By Guest contributor |
For years, Microsoft has been setting the pace for collaboration technology. And at its flagship customer event Ignite in November 2025, one thing was made crystal clear: the future of work will be shaped by AI-powered experiences and Microsoft Teams.
With new features for Teams like Facilitator and Work IQ as an intelligence layer that integrates with Microsoft 365, Microsoft is redefining how people work and collaborate efficiently. But the real impact of these collaboration-fuelling innovations depends on people consistently using Teams and Teams Rooms.
This is where Pexip’s long-term partnership with Microsoft becomes essential.
Well before the Covid-19 pandemic, Pexip made it possible to join Teams meetings from a variety of incompatible devices thanks to its class-leading Cloud Video Interop (CVI) technology implementation. Recently, we’ve also made it possible for Teams Rooms to join a wide range of third-party meetings, such as Zoom, Google Meet and many others, and with much higher quality and better user experiences than previously possible. For many organisations, this removes blockers that have prevented them from making Teams Rooms the standard for all their meeting rooms.
At Ignite, Microsoft described the collaboration industry’s evolution as a series of waves. The shift to cloud computing made communication highly scalable. That foundation enabled the rapid deployment of remote work during the pandemic, which in turn moved virtually all our meetings and chats into the cloud.
All that activity in the cloud enables AI through Microsoft Copilot, which can reason over the information and make people more productive. Each wave builds off the one before it, bringing us to where we are today – with Teams as our go-to AI-powered platform for work.
Still, even with all the changes happening in technology, some fundamental customer expectations remain consistent. Therefore, Microsoft continues to invest in what enterprises value most: secure technology they can trust, simple experiences people will actually use, and smart capabilities that help them increase productivity.
With significant growth in Teams Rooms deployments, we often hear from customers that they cannot easily use their rooms for all their meetings. Usability challenges are often due to practical constraints. Teams Rooms is perfect when joining Teams meetings, but they do not provide the same quality when they are used to join third-party meetings; third-party meetings also result in inconsistent user experiences, causing people to resort to their laptops, often with third-party meeting apps on them; and there are challenges when migrating from other ecosystems without disrupting user experiences.
When these situations play out, Teams Rooms may go underused, causing organisations to fail to realise the value from their investments and risk generating less of the high-quality meeting data that makes Copilot so great.
Pexip and Microsoft have collaborated for nearly a decade – first on the implementation of CVI and now through expanded Teams Rooms interoperability capabilities by adding cross-platform meetings via session initiation protocol. Our partnership is grounded in making Teams and Teams Rooms more useful throughout an organisation.
That alignment matters even more today. As Microsoft shifts towards AI-first collaboration, customers expect their meeting rooms to work for every meeting: internal, external and cross-platform. By removing interoperability blockers, Pexip contributes to driving room usage and strengthening the Teams ecosystem. For organisations, this means that rooms become more useful and Teams becomes the natural default for everyday collaboration. When Teams Rooms is part of everyday workflows, people naturally start to benefit even more from using Facilitator and Copilot.
A recent customer example highlights this in practice. The organisation migrated more than 700 rooms from Zoom to Teams, and Pexip became a catalyst for the migration by providing great user experiences throughout its journey. As a result, the customer also decided to move faster in their Copilot journey, more rapidly extracting the full value of their Microsoft 365 investment.
For organisations looking to accelerate their Microsoft collaboration and AI strategies, we emphasise three key priorities: ensuring every room can join any meeting, because cross-platform access is key to user experience and avoiding shadow IT; making experiences consistent and simple, because reliability builds trust and trust builds happy users; and selecting solution partners that align with Microsoft’s strategy, with partners such as Pexip that amplify Teams and Teams Rooms usability becoming even more important.
Teams Rooms will continue to evolve in AI-powered capabilities. Pexip’s role in this is to continue helping organisations make these devices simple and reliable to use, so people feel confident in using their Teams Rooms for all their meetings, and that Teams Rooms becomes customers’ preferred choice for room systems. This ensures they can fully realise the benefits of their AI-powered workplace.
Anders Løkke is vice president of product marketing and strategy at Pexip