Commsverse 2025 kicks off for day two today, with yesterday's proceedings revealing a lot about what the industry was focusing on.
The event has seen hundreds of UC and AV industry professionals gather at Mercedes Benz World outside London to discuss everything Microsoft 365 and its associated suite.
In yesterday's opening keynote, Microsoft guru Tom Arbuthnot and Jon Zoltie of sponsor AudioCodes told attendees that trends show everyone wants to stay in the Microsoft ecosystem and just "build out within that."
Indeed, a recent IDC report suggested that Microsoft now accounts for 46% of the UC and collaboration space. Recent announcements from Barclays show that companies use its various services to build large parts of their tech stack.
However, despite the multiple uses of the Microsoft suite, from CCaaS to telephony, when it was put to attendees, there was one thing that seemingly dominated the conversation.
Indeed, at a session called "Ask the MVPs and Microsoft Anything about Microsoft Teams", the 45-minute conversation focused solely on AI Copilot.
When UC Today spoke to Arbuthnot, who helped host the session to a packed room, about the thing that really cut through from the talk, he said, "Clearly the main focus is about ROI on AI".
Yet despite the conversation focusing on AI, many aspects, from ROI to implementing Copilot governance, were discussed.
Therefore, we've wrapped up the main topics that were brought up through the talk.
Copilot ROI and Business Value
The challenge of demonstrating return on investment for Microsoft 365 Copilot dominated much of the conversation, with attendees expressing frustration about justifying the $30 per user monthly cost to their finance teams and senior leadership.
The MVPs acknowledged that while the value proposition is clear to power users who leverage AI daily, translating this into measurable business metrics remains a significant challenge for most organizations.
CloudWay CEO Ståle Hansen emphasized that successful ROI measurement requires a systematic approach, explaining:
"We need to measure KPIs and where do we find them? Viva Insights Premium."
He noted that organizations with more than 50 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses automatically receive Viva Insights Premium, providing them with the analytics capabilities needed to demonstrate value through organizational measurement and department-level drill-downs.
However, Hansen stressed that ROI measurement goes beyond simple usage statistics, warning that organizations often fail because "they give users the Copilot license and say, yeah, this is great. You go, go, have fun. They use it once, but then they forget about it." The real value, he argued, comes from sustained engagement and proper training.
This feeds into the point discussed that most companies are buying AI Copilots, but due to their implementation or lack of understanding of it, are only using it for things like meeting transcriptions or search. This makes tying savings made to just that use case more difficult.
Agents and Advanced AI Capabilities
But it's not just user understanding that was blamed for stalling deeper usage. The conversation around Microsoft's agent capabilities revealed a current gap between expectations and practical deployment.
"One of the first things I did when I got the Copilot license was to ask it within teams to pull stuff out of my calendar, like whenever my next free slot is," Zach Bennett, Principal Architect at LoopUp, said.
"It responded to me saying, 'To find out when you next have space in your Teams calendar, you should check your calendar.'"
Many attendees echoed this statement by expressing interest in building custom agents that could work across the suite to handle complex, organization-specific tasks.
However, Hansen explained that this agent-like system can be built into the existing suite if you know how to orchestrate the process.
"We have the knowledge, we have the information, but it takes us an hour to get that all into word," Hansen said.
"So we need to talk beyond the tool and more about the process and what it can bring you."
