Microsoft Teams Insider

Microsoft Teams Monthly Update - December 2025

• Tom Arbuthnot

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MVP Tom Arbuthnot shares all the latest Microsoft Teams and Copilot news and announcements in less than 15 minutes for December 2025.

Many thanks to AudioCodes for their continued support.


PowerPoint Deck

  • Anthropic models on by default in Microsoft 365 Copilot
  • GPT-5.2 in Microsoft 365 Copilot
  • Microsoft Copilot Roadmap
  • Agentic AI Foundation
  • Microsoft Planner Major Update in 2026
  • Express Voice Enrollment in Microsoft Teams
  • Teams Meeting Recap and Recording APIs
  • Teams Devices Update
  • Teams Roadmap
  • Events


Briefings


Teams Insider Podcasts

Hi and welcome back to the podcast. This is the audio of my monthly Teams update. Everything you need to know in under 15 minutes. If you want to see the full video and slides, you can catch over on LinkedIn or X or on Empowering Cloud along with the full PowerPoint deck and all the links. Hope you find it useful.

On with the show.

 Welcome to the Microsoft 365 and Copilot Enterprise Update December, 2025. Many thanks to AudioCodes for all their support. They are the benefactor this month. Really appreciate them. They have just released their new brand story, which is the future Runs on voice ai. And it's talking about how AI is going to have such an impact on the modern workplace and the strategic value of voice ai.

Really interesting messaging. You should check it out on AudioCodes.com. Uh, also, if we're going to their partner event in January in the uk, I will be speaking there as well. So it is the end of the year. Uh, traditionally the news slows down a little bit this time of year, but there's still plenty to talk about.

Some really important AI changes, particularly on the philanthropic models on Copilot. Also, some really interesting things coming through to teams and on the teams roadmap and some new devices as well. So let's jump in.

Firstly, if you haven't been onto Empowering.Cloud recently, we've got loads of really exciting content. Uh, Rolf summary of all the Ignite News in 24 minutes has been really popular. Thanks to Rolf for that. Uh, Tom Morgan had a really interesting session with the ACS team on voice AI agents. That's really interesting.

As the latest open AI voice models have just gone to Microsoft AI Foundry as well. I talked to Alistair Pidd at Pure IP around contact options from what's native in the box teams call queues

through to connect, extend, and unify solutions from partners through to Dynamics 365 contact center and where he saw those fit for different types of customers. We also had some really great podcasts recently, uh, Tom Richards at Cisco talking about the whole Cisco journey into Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Teams Rooms.

That was really enjoyable. And also working from sea with virgin voyages. That was really interesting.

And if you haven't seen them yet, we got all our interviews up from Microsoft Ignite. Uh, great conversations with various people at the show there really enjoyed that show and, uh, already looking forward to the next shows in 2026 into the Microsoft 365, and Copilot News.

Firstly, the biggest news is the anthropic models are going to be enabled by default in Microsoft 365 Copilot. So previously Microsoft brought these models in and they were still running on AWS via Anthropic, and you had to opt into Frontier and you had to agree that you were happy for anthropic to control your, and you had to agree that you were happy for anthropic to process your data.

Microsoft have now brought the models onto Azure. Uh, in turn, Microsoft has now brought the Anthropic models onto Azure. They are in Microsoft AI Foundry, but Microsoft have also brought Anthropic on as a data subprocess. So that means as part of your Microsoft 365 agreement, you agree that certain parties will be subprocesses of data and therefore they will process your data. And that means that unless you opt out, Microsoft will enable anthropic models by default, and your data will be going to anthropic to be processed.

I anticipate that Microsoft intend to bring all the anthropic models onto Microsoft infrastructure at some point, but right now for Microsoft 365, they are going to run outside of the Microsoft infrastructure. If you're happy with that, totally fine.

You have to do anything. If you're less happy with that, you've got until the 7th of January, it's enabled to toggle a switch and say, you would rather not this hap, you'd rather not have this happen.

If you're happy with that. Uh, and, and Microsoft have obviously vetted anthropic and vetted how they manage the data and are happy that the data is secure. , But if you do want to opt out, you've got until the 7th of January, there is a toggle switch available. More details in the message center message there for how to, turn it off. This doesn't apply to G-C-C-G-C-C-I or DOD and it doesn't apply to EU and UK tenants.

Um, so those. Those will be default off for this and they must opt in if they want the anthropic models. Even if you've previously opted into the frontier plan, this is a different thing you are agreeing to. So for EU and uh, UK tenants, you do want those models. There's some actions to take

we've seen a lot of competition this year with the frontier models and certainly it feels like OpenAI felt a bit of pressure this year. They have brought out, uh, ChatGPT5, then five one, then five two in very quick succession, and Microsoft are doing a great job of keeping up with those models being available in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

So good news is we already have 5.2 in Microsoft Copilot. Microsoft have also improved the selector experience and now it's auto instant or thinking, so just a bit easier to understand in terms of what you're choosing. Rather than choosing a model, you are choosing the behavior you want, and you can see in the screenshot here there's also a more model to explicitly currently choose the 5.2 models.

So 5.2 quick response, or 5.2 think deeper.

A bit of good news that came out of Microsoft Ignite. There is a new Microsoft 365 Copilot business SKU a license. This is exactly the same as the Microsoft 365 Copilot license, but it only attaches to people with business or business premium licenses, and it's slightly cheaper. $21 per use of a month list.

And Microsoft are currently doing a promotion on Copilot, so you can also get 15% off either on this or the main SKU as well. But it's nice to see Microsoft have a slightly lower cost skew that aligns to the slightly lower cost business licenses. It just makes more sense as an uplift. If you've already got Microsoft 365 business or business premium and you're using Copilot, you wanna switch over to these SKUs 'cause exactly the same experience, but you can save $9 on your list price there.

A quick look at the Microsoft 365 Copilot roadmap. Some really interesting things coming up at the moment. Voice chat is a really big deal for me being able to interact with Microsoft 365 Copilot with voice that is rolling out this month into January. Scheduling meetings and R RS VP meetings directly in Copilot chat.

So that is being in the chat experience and creating meetings and replying to meetings. Not sure. I'd have a lot of use cases for doing that in chat, but obviously this is laying the foundations for doing more and more of this with voice, which I am more excited about. Copilot dashboard has been improved.

More insights into Copilot chat and one of the nice ones for teams overlap is the custom AI summaries. So meeting recap obviously has a default way it summarizes the meeting. Soon you'll be able to set a custom prompt for how you like to have a meeting. Recap summary.

A bit more industry AI news. The Agentic AI Foundation has been established, which is an open standards initiative under the Linux Foundation. Uh, the primary founders are open ai, anthropic, and block, uh, but Microsoft, uh, AWS, Bloomberg, CloudFlare, and Google are all founding members as well. And this is essentially trying to bring together how people, architect agents.

So OpenAI is donating their agents md, which is a markdown file that standardizes how agents should behave. Uh, block is contributing goose, which is an agent framework. And,

bringing together these protocols like MCP we got from Anthropic agents, MD, and Goose is starting to standardize how we architect agents, and it's really nice to see Microsoft pushing in those standards as well.

A big update to be aware of in 2026 is Microsoft Planner. It is getting some major changes in early 2026. Uh, a number of features are being retired. There's a message and a message there with more details. We're also getting some new experiences, so things like in meetings, facilitator, being able to put tasks directly into planner.

Uh, if you didn't realize as well earlier in the year it was announced, that project online. It's getting retired next year as well. So Microsoft's are kind of consolidating this experience. Uh, more news to come on that. We do have a briefing coming probably in January that we'll give more details about what's happening in planner.

So if you're into planner, take a look at those message into messages and definitely keep an eye on this in Q1 next year

onto teams and ai workplace news. So immersive events are now generally available. This is bringing what was Microsoft Mesh fully into teams. So as of this point, Microsoft Mesh is retired and you can use these 3D virtual experiences on the teams app in PC or Mac, or you can go full on Meta Quest goggles 3D experience.

Uh, if you do want to host an immersive event, you do need team's premium license, but co-organizers or attendees only need that standards team's license.

This is one of my favorite features that is coming next year. Express voice enrollment for Microsoft Teams. So for things like rooms, knowing who you are based on your voice and your face for the transcript to be accurate, and also for voice isolation. Users need to go in settings and read out a prompt to enroll their voice and optionally enroll their face as well.

Obviously getting users to do that proactively can be challenging in terms of just getting 'em to pay attention to do it. This is going to automatically prompt the user so when they're in a meeting, if they've said enough words that the system has enough of a voice sample for them, it will say, Hey, would you like to enroll your voice?

And it will use the existing speech that the users, it will use the existing speech from the meeting. And it will use that existing speech to enroll the voice without the user having to do anything proactively. I really think this will up the number of people that enroll their voice, and therefore we'll get the best Ben, and therefore we'll get the benefits of the voice isolation features,

but also in teams meeting rooms intelligently understanding who said what during the meeting. And that is coming in February. It is on by default. Uh, but you can opt out if you prefer. This is smaller. Uh. This is an important one for a number of people. This is compliance call recording for call queues.

So previously this was a bit tricky. Now you can explicitly record call queues with your team certified compliance recording solution. The slight gotcha here is. Your particular ISV, your solution has to have done the work to enable this. So do talk to whoever provides your call recording to check. You can do it.

We did a podcast recently with mnemonics. They were one of the early ones on this bandwagon. They can fully support this, um, others will too, and I'm sure others will too. But if you are recording q,

but if you are in a compliance scenario or you just want recording of your call queues, you can now do that with the team Certified Recording solutions. A quick look at the teams roadmap and what's coming up. So if you haven't seen it, teams desktop client on Windows is adding a new sub-process specifically for cooling.

This should improve performance on the Windows desktop experience. If you do have hardened, uh, windows desktops with a third party antivirus and, and lockdown, be sure to talk to your end user compute team or your in InfoSec team to make sure they're not blocking that process. Uh, NDI, which is to do with events and broadcast is getting a bandwidth increase.

Lots of work has gone into events and.

Lots of work has gone into the event story this year, including ultra low latency and 10 A TP. Nice to see that NDI story getting an improvement too. Auto correct in the teams compose box one I definitely need. So this will automatically fix your typing if it knows what to fix. Interpreter agent in calls, we obviously have that in meeting.

That is the live translation, but we'll be getting that in teams calls, both VoIP and PSTN, and I've mentioned already that new, and I've mentioned already that, and I've mentioned already that improved voice and face enrollment. We are also going to get a dashboard and data controls in the Teams Admin Center for that in February.

This one's a bit more developer, but we have got generally available APIs to access teams recordings, teams transcriptions, and meeting recaps. This is really exciting because it unlocks the ability for third party integration or workflows into that. Into those scenarios. So for example, you could automatically pull the transcription, do your own summary and push it into your CRM system.

You can also pull the meeting recap summary. You can pull the mentions of yourself in the meeting recap. So push these into line of business apps, do all kinds of third party summaries.

Great to see this API coverage. I'm really excited to see what people come up with. Let's have a look at Devices news. We had some Android and MDEP updates, so Neats portfolio, the Gen two Neat Bar, neat board 50, neat Board Pro and Neats Pad, all got up to Android 13 certification. Poly also have brought the X 32, X 52 and X 72, their video bars and the Studio G 62, which is their Android compute unit up to Android 13.

And, uh, Polly, as we heard at Ignite, have committed to MDEP in the future

and they've actually said publicly that they're going to go as far as Android 17 on MDEP on their current video bars.

And they've actually said they're going to go as far as Android 17 on MD e, on their X 32, X 52, and X 72 and the G 62 as well. Really interesting to hear the first mention of Android 17 on MDEP. I've linked the PDF there, so more details if you want them. I've been keeping a close eye on MDEP and there's a lot more hardware coming in.

2026 had some good pre ISE briefings. There'll be a lot more news there. So stay tuned on that. In terms of new hardware, Jabra, have a new scheduler or a teams panel that is running MD depth, Android 13 single cat cable, multiple mounting options, all in the box, and a 50% recycled material.

Really nice to see Jabra expanding their portfolio and again, look out for more coming next year. And a new type of device as well. This was announced at Ignite, the Smart Doc. So Yealink are the first, the Yale Link Link hub will be the first one. It's still pending certification, but essentially this is a laptop dock with a screen running Android, running a teams client.

So you can do desk-based check-in, you can see who's reserved the desk. So it all ties into the places story and the automatic reservation or the. Ability to, or the ability to manually reserve a desk through Microsoft places.

Lastly, let's have a look at the events coming up. We have got the teams fireside chat kicking off in January with Graham and Jimmy. A bit of a look at the year ahead for teams and also for teams, rooms and devices. Microsoft have, uh, converged communications bootcamp training online that's gonna be focused around teams, rooms, converged comms, obviously ai, and that is available to partners and also end customers.

We have the regular a MA, the regular change call as well, and then we are rolling up. And then we are ramping up for ISE I'm really excited about ISE. There is a lot going on at ISE as far as Microsoft Teams and teams rooms is concerned. So there'll be a wealth of news there. And then if you're not going to ISE, we'll have recaps in the AI powered workplace, uh, section, which is focusing on MD d.

And,

and Michelle will also be joining us in the February fireside chat going over all the ISE News. Going out a little bit further, we have the Microsoft uc user, and then late Feb we have the Manchester user group and the London in Person user group as well. Hope, see you at some of those events both online and in person.

Do let me know if you're paying to be at ISC and at Hope. See you in London or Manchester as well.

That's it for this update and the end of the year. Thanks again to AudioCodes for all the support and thanks to everybody this year who has been engaged in the community, supported the community, all the experts that have done briefings and podcasts and videos.

Really appreciate all the support and all the community, and really excited for next year if you're having a break. Hope you have happy holidays and uh, see you in 2026.