How is Microsoft using AI to rewrite the world of work?
Artificial intelligence is often talked about in extremes. Either it’s “overhyped and nothing will change” or it’s “the end of the world as we know it.”
In a recent talk I attended at ISE 2026 on AI trends in workspaces, Illya Bukshteyn, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Teams Phone, Devices, & Premium Experience, made a compelling case that the truth lies in neither extreme – especially for startups and small businesses.
“We do see AI as transformative for our industry, but more broadly, we believe AI is a once in a lifetime opportunity to give each of us superpowers and transform how work is done,” he said.
For founders and small teams, those “superpowers” translate into time, focus, and leverage – three things you can never get enough of.
From “nice to have” to multipliers of output
Bukshteyn argues that AI in the workplace should not be treated as a novelty but as a force multiplier for people: “By superpowers, we don’t mean ability to have notes generated for us. We think of superpowers as really multiplying yourself. How can you take what you do and have a team around you of AI-based agents that help you do five times, ten times, 100 times as much, while still leaving you with time to do the most creative parts of your work.”
For startups and small businesses, this is particularly powerful because you usually don’t have enough headcount, your team is context-switching constantly, and you need to move faster than larger competitors.
AI agents embedded in your daily tools – chat, meetings, calls, documents – can effectively act like extra team members handling the low-leverage work.
AI-powered collaboration
If your team lives in chat and project channels, Bukshteyn’s description of Copilot inside Teams maps directly to common startup pain points:
- New people join an ongoing chat and are lost in the history
- Founders and managers are added late to threads and don’t have time to scroll back
- Channels hold critical project context, but no one has time to summarise
Copilot addresses this by summarising chats and threads and surfacing what matters most to you: why you were added, what decisions have been made, and what’s expected of you.
This is especially useful when you hire quickly and need new joiners to be productive fast or if you’re juggling multiple client projects and can’t track every thread.
Beyond individual work, Teams Mode for Copilot lets you bring your AI assistant into group collaboration – sharing prompts, refining outputs, and co-creating documents together with your team and the AI. For a resource-constrained startup, that’s like adding a research assistant and junior writer to every working session.
AI in communication
Many small businesses now sell or partner across borders. Language can be a real barrier – especially when you don’t have the budget for dedicated interpreters.
Bukshteyn highlighted Interpreter as an AI agent in both Teams meetings and Teams Phone that can translate in real time, even in your own voice in another language. For a small, globally oriented startup, that could mean handling international customer calls without hiring multilingual staff, running cross-border partner meetings more naturally, and building trust by letting everyone speak in their native language.
AI is also helping with context transfer in customer service. When a call is transferred, Copilot can generate a summary of the conversation so far, so the next person doesn’t start from zero. For lean support teams, this can improve customer experience without scaling headcount.
AI-enhanced meetings
Meetings are notoriously expensive for startups: every person in the room is usually critical to the business. Yet much of what happens in meetings – note-taking, timekeeping, agenda tracking – is low-leverage.
Here, the Facilitator agent is designed to offload exactly those tasks:
- Keeping track of the agenda and time
- Helping ensure the right topics are covered
- Proactively surfacing relevant information and links during the meeting
- Delivering customised recaps afterwards (e.g., executive summary, speaker-specific notes)
“Facilitator can do all of that. Facilitator can even proactively speed up with information relevant to what you’re talking about … that facilitator is listening and adding value to the entire team,” notes Bukshteyn.
For a founder, that means you can stay present in the discussion while an AI captures the structure, decisions, and follow-ups. For distributed teams, custom recaps make it far easier for people to catch up without watching recordings.
Where small businesses can start
Bukshteyn closed with a simple three-step path that maps nicely to what startups and small businesses can do today.
Enable identity enrollment
Let users enrol audio/video identity so AI can correctly recognise speakers in meetings and provide personalised assistance.
Add a meeting facilitator agent
Use an AI facilitator for recurring team meetings or customer reviews to offload agenda tracking, notes, and follow-ups.
Experiment with group use of Copilot
Try Teams Mode with Copilot in a real project – content creation, product specs, or fundraising materials – so your team learns how to co-create with AI, not just use it individually.
Bukshteyn’s message is clear: for startups and small businesses, AI is no longer just a feature – it’s an opportunity to multiply your limited time and resources into something that can compete with much larger organisations.
