Microsoft 365 Community Conference Interviews
- AI, People & Data in Contact Center on Teams with Landis - LinkedIn, YouTube
- Shure IntelliMix View and the importance of meeting information in Work IQ - LinkedIn, YouTube
- Logi Rally Board 65 Teams Rooms on Windows, Rally AI Cameras & Logitech Spot - LinkedIn, YouTube
- Voice AI and business productivity with Microsoft Teams with AudioCodes - LinkedIn, YouTube
- Recording, Transcription & real time AI insights in Microsoft Teams with Numonix - LinkedIn, YouTube
- Jabra's New Boomless Headsets & Teams Rooms Express Install - What's Coming May 4th? - LinkedIn, YouTube
- Crestron AI ready Cameras, Audio & Compute for Teams Rooms Explained, Shipping Soon - LinkedIn, YouTube
Microsoft 365 E7 and Agent 365 are now generally available
Microsoft 365 E7 is GA, bundling Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Agent 365 and the Entra Suite into a single top-tier SKU. It lists at $99 per user per month (or $89 for the "without Teams" SKU) and saves around $10 compared to buying the components separately. That's a big price step up from E5.
Agent 365 is the cornerstone — Microsoft's control plane for discovering, governing and securing agents, both agent-to-agent and human-to-agent. The Agent 365 licence is needed by agents' users, not just by the people building them. As Brett unpacked on the podcast, that is the structural decision that makes E7 the package Microsoft wants frontier firms on.
Alongside GA, the Agent Registry is converging into Agent 365. If you have been using the standalone Agent Registry in M365 Admin Center, this is the migration to be aware of. Partners are already plugging in — ServiceNow has extended its AI Control Tower governance to Agent 365 and is making its AI specialists available in the Agent 365 Marketplace as "digital employees", which is the ecosystem signal Microsoft wants to validate the model.
Copilot Cowork — Opus 4.7, mobile, skills, plugins, Agent 365 integration
Cowork has had a meaningful upgrade since the last newsletter. The container-based, cloud-hosted Cowork in M365 (built in partnership with Anthropic) now runs on the latest Claude Opus 4.7 model, has mobile support on iOS and Android, and adds skills and plugins, OneDrive integration for processed files, Agent 365 integration, and searchable task history.
The mobile story is notable. Where Anthropic's Cowork dispatches a task to your physical desktop, M365 Cowork dispatches to containerised compute in the cloud — so the mobile experience is genuinely "fire off a task from your phone and pick up the result later".
Skills support is a big unlock. Markdown-based reusable instructions are spreading fast across the AI ecosystem (Claude Code, OpenAI, now Cowork and SharePoint), and having them in Cowork means teams can encode "how we do this task" once and have it executed reliably by anyone who needs it.
I've been testing Cowork a fair bit. It's impressive but still resource-constrained in the Frontier programme — you can feel it slow down in the afternoons UK time when North America comes online — but if Anthropic models are enabled in your tenant and you are on Frontier, it is well worth putting through its paces.
Custom skills are also now in public preview for SharePoint, letting edit-permission users author markdown-based AI tasks that respect existing SharePoint permissions.
Claude Opus 4.7 is in Copilot, alongside GPT-5.5 Instant
The multi-model story keeps deepening — different models for different surfaces, different jobs, GPT-5.5 Instant is now rolling out in Copilot Studio and Copilot Chat experiences, complementing the GPT-5.5 Thinking and ChatGPT Images 2.0 announcements from the last newsletter.
Opus 4.7 is initially in Cowork and Copilot Studio, and rolling out to Copilot in Excel. Microsoft is clearly leaning on Anthropic models for the more agentic surfaces inside Office.
Worth noting: Anthropic also GA'd its own Claude plugins for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Microsoft is partnering with both Frontier houses and competing with them at the application layer. The competitive pressure is real.
Work IQ API in public preview
Work IQ — Microsoft's semantic layer over the enterprise's email, OneDrive, SharePoint, chats, transcripts and so on — is getting a public preview API and MCP server. Developers can build agents and apps grounded in the M365 work graph without wiring up direct connectors. Users will need a Work IQ licence to query the MCP server, and REST is coming. Microsoft Mechanics has a good walkthrough of how the layer fits together.
Modernised M365 change management — Frontier, Standard, Deferred
The new feature release model will be Frontier / Standard / Deferred audience model, and new MCP endpoints for the roadmap. We have a webinar with the Microsoft 365 Change team coming up to unpack what it means in practice.
Teams moves under Ryan Roslansky — another Microsoft reorg
After Rajesh Jha's retirement, Microsoft has reshuffled, and LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky now leads the new Work Experiences Group, which includes Teams alongside Office, Copilot and Windows. Ilya Bukshteyn remains Corporate VP, Teams Calling, Devices, and Premium Experiences.
Charles Lamanna is also taking on more responsibilities, according to an internal memo seen by The Verge. Lamanna will lead the Copilot, Agents, and Platform (CAP) team inside Microsoft, which includes critical Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 services, BizChat, and more. Jeff Teper will now serve as executive vice president of apps and agents under Lamanna.
Tom Warren has a good breakdown at The Verge. MSFT News Now has additional context on how the AI-first remit reshapes the senior team.
This is a substantial change for the Teams organisation; it will be interesting to see what changes.
Copilot call delegation — voice AI agents answering Teams Phone calls
The first time we have seen voice AI agents inside Teams Phone. Copilot call delegation screens incoming calls, filters spam, asks whether a call is urgent, books a meeting via Microsoft Bookings if it is not, and surfaces context to you when it is.
It's similar to the iPhone-style call screening pattern that's now in Teams Phone, and it is genuinely useful for anyone who gets a lot of inbound calls, especially partial-context ones. Expect more with Voice Agents in Teams soon.
Consecutive interpretation in the Interpreter agent
A nice cultural-fit improvement. The Interpreter agent now supports consecutive interpretation — the speaker finishes, then the interpretation plays — rather than the simultaneous overlay model that already existed. Better for group meetings where two languages are being spoken in two locations, and for cultures where talking over the speaker (even in a different language) is uncomfortable. Up to ten languages supported, in public preview.
Targeted messages for agents on Teams (Preview)
Targeted messages let agents DM individuals inside a channel, group chat or meeting. The right shape for in-flow agent guidance — relevant nudges to the person who needs them, less noise for everyone else. I expect to see a lot more in this area as Microsoft positions Teams as an Agentic engagement platform.
As always, if you have any questions, corrections, thoughts, or feedback, please reply. I read all the replies. I really do want to hear your thoughts.
Thanks
Tom
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