AI in Teams Devices: What’s New and What’s Next? Irena Andonova, Head of Product for Teams Devices

Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners and UC/AV teams running Teams Rooms and Teams Phone estates — particularly those managing hundreds or thousands of rooms with small operations teams, or building the business case for return-to-office meeting space investment.

Guest: Irena Andonova — Head of Product for Teams Devices, Microsoft

Irena Andonova leads product for Microsoft Teams Devices — Rooms, Panels and Phones — and was the first PM on the original Skype Room System v2 (code-named Project Rigel) back in 2016. She sets out where AI is landing across in-room experiences, Teams Phone and the Pro Management Portal, plus the push to bring Windows and Android devices under one management model.

Key insights

• Teams Rooms passed the one million device mark earlier this year, with several million more devices across the other Teams Devices categories — the scale argument behind the investment in management at scale.
• Speaker attribution in rooms is now rolled out on both Teams Rooms on Windows and Teams Rooms on Android, so in-room participants are correctly named in transcripts and summaries rather than appearing as the room.
• Attribution depends on users enrolling a voice profile from the Teams client — the same enrolment also powers voice isolation (suppressing barking dogs, lawnmowers), giving admins a double benefit to drive adoption.
• Andonova is candid that speaker attribution still has limitations, particularly for larger meetings and more complex calendar invites — 'building the plane and flying it at the same time' — so expect incremental improvement rather than a finished feature.
• Rooms can now contribute to note-taking and summarisation for entirely in-person conversations with no scheduled Teams meeting — two people walking into a room and talking can still get a summary.
• Teams Phones already offer call summarisation in market, the first shipped AI capability in the phone category.
• The Pro Management Portal was designed from the outset as an AI platform doing 24/7 monitoring: alert, recommend an action, then act. The stated goal is self-remediation of as close to 100% of tier-one incidents as possible, barring physical faults — moving beyond admins clicking 'reboot' on a recommendation.
• Shared-space usage insights are rolling out in the Pro Management Portal at a facilities-planning level — e.g. rooms on the third floor busy only Tuesdays and Thursdays, first floor hitting capacity — to inform floor plans and room layouts for return-to-office planning.
• Cross-platform parity is a major investment area: Autopilot-style zero-touch deployment is being explored for Android to match Windows, Android panels and rooms are already surfacing health signals in the Pro portal, and MDEP (Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform) is a key delivery focus.

Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.

Listen: Apple Podcasts · Spotify · Other platforms