Microsoft 365 AI Workplace Update – July 2026

Full PowerPoint here

Thanks to This Month's Sponsor — Neat

Huge thanks to this month's benefactor, Neat, for all their support to the community.

Neat have recently announced a couple of big things:

• Neat Pulse MCP Server — manage devices, rooms and sensor data in plain language (beta). Lots of people have been talking about MCP and API connectivity to OEM tooling, and Neat are first out of the gate with it. I expect more to follow. Also check out Graham's video on the Neat MCP server.
• Neat Intelligent Framing — the camera follows the conversation in bigger rooms (beta, H2 2026).

Fresh on Empowering.Cloud

• Copilot Cowork Explained by Microsoft Experts — a great session with Alev and Femke, full of demos, use cases, pricing and best practice.
• Barco ClickShare Hub — wireless BYOD for Microsoft Teams Rooms — an overview of Barco and their capabilities in Microsoft Teams Rooms.

On the Teams Insider Podcast

All episodes are on the Teams Insider podcast.

• Copilot Cowork vs. Scout — with Alev Tamer & Chris Wheeler. Really interesting to see where Cowork fits and where Scout fits in the new autopilot story. Listen · YouTube
• How Microsoft, Zoom & Cisco Are Approaching AI Differently — with Kevin Kieller. Always a great conversation with Kevin. Listen · YouTube
• Teams Phone & Recording: API Integrations — with Ben Richardson & Andy Whiteside. A great look at how they're doing Teams recording and integrating into the Numonix API for some clever line-of-business work — all built in-house. Listen · YouTube
• Microsoft Scout Explained — with Michel Bouman (Microsoft). Michel has been using Scout internally at Microsoft for a while and takes us through how he's using it with his team. Listen · YouTube

Commsverse 2026 Recap 🙏

Another really great Commsverse this year — a proper UK heatwave, but still a well-attended event with great sessions and sponsors. Sadly, we found out this is going to be the last Commsverse. Mark, Randy, Martin and the team are stepping back, which will leave a big gap in the community events calendar. Massive thanks to Mark and the team for the enormous impact they've had on the community over the last seven years, and for all the opportunities to speak and be involved.

We ran a great customer roundtable there (we'll be doing another one at UCExpo — a private, end-users-only session), plus a session with enterprises on their Copilot adoption, which landed just as the Cowork consumption pricing was announced.

10 vendor interviews are on the Empowering.Cloud channel and LinkedIn — full playlist here.

Microsoft Resets for the 2027 Fiscal Year

The AI-First Reorg

We heard mostly in May that there have been various reorgs across Microsoft, all focused on driving AI and Copilot. Some of the headlines:

On the Teams side, Lan Ye is President of the Teamwork Experience Group (Teams, Engage, Planner), and Ilya is CVP of Teams Calling, Meetings & Devices, reporting into Lan Ye.

Microsoft Frontier Company

Microsoft has established the new Microsoft Frontier company:

• A new $2.5B company with ~6,000 embedded engineers. (TechCrunch)
• These are forward-deployed AI engineers placed inside customers to help them change and adopt AI processes — part engineer, part SE, part change-maker.
• Led by Rodrigo Kede Lima, working alongside Accenture & KPMG.

It's becoming clear that getting enterprises to adopt new tooling and new ways of working needs that consultative engineering approach. Interesting that Microsoft has set up its own company rather than relying purely on partners — though, as we've seen for years with MCS and its successors, partners will likely be subbed into some of these roles too.

M365 Price Rises — Live July 1

The new M365 price rises are live, ranging from +5% (E5) up to +43% (Frontline). Baseline Copilot Chat is now included in most base tiers, and standalone Copilot for business moves from $18 → $21. Microsoft has also confirmed annual local-currency pricing changes from January each year. (Microsoft price-list update)

Business

• Business Basic: $6 → $7 (+16%)
• Business Standard: $12.50 → $14 (+12%)
• Business Premium: $22 (no change)

Frontline

• F1: $2.25 → $3 (+33%)
• F3: $8 → $10 (+25%)

Enterprise

• Office 365 E3: $23 → $26 (+13%)
• Office 365 E5: $38 → $41 (+8%)
• Microsoft 365 E3: $36 → $39 (+8%)
• Microsoft 365 E5: $57 → $60 (+5%)
• Office 365 E1: $10 (no change)

Copilot "Super App" — August

• Merges Chat · Cowork · GitHub Copilot · new AutoPilots. (TechTimes)
• Personal ↔ enterprise toggle.
• Podcasts & Labs cut — features must "earn the right to exist."

We fully expect OpenAI to merge Codex and ChatGPT into a single experience, and Anthropic has done this with Claude Code, Cowork and Claude Chat. Microsoft wants to bring coding and building through to a single surface too — so expect more Copilot UI changes in August.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Updates

Cowork GA — Understand the Cost

Cowork is now generally available, and we better understand the cost model. It is consumption-only — $0.01 per Copilot Credit. (MC1393471)

• Still needs a Microsoft 365 Copilot seat.
• Priced on model · context · tool calls · runtime.
• End-user credit tracking now included.

Microsoft's example use cases run anywhere from ~$1 to $3 to $7+, and heavier tasks can get into the tens and hundreds fast — particularly with Opus (and when Fable and GPT-5.6 arrive).

Generally the OpenAI models have been more token-efficient than the Anthropic ones. This is a new world for AI in the enterprise: we'll have to think about how much budget to give people for Cowork, and what a good vs. bad spend looks like. (For context: I once pushed a single query to $230 — a 24-hour running task that spun up 72 sub-agents to research every relevant company in my email history. Extremely expensive, but arguably work a person couldn't practically do at all.)

Cowork — Admin & Models

• Admin action: you must enable usage billing or users can't use Cowork. (MC1393471)
• New Cost Management Dashboard — spend policies, budgets, alerts.
• Runs on Opus 4.8 / Sonnet 4.6 · GPT-5.5 in Frontier (EU data boundary) — so if you're not ready for the Anthropic models yet, you can use GPT-5.5.
• Reporting moves off the Viva Insights Agent Dashboard. (MC1413306)

Copilot — New Models & Experiences

• Claude Sonnet 5 now selectable. (Microsoft blog)
• Work IQ now reasons over Power BI reports & semantic models.
• Vision — show your screen or phone camera and ask by voice (MC1325421 · Roadmap 561037).
• Copilot Notebooks rolling out to Copilot Chat.
• Fable back in Claude — we'll see if/when it returns to Copilot and Foundry.
• GPT-5.6 on hold pending US government review — expected any day, and likely to reach Microsoft quickly.
• Bloomberg reports Microsoft is using more of its own MAI models in M365 Copilot scenarios — more efficient on non-consumption workloads, and adding model resilience alongside Anthropic and OpenAI. It's also why "Auto" is the default in so many Copilot scenarios — it lets Microsoft swap models as it pleases. Microsoft has also said it will use its native transcription model in Teams, and that its image model is competitive with Nano Banana 2.

Copilot — Agents & Governance

• Planner Agent GA + custom templates + custom fields on the roadmap. Lots of work going into Planner right now — custom fields, better API coverage, MCP, and a more established platform for humans and agents to work together. (MC1413299 · Roadmap 566867)
• Sales Agent GA + Sales in Copilot multi-channel (web/voice/SMS/email) — part of your M365 Copilot license. (MC1412480)
• Service Agent launches — part of the Dynamics 365 Contact Center ecosystem. (Microsoft blog · 30 Jun)
• AI content watermarking — org policy for AI audio/video, aligned with EU rules on being clear when AI is used. (MC1221451 · Docs)

Claude Tag — Anthropic in Your Chat

• @mention Claude in workplace chat, with persistent "multiplayer context." (Anthropic)
• Runs on Opus 4.8 · writes 65% of Anthropic's own code. (TechCrunch)
• Launched Slack-first (23 June).
• Teams: a native version is rumoured. (Winbuzzer)

This is similar to @mentioning Copilot in Teams chats and channels, and it'll pile more pressure on Microsoft. Teams is an awesome surface, and I fully expect it to get more agentic — especially as autopilots and Scouts potentially gain their own Entra identities, letting us bring agents into meetings, chats and channels as first-party users.

Microsoft Teams Updates

InfoComm News

Lots of good announcements out of InfoComm. Definitely check out the Ilya keynote — I did a speed edit here for a fast run through all the big news.

• Work IQ — AI grounded in your org's data.
• Teams Phone — multi-line, mobile Queues, call screening.
• Teams Phone Agent — AI auto attendant + Copilot Studio.
• Meetings — new controls, bot detection, voice tethering.
• AI Recaps — exec, newscast & podcast styles.
• Consecutive Interpreter — turn-taking AI translation.
• Third-party agents — @mention workflows via a new SDK.
• Teams Events — one app, up to 100k attendees.
• Teams Rooms — 1.5M+ active, new OEM devices.
• Voice & face enrollment — express, IntelliFrame labels.
• Facilitator Agent — Rooms alerts, notes, Zoom/Webex join.

Teams Phone Agent

The biggest announcement — Microsoft's AI auto-attendant / mainline attendant.

• AI auto-attendant for your main lines.
• Trained by uploading FAQ docs — no IVR scripting.
• Agent-to-agent handoff (Contoso Health demo).
• Frontier Preview · plus Copilot Call Delegation.
• Demo video

I'll be running a webinar on 23 July with colleagues at Pure IP and Microsoft, decoding Teams Phone Agent, Copilot Call Delegation and Copilot Studio voice agents — what each is, how they work, and where each fits.

Teams — Calling & Meetings

• Multi-line GA (10 numbers) — multiple numbers from around the world on a single account.
• Queues app GA on mobile.
• Recap app + video recaps & audio styles (exec/newscast/podcast) — a dedicated left-rail home for all your meeting recaps, which makes them far easier to find. (MC1404322)
• Facilitator answers knowledge gaps in meeting chat — now able to reach the internet and even a voice mode you can talk with. (MC1409304)
• Admin: transcript access controls (late Jul) · auto-block bots — a policy to stop bots even hitting the lobby, which has been a huge help on our large sessions. (MC1393806 · Roadmap 566201)
• Retires: Teams Live Events (30 Jun) · Together mode.

AI as a Teammate in the Room (InfoComm Devices)

A key theme at InfoComm was "a brain in the room" — ambient AI always present, with Facilitator at the centre of the conversation.

• Facilitator for Teams Rooms — proactive, ambient AI (room readiness). More in my InfoComm newsletter.
• IntelliFrame people labels — next-gen people labelling using intelligence in the camera + the Microsoft cloud, with floating labels in the room. Huddly are first to announce; I've got one of their cameras on the way for demos soon.
• Express voice enrollment.
• 1.5M active systems (+1,000/day).
• AVIXA training partnership · new Teams Rooms Portal — a whole new Teams Rooms training set on the AVIXA platform.

Devices — Management & Ecosystem

• Pro Management Portal — one home for all Teams devices. Android devices are now coming into the Pro portal, rolling out to the earliest customers. (Learn · MC1227622 · Roadmap 555235)
• Android management leaves the Teams Admin Center · TAC retires Sept — if your ops team manages Android devices, they'll need to start using the Pro portal.
• Cisco ↔ Zoom cross-play (beta Jun · GA ~Sept) — Cisco announced native Zoom Rooms as well as popping up Zoom in Room OS mode.
• Crestron Collab Compute (now GA) · Jabra+ service plans and new portal (in test, early 2027).

Upcoming Events

• 21 Jul — Teams Devices AMA (+ AudioCodes briefing). Register
• 23 Jul — M365 Change Community Round Up. Register
• 23 Jul — Teams Phone Agent webinar. Register
• 29 Jul & 26 Aug — Copilot Fireside Chat (Njeri Grevious). Register
• Industry: MCAPS Start 22 Jul · FY27 GTM Kickoff 28 Jul.

All events are listed at empowering.cloud/events.