Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Enterprise AI pilots are stalling in every industry I work with, and the buyers themselves can tell you why. They aren’t buying AI capability. They’re buying organizational trust at scale, with the least possible integration debt. The vendors still selling capability to IT leaders are losing deals to the vendors selling trust.

Learn what employee productivity really means, the metrics leaders track, and a step-by-step framework to measure it accurately.

Each quarter, we ask some of our R&D teams to take a week away from the day-to-day to experiment and innovate on AI. We call this AI Builders Week, and it helps fuel our AI transformation. In past quarters, we’ve focused on building for individual workflows — how do we each get faster and more productive by inserting AI into different parts of our daily to-dos?

Tomer Cohen spent 14 years at LinkedIn, six of them as Chief Product Officer. At Canvas 26, he discussed the rise of the full-stack builder — what it means for roles, org charts, and coordination — and named the collaboration challenge nobody has cracked yet. In fall 2022, Tomer Cohen sat in a conference room in Redmond and watched a demo of GPT-4 — several months before the rest of the market would see it.

This August, we are focusing on removing administrative friction from your day-to-day operations and helping your team work more smoothly. We’ve further improved ELI – our AI-powered assistant – and recently held a webinar where we demoed its newest capabilities now available to you.

An attendant console for Microsoft Teams is a dedicated call-handling interface that lets receptionists manage high call volumes directly inside Teams. It combines caller identification, directory search, real-time presence, calendar visibility, and one-click transfers in a single view, so front-desk teams can connect each caller to the right person on the first try instead of searching across three or four separate windows.

Managing contractors through disconnected spreadsheets, emails, payroll platforms, and project tools creates avoidable operational gaps. Onboarding requirements vary between departments, important documents become difficult to locate, and contractors may begin work without clear responsibilities, deadlines, or project context. Managers are also left without a reliable view of contractor availability, logged hours, costs, outstanding approvals, and delivery risks.