Many thanks to Landis, this month's community Benefactor. Their Contact Center now supports WhatsApp, SMS, and RCS alongside web chat. All channels run through queues in the same way as voice. Find out more here.
Microsoft 365 and AI Workplace Update Video
You can check out my January update video briefing to get all the news in under 15 minutes on YouTube, LinkedIn and on the podcast.
Thanks
Happy New Year, I hope you had a good holiday break.
Before I jump into the news, I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone in the community for all the support last year. We had so many excellent experts sharing on podcasts, briefings, and events, and I really appreciate it.
We hit record numbers for the site, podcast and videos in 2025, and regularly have over 200 people attend events such as the Teams Fireside Chat. This newsletter is at 10,673 people, and I just crossed 42,000 on LinkedIn. I don't like throwing numbers around much, but it's nice to know people are finding value.
Thanks to the Empowering.Cloud Benefactors, Patrons, and Supporters — none of this would be possible without them.
I/we hope and plan to deliver more value to the community this year. As always, if you have ideas for briefings or events or want to share your expertise or experience, particularly end customer stories and experiences, do let me know.
Microsoft 365 AI Workplace - 2026 Focus Areas
As it's January, I thought we'd start with a view of what's coming this year.
For Microsoft, AI and Microsoft 365 Copilot remain a major focus (surprise!). I'm excited for Work IQ. This is how Microsoft will differentiate M365 Copilot: by leveraging the context of your work data. It'll be interesting to see how the different product teams feed into that Work IQ layer.
We're finally getting "agents" in the Office apps, and in this context, agents mean they can interact with the open document. So Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. This is really what you want from Copilot or AI in the Office apps. These are due in February.
Copilot Chat (free) continues to receive a wealth of new features and added value. This includes Office Agent modes, and in Outlook, you will be able to review your entire inbox and calendar.
Agent building and adoption will be a theme for this year, with M365 Copilot Agent Builder and full Copilot Studio. Microsoft is keen to land agents, but I still think many business users are only just getting to grips with Chat.
On the Microsoft Teams front for 2026, we're just getting the new unified Copilot Chat experience, engaging all your Teams data. We have the @Copilot scenario, where you can bring Copilot directly into a Teams conversation. I have found that particularly useful in our internal conversations.
Channel agents are also interesting. They're getting MCP connectivity to other line of business apps, and they'll get access to the SharePoint data of that channel. I would still like to see a team-level agent that reasons over all channels and files within a team.
Facilitator is a central agent scenario for Teams - the idea of having an agent in your meetings proactively creating meeting notes, putting actions into Planner, drafting documents, etc.
In the meeting room, on the Teams Rooms front, we have the ongoing MDEP story, and I think it'll be a big year for multi-camera. Looking forward to ISE for some news.
On Teams Phone, I'm excited about AI voice agents, and on the contact centre side, the Queues app, ecosystem solutions, Unify, and Dynamics 365 Contact Centre.
There are also significant changes coming to Planner this year, and SharePoint continues to evolve its AI/agentic story.
M365 Copilot News - Image and Video Generation
OpenAI's GPT-Image-1.5 model is now rolling out to Copilot (MC1200577). GPT-Image-1.5 was OpenAI's response to Google's well-regarded Nano Banana models, and it seems many people are saying this is now on par with that model.
Also, video overviews from Copilot notebooks. This is the idea that a notebook can be generated into a video summary. The frontier preview started mid-November 2025 and will be completed by late February (MC1208690). I'm interested to see how this works.
26 Million Teams Phone Users
Even though it was relatively quiet in December, we did get some big news. There are now 26 million Teams Phone users. That's a big jump in Teams Phone since the last public number, around 30% growth over the last two years.
We know there are still many licensed seats available. Organisations with E5 will already have the Teams Phone license, and, of course, there are around 440 million M365 users, so there's still significant white space.
New Teams Features
Copilot Chat in Calls app post-meeting experience is now GA. Custom AI summary templates in Meeting Recap (MC1189004) will let you create and reuse templates across meetings - speaker summary and executive summary templates are default templates. Teams Admin Centre is getting a Frontline hub to consolidate all frontline-related features in one place.
Teams messaging safety features are being enabled by default for all users (MC1200576): weaponizable file protection, malicious URL warnings, and user reporting. If you've already customised your settings, they remain unchanged. To opt out of new defaults, adjust settings before January 12, 2026, but I can't see any reason to, and it's great to see more security by default.
Simplified external collaboration controls (MC1183006) are rolling out to Teams Admin Center mid-February with three modes: Open (full federation and B2B), Controlled (current enterprise defaults, no shared channels), and Custom (granular control). Check out Tony Redmond's blog for details.
Admins can now block users in Defender portal (MC1200058) rather than in Teams Admin Center.
Teams Chat with Anyone (MC1182004) will be enabled by default but currently only available to business SKUs in preview. It's governed by your existing Entra B2B and Teams guest policies. Microsoft has clarified this message three times already and is evidently more carefully testing the waters.
Native Slack to Teams migration tool (MC1213779) is now in preview - ZIP export from Slack, upload to blob storage, map channels and users via PowerShell. GA later this month.
Teams Rooms and Devices
Not too much news on devices pre-ISE. Barco have certifed their ClickShare Core, Pro, and accessories. Those are the first MDEP devices from Barco. Exciting to see those.
We also saw some new devices certified by Yealink: the MVC S90, S50, and S40. All of these are Microsoft Teams Rooms running on Windows, and the S90 has two physical cameras.
Microsoft Teams Native Bluetooth Headsets support just took a step forward. Beyond Intel® Core 12th Gen+/Intel Core Ultra CPUs, all Windows 11 compatible AMD and Qualcomm CPUs are now also supported.