Last week, I attended the Microsoft 365 Community Conference in Orlando. Approximately 3,000 attendees came together to hear from their M365 admin peers along with senior product leaders from Microsoft and key partners. The agenda focused on the Microsoft 365 suite, with over 200 sessions primarily on M365 Copilot, SharePoint, and Teams.

Here are my key takeaways:

Unsurprisingly, AI dominated most of the sessions and conversations. Microsoft emphasized its commitment to empowering users through AI-driven collaboration, content creation, and governance. Here are some of the highlights:

  • Copilot Cowork. Powered by Anthropic’s Claude, Copilot Cowork helps users take action with AI. Users can describe an outcome that they want or use a default prompt to organize their inboxes, prep for meetings, or conduct research.
  • Multimodel support for improved work output. M365 Copilot now supports multimodel analysis including “Critique,” which allows users to generate work with one large language model (LLM) and review/interrogate that work with a second LLM to identify areas of improvement.
  • Microsoft Teams is positioned as the key hub for human and AI collaboration. Microsoft envisions Teams as a way to shift meetings from where people talk to where work gets done.
    • The Microsoft Teams Facilitator agent continues to evolve. No longer just a note-taking and time keeping assistant, Facilitator will become a more active participant in a meeting. Users will be able to speak to the agent to ask questions, such as how much time is left. The Facilitator agent can identify issues in an environment, such as the wrong room size and suggest where to rebook. People joining a meeting late can ask Facilitator to quickly get them caught up.
    • The Forrester AI app for Microsoft Teams is an example of this human and AI collaboration in action. Forrester’s trusted research and expertise is available in the context of Teams meetings and chats. The Forrester AI app for Microsoft Teams provides insights, advice, and best practices grounded in Forrester’s proprietary research and data not available to public AI models. Ask Forrester AI your questions and get guidance, including the citations to the source research, all within the context of MS Teams.
  • Microsoft SharePoint gets more AI-powered governance and creation skills. According to Microsoft, SharePoint is the top source of knowledge to ground M365 Copilot, but many SharePoint customers recognize that their sites and libraries are not optimized for AI. Microsoft intends to provide additional tools to their clients to improve their AI experiences, including:
    • Content governance. Enhancements to SharePoint Advanced Management help admins identify oversharing, broken permission inheritances, and content sprawl to ensure that M365 Copilot (as well as search) doesn’t reveal information that users are not entitled to see.
    • Content generation and curation within SharePoint. Entire sites or pages can now be created with agents, such as a SharePoint page agent that can generate a page from a document or a conversation in Teams. Curation, often a burden for intranet administrators, can now be assisted with AI to retire low-activity pages, find gaps in content by analyzing user search logs, and find and fix broken links on a page.
    • Use Agent Skills to provide specific instructions and resources to agent. Skills (expressed as markdown files) can be used to package specific domain expertise into reusable, portable packages and extend agent capabilities without changing their core instructions. For example, a user that routinely generates a consistent set of documents for each a new client deal opportunity can invoke the “new deal room” skill to generate the document library, templates, and folder structure.
  • Agent 365 becomes the control plane for AI agents. First announced at Microsoft Ignite in 2025, Agent 365 will soon become generally available to licensed customers as a centralized control plane for managing AI agents. This includes:
    • Agent registry. Admins can monitor agent activity, their access permissions, and security policies, including third-party agents provided by other software platforms.
    • Agent governance. Tools with heat maps can visualize how agents interact with business groups and sites, allowing admins to block unauthorized or shadow AI tools.
    • Proactive monitoring. Features such as Meeting Monitor will help resolve issues in advance, such as ensuring system reliability during critical events like an all-hands company meeting.
  • SharePoint Embedded continues to gain traction. SharePoint Embedded — a headless/API-only content platform optimized for document-heavy applications — continues to attract not only software providers but also enterprises looking to migrate or modernize their existing content management environment. Among ISVs, the most recent announcement was from AODocs. AODocs has long provided enriched document management capabilities in the Google Workspace ecosystem but in recent years has established a presence in Microsoft environments, as well. Its support for SharePoint Embedded as a back end for document storage allows its customers to store their content in their own Microsoft tenant. This ensures that any security and governance policies, such as those configured in Microsoft Purview, extend to the content while benefiting from the rigorous document control features provided by AODocs.

A big thank you to the Microsoft executive sponsors and analyst relations team for hosting myself and other industry analysts for the first time at this M365 community event!

Forrester clients wanting to talk more about the highlights of the event, or to understand how to better get their content management practices more AI-ready, are welcome to reach out and request a guidance session.