The Future of Converged Communications – Leon Wright, Global Lead at Microsoft

Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners planning a Teams Phone or AI rollout, and partner leaders at SIs, telcos and rooms integrators deciding where to invest their practices in the coming financial year.

Guest: Leon Wright — Global Lead, Converged Communications, Microsoft

Leon Wright leads Microsoft's Converged Communications practice globally across systems integrators and telcos. He talks to Tom Arbuthnot about how AI is now pulling Teams Phone deals rather than the other way round, how SI and telco roles diverge as workloads commoditise, the merging of the Teams and Dynamics go-to-market, and why Microsoft has started sharing roadmap earlier and less polished.

Many thanks to Pure IP, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• The AI conversation has inverted the sales motion: customers who have adopted Copilot now ask for Teams Phone so calling and meeting data lands in their AI estate. Wright's view is that voice without AI capture is "a dark hole" — no record of who was spoken to or what was promised.
• Teams Phone is described as the second-largest workload behind Outlook/email, which is why bringing it into the AI addressable surface opens significant professional services work for partners.
• Partner sentiment shifted fast: in a partner advisory council session over a year ago only one or two partners said AI mattered to their voice business; eight months later it was a unanimous yes.
• Partners that folded their Copilot practice into their Converged Comms practice — running AI strategy workshops that pull voice through — grew their Converged Comms business by more than 20% last financial year, and shifted from managed-services deals to stickier strategic engagements.
• Wright's model of the market: SIs lead each new wave while complexity is high, telcos take over once a workload commoditises and drive scale (with professional services margin falling away), then SIs move to the next wave — voice first, now AI, next agents.
• Contact centre intelligence is moving down into standard calling — transcription, translation, recaps, CRM write-back — capabilities that previously sat behind a roughly $150 contact centre licence, which changes the value case for ordinary knowledge workers.
• There is a concrete "go back" motion for partners: revisit existing estates, e.g. a 200,000-seat Teams Phone deployment running perfectly but with no AI enabled, and turn on the built-in capabilities first before moving to agents and business-process work.
• Microsoft has moved from only discussing confirmed backlog to sharing roadmap high and early under NDA, explicitly flagging that perhaps 70–90% will ship, to get partner input sooner rather than surprise them later.
• Partner-to-partner pairing is being brokered deliberately — rooms partners with phone specialists, and infrastructure partners with Copilot partners — as a "mentored install" route to build AI capability without hiring scarce, expensive skills.

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

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