2024 - The Year of Collaborative AI

It is an exciting time for building collaboration solutions in Microsoft 365 to help every person and organization achieve more. It became clear this year that the Future of Work will be people and AI working together seamlessly and securely to get more done and help every member of the team grow.

As with the cloud journey, we are grateful to be on the AI journey with Best Community in Tech. It was fun to share and learn at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference, Build, Ignite, ESPC, and more events around the world how customers are embracing AI and hear where you want us to go next. Check out the events around the world at communitydays.org and I hope to see you at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference on May 6-8, 2025.

This was our busiest year yet with improvements in Microsoft 365 in both fundamentals - security, reliability, performance, usability, and more – and innovations led by Microsoft 365 Copilot. You have been clear to deliver the transformation with our collaborative AI tools you need three things - guidance on ROI, governance, and change management - which we have updated on Worklab and adoption.microsoft.com. Keep the feedback coming.

Below are just a few of the highlights for the year in the Microsoft 365 Platform: Microsoft 365 Copilot for AI, Teams for collaboration, and SharePoint for content management.

Microsoft 365 Copilot – In September, we announced Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2 as the UI for AI including a leap in performance and relevance, the availability of Copilot Pages, and a variety of new application features. In November, we followed this up with our Ignite Copilot News including Copilot actions; new agent features in SharePoint, Teams, and Planner; and improved governance capabilities like SharePoint Advanced Management and Copilot Analytics. We enhanced Copilot Stuido - including enabling custom agents using SharePoint content and other data sources in both Copilot and Teams.

Teams – It was a big year for both evolving the Teams UX as the hub for teamwork bringing people and AI together and delivering new value in Teams Phone, Rooms, and Premium as covered in monthly updates to our Teams Blog. A big focus was increasing the simplicity and flexibility of the Team user experience for a wide range of users including developer news at Build in May and our new customizable chat and channels experience in October. We continue to evolve Teams as a collaboration hub with new OneDrive, Planner, and Engage experiences in Teams. Per above, we are advancing the next wave of collaborative AI with the Facilitator, Interpreter, and Project Manager agents in Teams.

SharePoint – SharePoint continued to grow as the most flexible content solution - which is even more critical in the AI era. The SharePoint platform powers numerous experiences across Microsoft including our latest - Copilot Pages - as well as many 3rd-party ISV solutions with the new SharePoint Embedded. We enhanced the files UX with OneDrive with a fast, intuitive view of all your files, and the site UX with SharePoint branding, co-authoring, flexible layouts, design ideas, Copilot integration and more. We will recap all the SharePoint updates at our upcoming January SharePoint Event. Building on the base experience, we released new SharePoint content processing, Backup, Archive, and much more working with partners across the industry.

I often get asked about my favorite feature. It is hard to pick but reflecting on our journey with collaboration, the highlight was SharePoint Agents. Our goal is to make it as easy to create, share, and secure agents as we did intranet sites with your most valuable information so we can help everyone realize the potential of collaborative AI. Thank you again for all your support and for being part of the best community in tech! Happy Holidays and New Year!

Jeff