Microsoft Teams Insider

Michel Bouman, AI Powered Workplace Lead EMEA, India and SEA - Teams Engineering at Microsoft, shares a deep dive into Microsoft Scout, the new desktop AI autopilot that acts on your behalf around the clock.

• What Microsoft Scout is, how it evolved from Project Lobster, and how it differs from Copilot Chat and Copilot Cowork

• How Michel onboarded a personal agent called Red to manage email triage, calendar scheduling, and complex multi-step reporting tasks

• Real-world autonomous workflows including expense filing, booking appointments, and even monitoring EV battery charge for road trips

• Agent-to-agent orchestration in practice and how teams share skills and automations across their agents

• The security model behind Scout, including resistance to prompt injection and impersonation safeguards

• The psychology of working alongside AI agents, why treating them as human can be a risk, and Michel's upcoming book "When Your Next New Hire Isn't Human"

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

Alev Tamer, Sr. Partner Solution Architect at Microsoft, and Chris Wheeler, Senior Copilot Solution Engineer at Microsoft, discuss the latest Microsoft Copilot announcements fresh from Microsoft Build.

• Multi-model strategy: how Microsoft brings together models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft AI to offer genuine choice

• Critique and Council: using multiple models to validate and challenge each other's outputs for improved accuracy

• The DRACO (Deep Research Accuracy, Completeness, and Objectivity) benchmark and how Research with Critic achieves the highest score for deep research completeness and accuracy

• Copilot Cowork vs Scout: cloud-based fire-and-forget task execution versus local desktop agent capabilities

• Work IQ as the personalisation layer that makes Copilot genuinely relevant to your role and daily work

• Real-world use cases including automated demo pack generation, fitness apps built on Azure, NHS website creation and AI-assisted performance reviews

• Skills and plugins: creating reusable instruction sets for repetitive tasks and new integrations including Dynamics 365 and Fabric IQ

• Data residency and security: navigating Anthropic data processing, EU data boundaries and flex routing for European organisations

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

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