Microsoft Teams Insider

Gidi Adlersberg, Voca CIC Business Line Manager at AudioCodes, discusses the new Microsoft Teams Voice Agent Certification Program, with AudioCodes being the first vendor to achieve certification.

• How the certification builds on Microsoft's Unify integration model, using the same Azure technology stack as the Microsoft Teams Contact Centre certification

• The difference between Microsoft's native Teams Phone Agent and the extended, fully managed AI receptionist service from AudioCodes

• Real-world use cases including caller authentication, knowledge base-driven troubleshooting, and sentiment-aware bot responses

• Why proper bot-to-human escalation is critical and how context is preserved when transferring to a live Microsoft Teams user

• AudioCodes' predictable, capped commercial model with no token-based charges

• Implementation as a fully managed service, from proof of concept through to production

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

MVP Tom Arbuthnot shares all the latest Microsoft Teams news and announcements in less than 15 minutes for September 2026
Upcoming Events
Events are back after the August pause:
Teams Fireside Chat — Kim Matlock, Principal Lead Program Manager, Teams Rooms, with Matt Slomka · 10 September — going deep on Rooms, Android and the Pro Management Portal; bring your questions
How a Global Legal IT Team Turned Message Center Chaos into Governance · 16 September
Microsoft Teams Devices Ask Me Anything · 22 September
M365 Change Community Round Up · 29 September
Microsoft Teams Contact Center Face-Off: 5 Solutions, 5 Demos, 50 Minutes Live · 15 October — five certified vendors in one live session, each walking through their solution and what makes it different. Come and ask questions.

Many thanks again to Ribbon, this month's benefactor. Hope this update has been useful

Chris Bailey, Lead Infrastructure Engineer (Voice and Contact Centre) at Maersk, discusses the practical realities of deploying voice AI across a global enterprise, from early proof of concepts to live production in 50 countries.

• Why the business drove Voice AI adoption, approaching IT rather than the other way around

• Inbound vs outbound use cases and why outbound finance collections proved the bigger success

• Vendor selection beyond the incumbent: balancing AI voice quality and telephony integration

• The integration challenge with PSTN transfers, SIP trunking, and API media streaming as the gold standard

• Hidden costs including PSTN, resourcing effort, and the ongoing refinement voice AI demands

• The "new hire" analogy for onboarding and monitoring your AI agent

• Who should own voice AI in your organisation and bridging the skills gap between telephony and prompt engineering

• Why business collaboration and clear ownership of responsibilities matter from day one

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

Mahendra Sekaran, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, discusses the rapid pace of AI transformation and its impact on the communications and collaboration space.

• Azure continues its strong growth at 43%, fuelled by accelerating AI adoption and cloud investment, with remaining performance obligations reaching $678 billion.

• Microsoft's product teams are using AI agents to compress planning cycles from six to eight weeks down to days, with approximately 80% accuracy on cost estimates.

• Full agentic loops are being built across Microsoft's code bases, transforming the software development lifecycle and accelerating iteration velocity.

• Work IQ provides the platform layer that makes enterprise knowledge, including documents, emails, chats, meetings, and transcripts, accessible to Copilot and agents, whilst maintaining data governance and compliance.

• Microsoft's multi-model approach gives customers choice across OpenAI, Anthropic, and in-house models, optimising for cost, performance, and flexibility.

• Microsoft Teams Phone Agent is in Frontier Public Preview, enabling voice AI agents to front customer interactions with an expected 70-80% call deflection rate.

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

Ally Ward and Kevin Spence discuss the practical realities of moving 2,500 of 8,000 users from Microsoft E5 to E7, covering migration strategy, agent governance, consumption costs, Entra Suite, and lessons learned from a global legal practice.

• Why E7 is far more than a simple licence swap and the operational complexity behind it

• The hotel room analogy: how unassigned E7 licences impact your E5 capacity

• The double-hop migration process and why the order of operations matters to avoid service desk chaos

• Agent 365's promise versus reality: regional reporting gaps, licensing for agent consumers, and governance challenges

• Entra Suite as a sleeper benefit bundled into E7 and the partial-coverage problem

• The Cowork consumption credit conundrum: 175,000 credits burned in under a month by 20 users, how do you measure value?

• Why agent governance is not an IT problem and needs business-wide engagement

This episode is sponsored by Luware Recording - a cloud compliance recording and analytics solution that helps organisations securely capture, archive, and analyse communications across multiple platforms to meet regulatory requirements.