AI in Action: Tap into Customer Intelligence from Microsoft Teams Conversations

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping how businesses communicate and serve their customers. In a recent webinar titled “AI in Action: Tap Into Customer Intelligence From Your Microsoft Teams Conversations,” experts from Microsoft and Tollring explored the transformative power of AI in modern business communication. Presenters Greg Easton (Head of Business Development at Tollring), Ian Bevington (Product Marketing Manager at Tollring), and Apay Obang-Oyway (Microsoft’s Head of Partner Solutions) shared insights, real-world examples, and practical strategies for leveraging AI to gain customer intelligence. The discussion highlighted how AI can empower teams, enhance customer experiences, and uncover actionable insights from everyday conversations – all while remaining accessible and impactful for business leaders and IT managers.

The Transformative Power of AI in Modern Business Communication

We are living through a major technology shift – an “AI platform era” – that is impacting virtually every industry. As Apay Obang-Oyway noted, “this innovation touches every aspect of humanity today… every single aspect of our world… is touched” by AI. In business communication, AI’s impact is especially profound. It can analyse interactions at scale, reveal customer needs and sentiments, and even automate tasks that once required intense human effort.

Crucially, AI is no longer a far-off concept or hype; it’s already here, embedded in the tools employees use daily. “75% of employees today… are using some form of AI within their own world within your organisation. You may or may not be aware of that, and 46% of those [started] in the last six months,” Apay revealed. In other words, your workforce is likely experimenting with AI to boost productivity and outcomes, even if informally. Business leaders need to harness this grassroots adoption and provide the right AI capabilities and governance. “It’s not about tech for tech’s sake – it’s about translating it into real outcomes,” Apay emphasised, urging companies to focus on practical business results over buzzwords.

The transformative power of AI in communication lies in its ability to augment human capabilities. AI can listen to thousands of hours of conversations, detect patterns or problems invisible to human managers, and surface insights in real time. It can coach employees, delight customers with faster responses, and free people from tedious tasks. As Apay summed up, AI offers “the opportunity for one instructor for every individual… a teacher for every student, a doctor for every patient” – not to replace humans, but to amplify what teams can achieve. For organisations, the message is clear: those who leverage AI in their communication workflows will gain a competitive edge, and those who ignore it risk being left behind.

Microsoft’s Four Pillars of AI Transformation

To guide businesses on this journey, Microsoft uses a four-pillar framework for AI-led transformation. Apay Obang-Oyway walked through these pillars, sharing how Microsoft has applied them internally and how any organisation can do the same:

1. Empower Employees with AI: The first pillar focuses on equipping your people with AI tools to amplify their productivity and capabilitiesf. Your employees are your most valuable asset, and AI can help them achieve more. For example, Microsoft deployed its Microsoft 365 Copilot to 65,000 employees, enabling workers to automate tasks and access information faster. The results were tangible – the top quartile of Copilot users achieved 23% faster sales closure rates and 9% more revenue per head against their personal best. By investing in generative AI for employees, companies can boost efficiency and even reward teams for improved performance. The key is to nurture employee potential with AI and measure the outcomes, creating a culture where staff are excited and empowered by these new capabilities.
2. Reinvent Customer Engagement: The second pillar is about using AI to enhance how you interact with customers, delivering better experiences at scale. Apay shared a striking example from Microsoft’s own support division, which handles 75 million customer incidents a year. By deploying AI “Copilot” agents to assist human support reps, Microsoft dramatically streamlined customer service. Routine or known issues are now handled partly or fully by AI, allowing faster triage and resolution. In fact, “that whole reinventing customer engagement… so far this fiscal year has saved us over $500 million in cost”. AI assists by answering common questions instantly with a high confidence level, or by routing complex issues to the right experts with relevant context already gathered. The outcome is a win-win: customers get quicker answers, and the company reduces support costs and workload. Every business can rethink customer engagement – from chatbots to AI-assisted call centers – to deliver responsiveness and personalisation that would be impossible to achieve manually.
3. Reshape Business Processes: The third pillar involves infusing AI throughout your internal processes to make operations more efficient and effective. Rather than simply automating existing steps, this may mean re-imagining workflows with an “AI-first” mindset. Microsoft even appointed a Chief AI Officer to review all business processes and ask, “Where can an AI agent or Copilot take over, and at what point do humans need to be involved?”. By rethinking processes in this way, organisations can unlock massive savings and speed. Microsoft’s goal, for instance, is to find the next “billion-dollar saving” through AI-driven process improvements. Whether it’s automating data entry, optimizsing supply chain logistics, or enhancing decision-making with predictive analytics, AI can streamline operations and free up humans for higher-value work. This pillar reminds leaders to evaluate every workflow for AI opportunities – the gains can be game-changing.
4. Bend the Curve of Innovation: The fourth pillar is about accelerating innovation and staying ahead of the competition by leveraging AI. AI enables companies to develop new products and solutions faster than ever. Apay noted that in the past year, Microsoft “built more product in the last 12 months than we have done in the last three years” thanks to AI like GitHub Copilot, which now writes about one-third of Microsoft’s code. This dramatic boost in R&D velocity isn’t unique to software development – industries from scientific research to manufacturing are seeing similar leaps due to AI-driven design, simulation, and creativity. To “bend the curve” means using AI to exponentially increase your innovation output and reduce time-to-market. Companies that embed AI in their innovation process can deliver more value to customers, faster. In practice, this could mean using AI to prototype products, analyse customer feedback for new ideas, or even generate content and campaigns in marketing. The lesson: AI can be your innovation co-pilot, helping your teams achieve in months what used to take years.

Together, these four pillars – Employees, Customer Engagement, Processes, and Innovation – provide a holistic roadmap for AI transformation. They ensure that AI efforts aren’t siloed or ad-hoc, but aligned to core business outcomes: an empowered workforce, delighted customers, efficient operations, and a future-proof ability to innovate. As Apay stressed, it’s vital to tie AI initiatives to real business value and strategy. Remember the idea that when implemented thoughtfully, AI “is not technology for technology’s sake – it’s about driving real business outcomes, real business value”? Well, businesses that embrace these principles are already seeing outsized returns. According to industry research Apay cited, organizations investing in AI achieve an average 3.7x return on that investment, and 92% of companies using AI for productivity report growing faster than peers In short, AI transformation is becoming an imperative for companies that want to lead in the modern era.

Turning Conversations into Intelligence: Real-World Examples

One of the most immediate and accessible areas to apply AI is in mining everyday communications – calls, meetings, and messages – for actionable customer intelligence. Ian Bevington shared real-world use cases of how Tollring’s Analytics 365 suite (a native AI-powered app for Microsoft Teams) helps organisations do exactly that. By using AI to transcribe, analyse, and alert on insights from Microsoft Teams conversations, businesses can zero in on the conversations that matter and respond faster to customer needs.

For example, consider industries where emotions run high on calls, such as social housing, local government, or healthcare. Frontline staff in these fields often handle highly charged conversations. Ian explained that with AI analysis, “managers can quickly identify and review high-risk calls and then take action if necessary”. Analytics tools automatically rate the sentiment of every conversation and flag calls containing certain keywords or signs of distress. This means supervisors no longer have to listen to random call samples or wait for a complaint – they can proactively find the toughest interactions (say, an upset tenant or a difficult patient call) and support their team in coaching or resolution. The benefit is twofold: ensuring customers receive great service even in tough moments, and protecting staff by intervening in abusive or challenging calls before they escalate.

Another powerful use of AI is ensuring compliance and consistency in customer communications. Ian highlighted the example of an insurance company that must include mandatory compliance statements in every call. Instead of manually checking calls, the AI can automatically scan all call transcripts to verify that the required disclaimer was given. If any call is missing it, managers know immediately. In fact, one Tollring customer even uses topic detection to track when agents obtain new GDPR permissions from customers: the system produces a list of all calls where a customer gave a GDPR consent, with the recordings as proof of compliance. This kind of comprehensive oversight would be nearly impossible to do manually across hundreds or thousands of calls. AI ensures no detail slips through the cracks, which is critical in regulated industries.

AI-driven conversation analytics also unlocks the “voice of the customer” on a large scale. Businesses often record calls and meetings, accumulating a trove of customer interactions that historically went unused beyond the moment of the call. “Thousands and thousands of hours of customer interaction… have no way of unlocking all of that conversational intelligence,” Ian noted. AI changes that. By transcribing every conversation and detecting topics, trends, and sentiment, tools like Analytics 365 can surface what customers are really talking about – their praise, pain points, requests, and complaints. For instance, a telecom provider could analyse all its support calls and discover recurring themes. Ian described a scenario where an internet service provider was losing customers to competitors. Using AI, they created topic categories for each major competitor and the reasons customers might mention (e.g. price, speed, service issues). By filtering all the cancellation call transcripts, the company could identify why each loss happened – maybe “losing to Competitor A because of an aggressive price promotion, and to Competitor B because they’re claiming faster broadband speeds,” as Ian illustrated. Armed with this insight, the business can respond strategically – adjust pricing, improve service quality, or target marketing to win customers back. This example shows how AI transforms raw call data into a strategic asset: customer intelligence that guides better decisions.

Even day-to-day customer service management gets easier with AI. In retail and hospitality, for example, staff juggle face-to-face customers and incoming calls, and it’s easy to miss calls or forget to call someone back. Analytics 365 can track every missed call and even alert managers to unreturned missed calls – situations where a customer’s call wasn’t answered and nobody has called them back yet. With a quick dashboard view, managers can ensure every enquiry is followed up, preventing lost sales or dissatisfied customers. In another scenario, consider utility companies that face sudden spikes in call volume during outages. Real-time AI dashboards can display the number of calls in queue, wait times, and even the Teams presence status of potential backup agents who aren’t on calls, so supervisors can dynamically pull in extra staff to help. These AI-driven insights enable businesses to adapt on the fly to serve customers better during unpredictable events.

Overall, the webinar’s real-world examples all underscore a common theme: AI can extract intelligence from conversations and make it actionable. Whether it’s spotting a frustrated customer in need of attention, ensuring every customer gets the correct information, or learning why deals are won or lost, AI gives managers superhuman listening abilities. Rather than being overwhelmed by the volume of calls and meetings, organisations can let AI surface the moments and trends that matter most. This empowers business leaders to respond quickly, improve processes, and coach their teams with data-driven clarity.

AI-Powered Features in Tollring’s Analytics 365 Suite

Many of the above capabilities are made possible by specific AI features now built into communication analytics platforms. Tollring’s Analytics 365 suite for Microsoft Teams, for instance, introduces several key AI-driven features that turn raw call data into meaningful intelligence. Here are some of the standout features and their benefits, as highlighted during the webinar:

Conversation Analytics (Transcription & Topic Analysis): Every Teams call and meeting can be automatically captured and transcribed, creating a rich database of conversations. Analytics 365 uses AI to identify keywords and topics in these transcripts – from mentions of products or competitors to common customer questions. This effectively unlocks all those conversations so you can query and analyse them. Managers gain the ability to search and filter calls by topic, uncovering insights like what customers frequently ask about, or how often certain competitors come up. As Ian explained, businesses often discover patterns that were previously hidden in call recordings. “Using AI, we can unlock the voice of the customer… find out what they’re saying about our products and services… [or] if we’re getting complaints about a particular product,” he noted. In short, conversation analytics ensures no customer feedback is missed, and it allows decision-makers to base actions on real customer dialogue, not hunches.

Sentiment Detection: Beyond just transcribing words, AI can gauge the emotional tone of a conversation. Analytics 365 automatically scores each call’s sentiment (e.g. positive, neutral, negative) and even visualises sentiment over the course of the call. This is invaluable for flagging calls where a customer grew upset, where an interaction turned sour, or critically, where an agent managed to turn a conversation around. Managers can sort conversations by sentiment score to find the most problematic calls instantly. “We rate every conversation for sentiment,” noted Ian, which lets teams pinpoint interactions that need attention. For example, if a usually calm customer sounded very negative in their last call, that’s a red flag to follow up. Sentiment detection also helps measure overall customer mood trends and can identify exemplary calls where a rep turned a negative situation into a positive outcome. By quantifying customer emotions, AI gives leaders a pulse on customer experience at scale.

Automated Redaction of Sensitive Data: Compliance and customer privacy are paramount in recorded conversations. A particularly useful AI feature in Analytics 365 is the automatic redaction of sensitive information (like credit card numbers or personal data) from call recordings and transcripts. If your Teams calls are recorded and a customer provides a credit card over the phone, AI can scrub those digits from the saved audio/text so that no one can retrieve them later. This happens without any manual intervention. “If we’re taking card payments over the phone, we can use AI to automatically redact the card payment data,” Ian noted, “eliminat[ing] the human error often associated with manual pause-and-resume” procedures for call recording. In other words, AI ensures sensitive data never hits your databases in the first place, dramatically reducing compliance risk. It also removes the complexity of older methods where staff had to remember to pause recordings. Automated redaction gives both customers and businesses peace of mind that private information is handled safely and no confidential data is exposed in recorded calls.

AI-Based Call Evaluations (Quality Scoring): Traditionally, quality management in contact centers involved supervisors listening to a few calls per agent and scoring them against a checklist. This manual approach is slow, labor-intensive, and samples only a tiny fraction of calls. AI changes the game by enabling automated call evaluation at scale. Tollring’s solution can use AI “scorecards” to evaluate every single call recording against chosen criteria – for example, whether the agent greeted properly, used the customer’s name, offered a solution, and so on. As Ian described, doing this by hand is resource-intensive and often inconsistent between evaluators. “By contrast, if we use AI, once it’s set up, the AI evaluation process requires absolutely no human resource,” he said, “and we can evaluate every single call… 100% consistent… with results almost immediately, which means we can act early and avoid any impact on the business.”. In essence, AI call evaluation provides objective, instant coaching feedback on all calls, not just a few. Managers can identify common coaching needs, reward top performers, and ensure quality standards are met across the board. It also closes the loop faster – if an issue is detected in a call today, training or corrective action can be taken tomorrow, rather than weeks later. The result is a much higher and more uniform level of customer experience.

Real-Time Alerts and Notifications: One of the most exciting capabilities of AI in conversation analytics is the ability to set up real-time triggers for certain events or keywords. Analytics 365 can monitor live call transcriptions or recent calls for defined “red flag” scenarios – for example, a call where a customer says “cancel my service” or uses strongly negative language, or when a compliance term like “not satisfied with advice” appears. When such a trigger is hit, the system can instantly notify the relevant manager or team. Ian gave a compelling example: in financial services, if a conversation indicates a potential compliance breach or customer mistreatment, “the compliance officer then gets a real-time alert. They can click on that alert… see a visual timeline of sentiment and topic matches… and skip straight to the critical part of the conversation and, if necessary, take timely action to limit the impact.”. In practice, this could mean intervening to appease an unhappy VIP client, or halting a sales process that’s veering off policy, before it results in a loss or penalty. Real-time alerts turn your conversation data into an active defense mechanism – instead of finding problems weeks later in reports, you get the chance to fix them in the moment. For customer-facing teams, this agility can significantly protect your brand’s reputation and improve customer trust. It’s like having a virtual assistant always on watch for issues, 24/7.

All these features are designed with usability in mind. The goal is not to burden managers with complex AI tools, but to surface insights in a simple, actionable way. Greg Easton underscored this approach from Tollring’s perspective: “We’ve been really super laser-focused on building products that are just really easily accessible… available in the Microsoft marketplace… very simple to use. You don’t need to employ data analysts or AI specialists… They are out-of-the-box solutions.”. In other words, advanced AI capabilities like transcription, sentiment analysis, and auto-redaction are delivered as ready-to-use features in Analytics 365. Business leaders and IT managers can deploy these tools quickly (through Microsoft’s AppSource marketplace for Teams) and start seeing value on day one, without a lengthy implementation project. This emphasis on accessibility and ease of deployment means that even mid-sized companies or smaller teams can take advantage of AI in their customer communications – you don’t need a Fortune 500 budget or an army of data scientists to begin tapping into AI insights.

Why Act Now on AI Transformation

A recurring theme in the webinar was urgency: why should businesses act now on AI in communications, rather than taking a “wait and see” approach? The consensus among the experts was that the sooner you start embracing AI, the better positioned you’ll be in the evolving landscape. “Working out where you can derive most business value from AI is a bit of a journey, so it’s really important to get started now,” advised Ian Bevington. AI adoption is not a one-off project but an iterative learning process – teams refine use cases and learn from early experiments. Starting that journey early allows you to accumulate experience (and data) that competitors might lack. If you’re aiming to boost productivity or deliver a standout customer experience, “it’s important to start that journey, get ahead of the curve and stay there,” Ian said. In short, early adopters can leapfrog rivals by unlocking AI-driven gains in efficiency and customer satisfaction before others do.

Apay Obang-Oyway echoed the urgency from a strategic perspective. He pointed out that employees are already using AI and reaping benefits, as mentioned earlier – the train has left the station. Moreover, your competitors are likely exploring AI, and many have already integrated it into their operations. “If you’re not using it, but your competition are… what do you think they are doing with that? How do you think they’re growing differently to you?” Apay challenged, warning that “you are not likely to keep up [if you don’t embrace AI], and eventually you will be disintermediated.”. Those are strong words, but they reflect a real risk: companies that ignore the AI revolution could find themselves outpaced and disrupted by those that harness it. On the flip side, those who invest in AI capabilities now are seeing measurable returns – as noted, a 3.7x ROI and faster growth rates on average. In other words, AI is moving from a nice-to-have to a must-have for staying competitive.

Another reason to act now is that AI technologies in the workplace have matured to a point where they are practical, affordable, and user-friendly. Gone are the days when implementing AI meant hiring PhD researchers and building models from scratch. Today, solutions like Analytics 365 package up sophisticated AI into tools that plug into your existing workflows (in this case, Microsoft Teams). Ian recommended choosing “flexible applications that are easy to deploy” with minimal setup costs, so that you can “focus on the business value, rather than be distracted by technical challenges”. In essence, the barrier to entry for AI in communications has never been lower. With cloud-based AI services, even smaller organisations can trial capabilities like call transcript analysis or sentiment tracking quickly and scale up if they see value.

Finally, acting now on AI transformation sends a powerful message within your organisation. It builds a culture of innovation and continuous improvement. Leaders who champion AI initiatives demonstrate a commitment to empowering their teams with the best tools. This can boost employee morale (who wouldn’t want an annoying part of their job automated away?) and attract talent who want to work at a forward-thinking company. It also shows customers that you are evolving to serve them better – using advanced technology to understand and meet their needs.

In conclusion, the webinar delivered an inspiring yet grounded look at how AI can turn everyday communications into strategic gold. From transcripts that reveal customer sentiments to AI assistants that coach employees, the technology is ready to make a difference. The transformative power of AI in modern business communication is not a future promise – it’s here and now, available to organisations of all sizes. The experts from Microsoft and Tollring encourage business leaders to seize this moment. Start tapping into the intelligence hidden in your Microsoft Teams conversations and beyond. Those who act decisively will not only improve their customer experience and efficiency today, but also future-proof their organisations for the AI-driven era of tomorrow. As Apay put it, AI is “a driver for change, a driver for growth, and a driver for real competitive advantage” – and it’s up to each business to turn that potential into action.

Throughout the webinar, one thing was clear: AI in action is less about robots replacing humans, and more about augmenting teams with insights and capabilities that make them smarter and more effective. By leveraging solutions like Analytics 365 and embracing the four pillars of AI transformation, companies can create a modern workplace where customer intelligence flows freely from every conversation, innovation happens faster, and people are empowered to achieve more than ever before. The time to tap into this potential is now, and the opportunities are limited only by our imagination and willingness to lead.

Watch the webinar on demand here.

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