Welcome to the forefront of conversational AI as we explore the fascinating world of AI chatbots in our dedicated blog series. Discover the latest advancements, applications, and strategies that propel the evolution of chatbot technology. From enhancing customer interactions to streamlining business processes, these articles delve into the innovative ways artificial intelligence is shaping the landscape of automated conversational agents. Whether you’re a business owner, developer, or simply intrigued by the future of interactive technology, join us on this journey to unravel the transformative power and endless possibilities of AI chatbots.
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Keith Boyd
Microsoft Digital stories
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.”
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. 
SharePoint
Enterprise content management with document sharing, intranet portals, and workflow automation.
Office 365
Unified cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools.                     
Microsoft Teams
Centralized collaboration hub integrating chat, meetings, calls, file sharing, and apps.
Microsoft Viva
Employee experience platform integrating communications, knowledge, learning, and insights.
Microsoft Loop
Real-time co-authoring across apps with portable components, enhancing fluid collaboration.
Copilot Studio
Creation of custom AI copilots using low-code tools, integrating with business data and workflows.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Pages
AI-powered content creation and knowledge management within Microsoft 365.
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.
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. It continues to redefine how we plan, meet, decide, and drive impact internally here at Microsoft.”  
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: 
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.”  
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: 
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. 
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.
Choosing which agent to use
Use Agent Builder in SharePoint when you need a lightweight, embedded experience that surfaces answers from SharePoint-hosted content—ideal for quick, site-specific help. Choose Copilot Studio when you need to build more robust, multi-source agents that can orchestrate actions, integrate with external systems, and scale across Teams, Outlook, and other Microsoft 365 surfaces.
It’s easy to build useful retrieval agents in SharePoint:
A few ways that teams across Microsoft are using these agents today include:
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.
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.”
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: 
“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.”
Key takeaways
Here are some tips for transforming collaboration at your organization using Microsoft Teams and our agentic Microsoft tools:
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