My Takeaways from Ignite 2023

Last week I attended  Microsoft Ignite in Seattle. With more than 4,500 in-person attendees including customers, partners, and developers and many more joining virtually; the energy was palpable as Microsoft launched what it calls “the age of Copilots”. Here are the key announcements related to Microsoft’s collaboration apps and my takeaways from the event (Please refer to Microsoft's website and blogs for additional information including product licensing, pricing, and availability).

• Microsoft’s AI vision – One could have easily called Ignite 2023 the “Copilot event” as Microsoft reaffirmed its vast AI vision. With 100 new updates announced over two days, many of which were AI-led, Microsoft is moving at a fast and furious pace. As Satya Nadella summed it up, “We are the Copilot company. We believe in a future where there will be a Copilot for everyone and everything you do.”
• Your Copilot, your way – Copilot Studio, a low-code tool, designed to customize Copilot to meet each organization's unique needs and workflows brings together a set of conversational AI capabilities—from custom GPTs, generative AI plugins, and manual topics. It is clear that Microsoft is not just democratizing AI but also committed to making it usable by leading with customized experiences.
• Copilot across the stack – Microsoft is not just extending Copilot across its stack, it is also building Copilots for business functions to ensure that users don’t have to start from scratch. Copilot for Sales was announced earlier this year. At Ignite, Microsoft announced Copilot for Service for contact center agents. In the future, we can expect to see Copilot for HR, Copilot for finance, and so on.
• Frontline workers – While many communication platforms in the market focus predominantly on knowledge workers, Microsoft has been very committed to developing solutions for frontline workers. Starting next month, all Microsoft 365 F3 Licenses will include Microsoft Copilot allowing AI-powered web searches, answers, and content generation.
• Proving the business value – AI is moving beyond the hype cycle and delivering value. Copilot for Microsoft 365 is available today at a whopping $30 per user per month. Jared Spataro, Corporate VP of Modern Work & Business Applications at Microsoft, addressed what’s on everyone’s mind – is Copilot worth it? He shared stats from Microsoft's 2023 Work Trend Index that show users are seeing measurable gains. 77% of the people who have used Copilot said they don’t want to give it up, 70% said Copilot made them more productive, and 68% said it improved the quality of their work.  
• Security and privacy – Microsoft is building everything with security and privacy in mind. When users are signed into Copilot with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), they get commercial data protection for free which means chat data isn’t saved, Microsoft has no eyes-on access, and user data isn’t used to train the models.
• Teams is moving full speed ahead – Microsoft announced that Teams has hit a new milestone of 320 million users and 17M+ Teams Phone PSTN-enabled users. Teams Premium is gaining fast adoption too and is already being used by 10K+ customers. Teams is also the dominant cloud platform for meeting rooms today and growing at a good pace. Microsoft reported 2X active Teams Room devices growth over the last 18 months. Teams continues to innovate and build on delivering intelligent audio, video, and content collaboration experiences. The demo of Decorate your Background feature (i.e unclutter your room) got an excited applause from the crowd. Other new capabilities include Voice Isolation (AI-driven noise reduction feature,) expansion of Intelligent Speaker recognition (using microphones in the existing hardware to attribute spoken meeting contributions to individual attendees in the transcript), Cloud Intelliframe  (enhanced video gallery experience leveraging Microsoft Cloud AI), Real-time note taking in meetings, Intelligent recap integration with Copilot (allows users to ask specific questions about the meeting), Teams Phone Shared calling, Copilot in Teams Meetings without transcript retention, Copilot compose in Teams chat/channels, Copilot in Whiteboard that turns spoken ideas/topics in a meeting into a visual collaboration space in Whiteboard. The list is long. It's important to note that Microsoft is not the first to market with many of these capabilities. However, it has the distinct advantage of having the broadest reach in the market and a large installed base of users. With each new feature, the benefits of the platform add up for customers.
• Net new growth opportunities with BYOD – In her session, Nicole Herskowitz, VP of Microsoft Teams & M365 Platform, shared a key Frost & Sullivan stat that <15% of the meeting spaces today are video-enabled. BYOD has been a big part of meeting rooms and is here to stay. This year, Microsoft has taken several initiatives to make BYOD spaces more discoverable for IT and to deliver a better experience for users. This is a net new growth opportunity for Teams licenses. Sandhya Rao, Principal Group Product Manager at Microsoft Teams Devices, and Christian Schacht, Principal Product Manager Lead at Microsoft Teams, put together a demo for me of the new shared display mode. Teams now detects when you are connected to an A/V peripheral and external display in a BYOD room. As the user starts a Teams meeting, there is a prompt to “Join with room audio.” This automatically connects to the A/V in the room and optimizes the gallery and shared content for in-room participants. It also minimizes the personal information that others can see from other windows the user might have open on their laptop. The user can then control what others in the room can see on the shared display versus what they see (e.g. with PowerPoint Live, participants will see the slide show while the presenter can see notes). Intelligent speakers, previously only available for Teams Rooms, is now coming to BYOD rooms. Also launched is a new entry-level Teams Rooms at $799, that allows users to upgrade a BYOD space to a full-blown Teams Rooms on Windows with the MAXHUB XCore Kit. Additional partners will also announce sub $1K offerings in the coming months, expanding the ecosystem and encouraging users to turn BYOD rooms to Teams Rooms at scale.
• What was missing – I did not hear any mention of Microsoft Places which was announced last year. Complexities of Hybrid work and return to office are real-world challenges that businesses are facing. Intelligent booking and space scheduling, wayfinding, space insights, and optimization are critical to bringing people back into the office and meeting rooms.
• Growing complexity  – As Microsoft expands its portfolio and leads with multiple Copilots, the complexity has grown too. While Teams was not built for simplicity, the overall stack is becoming increasingly complex to navigate. Confusing naming/branding extends into complex and pricey licensing schemes that will elongate sales cycles and tech acquisition for many enterprises. It is also not clear, how much of the innovation going forward will be made available as part of the core Teams E3/E5 license versus Teams Premium or the Copilot license(s).

While I haven't covered everything from Ignite in this article (Surface Hub 3 Teams Rooms on Windows,  Mesh for enhanced meetings experience), overall I was very impressed. I was also surprised to hear so much all together at a single event. Clearly, Microsoft is firing all engines to create a comprehensive AI-powered stack. Microsoft's unprecedented innovation velocity, an astute choice of growth vectors, the ability to identify new target customer segments, support for a broad range of integrations, and a robust device partner ecosystem positions Teams to continue its dominance as the leading communications and collaboration platform.