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

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