Enterprise Connect 2025: Communication & Collaboration in the era of AI

Okay, we are back.

That was again.

It's like NASCAR has got nothing on, on the crew we've got here.

Great.

Help changing the set.

So please if we can all take your seats and get ready, we're going to start the Microsoft keynote.

And, again, as as, you know, you know, Microsoft has become such an important player in this industry.

Obviously, as AI has emerged as such a critical issue, that's an area where Microsoft plays so heavily.

But obviously Microsoft is is in so many parts of collaboration in the in the meeting room, in on the desktop video collaboration platforms. And so, we always appreciate, having, a keynote from Microsoft where they help us, help you understand where the industry's going,

what the trends are, what the technology developments are that you need to be aware of.

And, so we're we're very fortunate today, to have, delivering our first keynote for enterprise Connect 2025.

We have, Ilya Bukshteyn Ilya is corporate VP for Microsoft Teams calling devices and premium experiences.

Ilya been presenting and and joining us at the show for a long time.

And it's, it's a real pleasure to welcome Ilya to the keynote stage. So

Ilya Bukshteyn.

Thank you Good afternoon everybody.

Thank you so much for coming to Enterprise Connect, for taking the time to join us here.

It's, as Eric said, about, I believe, my 13th enterprise connect with the pandemic.

I lost track a little bit.

Not quite the 30 year journey that my friend Jim had.

Jim Burden was talking about, but still quite a few years.

Always fun to be here at the Gaylord where it's about ten degrees colder than outside in Seattle.

Really, really great for me to look at this journey and be here today.

And in fact, that's what I was doing before coming here when I was thinking about this is my first opportunity to actually headline a keynote.

I've been in a few, but as I wanted to sort of put my thoughts together for headlining, I couldn't help but go through mentally the journey over my time at Microsoft, my time in Enterprise Connect and really reflect on these major waves of technology change and innovation that we have lived through and work

through together.

Going back to the 90s when we saw everything become digitized.

And of course, here at the conference, I believe back then called the PBX conference, many of you worked to move communications from analog to digital.

Then, as all of those PCs became connected with this brilliant innovation called the internet, and this conference became voice kind.

That was when I first started to attend.

We worked together to move communications, to be IP based and open up a whole new set of opportunities for multimodal unified communications.

More recently, as devices became more personal than ever in our pocket, the power of what would have been amazing as a PC all shrunk down to the size of a mobile phone, and we got the amazing leverage of the cloud limitless compute that we could use at worldwide scale.

We came together at Enterprise Connect and talked about how to move communication and collaboration forward, including with the birth of Microsoft Teams here at this conference.

And that brings us to today, while also a major technology innovation wave.

I think what we're living through today is really unprecedented.

Two very powerful forces and change agents coming together.

We have now changed where people work with hybrid and flexible work, and we're in the process together of changing how we work with.

Of course, AI through these waves.

As I was reflecting on all the customer meetings I've had here with many of you, it became apparent that although the technology changes, the things you've told us that you need have been remarkably consistent.

You've told us that you need to deliver infrastructure and platforms that are fundamentally secure, can be relied on at many nines of reliability, scale.

You've also told us that your users often struggle to adopt new technologies that are complicated.

And so you look to us to simplify those experiences so that when you roll out new capabilities, you see ROI quickly.

And last but certainly not least, you've told us that you are counting on us to build in AI and make the processes, workflows, and solutions that you roll out smarter.

These are the pillars of what we work on in Microsoft Teams, and what I'm so fortunate to help lead part of with teams calling and devices and premium experiences.

We are working to evolve teams from a broad communication and collaboration platform to the platform for AI powered work moving forward.

Thanks to all of you.

Teams has become not just the leading cloud communications platform, but really the basis for how so many companies do work.

And so before I go any further, I just want to thank all of you and our customers for betting on teams and being part of our team.

Thank you so much.

With that, I want to spend the remainder of my roughly 25 minutes with all of you giving you a tour through the kinds of work we are doing and the capabilities we will be delivering to you as a secure, simple and smart platform.

And of course, I need to start with security.

You've told us the teams is a mission critical platform for your businesses, and we take that responsibility very seriously.

These are unprecedented times in terms of security challenges.

So security continues to be the single biggest resource investment for us, starting with the need for more secure communications as our world becomes ever more connected.

We know that there are many different new ways for users to potentially get themselves in trouble, and so we need to look ahead with teams. One of the things that we've seen happen is an attempt by people to impersonate brands, right in teams, chat.

So we've made available brand impersonation protection.

Teams can now look at an external chat, allow you to preview a message, and then Intel intelligently choose whether to accept or block that person.

Another very common need is when you are inviting people external to your organization, to meetings.

You may choose to require some form of verification.

And so I'm really pleased to say that coming very soon we will have one time passcode meeting join.

So a person that's external when they're invited, when they look to join that meeting, they will receive a one time passcode in their email that they have to enter before being able to join that meeting.

Users are of course not the only threat vector these days.

There are many, many bots around.

Some deliver great value.

Some can be bots you want to keep out of your meetings.

So also available now is a capture test for meeting joint.

By requiring this Captcha test as an option, you can make sure bots are blocked from joining your meetings.

Now these are just a few of the areas that we are investing in and delivering for security.

There are many more.

And instead of just talking about them, I want to actually show them to you and to help me do so, I want to invite on my friend and coworker Kerry Perez Heffernan.

Hey Kerry So I'm excited to show everybody about the security that Elliott was talking about with advanced protection in teams meetings.

So let's jump into a meeting that I started with a colleague.

So I start to join, waiting for my waiting for my colleague to join as well.

I know we're all working to try and keep track of sensitivity labels, sensitive data and meetings can be one of the places where we might inadvertently share something.

So in this particular meeting, my colleague has shared a deck and this is a great deck.

We're working through a project, that project plan, and it's got a lot of information on it.

So in this particular case, as I go to open it or look at it, I'm going to realize that I'm going to be checking as to whether or not it has the same sensitivity label as the meeting itself.

The great news is it's not up to just me anymore or up to just my colleague.

Teams is there to help us.

So you see that teams has identified that the sensitivity label on this particular deck doesn't necessarily match that of the meeting itself.

So I can easily update or dismiss depending on what I want to do with this particular label.

The other thing that often happens in meetings is you see that you might be sharing a large amount of information, and you may or may not remember every piece of information on every slide.

In this particular case, I'm getting the notification as the organizer, as is my colleague who's presenting that they've actually shared some sensitive data.

It's just another great way that you can very quickly and easily take corrective action.

Both of these can be either enabled by IT across all meetings, or you can have a specific templates for individual meetings.

But it's just another way that we can really help detect sensitive information and stay on top of creating secure meetings.

Yeah.

And I think the key point there is to make it simple to not have to guess to take the guesswork out of information protection.

Which of course brings me back to the second pillar I mentioned at the beginning, simplicity.

We know how overwhelming technology can be for your users.

So we are working very hard to simplify not just user experiences, but workflows.

Business processes make all of those seamless and accessible.

One of my favorite parts of teams that we've recently simplified is the new chat and channels experience, as well as the live chat experience for customer service.

These are designed with simplicity in mind.

So let's take a look at those.

Kerry Absolutely, Ilya I love the simplicity of the chat and collab and chat and channels experience as well.

In fact, what I love about it is how you can really set it up the way you like to work.

So let's look at a few features.

One of these I can start to move things up.

I'm somebody who likes to work on specific topics, and I like everything to be in one place.

So I could either choose from an existing or start a new section.

It's a great way to make sure that I'm easily able to find the information that I want.

Another piece of this is within standard channels, the loop workspace.

So you might know loop from other iterations, but within the loop workspace you can really easily collaborate with coworkers.

In real time.

And it keeps all of the information right here.

So I might want to vote on ideas.

I might want to talk to my coworkers.

And it's a place that we can all come back to.

A couple of other features that are great.

One that helps me with my own productivity.

It's new in teams, but something that you've likely seen in windows before.

And this is the pop out experience so that you can really set up your screen the way you would like it to be set up.

This is great if you want to take notes, but also be looking at a document while you're doing so.

Again, something that we're all familiar with in windows.

And now it's here in teams. I think the other exciting innovation that we've got relates to, the ability to be more flexible and how we're zooming in and out on our, on our workspace.

So it's both inclusive and really helps me pay attention to that. The task at hand.

to that. The task at hand.

What's great is you no longer have to go scroll over.

You can simply click on the Collapse Apps menu and get right back to it.

This is really great for those of us that have been here many years, maybe need things to be a little bit bigger.

I love this feature.

It's great.

I think all of these really show us how we can collaborate with, coworkers more easily and stay more productive in our own work, but we know that it doesn't stop there.

We don't just collaborate with coworkers.

We also are collaborating with, with other, our our employees or with our customers themselves.

So with that simplicity of collaborating with customers, we now have live chat in teams. It's a great way for small businesses to enable direct customer service through website chats.

Simple to set up and available on any device today. Thanks, Kerry

device today. Thanks, Kerry Now, we've talked about, some great experiences that I've been using for a while.

I love the customization capabilities of the chat and channel experience.

If you're like me, another very common scenario is attending meetings where there's a super active chat, but also a loop component for notes or agenda, and switching back and forth between those can be, frankly, cumbersome and complex.

So I'm really excited to announce something I've had an opportunity to use for a while that is coming next quarter.

Pop out meetings panel.

This lets you take that side panel, have it in a separate window, and be able to constantly monitor lots of different information in addition to the core meeting itself.

There we go.

Now simplicity as I mentioned at the beginning, doesn't just extend to user experience.

It also extends to how you think about your infrastructure.

Which brings me to team's phone.

Thanks to all of you.

Team's phone is the leading cloud PBX PSTN communication service, but it is primarily used by information workers, and many of you have the added complexity of choosing a different service for your contacts center.

So we've heard your ask to extend teams phone into the contact center, and I am thrilled to announce that we now have teams phone extensibility coming very soon.

This will enable you to take that team's phone PSTN investment, that you've made that infrastructure and leverage it in your contact center system of choice.

Starting with our first and best partner, dynamics 365 Contact Center.

So here you can see a dynamics 365 contact center dashboard.

Now with built in intelligence from Copilot, including the ability to have suggested follow up actions or to chat with copilot.

Now with teams phone extensibility as I receive a call that's actually coming in using team's phone, I can accept the call.

I can start doing more advanced capabilities, like getting an assessment of sentiment on the call.

And of course, I get all of the power of teams phone, including doing things like transferring the call to another coworker in teams. This enables you to, again, use that investment that you have built up in teams from everywhere through your organization.

And we're not stopping at dynamics 365 teams. Phone extensibility will be coming to all of our launch partners, and you can expect to see this ecosystem only grow over time.

We also know from talking to you that not everyone who provides customer service lives in a contact center.

There are many what we call citizen agents, folks that may be at a helpdesk or in a branch of a bank, who also need some of these capabilities to work together to provide the best possible customer service.

And for that scenario, we launched the Queues app in Microsoft Teams a year ago.

I'm now thrilled to say we will continue to bring more advanced capability to Queues, including monitor, whisper, Barge and take over capability.

Coming to public preview in April.

A few of you are excited.

That's great. I'm excited too.

So here is the Queues zapping teams where as a supervisor, I can get real time and historical analytics.

I can also take action without having to go to my ITE friends so I can, opt out of a Queue I can add folks, I can manage that Queue fully all within teams. Now with monitor whisper Barge, I can also assist some of my colleagues.

So when Sonia here is doing a call, I can choose to monitor that call.

I can also choose to help her out.

So if I do a whisper, I can provide additional information for her that only she can hear, not the actual customer she's providing service for.

And if I think I can add more value, I can of course choose to barge in meeting fully, take over that call, or add myself to the call, or fully take over that call.

We will continue to add more and more capabilities based on your feedback to Queues to make it a great solution for everyone not in a contact center to be able to provide customer service.

Last, but certainly not least, let's shift gears and talk about the amazing opportunities we have ahead of us.

Powered by.

There's so many places where we see benefits that we can deliver to you, and we're just at the beginning of what we can do together with AI.

So I want to show you a few user AI capability examples, and let's go back to you, Kerry Fantastic.

We're going to start with SharePoint agent.

So hopefully you're familiar with this.

It's a great way to very easily with a couple clicks create an agent.

And what's really great is you're pulling from different sources.

You can add additional content.

You can even set up prompts that you may want for this agent.

It's a great way to bring this to your team.

So I've saved the prompts that I want.

And you'll see that the agent pops up.

But we know that it's really impactful when you bring information to where we all work.

So I'm going to bring this, resource agent directly to my chat.

My team's in here working day in and day out.

So I simply paste the resource agent in here, and with one more click, I've added this to the chat.

Again, it's a great way to get your team to be able to use the agent in the flow of how they're already working.

Yeah, what I love about this is user habits are so hard to build.

So trying to coax users to come to information is so much harder than what we're doing here, which is bringing information to the users.

I agree, it just it brings everything and makes it a lot easier.

The other great part of the SharePoint agent, as I bring it into teams is it's still just as secure.

So it will remember any sensitivity labels or access that you've already set up in SharePoint.

It doesn't forget it.

And in fact, I just got a notification that there's a few folks in this chat that don't have access to all of the all of the documents, so I can easily view the response before I post it to make sure that there is nothing that I wouldn't want this whole group to see.

All looks fine to me, so I'm going to go ahead and post up again.

A great way to bring everybody together.

Make sure that the information is easy.

You can pull the information that you need and it's in the flow of work.

But I isn't just for meetings and chat.

It's also an important part of teams phone.

So let's take a look at an existing call that I have up.

So I'm an agent chatting with somebody, and during the course of the conversation I realize they might they might have a specific subject that they want to talk about.

That's better suited to my colleague.

So I can easily transfer the call.

Let me I think Monica is best suited.

But you see here where I can generate call transfer now it's for the recipient.

We've all been on the the customer end of this where we've been transferred and had to repeat the same thing multiple times.

I hate that I do too, right.

You've already said it once.

But what's great about this is it also gives the other agent, that ability to quickly look it over quickly, see what has already happened in the conversation.

Any key actions that they need to talk about, and they can go straight to helping the customer.

Another great way to use copilot in calls as well.

And, I know we've talked about AI powered communications.

We've talked about how AI can help in collaboration, but also we know that AI is super important in the workplace for the AI powered workplace.

And the key capabilities for this are in Microsoft Places.

We launch places as our, solution, if you will, to enable flexible work.

And we're going to continue to enhance it because knowing where someone is and what kind of present status they need is key to making smart decisions about where you work.

So one of the features that's coming to public preview soon is the ability to opt in, to have your presence and location be updated using Wi-Fi, using the Wi-Fi that you're connected to.

Once we have that more precise information, there's some really cool things we can do.

And one of my favorites is being able to chat folks that are actually near me.

No more having to go to a chat and say who's around for lunch and have people, in my case in Vancouver, BC that and go, why are you bothering me?

I can say at nearby, who's around for lunch?

Who's available for brainstorm?

Who knows what the specialist today in our cafeteria.

And only people that are truly physically nearby will see that.

Now, one of the other interesting changes that we've seen with flexible work is the meeting rooms have become a premium.

No more empty offices these days, even if desks may be empty.

If your office is like mine, every meeting room tends to be taken.

So we see this phenomenon of where people come into the office and sit at desks near each other.

Taking a teams meeting together.

That's not what Return the Office is about.

It's about getting people together.

So we're using the power of AI to try to help with this, with something we call room recommender.

Room recommender will take a look at your schedule in the morning.

Look at who you have meetings with.

And if those people are actually in the same building with you.

If even two people are together right in the chat for a meeting, it will recommend that you go get a meeting room and offer to help find an available meeting room for you.

So the people who take the time to come to the office actually end up being together.

Also, a phenomenon that we're seeing more and more is what I like to call the Kramer from Seinfeld moment.

As you're walking down the hallway looking for a meeting room that's available.

You don't know if someone's in there or not, so you burst in through the door only to interrupt people.

We can help with that as well.

So coming soon, we will use teams rooms and other sensors to have an intelligent occupancy status that's shown on teams panels outside of the room.

Now last.

Thank you.

Last, but certainly not least.

And I think having the most promise in terms of the future, we're going to use the brain that all of you have deployed into your rooms on teams rooms to run.

I the same facilitator agent that we've previously shown in teams meetings, can run in physical spaces.

And that means if Kerry and I walk into a room for an ad hoc meeting, but we still want to have notes, transcription, capture of the whiteboard, we can do that right on the teams room without a scheduled teams meeting.

And this is just the beginning.

Having that AI in the room means that we'll be able to deliver more sophisticated capability.

Just the other day, in one of our early ring rooms, we walked in and my colleague Kim put her big water bottle on the table, with facilitator now having use of the camera, it actually commented and said, wow, that's a lot of water.

Good on you for staying hydrated.

Not a single line of code was written for that.

It can now see if the room is messy and suggest a different room.

It can see if there are too many people in the room and suggest a different room.

My favorite.

This is the bane of my existence for ten years working on teams rooms. It can see if someone put a chair right in front of the camera and nicely asked you to move that chair, because seeing is so important for the meeting.

Still some work to do, by the way, on responsible AI because we didn't notice it.

Starting to make suggestions for people's outfits.

Seriously.

So we've got some work to do, but that amazing opportunity for having a host in every physical space helping you get the meeting going is something we're so, so excited about.

Now, we've been talking a lot about all of us as end users.

I know many of you are also IT administrators and are thinking, well, how can I get me some of that AI goodness?

We've got you covered to carry.

Let's take a look at that. Absolutely.

So you already know and love Pro Management portal.

It's a great place to go for anything you want to know about your rooms or workplace.

But now you can bring in with the AI assistant asking conversational questions to quickly get the data and information that you need.

So you see here I was able to easily poll which devices had the particular teams app version that I wanted to see about.

But AI doesn't stop there and Copilot doesn't stop there at all.

It's also coming later this year in the teams admin portal.

Copilot will help simplify meetings and calling admin experiences even more.

It's a great new capability.

Yeah, I know if you're an admin like me, I'm an admin for my wife's, but.

Oh, hold on for a second.

I've got a call coming in here from someone who looks important.

Let me just go ahead and join that.

Oh wow.

It's Snorre Welcome, Snorre.

For those of you.

Thanks.

I'm not doing anything, you know, too critical and just doing a EC keynote.

So welcome to EC For those of you that don't know, Snorre is the leader for WebEx and devices at Cisco.

How are you today?

You know, I'm, doing fantastic.

And thank you for inviting me to your keynote.

Yeah.

You know, now that you're here, you can actually help me demo another AI feature.

I've heard that you can speak German as AI, right?

Yes, I can.

So let me go ahead and invite our interpreter agent, because I don't understand German.

And now maybe you can demonstrate some of your German skills.

Guten tag.

Ilya VK.

It's, It's just.

Ilya How are you?

It's, younger engineer puppy.

I young in Heidelberg.

I speak a little German, and I understand most of it.

As a young engineer, I worked in Heidelberg for three years.

So not only did the interpreter agent make German understandable for me, it did so in Snorre own voice.

This is a super exciting feature that's coming to teams meetings and teams rooms, including those powered by Cisco.

So Snorre thank you so much for demoing that.

Thank you.

And it's, funny that you have a Norwegian living in California speaking German to a conference in Orlando.

And, I also would like to say to everyone that if you want to hear more about interop, there is a very good panel tomorrow morning at 8 a.m..

Indeed.

I'm looking forward to that 8 a.m.

interop topic.

Nothing better.

Snorre Thank you.

And I have a feeling I'll see you around the conference.

That's right.

Thank you so much.

As I said, there's so much opportunity for us together with you to innovate in AI.

There's no way we could cover everything we're working on in 30 minutes.

And this is just a quick list of everything coming soon that we are looking forward to deliver together for you.

So I'd like to invite you to join me and everyone else on the Microsoft team that's here in panels, in sessions, of course, at the booth on the expo floor, and learn more about what we can do together to deliver that AI powered workplace.

And with that, I want to finish where I started by saying a genuine thank you.

Thank you for being part of our team.

Thank you for betting on teams and thank you for partnering with us in this AI powered future.

Have a great enterprise connect.

Thank you