Microsoft Teams Insider

Howard Crow, Director of Product at Microsoft, joins the podcast to discuss the evolution of Microsoft Planner, its deep integration with Microsoft Teams, and the growing role of AI agents in work management.

• Howard shares his nearly 30-year journey at Microsoft, from the founding days of SharePoint to leading the Planner and Project teams

• The genesis of Microsoft Planner and how it democratised project management beyond specialist tools like Microsoft Project

• Microsoft's unification strategy, bringing To Do, Planner, and Project for the Web together under a single Planner brand

• How Planner integrates deeply with Microsoft Teams across meetings, channels, and chats

• The Planner Agent and Microsoft's multi-agent runtime service, the first production multi-agent harness shipped at Microsoft

• How MCP (Model Context Protocol) is becoming the "USB for APIs" and unlocking new integrations for Planner

• The future of work: managing teams of humans and AI agents together, and why a visual planning surface matters for knowledge workers

Thanks to Luware, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support of Empowering.Cloud

MVP Tom Arbuthnot shares all the latest Microsoft Teams and Copilot news and announcements in less than 15 minutes for June 2026. 
Many thanks to Pure-IP for their continued support. 
The Copilot Super App Is Coming
Scout and Autopilots
NVIDIA-Powered Laptops
Windows Optimisations for Open Claw and Local Agents
Work IQ and Web IQ APIs GA
Project Solara — Agent-First Hardware Devices, Powered by MDEP
7 New Microsoft AI Models
Teams Devices News
Link to the deck
Useful Links: 
Briefings 
• 4 Ways to Improve Customer Experience With Landis Contact Center for Microsoft Teams 
• First Look at the Neat Board 32 Microsoft Teams Rooms With MDEP 
• The Lenovo Microsoft Teams Rooms Portfolio Explained and the Huddly Partnership 
• Decoding Dynamics 365 Contact Center: Microsoft Teams Voice, New AI Agents, and Licensing 
Teams Insider Podcasts 
• Microsoft Teams Facilitator: The First Group AI Agent for Meetings With Madhu Sudan, Microsoft 
• Microsoft Teams Call Quality Dashboard (CQD): Intelligent Classifiers, Silent Test Call and Power BI 
• Microsoft 365 Message Center and M365 Change Explained with Brian McGough, Principal Program Manager 
• Microsoft 365 Agents Explained - Declarative, Copilot Studio, Pro-Code or Skills in Copilot Cowork? 

Microsoft Build 2026: Be yourself at work 
GitHub Copilot app: the agent-native desktop experience 
What's New in Microsoft 365 Copilot — May 2026 
Microsoft 365 Copilot release notes 
Introducing Microsoft Scout: your always-on personal agent 
Project Lobster is Microsoft Scout 
Introducing Surface Laptop Ultra: Made for world makers 
Surface Laptop Ultra product page 
Windows platform security for AI agents 
Announcing the new Work IQ APIs 
Work IQ: production-ready intelligence for every agent 
Announcing Microsoft Web IQ 
Composing a new platform for agent-first devices 
Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform documentation 
Microsoft Build 2026 Live blog 
Building a hill-climbing machine: launching seven new MAI models 
Build, scale, and monetize apps and agents with Microsoft Marketplace 
Certified Android-based devices for Microsoft Teams 
More choice and flexibility: Cisco Board Pro Certified for Microsoft Teams Rooms
 Q-SYS QSP-11 Scheduling Panel

Madhu Sudan, Partner Director of Engineering at Microsoft, discusses Microsoft Teams Facilitator, a first-of-its-kind group AI agent built to actively collaborate with entire teams during meetings.

• How Facilitator differs from Copilot: group-level support vs one-to-one assistance

• Real-time note-taking, action item assignment, and meeting moderation built into Microsoft Teams

• Proactive capabilities including knowledge gap detection, quorum checking, and late-joiner recaps

• The permissioning model that keeps group conversations secure and prevents data leakage

• Plans for meeting series memory and bringing cross-meeting context to future sessions

• Extensibility with other Microsoft Teams agents and Microsoft 365 data

Thanks to AVI-SPL, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support of Empowering.Cloud

James Parkes, Senior Product Manager for Microsoft Teams Call Quality Management, Siunie Sutjahjo, Principal Product Manager for Microsoft Teams Meeting, and Victor Guzman, Senior Technical Program Manager, all at Microsoft, discuss the latest advances in Microsoft Teams call quality tools and reporting.

• How CQD has evolved from on-prem monitoring to cloud-scale Power BI reporting with over 45 report pages in the latest v5.3 release

• The new intelligent classifiers: around 40 models that move beyond legacy network averages, using real user feedback as ground truth to pinpoint issues at the device, compute and network level

• How remote and local models identify whether a quality issue originates from a user's machine, their network or a dominant participant affecting others in the call

• A walkthrough of the Power BI QER reports, including the search report, user health details and media health as starting points for troubleshooting

• Silent test call: a full bi-directional media stream test for proactively evaluating network readiness, available for Microsoft Teams Premium users

• Admin-initiated remote log collection: how IT admins can now pull client logs directly from the Teams Admin Centre without relying on end users

Thanks to Neat, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support of Empowering.Cloud

Brian McGough, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, gives a behind-the-scenes look at how change communications work across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and what's coming next.

• How Message Center has grown from 50 posts a month to over 225, and the operational complexity behind keeping hundreds of live posts up to date

• The targeting system behind Message Center, from licensing-based filtering to tenant-specific notifications across multiple clouds including GCC, GCC High, and DoD

• Microsoft's modernised approach to change management, introducing frontier, standard, and deferred release options that give admins more control over when changes reach their users

• The new MCP servers for Message Center and Roadmap data, and how they unlock conversational, tenant-grounded insights

• Why customer feedback on Message Center posts genuinely drives change, including stopping feature rollouts and reversing retirements

Thanks to Landis, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support of Empowering.Cloud