, using the same Azure technology stack as the Microsoft Teams Contact Centre certification

• The difference between Microsoft's native Teams Phone Agent and the extended, fully managed AI receptionist service from AudioCodes

• Real-world use cases including caller authentication, knowledge base-driven troubleshooting, and sentiment-aware bot responses

• Why proper bot-to-human escalation is critical and how context is preserved when transferring to a live Microsoft Teams user

• AudioCodes' predictable, capped commercial model with no token-based charges

• Implementation as a fully managed service, from proof of concept through to production

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

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

Upcoming Events

Events are back after the August pause:

• Teams Fireside Chat — Kim Matlock, Principal Lead Program Manager, Teams Rooms, with Matt Slomka · 10 September — going deep on Rooms, Android and the Pro Management Portal; bring your questions
• How a Global Legal IT Team Turned Message Center Chaos into Governance · 16 September
• Microsoft Teams Devices Ask Me Anything · 22 September
• M365 Change Community Round Up · 29 September
• Microsoft Teams Contact Center Face-Off: 5 Solutions, 5 Demos, 50 Minutes Live · 15 October — five certified vendors in one live session, each walking through their solution and what makes it different. Come and ask questions.

Many thanks again to Ribbon, this month's benefactor. Hope this update has been useful

Chris Bailey, Lead Infrastructure Engineer (Voice and Contact Centre) at Maersk, discusses the practical realities of deploying voice AI across a global enterprise, from early proof of concepts to live production in 50 countries.

• Why the business drove Voice AI adoption, approaching IT rather than the other way around

• Inbound vs outbound use cases and why outbound finance collections proved the bigger success

• Vendor selection beyond the incumbent: balancing AI voice quality and telephony integration

• The integration challenge with PSTN transfers, SIP trunking, and API media streaming as the gold standard

• Hidden costs including PSTN, resourcing effort, and the ongoing refinement voice AI demands

• The "new hire" analogy for onboarding and monitoring your AI agent

• Who should own voice AI in your organisation and bridging the skills gap between telephony and prompt engineering

• Why business collaboration and clear ownership of responsibilities matter from day one

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

Mahendra Sekaran, Corporate Vice President for Product Management and Data Science at Microsoft, discusses the rapid pace of AI transformation and its impact on the communications and collaboration space.

• Azure continues its strong growth at 43%, fuelled by accelerating AI adoption and cloud investment, with remaining performance obligations reaching $678 billion.

• Microsoft's product teams are using AI agents to compress planning cycles from six to eight weeks down to days, with approximately 80% accuracy on cost estimates.

• Full agentic loops are being built across Microsoft's code bases, transforming the software development lifecycle and accelerating iteration velocity.

• Work IQ provides the platform layer that makes enterprise knowledge, including documents, emails, chats, meetings, and transcripts, accessible to Copilot and agents, whilst maintaining data governance and compliance.

• Microsoft's multi-model approach gives customers choice across OpenAI, Anthropic, and in-house models, optimising for cost, performance, and flexibility.

• Microsoft Teams Phone Agent is in Frontier Public Preview, enabling voice AI agents to front customer interactions with an expected 70-80% call deflection rate.

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