The Future of Event Management with Microsoft Teams

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, internal comms and events teams, and AV/production professionals responsible for all-hands, town halls and external webinars who are weighing whether to consolidate event workloads onto Teams.

Guest: Preethi Ramarathinam — Group Product Manager, Head of Product - Teams Virtual Events and External Meetings, Microsoft

Preethi Ramarathinam leads product for Microsoft Teams virtual events and external meetings at Microsoft. She walks through the internal and external use cases for webinars and town halls, the production capabilities such as NDI and green room, the new webinar APIs and marketing automation integrations, and where AI fits into event set-up, moderation and post-event recap.

Many thanks to Landis, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• Teams splits large-event delivery into three tiers built on the same meeting stack: standard meetings for intimate, fully interactive AMAs; town halls for one-to-many broadcast to thousands of attendees; and webinars for registration-driven external sessions. Choosing between them is a question of how much control and how much two-way engagement you need, not a different platform. ▶ 6:06
• NDI support lets production teams isolate individual audio and video streams, composite them in external software and feed the finished mix back into Teams — the route for highly produced corporate events without leaving the platform. ▶ 7:40
• Microsoft's own internal pattern is a combination of Teams Rooms plus Teams events: leaders host hybrid AMAs from a conference room and use green room to set up and wait for the audience to arrive before going live. ▶ 9:13
• Satya Nadella's monthly employee town hall runs on the Teams events platform but is surfaced through a Viva Engage leadership community — the event experience is embedded in Viva Engage, turning a point-in-time broadcast into an ongoing communication lifecycle. ▶ 10:13
• Webinar integration with marketing automation is now available out of the box for HubSpot and Zapier, plus a full set of APIs so customers can build their own integrations with any third-party marketing automation or learning management system. ▶ 16:50
• Acknowledged gaps that stop full workload migration: webinars still cap below the scale customers want (beyond 1,000 attendees) and webinar recording is not yet supported — both are on the roadmap to close. ▶ 17:22
• The AI roadmap for events targets three high-stress points: guided event creation (asset and description generation, and knowing which settings to configure), live moderation and production help (tracking the agenda, routing Q&A, managing who is on and off stage), and post-event recap, highlights and summarisation. ▶ 18:55
• Because the event offering sits on top of the Teams meeting stack, investments made in meetings — including intelligent recap-style AI — can be carried across to town halls and webinars rather than rebuilt. ▶ 21:30
• A key argument for consolidating events onto Teams is user familiarity: senior presenters who are not natural IT users or presenters already know where the mute button is, which removes a layer of stress from an already high-pressure event. ▶ 15:48

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

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