Microsoft Teams keeps evolving, and the past few weeks brought one of the biggest update batches of the year. This release landed alongside
Microsoft Build, Microsoft’s annual developer conference, and a lot of the new features tie directly to what was announced on stage. Here’s what your team will actually notice — and what your IT admin needs to know before the end of the month.
Meetings Get Smarter (and More Controllable)
AI-Generated Video Recaps
Missed a meeting? You no longer have to scrub through a 60-minute recording. The new AI-generated video recap turns meeting recordings into short, narrated highlight reels so you can catch up on what matters without watching the full session. This is part of Microsoft’s continued push to put
Microsoft 365 Copilot to work inside your daily workflow.
A Kill Switch for Meeting AI
Not every conversation should be summarized. A new in-meeting toggle lets licensed organizers and presenters turn Meeting AI — including Copilot, Facilitator, and meeting recap — on or off during a live meeting. Useful for HR discussions, legal matters, or anything sensitive.
Delete Recap Content When You Need To
Meeting organizers can now delete meeting-generated content directly from the recap page, including recordings, transcripts, AI-generated summaries, and notes. Deleted recap content cannot be restored, so use it deliberately.
A Cleaner Meeting Experience
Teams is rolling out simplified, center-aligned meeting controls and a redesigned share panel with live previews and a two-step share confirmation. That second confirmation step alone will prevent a lot of accidental screen shares. For more on getting the most out of Teams meetings, check out our
8 tips for a better online meeting experience.
Teams Phone Fights Back Against Scam Calls
This is the update we’re most excited about from a security standpoint.
Brand Impersonation Protection now alerts you in real time when a caller may be posing as a trusted brand — like your bank or IT helpdesk — so you can decline or report the call with confidence. Voice phishing has exploded over the past two years, and attackers love impersonating IT support. Built-in detection at the platform level is a real win.
Users can also now report calls that appear unusual or suspicious directly in the Calls app history. Suspicious calls used to be easy to hang up on but hard to do anything about. Now your team can flag them in two clicks. If your organization wants a broader look at how social engineering and
modern communication threats are evolving, this is a good starting point.
Chat and Collaboration Improvements
A handful of small quality-of-life updates that add up fast:
Teams received slash commands like /goto, code blocks now have line numbers, and the badging experience has been updated to make unread message counts easier to find and navigate.
On mobile, a new Catch Up interface lets you swipe across unread messages and mark them as read. Search results now surface instantly without pressing Enter, the Find experience in chats and channels has new filters, and Teams finally respects Windows’ Do Not Disturb setting. Yes, finally.
Microsoft is also fixing one of the most annoying behaviors in Teams: users are currently blocked from sending messages while a file upload is in progress. That restriction is going away.
You may also notice fewer visible items in the Teams app bar on Windows and Mac. Microsoft is simplifying the navigation to create a cleaner workspace, with additional apps grouped together.
For the Developers (and the AI-Curious)
Three new partner agents arrived in Teams: Linear, Cursor, and Atlassian Rovo. These turn channel conversations into shipped code, filed issues, and updated project plans without leaving the chat. Microsoft also released a new Teams CLI, letting developers register, configure, and deploy a Teams agent with one command.
Even if your business doesn’t write code, this signals where Teams is headed: AI agents that do work inside your existing conversations, not in a separate app. It’s part of the same trajectory as
integrating third-party apps and workflows directly inside Teams.
Heads Up: Three Things Are Going Away
This is the part your IT team should act on now.
1. Teams Live Events retires June 30, 2026. After June 30, users will no longer be able to schedule new Teams Live Events. Existing events scheduled before that date will continue to function through February 2027. Microsoft recommends transitioning to Teams town halls for large virtual events. If your organization still needs a refresher on how Live Events worked, our
Teams Live Events setup guide covers the full picture — and now is the time to plan your migration to town halls.
2. Together mode is retiring this month. Teams will retire Together mode in meetings starting early June 2026, completing by late June. Together mode and custom scenes will be removed, with gallery view becoming the primary layout.
3. Old browsers stopped working on Teams web. As of May 15, 2026, Teams on the web only loads on browser versions that support ECMAScript 2022. If anyone in your office is running an outdated browser, Teams simply won’t load.
One more change worth knowing: Teams changed the default file open preference for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint from Teams to the desktop or web app starting early May 2026. No admin action is needed, and users can revert the preference anytime.
What This Means for Your Business
The pattern in these updates is clear. Microsoft is putting AI deeper into meetings, hardening Teams Phone against social engineering, and retiring legacy features on firm deadlines.
The retirements are the action items. If your company runs town halls on Live Events or has standardized meeting layouts around Together mode, you have weeks — not months — to adjust.
If you’re not sure how these changes affect your Microsoft 365 environment, that’s exactly the kind of thing we handle for our clients every day.
Reach out to WheelHouse IT and we’ll walk through it together.
Source: Microsoft Teams Team, Microsoft
