From AI in Teams Premium to updates for Viva—here’s what’s new in Microsoft 365

Work smarter and better with Microsoft 365 this month. We’re bringing new AI-powered capabilities to Microsoft Teams Premium to make meetings more intelligent, personalized, and protected. Microsoft Viva Engage helps keep everyone aligned from the boardroom to the frontlines. New Microsoft Loop components in Whiteboard let your team collaborate and stay in sync before, during, and after your meetings.

Let’s dive in.

AI in Microsoft Teams Premium changes the productivity equation

Microsoft Teams Premium is now generally available and brings the most up-to-date technology—like the AI behind OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, to your Teams meetings—from small one-on-one check-ins to virtual appointments and webinars.

With intelligent recap, Teams Premium is integrating AI across your meetings experience, helping you get the information most important to you from every meeting and increasing productivity in new ways. In the coming months, AI-generated notes (powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5) will automatically generate key points and takeaways from every meeting, while AI-generated tasks will make follow-up easy by automatically creating and suggesting action items.

Personalized timeline markers, which only you can see, let you quickly find relevant parts in a meeting’s digital recording. Available today, you can see when you joined or left a meeting, and in the coming months, timeline markers will bookmark when during a meeting your name was mentioned, at what point a screen was shared, and who spoke (and when they spoke)—which lets you quickly catch up on anything you may have missed.

AI-generated chapters in PowerPoint Live, which is currently available, leverages this same technology to highlight and mark where different sections of a presentation begin and end, which makes it easier for you to find the content most relevant to you.

To help you create a best-in-class experience, Teams Premium now enables you to customize your Teams meetings. An important part of any meeting is to embody the company’s brand and culture. And now with branded meetings, you can add things like your company’s color scheme and logo to all your digital meetings. This adds an extra level of professionalism and distinction to all your online engagements. And meeting templates, which is now available, lets your IT admins create customizable settings, or templates, for all different types of digital meetings. In meetings where businesses’ sensitive information is discussed, you can use advanced meeting protection, which includes watermarks or restrictions on who can record a meeting, to add a layer of protection to help ensure your content and information remain secure. These capabilities give you more control over your day-to-day digital interactions and let you easily adapt to different business situations. Learn more about Teams Premium, including additional webinar and virtual appointment capabilities from our latest Microsoft 365 blog.

Viva Engage lets you lead, communicate, and connect from anywhere you work

New AI-driven capabilities in Microsoft Viva Engage connect leaders with employees, helping to close the productivity paranoia gap and scale culture across a digitally connected, distributed workforce.¹ Leadership Corner, which is now generally available for both Viva Engage and Viva suite users, empowers leaders and employees to connect and engage directly and effectively. Viva Engage delivers a personalized experience for every employee based on organizational structure and who they choose to follow. Leadership corner automatically aggregates posts and announcements, cascading them to appropriate employees and enabling employees to know what’s top of mind for their leaders. The Ask Me Anything (AMA) capability is a new event style that lets employees post questions, raise concerns, and engage leaders during planned events like All Hands meetings. AMA’s event features moderated questions and answers, enabling a modern take on the live town hall that can span hours or days to be inclusive of employees across time zones. 

Answers in Viva is another AI-enhanced communication and collaboration capability, which crowdsources information from across your business and leverages collective knowledge to make everybody better informed. Answers in Viva, which is available today, offers people a forum to ask questions, and then automatically surfaces answers to similar questions that have already been asked, and recommends a variety of subject matter experts in your organization who can answer a query. This capability will help cut down the churn for onboarding employees and lighten the burden for experts when others with similar knowledge can be automatically identified to answer questions.

We’re also excited to announce that Yammer is evolving. In addition to these new Viva capabilities, we also shared that Yammer will be fully rebranded into Viva Engage in 2023.

Collaborate in the flow of work with Loop components in Whiteboard

New Loop components in Whiteboard help keep everyone in the flow of work and in sync. Now, you can copy an existing Loop component from Teams, Outlook, and Word for the web and paste it into Whiteboard. Like all Loop components, changes made to a Loop component in Whiteboard sync across all the places that the Loop component lives.  

And the new timer capability in Whiteboard helps all participants in a meeting stay focused so facilitators can stay on track to achieve their agenda items. By setting a timer, meeting facilitators can visually highlight for all team members how much time remains for everyone to accomplish their tasks.

Looking forward

We’re bringing AI-powered capabilities to Microsoft 365 to help everyone stay connected, productive, and aligned on the most important work while reducing cost and complexity for IT professionals. Stay tuned for more new developments in March.

• Get started with Microsoft Teams Premium today.
• Enhance communication and connection with Microsoft Viva Engage.
• Collaborate in the flow of work with Microsoft Loop.

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¹Why Managers and Employees Can’t Agree on How Much Work Is Getting Done, WorkLab, Work Trend Index, Microsoft.