Many thanks to Ribbon, this month's Empowering.Cloud Benefactor.
I'm just back from speaking at their Insights event in Lisbon. For anyone in the US, check out Ribbon INSIGHTS Dallas in November.
Microsoft Teams Monthly Update Video September
Check out my monthly Microsoft Teams update video for September.
All the news you need to know in 12 minutes on LinkedIn or Empowering.Cloud.
You can also catch the audio version on the Teams Insider Podcast.
Heading to UC Expo in London this week? I am hosting some great sessions alongside Microsoft, customers and partners. I hope to see you there.
Unified Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat In Office Apps for Free and Paid Users
I know I usually discuss Teams first, but there is some significant M365 Copilot news that affects Teams as well as the entire M365 suite.
Copilot Chat is being integrated into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote (and Teams, as well, which we'll discuss in a minute) for both free and paid users. MC1096218 - rolling out now into October.
Obviously, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.. Already had an embedded Copilot Experience, here is what is new:
- This will now be a/the single Copilot Chat experience, the same as you get when running Copilot Chat standalone app, now integrated into all the office apps to give a unified chat experience
- For Free/non-M365 Copilot licensed users, Copilot chat in the app will engage with the content open in the app, e.g. the email, the Word doc, the PowerPoint - but is limited to engaging with the single open document.
- M365 Copilot licensed users get the full M365 Copilot experience, being able to reason over the other documents they have access to in their tenant and also includes agents (which are PAYG on Copilot Free).
- Licensed Copilot users will also have in-app access to Researcher and Analyst agents in Copilot.
The Microsoft 365 Copilot licence is now being positioned as "The premium Copilot experience". They also get "priority access" to features like file upload and image generation, along with the latest technology like GPT-5, including faster response times and more consistent availability—even during peak usage periods"
So a win for free users, getting better in-app experience and a step closer to the idea of there being one M365 Copilot experience that can seamlessly reference all your "work data" from any interface.
But Microsoft Teams was completely missing from this announcement?
A week later, we heard that Teams will also get the same Unified Copilot Chat Experience (MC1156360). It looks great, with a single, consistent Copilot experience across Chat, Meetings, and Calls (versus the current, more isolated/separate Copilot experience in each scenario). Again laying the foundation for all your Teams info to be available to Copilot.
The catch, though, is that the Teams Unified Copilot Chat (right sidebar experience) will only be available to M365 Copilot-licensed users.
Copilot Free users will continue to have access to the top-right web-grounded Copilot chat in the Teams app (top left in chat), but they won't have the ability for Copilot in Teams to engage with the current content (chat/meeting/call content).
Also in Copilot news:
Microsoft 365 Copilot App will be Auto-Installed on Devices with Microsoft 365 Apps (MC1152323)
Anthropic models (Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1) will be available in Microsoft 365 Copilot! - Starting with Researcher Agent and Copiot Studio. It's an Admin opt-in (Copilot docs, Copilot Studio docs), and be aware that these models are not running in Azure, which might cause some concerns.
SharePoint Knowledge Agent Preview: AI-powered content optimisation in SharePoint (MC1155312).
Microsoft Teams News
In addition to the announcement of the new Unified Copilot Chat in Teams experience, Microsoft also announced that Facilitator (sometimes called Meeting agent) is now GA with new Task management and document creation (Word or Loop) skills in Public Preview.
Dedicated per-channel Agents also went into preview. This is, as the name sounds, an agent that reasons about just that channel's content. You can ask it questions, but it can also proactively generate weekly Loop Summaries of the Channel content ("Status reporting").
People without a Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription can still see Channel Agent’s responses, generated content, and other people’s interactions with the agent, but to engage with them, you must be licensed.
Check out the Introducing Channel Agent in Teams blog.
An update to Interpreter Agent (GA in July). Licensed users now get 20 hours of interpretation included (increased from 2 hours) per user per month. "Access beyond the hours included is subject to available capacity". This is challenging for organisations with users who want to use it more than this; there is currently no way to purchase additional capacity. I can see scenarios where some users use interpreter heavily, while most users won't have a regular use case for it. The same challenge exists with Researcher and Analyst, which are limited to 25 queries per month.
Cloud IntelliFrame is rolling out to Teams Rooms for Android, beginning mid-October 2025 and is expected to be completed in October (MC1158333).