Get ready for the future of work with Microsoft Teams | Enterprise Connect 2024 Keynote

- But hello everyone.

I'm Nicole Herskowitz, Vice President of Productivity and Collaboration Copilot at Microsoft, and it is so great to be back with all of you at Enterprise Connect this year.

Now, one of the best parts of my job is spending time with our customers, and I want to share with you today some of the two most topical topics that I hear from them every single time we meet.

First, how do we make this new normal of hybrid work actually work?

We all know it has not been a soft landing and it's been challenging for many of us.

The second topic is, of course, AI.

Our customers want to know, how do they best reinvent their businesses for this new age of artificial intelligence?

So first let's talk about hybrid work.

As I alluded to before, it's been a little complicated and at times really messy.

We work across time zones, we shift our work hours at times, we work from coffee shops, in our cars, in the office, even behind stage like I was just a few minutes ago.

The reality is we did not settle into a one size fits all model where everyone is in the office or everyone is working from home.

The new norm is somewhere in between, working both remotely and then also in the office some of the times.

The fact is the majority of knowledge workers are at least in the office one day a week, and many of us more.

For example, my team, we've established what we call anchor days.

Tuesdays through Thursday we're in the office.

But on other days it's pretty mixed.

So collaborating from the office must be as easy as joining a meeting from home.

And this has led to many of our customers rapidly deploying Microsoft Teams rooms across their offices.

Now, we have made major investments to simplify the process for setting up Microsoft Teams rooms, making it as easy as a push of a button.

So I am going to go right here, push the button.

Now start your stopwatches.

This device should be fully set up in 15 minutes or less.

Now clearly, there has been a massive shift towards flexibility in how, when and where we work.

Now we have another challenge, staying on top of all the information that is inundating us all the time.

Emails chats meetings and more that are competing for our time.

I have a friend, 'cause I'm not able to push the button.

He's going to double check for me right now.

Oh dear. (audience laughing)

We might have to check if it's plugged in.

(laughing) Our recent WTI research uncovered that employees spend two full days a week just doing emails and attending meetings, leaving us less time than ever to actually do our work.

We call this phenomenon digital debt.

And it's having a massive impact on work.

Nearly 2/3 of employees say they don't have the time or energy to actually do their jobs effectively.

So something has to give.

We can't continue like this.

And luckily we don't have to.

We are experiencing a once in a lifetime shift.

AI provides an opportunity to completely reinvent how we work and how we live.

AI will be pervasive.

Gartner predicts that generative AI will play a role in 70% of the data and text-heavy tasks by 2025.

With AI, we can work in ways not possible before, doing in seconds what used to take us hours or even days.

For example, I use AI to understand how I spend my time, especially related to meetings.

It helps me assess if I'm allocating my time in alignment with my business priorities.

I use AI to brainstorm.

When I prepare for a big team meeting, like an all hands, I use AI to give me ideas for the agenda to ensure I cover the topics most important to my team.

I use AI to create completely new things like the blurb for this keynote.

I no longer have to start from scratch.

All right, ah, the button has now been pressed. (laughing)

Okay, now start your stopwatches.

All right.

Organizations that embrace this AI transformation will gain a competitive advantage, and those that don't will be left behind.

We are committed to partnering with you on your AI journey.

And one of the ways we're doing this is by infusing AI into all the products we build, from Windows to our productivity apps like PowerPoint and Word, and of course Microsoft Teams. Every part of Teams has been reimagined for the era of AI, from meetings to chats to calls and more.

And today, over 320 million people across over 181 markets and in 44 languages rely on Teams to communicate, collaborate and get their work done.

And customers are continuing to expand their usage of Teams to take advantage of the most advanced capabilities.

Today, more than 2/3 of our enterprise customers are using Teams Phone, Rooms, or Teams Premium.

And with over 145,000 custom line of business apps and more than 2,000 third party apps in our Teams store, you can make Teams the hub for all of your business processes, helping your employees have everything they need in one place.

Now, with all this momentum, Teams has truly become a mission-critical application for organizations around the globe.

We take this responsibility super seriously and we have dedicated a significant portion of our engineers to the core foundation of Teams. And we are truly, truly grateful for all of you, everyone in the audience today, the people who set up and manage Teams in your organizations.

Many of you are currently deploying new Teams across your companies, and you need to have confidence that it's performant, it's reliable, and easy to use.

So let's touch on some of our investments in these areas.

First performance.

A year ago on this very stage, I announced the new era of Teams, where we released a brand new, built from the ground up desktop app.

We benchmarked against classic Teams, and new Teams is twice as fast while using half the memory.

Today, over 75% of our customers are using new Teams, and we're constantly tracking the telemetry and listening to your feedback to further improve the performance.

Next, let's talk about reliability.

With new Teams, we've embraced technology such as WebView2 and React, which have significantly improved app reliability.

Service reliability is another key aspect of, excuse me, service availability is another key aspect of reliability.

Your business runs on Teams, and we know that it is very important that it's always available.

One big leap forward in reliability is Teams Phone.

(audience applauding) And I am so excited to announce that as of April 1st we are updating our financially backed service agreement for Teams Phone to five nines uptime.

You can clap again.

(audience cheering and applauding) The third area of investment is ease of use.

We want everyone to get the most out of Teams no matter your role, function, device or platform.

And we're taking steps to reduce the noise and help you navigate Teams with fewer clicks.

One example is the Discover Feed in channels, which is now generally available.

The Discover Feed is a personalized feed powered by AI that provides the most relevant information to you across all your channels, based on the people you work with and the topics you care about most.

We also know that you want to personalize Teams to work the way you work.

So for example, if you're a developer, you may prefer dark versus light mode.

You may choose compact versus comfy to view your chats so that you have more text on your screen.

And you can even customize emojis with the ones you use most often.

It truly is your Teams. Now this is just a glimpse of the investments we're making to the fundamentals of Teams. Jeff Teper posted a blog today with more information, so please go check it out.

Now going back to what I mentioned before, we're all struggling with digital debt and AI has the potential to help us.

It is hard to believe that in just one year ago we introduced Microsoft Copilot.

It's incredible to see both the pace of innovation and the rapid adoption.

Tens of thousands of employees at customers like L'Oreal, KPMG, Visa, and more are not only using Copilot, they're also helping us shape the product.

Now Copilot can answer your questions, create content, and reason over your data.

And what makes Copilot so unique is that it has access to all your data at work, all stored in the Microsoft graph.

So all of your emails, your chats, your meetings, your calendars, your documents and so much more.

And by inheriting all your existing Microsoft 365 security, privacy, compliance policies, your data stays under your control, in your tenant, and does not inform the future LLM models.

And since Copilot is your assistant, it can't act without your knowledge or access any information that you don't have permission to see.

For me, using Copilot is like magic.

But you may be wondering, is it worth it?

We conducted extensive research with thousands of Copilot early users to answer this question.

And what's the headline?

Copilot makes people more productive and creative.

In fact, 77% of people don't want to give it up.

70% of Copilot users are more productive, and 68% observed that their quality of their work had improved.

And the most powerful finding from my perspective is Copilot users on average save 10 hours per month.

Just think what you can do with an extra 10 hours.

Now, Copilot shows up in Teams in two ways.

First, it's embedded in your Teams chat so you can work with it just like any other colleague.

You can ask it questions spanning all of your business data, your emails, your calendars, your files, your documents.

Copilot is there to assist you.

Second, Copilot is in each Teams workload, providing AI functionality that's fine tuned for meetings, for calling, for chat, for channels, making it so much easier to work together.

Now one of my favorite AI features is Intelligent Recap in meetings, because it automatically creates meeting highlights, notes and action items. With Intelligent Recap, I no longer take notes and it's so much easier to catch up on missed meetings.

I'm excited to announce that Intelligent Recap is coming to calling.

So now you get AI powered recaps to all your VoIP (audience applauding) and PSTN calls in Teams. You never have to worry about capturing any of those key points on your call.

Especially for me when I'm on a mobile phone.

This is so great.

Now Teams is making it easier to collaborate and smarter to work with Copilot.

But seeing is truly believing, so I'd like to invite Derek Snyder on stage so we can take a closer look.

Hi Derek.

(upbeat music) (audience applauding) - Hi everyone.

Whoo!

Do you want to see some demos?

Alright, so as Nicole was talking about, we have a lot of digital debt these days.

I live in New York City, most of my team is on the West Coast in Seattle.

And so by the time I wake up in the morning, lots of decisions have happened.

Now I used to have to go app by app to sort of see what happened and what decisions took place.

But now I actually just use Copilot and give kind of a very simple prompt.

So when I wake up in the morning, I open up Copilot on my phone.

And I say, you know, help me prepare for my day, and organize them by emails and Teams chats and meetings.

And you'll see that Copilot can actually reason across all of my business data.

It's pulling together summaries from those emails.

It's giving me a good sense of all the things that happened, you know, while I was asleep.

It's giving me a sense of the Teams chats.

And also it's telling me that I've got, you know, a number of meetings coming up today, including this one about Project Sniff that I don't really understand.

Now the good news is you can use a conversational interface to just ask follow-up questions.

So in this case, I'm going to tell it to, you know, tell me a little bit more about this smell-o-vision project that I have a meeting on today.

And it's now going to go off and grab information across the Microsoft graph, which is my calendar, my contacts, my emails, my meetings, my Teams chats and channels, and give me a very, very succinct summary.

So the Smell-o-vision Project, also known as Project Sniff, is a new product that can create personalized scents based on your mood and environment.

Oh no, this is very confidential stuff.

I can't believe I have outed our secret plans to add scents to Teams. Don't tell anyone.

We'll get you to sign an NDA on the way out.

So you can see there it's very easy for me to ask questions, especially when I'm, you know, on the go across all of my business data.

But we also have integrated Copilot into the individual experiences inside of Teams. So let's take a look at my computer now.

And what you'll see here is I've actually got the Calls app pulled up.

So this is the Calls experience.

And so it should be very familiar if you use Microsoft Teams today.

It's got, you know, all of my calls.

And again, this represents not only calls that are done over VoIP, but also calls that are done through PSTN.

So calls that I'm making to landlines and mobile phones and things like that.

Now, I wanted to spend a little bit of time brainstorming with a person on my team, Pradeep, for this meeting that we had later in the afternoon.

So I actually just called him from Teams Phone on his cell phone.

And now we were both commuting so we didn't really have a chance to actually take notes.

Our hands were kind of occupied.

And so what you'll note is that now all of the calls that I actually have through Teams Phone come with a complete recap.

And that's what Nicole just announced there, which it gives me all the summary, basically, of what happened in the call, including little things like citations.

(audience applauding) Yeah, how cool is that?

But check this out.

Copilot of course is a reasoning engine.

So I can actually ask very, very complex questions.

And so in this case, Pradeep and I just had a very unstructured brainstorm, right?

And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually tell Copilot, hey, Pradeep and I had a brainstorm.

Organize all the ideas we discussed into a table with columns for challenges, solutions, and what to do next.

So you can put Copilot to work, not like a search engine, but actually like an intern where you're giving it complicated instructions and it'll actually start to build that out, again, just based purely on what was said out loud in the call, purely based on the transcript.

How cool is that? (audience applauding)

So here we go.

I've got my challenges, I've got my solutions.

It's actually even making inferences around what to do next and suggestions, which is super, super cool.

And it's actually giving those to me here in real time.

Now one of the great things about Copilot is that it is just for me.

So when I'm asking Copilot questions, no one else can see this.

I, of course, can only access the things that I already would have access to, in other words, calls that I was on or meetings that I was in.

But one of the things that's really great is that I can actually take that and copy that and share that with other folks.

So I'm now going to go ahead and take that brainstorm recap that I just prepared, and I'm going to pop it into our little group chat here.

Of course, the Aroma Alliance, people working on the Project Smell-o-vision.

In this case, I usually hesitate a little bit 'cause I want to provide a little bit of context to the team of what just happened.

So I'm just going to go and write something really short.

Pradeep and I had a brainstorm.

Here are the notes.

Okay, great, so I've got that.

And now what I'm going to be able to do is actually use Copilot to rewrite that into something a little bit more meaningful for the Team.

And so you can make all sorts of adjustments.

I can make it enthusiastic, I can make it a little bit longer, I'm going to do that as well.

And Copilot really takes the heavy lifting of, in this case, you know, providing a little bit of that context.

So here we go.

After discussing some ideas with Pradeep, we came up with a summary of our main points and suggestions.

Okay, that's pretty good.

You know what, I'm going to make one final little change here.

And you can actually have Copilot make any tweak you want.

So I'm going to ask it to add a pun about smells.

Very important to be funny at work.

We snipped out some ideas with Pradeep, here are the notes.

All right, well I'll keep it.

There we go.

And so now I've gone ahead and pasted in, again, that beautiful table that Copilot generated for me.

And it's really easy for me to share this with everybody in the group.

So what you've just seen is Copilot, not only inside of the chat experience where you can ask it questions about any of your business data, but actually become now a teammate where you can use it to start to organize and share context from things, including your calls.

Back to you, Nicole.

(audience applauding) - Thanks, Derek.

It's great to see how AI can help us be more productive with work.

But as I mentioned before, most of us are back in the office at least some of the time.

But is the office really ready for us in our new normal?

We have designed Microsoft Team Rooms to provide the best experience for in-room and remote attendees, with innovations like IntelliFrame with smart video feeds and speaker recognition, Teams makes sure that everyone is seen and heard.

Today I'm excited to announce that we're expanding speaker recognition to every Teams device on Windows.

Gone are the days of not knowing who is saying what in a hybrid meeting.

Speaker recognition captures the actual speaker's name, not the conference room name.

It also unleashes the power of Copilot as it attributes statements to the person talking in the conference room.

But we know not all rooms are Teams Rooms. In fact, most meeting rooms are not video-enabled, impacting the hybrid meeting experience.

That's why we're making investments to make Teams great in every space, whether you're joining from a noisy cafe or huddled around a laptop with your colleagues in a focus room in the office.

Now to see a few of these capabilities in action, I'm going to hand over to Derek once again.

- It's great to be back.

So as I mentioned literally a moment ago, I live in New York City and so I am often the remote participant when it comes to joining meetings, especially with folks back in the office.

And even though I'm surrounded by the world's best bagels and pizzas, I often end up with this view.

This one on the bottom left, does it look familiar?

The conference room from hell.

It's a round table, but there's a camera somewhat in the middle of the room.

The person has no idea that he's blocking the view of everybody else.

And I actually have no idea who these people are.

And to make matters worse, when I go ahead and try to get a summary from Copilot after the meeting is over, and I have to, you know, of course ask questions from Copilot, you'll notice that there's not individual attribution to the individuals in that room.

So you know, same here, we could expand the team and bring other cross-functional stakeholders.

Wait, hold on, who said this?

It says cfoe62d, who is this person?

Now I want to contrast that a little bit with what you see in this other conference room, which may not even look like a conference room at all.

Because all the video actually spliced up into these perfect little rectangles.

And you'll also notice that we're getting attribution not only for the names, but check this out.

We're also getting attribution for the individuals.

Here's Alex in conference room One Esterra 6.2C, and she's saying, "Good suggestion."

So she's getting credit for all her great ideas.

And this will show up in the Copilot summary as well.

Now how cool is that?

(audience applauding) Now, I couldn't help but notice we had invited Ilya to this meeting.

I know he's kind of a local celebrity.

I'm going to break the glass.

I don't know if any of you have ever done this.

It's very passive aggressive.

You can invite somebody to join a meeting if they're late and it actually rings them on Teams. So we're going to pull him in 'cause god knows where Ilya actually is.

And we're going to see if we can get him on this call as well and really make a, (students clamoring) Ilya, where are you?

Are you surrounded by a group of students?

I can't hear anything.

- It's so loud.

We've got a group of students in the room, this is awful.

- Oh yeah, this is terrible.

If only there were a feature you could enable that would somehow solve this problem.

- Gimme a sec.

How is that?

Is that a little bit better?

- Wow, maybe you should turn it on. (laughing)

- Yes.

How's that?

I've got voice isolation turning on right now.

Is that better?

- I dunno, flip it on. (laughing)

- It's so loud that I can barely hear you even though I've got you on the phone.

- Ilya, are you telling me that it's dangerous to do these kind of demos live?

(audience laughing) - So I've got voice isolation turned on, which is-- - There you go.

Now we got it. (audience applauding)

- There we go. - Perfect.

- Yeah, so all I have to do is enroll my voice, and now Teams will only let through my voice and not anybody else's voice.

And it's actually the same enrollment that's used by our profile on Teams Rooms to know who said what.

Oh hey, I saw a Zoom (indistinct) coming by.

- Wait, you said the Zoom people are coming?

Okay.

Well, it's just as easy to remove people from the meeting as well.

(audience laughing) Very, very easy.

Alright, thanks Ilya, that was a lot of fun.

(audience applauding) Let's just show a couple slides with a couple other things that we're bringing out into the Microsoft Teams Room experience.

Number one, you know, what we showed here is obviously going to be great when you have an in-room camera, but we're also going to start supporting automatic camera switching from other sources, including laptop cameras.

So if indeed somebody left the bowl of snacks in front of the room camera, we will then switch to people's laptop cameras to make sure that you always have a great sort of straight on view.

And using cloud AI will make sure that we always choose the best version of that view.

So this is some super cool stuff coming in the coming months.

Next up, we have two other things that we're going to announce, and this is really around making it easier to join meetings.

We have a new feature called Ultrasound Proximity Join, which uses the mic and speaker of your laptop when you're in an MTR to seamlessly just connect you without any fuss.

And we also have join with QR code, which is exactly what it sounds like.

And finally, you might have noticed that our MTR came to life.

And so what you actually saw is a dramatic reduction in time to deploy an MTR.

It usually takes hours or sometimes days, and you need special technicians and special equipment.

And what we have now shown you today is our brand new Autopilot in MTR feature.

And so when Nicole hit that button, that was all she had to do to actually deploy the MTR.

So in the same way that if you've ever set up a Windows PC and it's auto provisioned from the cloud, we're taking that same great technology and bringing it to the MTR.

And we counted, it took 13 minutes and 27 seconds, even on this hamster wheel internet.

Whoo! (audience applauding)

Alright, that's it for these demos.

Back to you, Nicole.

- All right, thanks Derek.

We did have someone else have to come out and help us push the button.

I think we had a tech issue with having it actually I think plugged in.

That being said, now we have largely been talking about collaboration across colleagues, but we know for many of our Teams users, your most important collaboration is with customers.

And by customers I mean anyone.

It could be a consumer calling their bank, it could be an employee calling their IT help desk.

We believe that technology should make it easy to engage with customers, enabling you to focus on what really matters, quickly resolving customer issues.

But according to Gartner, 43% of service reps say that they are overwhelmed by the number of systems and tools needed to complete their work.

We are committed to making customer engagement simpler and more powerful, thanks to Teams integrations and AI.

So no matter how complex your needs, there is a modern engagement solution to match the way you work.

So for starters, many of the 17 plus million Teams Phone users today are using it for customer facing work.

And that's why I'm excited to announce that we're adding advanced phone capabilities with the launch of the Queues app.

(audience applauding) The Queues app makes a workspace that you can manage all of your customer calls for both supervisors and the employees.

So it makes it so much easier to be able to handle and manage all of those incoming customer calls.

The Queues app is now available in private preview and will generally become available next quarter.

If you want to join the preview, just go to this link.

We would love to hear your feedback.

And next, for companies with existing CRM systems like Dynamics 365 or Salesforce, Copilot for Service unlocks your organization's customer data and enables AI powered insights to help you better serve your customers.

And for those most critical customer engagement needs, integrated experiences across Teams, Copilot for Service, and Dynamics 365 will help you create more knowledgeable and effective customer service teams. So now Derek, one more time, come up and show us how Teams and Copilot are helping customer facing roles.

- Awesome, thanks so much Nicole.

Okay, one more for you all.

Want to first show you the Queues app.

So as Nicole just said, we're releasing this in private preview now.

And this is giving us advanced capabilities inside of Teams Phone so that you can actually have a queue for all of your calls and then actually do some power user features as well for anybody that's customer facing within your organization.

You can see right now that I'm currently opted out from getting calls, but I have some calls waiting.

You can see sort of the longest waiting time.

So I'm going to go ahead and choose to opt in, at which point the flood gates will open and I should start receiving those calls.

Now when I go into one of the calls, you'll notice it's the same familiar Teams interface.

And this is really the power here.

Suppose I'm having a conversation with a customer and I need to, you know, maybe get an engineer or somebody else from the organization on the line, it's really easy for me to either transfer the call to them.

Or I can actually consult and then transfer where I connect with the person internally first, give them a little context, and then share that again with them.

So very, very easy to use, again, using sort of the core experience we already have inside of Teams Phone.

Okay, let's switch gears a little bit and talk briefly about Copilot for Customer Service.

Now this is really cool because it actually works on top of your existing system of record.

So in this case we're using Salesforce.

So I'm going to go ahead and actually join a customer call that I'm going to be using Teams for.

You know, and imagine we're in a situation where, you know, I'm actually working through the issue with the customer.

Now what's really cool is that I both have the ability to see details from inside of the call screen, so I can open up the Copilot for Customer Service panel and now it's giving me context on what this call is about.

You can see that it's connected to this specific case.

I can see the case number, I can see the contact ID, I can see, oh, okay, this is about ordering a bunch of tents.

So now we're in the tent business, apparently.

And then check this out.

I also can open that directly up in my system of record, in this case Salesforce, and it deep links directly into that card.

Now the other thing that's really cool is I can start to consult with Copilot for Service the way I would any other colleague.

And so I can ask questions and it's going to use the large library of data in the knowledge center that's available inside of Salesforce as well as SharePoint sites or any other place where I have a repository of knowledge, and I can ask questions.

Like for instance, hey, what do I do when the exterior of the tents are damaged?

Oh, if they're damaged you can replace all the damaged items if the order was delivered within 30 days.

So really easy to use this conversational interface, again, right in the midst of a Teams call with the customer to get the answers I need.

Now check this out, one thing to take this even further.

Maybe I just want to solve the problem.

I'm just going to tell Copilot for Service to remediate.

And it'll say, you know what?

I'll start the return policy process.

Can you confirm the order for Zenith tents with two day delivery?

Yes I can, I confirm that, and it goes ahead and actually completes the process to have these tents replaced.

How cool is that?

(audience applauding) Now for customers using Microsoft Dynamics 365 as their primary CRM platform, we've got a host of new capabilities and even deeper integrations inside of Teams, including things like the ability to share a link so your customer can join the call, and they don't even need to download the Teams app.

With the investments we're making like the Queues app as well as Copilot for Service and Dynamics 365, which we didn't even demo today, we're endeavoring to really transfer the way that customer-facing service is delivered.

I hope you enjoyed all the demos today.

I'm really going away now.

Thank you very much and have a great show.

Take care.

(audience applauding) - Alright, thank you all.

It is so much fun to have been able to present some of our latest innovations.

But of course 30 minutes is not enough to cover all the announcements that we're making this week.

So here's a quick little snapshot.

But please go check out the What's New in Teams blog.

It lists all of our latest innovations.

Final, this is a truly transformational time.

How we work and how we live will be completely reinvented.

We're on this journey together, and thank you for being a part of our team.

In closing, I'd just like us to take a look at a few of our customers who have harnessed the power of Teams and AI to lead this way in the new way of work.

Thank you all.

(audience applauding) (upbeat music) - What we did with the Digital Teaching Studio is we created a space where we replaced 300 empty seats and the cost associated with audiovisual equipment and technology to deliver them a first class digital experience.

- Copilot is able to plug into our own customer applications called Digital Interact.

We have literally hundreds of thousands of assets.

We can now search with more natural language all within Teams. - This is about leveraging tools like Copilot to help us be more strategic, more creative, and more responsive, where we can add the most amount of value for our clients.

And that's hugely exciting.

- Model Store integrated into Microsoft Teams definitely help to bridge some of these communication gaps between lab researchers and data scientists.

Copilot takes over the task of finding the models that you could use, and get the expert opinion.

- [Craig] We're using Microsoft Teams to communicate throughout the facility, to document photos, to do live chats, to remote people into the site for help.

Having a connected workforce enables folks to contribute in ways they never knew was possible.

(upbeat music)