Reimagining how we collaborate with Microsoft Teams and AI agents

In 2017, the introduction of Microsoft Teams revolutionized how our employees connected and collaborated.

Fast forward to 2025, and the employee experience landscape has evolved dramatically, both here at Microsoft and in the world at large.

“One of the most exciting things about AI is its potential to enhance collaboration across disciplines, product groups, time zones, and even languages. The benefits of these new agentic capabilities have been transformative for Microsoft and our customers.”

Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president, Microsoft Employee Experience

Teams remains the backbone of enterprise collaboration at Microsoft and for millions of information workers globally. But today, it’s AI-powered agents, intelligent experiences, and integrated tools like Microsoft Loop and Pages that are currently transforming how we work together. 

“One of the most exciting things about AI is its potential to enhance collaboration across disciplines, product groups, time zones, and even languages,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Employee Experience. “The benefits of these new agentic capabilities have been transformative for Microsoft and our customers.”

At Microsoft, we’ve embraced a new era of collaboration—one where human intelligence is augmented by AI-powered tools and capabilities that vastly improve our productivity and collaborative possibilities across our company. 

Key moments in Microsoft collaboration history

SharePoint and Microsoft 365 Copilot are the bookends of a collaboration journey that we have been on internally at Microsoft over the last 25 years.

Collaboration in 2025: A new paradigm 

At Microsoft, Teams is where we collaborate. But now the spotlight is shifting to different experiences that Teams enables, including AI-powered agents.

“(Microsoft Teams) is how we stay connected. It’s what brings our people, our content, and workflows together in this age of AI.

Sara Bush, principal PM manager, Microsoft Digital

Since the pandemic disrupted the world of work beginning in 2020, we’ve had to adjust to the fact that the modern workplace is no longer defined by an employee’s location or time zone. Instead, it’s defined by context, clarity, and connection. Our company’s internal transformation—powered by new agentic capabilities in Teams—reflects this shift: 

• AI-powered agents like Facilitator guide our meetings by managing our agendas and keeping track of time, and by ensuring inclusive participation by nudging quieter participants.
• Intelligent Recaps integrate seamlessly into Teams, delivering meeting insights that help our employees catch up on what they missed, review key information, and take follow-up actions quickly and effectively. 
• Loop components in Teams chats and meetings allow for dynamic brainstorming, insightful decision making, and easy content creation. 
• Microsoft 365 Copilot Pages provide a flexible canvas for sharing knowledge, updates, and project status in a visually engaging format. 

Teams remains the connective tissue that binds us together even as we have shifted into this new AI-powered world.

“It’s how we stay connected,” says Sara Bush, a principal PM manager in Microsoft Digital, noting that much of our work today is powered by new Microsoft 365 Copilot and other AI capabilities that have been rolled into Teams. “It’s what brings our people, our content, and workflows together in this age of AI. It continues to redefine how we plan, meet, decide, and drive impact internally here at Microsoft.”  

Agents in action: Copilot Studio accelerates enterprise AI

Teams is our cornerstone for collaboration but we use many other tools as well, including Microsoft Copilot Studio, our Power Platform-based stage for building, deploying, and managing enterprise level AI agents. These agents have moved beyond simple chatbots— they’re enabling our employees to rapidly build and deploy intelligent systems that can operate on behalf of individuals, teams, and entire organizations, revolutionizing the way we work.

Copilot Studio capabilities include: 

• Custom and autonomous agents that complete tasks, answer questions, and escalate work items based on enterprise data and context. 
• Multi-agent orchestration, where agents collaborate across systems. For example, a data agent retrieves insights from Fabric, a Microsoft 365 agent drafts documents, and an Azure AI agent schedules meetings—all orchestrated toward a single successful business outcome.
• Agent flows and templates that streamline structured tasks like IT support, recruitment, compliance checks, and contract reviews. 
• Governance and security built into the Power Platform admin center, enabling safe deployment and lifecycle management at scale. 

Microsoft employees have already used Copilot Studio to build agents that automate tasks as disparate as reconciling balance sheets, triaging support tickets, and simulating sales training conversations. These agents are embedded directly into Teams, SharePoint, and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat—meeting our employees where they work. 

Unlocking knowledge with Agent Builder in SharePoint

To further democratize AI, Microsoft has empowered employees to build retrieval agents using Agent Builder in SharePoint. These agents are designed to surface relevant information from organizational knowledge bases, making them ideal for onboarding, training, and cross-team collaboration.

By putting agent creation in the hands of employees, we’re empowering our employees to scale their knowledge access and reduce friction in their everyday work.

AI-powered collaboration scenarios across the enterprise

In a complex organization like Microsoft, collaboration takes many forms—and AI is increasingly embedded in each one. Beyond meetings and documents, here are some other common scenarios where AI is enhancing how we work together:

Cross-team knowledge discovery: Microsoft 365 Copilot helps our employees find relevant documents, conversations, and experts across silos. We use semantic search and retrieval agents to surface answers to common questions, like “How can I find a mentor?” or “Who has worked on generative AI pilots in the manufacturing sector?”

Change management: We use Copilot to draft adoption plans, to anticipate blockers, help with our localization of resources, to prepare readiness assets, and to evaluate the effectiveness of our campaigns.

Communications: AI assists our communications professionals with draft messaging, sentiment analysis, and suggests optimal timing and formats for announcements.

New employee onboarding: AI-powered agents create adaptive onboarding paths for our new employees, answering their real-time questions and recommending mentors and resources based on their goals and activity.

Customer and partner collaboration: Our sellers use Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales to seamlessly integrate with Dynamics 365 Sales, draft communications, and coordinate their partner engagements across geographies and business units.

Engineering teams: Our product managers and software engineers are using Loop components to co-author specs and track decisions in real time, reducing email churn and version confusion. 

Across all disciplineswe’re seeing employees use Copilot Pages to refine AI-generated ideas and help accelerate ideation, creativity, and solution delivery.  These scenarios demonstrate how AI is becoming a trusted partner across Microsoft—we’re using it to amplify our human capabilities, reduce friction, and unlock new levels of productivity.

“For organizations looking to transform their own collaboration culture, the path is clear—embrace AI and empower your people with agentic capabilities, and, at the organizational level, build on an enterprise collaboration platform that scales, like Microsoft Teams.”

Matt Hempey, partner group product manager, Microsoft Digital

The future of collaboration

Our agentic journey here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, and across Microsoft is ongoing, and our goal is to ensure that our employees—and by extension, the employees of our customer—are the most productive in the world. To enable that vision, we’re working hard to: 

• Integrate and extend AI across Teams and our entire collaboration stack 
• Integrate Loop and Pages more deeply into everyday workflows and provide the awareness and training necessary for our employees to incorporate these new tools into their workflows
• Empower employees to build and deploy their own agents with Copilot Studio and SharePoint

“For organizations looking to transform their own collaboration culture, the path is clear,” says Matt Hempey, partner group product manager. “Embrace AI and empower your people with agentic capabilities, and, at the organizational level, build on an enterprise collaboration platform that scales, like Microsoft Teams.”