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Collab AI Research

How Microsoft is using science and research to invent the future of collaboration

Welcome to Collab AI

Collaboration is a central feature of how work gets done, involving coordination across people, tasks, and information sources. As AI systems increasingly contribute to shared workflows—synthesizing discussions, generating alternatives, maintaining context, and supporting group decision processes—understanding how humans and AI function together in group settings has become a scientific and operational priority. This shift raises new questions about evolving intent, shared grounding, and how collective reasoning unfolds across time and modalities.

Collab AI serves as Microsoft’s research center dedicated to studying collaborative processes and building intelligent systems capable of participating in them. The work spans empirical studies of team interaction, computational models of shared context, dialogic representations that capture how knowledge is co‑created, and methods for enabling AI to engage in multi‑party alignment and decision‑making. Featured papers, talks, and research artifacts explore emerging data, architectures, and evaluation frameworks for systems that operate not as single‑user tools, but as contributors to group activity.

Dive in to explore the science behind collaborative AI—and to engage with research aimed at creating intelligent systems that do more than assist individuals. The goal is AI that helps teams form shared purpose, sustain coherent dialogue, and work together more effectively than ever before across conversations, meetings, and organizational workflows.

Collab AI group header | two people conversing with another person displayed on a virtual mobile device

From One to Many

In recent years we’ve all lived through the transition to cloud computing, a sudden shift to remote work, and now the rapid rise of AI. Each individually has felt like a seismic event, but in reality they are all just chapters in one ongoing story: the digital evolution of collaboration.