With the current challenges to our economic climate and the move to flexibility in work patterns, companies are looking for innovative solutions to new situations. Microsoft is investing heavily into modern digital tools to supplant legacy ways of working. AI-powered technology shows promising results to enhance team collaboration, working productivity and to change our fundamental attitudes to work processes.

The advent of Microsoft Teams Premium, available now, brings to the table a host of new AI-powered collaboration tools to organisations. We take a look at some of the new features that are available now or are being made live this year.

Intelligent recap

Teams is introducing an intelligent recap feature which allows participants to save time when reviewing meeting recordings. With the help of AI, meetings will be divided into chapters to assist in viewing the most relevant content. This is now available for PowerPoint Live meeting recordings. The tool can also automatically generate chapters based on the meeting transcript.

Later this year, the AI tool will pick out key points and takeaways after the meeting with automatically created note. Follow-up actions will also be recommended automatically.

AI-powered live translation

Live captions has been a wonderful accessibility tool for those that wants to read captions in real-time. Now, Microsoft Teams Premium brings along AI-powered real-time translations for 40 spoken languages. This allows companies to save money on expensive translation services by introducing this in-application tool. Amazingly, only the meeting organiser needs to have Microsoft Teams Premium for all participants to enjoy the new feature.

Advanced security

Finally, security has been a hot topic and high priority for Microsoft when developing Teams Premium. With enhanced meeting protection safeguards now in place, organisers can be confident in secure meetings for sensitive discussions. Organisers can now add a watermarks over video feeds and screen shares to deter leaks and limit recording permissions. Significantly, IT-enabled users will be able to apply end-to-end encryption which disables core meeting features for absolute security.

Microsoft has introduced a host of new features to boost productivity, security, and collaboration on their widely used Teams app. We couldn’t list every change here but check out their official announcement to learn more.