It started with a comedian who had no audience.
In early 2020, as the world was shutting down, Jaron Lanier, Microsoft Research scientist and the man who coined the term “virtual reality,” found himself with a problem. He occasionally played in the house band on Stephen Colbert’s late-night talk show. COVID-19 had put a stop to that. The bigger problem, as Lanier saw it, was Colbert himself: trying to deliver a monologue to a camera in an empty room.
“Stephen was having a really hard time being a comedian without an audience,” Lanier told Microsoft WorkLab. “I thought, ‘What if we could make a virtual audience so he could see people in real time reacting?'”
He reached across Microsoft’s network of researchers, behavioural psychologists and engineers. Within weeks, he had a prototype. That prototype became Together Mode, launched in Microsoft Teams in July 2020, and it quickly became one of the most recognisable features of the pandemic-era collaboration boom.
This month, Microsoft confirmed it is switching it off.
Microsoft Teams Together Mode Retirement: What Changes in June 2026
Microsoft’s message centre notification MC1296478, issued on 30 April, confirmed that Together Mode retires from Microsoft Teams starting in early June, completing by late June. Custom scenes, seat assignments, and the Together Mode toggle in the View menu all go with it. The Gallery view, which displays up to 49 participants at once, becomes the sole primary layout for multi-participant meetings.
Katarina Tranker, Product Manager on the Teams team, explained the decision on the Microsoft Community Hub this week:
“We’re always working to make meetings easier to join, simpler to manage, and better for everyone, regardless of device or network conditions. As part of that ongoing effort, we’re retiring Together mode in Microsoft Teams.”
Microsoft gave three reasons: simplifying the meeting experience, reducing backend complexity, and redirecting engineering investment toward “improvements that benefit every Teams meeting, such as video quality, stability, and performance.” Tranker added that the Gallery view now fully meets the core need Together Mode was built to address: keeping the right people visible in a meeting.
The Research Behind Microsoft Teams Together Mode
Together Mode was not a gimmick. It drew on genuine science about why video calls felt so draining, at a moment when everyone suddenly needed them not to be.
Stanford University professor Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab, had spent decades studying how video calls affect cognition and social perception. He and Lanier diagnosed the core problem: the standard grid of boxes strips out the social cues that make conversation feel natural. Eye contact, spatial awareness, the sense of a shared room: the grid erases all of it.
Together Mode used AI to place participants in a shared virtual space: an auditorium, a coffee bar, a seminar room. In early tests, the effect struck observers immediately. Microsoft Research cognitive scientist Mary Czerwinski said at launch that the approach would have “a dramatic effect in terms of increasing social cohesion, respect and trust.”
Lanier put it in simpler terms: “One of the first things we noticed, even with the earliest tests of Together mode, was the lightness people felt when they used it. People smiled. They laughed.”
Teams was, at this point, a phenomenon. Usage grew from 32 million to 145 million monthly active users between March 2020 and April 2021. Together Mode launched into that surge, and the initial response was enthusiastic.
Why Microsoft Teams Together Mode Never Became a Habit
The honest answer is that most people tried it a couple of times and went back to the grid.
Tony Redmond at Office 365 for IT Pros explained: “Together mode is the kind of thing that people try once or twice before they conclude that it’s a feature that they don’t need to use. I haven’t attended a meeting that used Together mode in years.” Reaction on the Microsoft Community Hub since the announcement has been similar: the loss is surprising, but not mourned.
The practical issue was context. Together Mode worked well in structured, high-attendance scenarios: large team meetings, classroom settings, all-hands calls. In everyday small group calls, switching layouts added friction, and the AI segmentation occasionally produced an uncanny result. As pandemic urgency faded and hybrid work settled into routine, the Gallery view proved good enough for most people most of the time.
Teams Together Mode and Microsoft’s Copilot Strategy in 2026
The retirement makes more sense when you look at where Microsoft is directing its engineering effort in Teams. The 2026 roadmap is heavily weighted toward Copilot: AI-generated meeting recaps that work without saved recordings, an AI Facilitator that surfaces answers to questions raised mid-meeting, and Interactive Agents for meetings arriving in September. As Redmond noted, the effort that went into maintaining Together Mode “can be used more productively to build yet another Microsoft 365 Copilot feature.”
There is a pricing dimension worth noting for IT buyers. Microsoft 365 plans rise across the board from July 2026, and the version of Teams that enterprise customers pay more for from July will offer fewer meeting layout options than it does today. For organisations using custom Together Mode scenes for brand presence in meetings, Microsoft recommends branded backgrounds, including frosted glass options, as the replacement.
What the Together Mode Retirement Tells Us About How Collaboration Has Changed
Together Mode tried to solve a specific problem: the social isolation of full-time remote work during a once-in-a-generation crisis. It drew on real research, built by serious people, and launched at the right moment. None of that made it stick.
The gap between its ambition and its adoption reflects how sharply collaboration priorities have shifted since 2020. The problem then was presence: organisations reached for anything that could recreate a sense of shared space. The problem in 2026 is different. Workers are not struggling to feel like they are in the same room. They are drowning in meetings, chasing context across tools, and trying to act on information faster than it arrives. The features that earn engineering investment now are the ones that reduce that burden. Together Mode gave people a feeling. Copilot gives them time back, and that is where Microsoft has decided to put its chips.
Related Reading:
