Copilot Cowork GA (consumption-only), Teams Phone Agent AI mainline — Full InfoComm Keynote
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A big two weeks, and most of it landed at InfoComm. Ilya Bukshteyn’s InfoComm keynote (speed edit video here) introduced Teams Phone Agent, agents that hand off to other agents, turn-taking interpretation, and Facilitator stepping out of the meeting and into every Teams Room. Also, Copilot Cowork went generally available worldwide — and switched to consumption-only billing, which will be a big conversation for enterprises. Copilot Cowork is GA — and it’s consumption-onlyCopilot Cowork reached general availability worldwide on 16 June. The headline isn’t the GA date, though — it’s the commercial model. Cowork still requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot seat per user, but the work Cowork actually does is now billed per use in Copilot Credits. Pay-as-you-go is priced at $0.01 per credit, and each task’s cost is calculated based on four inputs: the model used, context retrieval, tool calls, and runtime. If you want a discount, there’s an option to commit to a usage volume up front. MC1393471. There’s a grace period worth knowing about: tenants that had at least one Frontier user (30 March–16 June) running Cowork won’t be billed for that usage until 1 July. On models, Cowork runs on Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6 at GA, with GPT-5.5 available in Frontier and a “Cowork 1” model coming (Possibly based on the MAI models?). GPT-5.5 in Cowork respects EU Data Boundary commitments, expanding the number of people who could now enable Cowork who previously were not going to enable Anthropic models. This is the same shift as the Work IQ APIs moving to consumption, as mentioned in the last newsletter. It’s worth modelling the likely credit burn for heavier users before rolling it out, and Microsoft has shipped end-user credit tracking so people can see what they’re spending. I don't know many organisations that can move this quickly to enable consumption billing for an unknown cost. For those coming to Commsverse next week, I'll be talking about this in my enterprise panel and session. Hope to see some of you there. Say hi if you see me. Planner Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot — now GAThe Planner Agent is now generally available, bringing chat-based, Copilot-style task management directly into Planner. Microsoft has a companion how-to on managing tasks through the agent. We talked about this on a recent podcast with Howard Crow, Director of Product at Microsoft. Microsoft Teams and the AI-Powered WorkplaceAlmost all of the Teams news came from Ilya Bukshteyn’s InfoComm 2026 keynote — the full video is here (a 27-minute speed edit), and it’s worth the time. Teams Phone Agent — AI for the main lineThis is the big one: Teams Phone Agent, now in Frontier Preview — think of it as an AI-powered auto-attendant for any main line: a department, a branch, or the whole company. You train it on your own information by feeding it an FAQ document; there’s no IVR scripting. (In the keynote at 5:22; standalone demo video). It can also direct people to other agents. Copilot Studio voice agents now integrate with Teams Phone, so the Phone Agent can hand off to a purpose-built agent with no custom code. The keynote Contoso Health demo made the point well: the caller authenticated once, booked an appointment with the main agent, and was then handed to a separate billing agent — built in Copilot Studio and wired to a payment system — who processed an outstanding balance without ever repeating themselves or re-authenticating. Expect public preview in July and GA around October. Partners are already building on it: AudioCodes demonstrated an extension of the Teams Phone Agent, showing how its voice agents plug into the new capability. No details on commercials yet, but based on the Graph API and Cowork, I'd expect consumption billing. Copilot Call Delegation — a personal call screenerAlongside the mainline agent, Copilot Call Delegation was shown live on stage — screens your calls, takes information, and books meetings via Bookings while leaving you in control. It’s running in Frontier today, starting with telephony and extending to LinkedIn and other message channels over time. (In the keynote at 3:55). Interpreter gets a consecutive (turn-taking) modeTeams Interpreter shipped about a year ago in simultaneous mode — the interpreter talks over you, broadcast-style. The feedback was that meetings feel more natural when you take turns, the way a human interpreter in the room would. So Microsoft has added consecutive interpretation in public preview: you speak, then the interpreter speaks. The French-language demo on stage was convincing, and Ilya teased Interpreter coming to Teams events (In the keynote at 13:40). MC1395010 brings a set of enhancements to the existing simultaneous mode — distinct speaker voices for better differentiation, fewer visual distractions for non-interpreter users, an audio cue on activation, and a new PowerShell admin control to disable voice simulation for policy or compliance reasons. Third-party agents in Teams via the new SDKWith the new Teams SDK, anyone can build an agent that’s invoked as simply as an @mention in a channel. The demo had a Linear agent create an issue and assign it to GitHub Copilot — a third-party agent handing work to a first-party one — with status flowing back into the same thread as the pull request was raised. A small example of a big idea: the channel becomes the place where your agents and your people coordinate. (In the keynote at 15:28). Also announced in the keynoteA few more things Ilya covered:
Workplace check-in via Wi-Fi for Places and TeamsA quieter but practical one: workplace presence now updates automatically via Wi-Fi check-in, keeping people’s in-office location current across Microsoft Places and Teams so in-person days are easier to coordinate without anyone manually setting a status. Teams Rooms and DevicesAmbient AI: Facilitator moves into Teams RoomsThe part of the keynote I found most interesting. Facilitator — until now a meeting agent — is gaining agent skills for Teams Rooms in public preview, using the room’s own cameras and sensors. Ilya's framing was “eyes, ears and a brain” in every space, and the examples were refreshingly concrete. Ten people walk into a six-chair room, and Facilitator proactively offers, by voice, to find a bigger available room. It can warn you when a room is messy — chairs missing, a chair blocking the camera, lunch left behind — and offer to rebook, even on your personal device, before you arrive. You can say “Facilitator, take notes” without QR code scanning, then share those notes by adding someone to the roster (public preview next month). It can answer “how do I join a Zoom or Webex meeting from this room?” and walk you through casting step by step. And it’ll handle general-knowledge questions — the on-stage one was “if I leave now, how long to SeaTac airport?” (In the keynote at 22:20.) Microsoft is shipping express voice enrolment: instead of reading sentences aloud, a user opts in, and Teams generates their digital signature from a meeting recording. No raw audio is stored — it’s a signature that meets your retention policies. Face enrolment will follow, using as few as a single frame. MC1197146. IntelliFrame people labels are new in public preview: hover over a participant to see their name, then click to open their full people card. The Huddly C1 will be one of the first cameras to support this via a new AI data channel. 1.5 million active Teams Rooms, and a new AVIXA training partnershipIlya reported that there are now over 1.5 million active Teams Rooms — growing by more than a thousand systems per workday. To support that growth, Microsoft announced a long-term training partnership with AVIXA: its learning and certification will be available on AVIXA’s global learning platform. This will be open to end users and partners. I hear Jabra are also doing content for it for their systems. Teams Devices Partner News
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 New on Empowering.Cloud
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