Skip to content
Sign in Join free
M365 Perspective

Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence, Copilot Code defaults, Teams Meeting Connect with Zoom

Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence brings Microsoft's AI voice agents to the contact centre you already have. Plus Copilot Code admin defaults, agents getting accounts, Targeted Release retiring, Teams Phone Agent three weeks in, and Cross-Platform Meeting Connect.

Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence, Copilot Code defaults, Teams Meeting Connect with Zoom

Many thanks to Logitech, our October community Benefactor, for supporting Empowering.Cloud. Logitech just announced a whole lineup of new products: Rally Bar 2, Tap IP 2 and Tap Scheduler 2: GA now and MDEP from launch and the upcoming Rally System 2 Pro, Rally Speaker 2 Pro/Max with Sound Shape, due summer 2027, beta early 2027. Look out for a podcast soon with Henry Levak giving us the inside track on all the new capabilities.

It's been a busy month. It was good to see some of you at UCX London, Microsoft Frontier Tour London, and the enterprise roundtables. The next big event for me will be Microsoft Ignite in November.

Microsoft Teams Enterprise Update — October 2026

Everything you need to know in 15 minutes or less. Watch on YouTube or read it on Empowering.Cloud. Teams Phone Agent GA, ACS retiring, deepfake detection coming to meetings, who gets what in Teams events licensing, and 24 quick-hit updates across Teams, Teams Phone and intelligent spaces.

Upcoming Events

Online events

In-person events

Microsoft 365 and Copilot News

Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence — Microsoft's AI voice agents in the contact centre you already have

On 21 October Microsoft announced Contact Center Intelligence (CCI), in public preview. It takes the agents built into Dynamics 365 Contact Center and runs them on top of other contact centre solutions and can also hand off to Microsoft Teams.

The caller rings your existing number. Your CCaaS (Genesys, Five9, whatever) still owns the telephony, IVR entry, routing and queues. When the call hits a point where you want the AI, the platform opens a WebSocket to a Microsoft-hosted endpoint and streams the call audio to it in real time. Microsoft's agent streams audio back.

The blog names Five9, Webex Contact Center and Avaya as connectors, and the customer quotes mention Genesys and ServiceNow. The Learn docs tell a narrower story so far: Genesys Cloud has documented voice, chat and biometrics connectors today; everything else goes through a Microsoft-hosted universal connector, a WebSocket protocol any vendor can implement.

There is a free 30-day trial. Billing is usage-based through Copilot Credits. Also consider that your contact centre vendor may charge for API access or voice-channel licences on top.

The agent builder arrived the same day: the customer conversation harness in Copilot Studio. One agent builder for voice and chat, teams of specialist sub-agents, generative skills mixed with deterministic IVR-style topics, and you can buy phone numbers in Copilot Studio and point an agent at them. Handoff is "to a Teams queue, and very soon directly to Teams chats".

We now have a lot of voice agent options in the Microsoft ecosystem:

1. Teams Phone Agent — no-code, set up in the Teams admin centre on a number you already own in Teams Phone, in front of a call queue or auto attendant. For Teams Phone admins.

2. Customer conversation harness in Copilot Studio — build it yourself. Same engine, your own numbers bought in Copilot Studio. Hands off to a Teams queue (Teams chats "very soon"). For makers and developers.

3. Teams Phone Agent in front of a Teams-certified contact centre via Unify — the AI answers, then routes to agents in Luware, Landis, AudioCodes and others through Teams Phone extensibility.

4. Dynamics 365 Contact Center — Microsoft's own contact centre, where these agents are native rather than connected, with voice through Teams.

5. Contact Center Intelligence — behind your existing non-Teams contact centre. The caller still rings Genesys, Five9, Webex or Avaya; the platform streams the audio to Microsoft's agent over a connector, which does self-service, QA scoring and biometrics and hands back into normal routing.

Omar Aftab, Vice President, Conversational AI at Microsoft, is coming on the podcast shortly to talk about CCI. If you have a question for him, reply and let me know.

Also this week: Microsoft was named a Visionary in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS, its first year in the evaluation. Not the classic top right we are used to with Microsoft products, but they are on the board.

And if you are interested in contact centres, earlier this month we ran a Teams-certified contact centre face-off, now available on demand, with lots of live voice agent demos.

Copilot Code reaches Frontier — two admin defaults to know

Copilot Code started rolling out to Frontier tenants in late October (MC1519871). It builds apps, trackers and dashboards from a description, grounds them in Work IQ, publishes to the Copilot Managed Runtime inside your tenant, and can open draft pull requests against GitHub. It needs a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, usage-based billing and a spending policy that includes Code.

Two defaults to be aware of: Code is default on for any eligible user with that spending policy. Local coding on the PC is off until an admin sets "Code execution location" to "Cloud and local" in the admin centre.

Alongside it, Projects in Copilot gives Chat and Cowork a shared workspace for related conversations, tasks, files and instructions; the Cowork tab has it worldwide from 20 October, the Home experience follows through mid-November, and files stay in OneDrive with their existing labels and retention (MC1519856).

Admins, the cost controls are catching up: there are now Microsoft Graph beta APIs to read credit balances, create spending policies and approve credit requests (MC1521616), and Power Platform gets per-environment credit tracking and pay-as-you-go caps in preview from 31 October (MC1508949). I'm still having a lot of conversations about usage-based billing.

We are looking at doing some usage/UBB reporting in ChangePilot (Dataverse, model-driven app, generative pages, Power Automate); if you have ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Team knowledge bases in SharePoint — markdown files for agents

On 14 October, the SharePoint team announced team knowledge bases, in Frontier preview. Team members contribute emails, chats, meetings and site content; Copilot compiles it, using Work IQ's "knowledge compilation engine", into a library of interlinked, agent-friendly markdown files that people can read and agents are grounded on. Microsoft's internal testing claims agent answers are up to 4x faster and 30% more token-efficient. It's available in the Copilot app, only for users enabled for usage-based billing, with "billing terms may change before general availability".

The tell is "markdown files for agents". Anyone running coding agents will recognise the pattern of a curated context folder (Obsidian anyone?); Microsoft is building it into SharePoint.

Agents get accounts, skills and plugins

In Copilot Studio, agents can now have their own Microsoft 365 accounts, so you can @mention one in a Word comment or email it a task, plus memory of how your processes work and scheduled or signal-based triggers, all rolling out through Frontier. Building Copilot Chat agents in Copilot Studio gets topics, connected agents, evaluations and a dev-test-prod lifecycle, GA on 26 October (MC1518233).

Skills in Copilot Chat let users create, upload and share task instructions, which admins can deploy, block and review from the admin centre, user-created ones included; sharing user-created skills is not yet supported in Information Barriers tenants (MC1493223). And Cowork draws on the plugin registry for Power Platform connectors, MCP connectors and role-based skills for Sales, Service, Education and Legal.

Copilot for legal, with more than 20 legal skills, is now generally available to Copilot customers worldwide. Redlining lands as native tracked changes in Word, drafting works from approved precedents in SharePoint with content controls, and Cowork handles the multi-step work, obligations across a contract portfolio, case chronologies, and minutes from meeting records. Interesting to see the dedicated legal AI tools go up against the plugin model from Anthropic, OpenAI and now Microsoft Copilot too.

Charles Lamanna now runs Office, Teams and the Copilot platform

Microsoft's 1 October leadership update moved Sumit Chauhan and Lan Ye under Charles Lamanna after Ryan Roslansky's decision to leave, which puts Office, Teams and the Copilot platform in one organisation; The Information puts it at roughly 25,000 people, about three times its size a year ago. Lamanna came up through Power Apps and Flow.

Targeted Release is retiring in January

Targeted Release will be replaced by three release preferences, Frontier, Standard and Deferred, and from November admins lose the ability to add or change Targeted Release enrolments, ahead of the January retirement (MC1490899). Most tenants have a Targeted Release group somebody set up; find out who is in yours and decide where they go before November.

Microsoft Teams and AI-Powered Workplace

Teams Phone — Phone Agent three weeks in and the Queues trial clock

Teams Phone Agent has moved quickly since GA. The set-up guide changelog shows 42 voices from 14 October, Copilot Credit Estimator support from 19 October and a spam-detection template in the Teams admin centre from 21 October. It is not supported in India. There is also a warning for 1 November, when North America leaves daylight saving: Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba and north-west Ontario now stay on summer time, so any Phone Agent set to a Mountain, Pacific or Eastern time zone for those callers needs re-pointing before the weekend.

If your tenant averaged more than ten monthly active call-queue members between April and June and you received the offer in Message Center, the 500 Teams Premium trial licences for the Queues app have a redeem-by date of 14 December (MC1471792).

Meeting and chat safety — phishing detection, recording policy and who gets to turn AI on

Teams is getting AI-powered phishing detection for messages (MC1519866, roadmap 575288). It reads the conversation for impersonation, social engineering and "deceptive intent" rather than waiting for a malicious link, starting with external first-contact chats. Targeted release early to mid November, GA early to mid December, nothing for admins to configure.

From November (targeted release, GA in December), the recording and transcription options in meeting settings follow the organiser's effective meeting policy, so people only see the automatic recording and transcription choices they are allowed, plus a new "Record only" option (MC1508234).

On the roadmap for November/December, enhanced Copilot and AI controls so the organiser decides who can turn AI on in a meeting (roadmap 577399); default meeting templates with protection settings applied from the calendar, Teams Premium (roadmap 576609); AI Interpreter for town halls and webinars (roadmap 576711); and an audio announcement when recording or transcription starts (roadmap 559609).

We're running a Deepfake Calling Fraud session on 3 December, which covers the human side of all of this.

Key Teams Changes

  • Immersive Events and Avatars retire in April 2027 (MC1499189). That is the last of Mesh in Teams.
  • Event producers get a streaming switchboard to send up to eight NDI sources from a meeting or event to production software, GA early to mid November; it needs AllowNDIStreaming in the meeting policy (MC1521613).
  • Efficiency Mode now turns itself on for 8 GB and older-CPU machines, and Microsoft says Teams launches up to 20% faster on that hardware (Teams blog).
  • The Teams admin centre gets a guided "Manage access" flow that combines availability, install, permission consent and allow/block, with nothing applied until you say so (MC1515931), and from November (GA in December) team owners can set an onboarding workflow that drops new members into the right channels automatically (MC1518033).

Teams Rooms and Devices News

Cross-Platform Meeting Connect — Microsoft and Zoom build on Direct Guest Join

On 20 October, the Teams team announced Cross-Platform Meeting Connect with Zoom: a Teams Room joining a Zoom meeting, or a Zoom Room joining a Teams meeting, gets HDMI content share, the roster, read-only chat, synced mute and end-call, a dual-display layout, and up to 1080p for Teams meetings on Zoom Rooms, subject to policy, hardware and network. Windows rooms first, then Android, and Microsoft says it "will get on the public roadmap as we get closer to the availability date"; Zoom's side says the first half of 2027. It is still a guest join rather than a native one, but it closes most of the gap people complain about.

Rooms and Intelligent Spaces Updates

  • The "Turn off IntelliFrame" option goes away for online participants from late November, completing worldwide by early January (GCC and GCC High mid-December to late January); remote users will always see the room's Cloud IntelliFrame view as configured on the device, and in-room users can still change it from the console (MC1521614).
  • Teams Rooms on Android in Pro-licensed rooms get the private presenter and organiser chat in green-room meetings and events when the room joins as the organiser, mid to late November (MC1519857).
  • Facilitator AI notes for in-person meetings on Teams Rooms on Windows, Pro only, is listed as GA this month, one tap from the console with notes shown on the display (roadmap 560318).

New on Empowering.Cloud

Subscribe to the Teams Insider podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or the YouTube playlist.

As always, if you have any questions, corrections, thoughts, or feedback, please reply. I read all the replies.

Thanks

Tom

Next

Comments ()