2025: Eyes on the crystal ball
A new year has begun, and resolutions are being put into action – whether at the gym or in the office. Netox’s productivity gurus Teemu and Simo gazed into their crystal ball and set out to uncover what 2025 holds for Microsoft’s productivity landscape.
If 2024 was the year of arguing over office vs. remote work, we predict 2025 will shift the focus to what we want to achieve at work—not where we do it.
Meetings and Copilot
Productivity will be knocking on many doors in 2025, but in this blog, our productivity prophets focus mainly on the latest developments in meetings and Copilot. We believe these will be among the central topics in workplace discussions.
For years, we’ve been predicting when public opinion would shift to the point where Teams meetings are seen as more “real” than those held in a physical meeting room. That year, dear reader, is now.
Teams meetings will continue to grow as versatile spaces for collaboration and information sharing. This spring, breakout room meetings will allow participants to choose their own rooms based on topics of interest. Let people gather around the subjects they care about. Town Halls and Webinars will get a dedicated organizer chat, and Q&A sessions in these events will offer the option to reply privately. For extra-large Town Halls, the capacity will increase to 50,000 attendees.
Microsoft is pushing AI development forward at full speed. In the near future, you’ll be able to have foreign-language speech translated into your own language during Teams meetings. The experience will be so realistic, including lip movements and intonation, that participants won’t be able to tell the difference. This feature will have a huge impact on working life. The role of foreign languages will change significantly. Still, we’re not recommending you burn your adult education Spanish books just yet. Our productivity experts are already planning to expand training offerings to Eastern and Southern Europe.
Teams meetings held in physical meeting rooms are also getting an AI boost. Soon, Teams Room devices will recognize participants by both voice and face. This will pave the way for Copilot to create accurate, AI-based meeting notes. Notes will even include relevant visuals shown during the meeting.
At Microsoft Ignite, it was announced that Copilot will start taking into account shared presentations during meetings, further improving the quality of the notes. Our oracles predict that Copilot will eventually be able to analyze video content holistically. So if Teemu does a backflip on camera during a meeting, it might end up in the notes—whether it’s mentioned out loud or not.
The technology is also maturing to the point where Copilot can analyze conversations and guide them in the right direction. In the future, Copilot will independently follow up on unresolved questions and won’t let the meeting move on until the mysterious “someone” assigned to a task gets a real name. Even now, without proper meeting practices and leadership, tasks often go unassigned. Maybe one day “someone” will be out of a job and the right people will get things done. Humans will still need to define clear objectives and create agendas so Copilot can track progress. Of course, Copilot can also suggest agenda items based on previous discussions and related files.
There are many solid models for effective meetings, but we humans often drift away from the agreed rules. It’s important that participants understand why these rules exist and aim to follow them. Copilot has the potential to help us stick to those structures and make meetings more productive and goal-oriented.
Incoming: Agents and automations
Microsoft is bringing a lot of updates to its AI features across applications, and 2025 looks to be just as busy as the year before. While it may sometimes seem like the updates are mostly about renaming things, there’s actually a lot of new functionality coming.
The future of the Microsoft 365 Copilot product family will bring automation and generative AI together more seamlessly than ever before. This combination is a real step forward, especially for M365 end users. Our productivity gurus are hoping for a future where you can simply “chat with Copilot.”
Copilot Actions will automate specific tasks for individual M365 Copilot users and generate the desired content in the chosen channel. However, Actions seem to sit somewhere between Agents and scheduled prompts, so time will tell what the feature is truly capable of. Scheduled prompts are currently in preview, but the official rollout is expected to begin in March 2025. Our oracles are eagerly awaiting this one.
Microsoft’s Agents are already handling tasks independently or on request. Many useful Agents have been created, and the list of ideas for new process-specific Agents is growing fast. As long as “someone” just gets to work.
A workday on 2026
So what might a young techie’s day look like in early 2026? Here’s Simo’s prediction for January 2nd:
On vacation in Tahko. Slightly hungover.
And Monday, January 12th?
7:13 AM
Simo pops in his earbuds and heads toward the Ilmalanlinna office. On the tram, he opens the Copilot app. A voice – Scarlett Johansson’s, naturally – asks if he wants a summary of things that happened during his vacation or a preview of the workday. He says yes, and Copilot updates him on top messages, suggesting replies. Simo gives the green light, and Copilot takes care of it.
7:46 AM
At his desk. Boots up his virtual machine, which he still hasn’t automated.
8:00 AM
Simo starts planning the next day’s training sessions at Copilot’s suggestion. He heads over to the Loop workspace, where ready-made proposals for the training agenda are already waiting. The plans are based on earlier sessions, but the topics and demos have been tailored to fit the goals of the upcoming training. Simo fine-tunes the agenda and runs through the demos with his own two hands.
10:00 AM
Simo joins an internal meeting. Copilot handles the notes and flags that junior sales trainee Tommi looks a bit unwell and it recommends health services. It also ensures meeting objectives are hit and assigns follow-ups to ToDo lists.
11:30 AM
Lunch.
12:00 PM
Simo continues working on the client’s AI strategy that he began before his vacation (due date: January 12, 2026, at 2:00 PM). Copilot suggests details for the strategy based on discussions from several meetings held the previous year. It also recommends including development areas and proposed solutions documented in the previous project.
1:00 PM
A meeting with the client about the AI strategy and its implementation. Simo presents the finalized action plan, and Copilot suggests times for the next meetings and sends out calendar invites accordingly.
2:00 PM
Simo checks out blog draft ideas created by Agents, based on Microsoft Roadmap updates. Picks one, heads out for a walk, and edits it verbally via Copilot. Copilot adds Simo’s thoughts and stories to the piece. After the walk, Simo saves the final version to a designated location, triggering the Agent to schedule its internal publication for the next day. The blog will be published publicly at a later time.
3:50 PM
Copilot asks Simo if he would like a summary of his workday, and Simo agrees. The summary includes all the meetings he attended, along with details about the files he worked on and his communications. Below the summary, Copilot provides suggestions for descriptions to be used in his time tracking. Simo confirms his hours in a separate system.
4:00 PM
Done for the day. Simo shuts down Copilot and heads to padel. A productive day, wouldn’t you say?
Forecast in a nutshell
Expect major shifts in Microsoft productivity tools and meeting culture in 2025. Teams meetings will continue to grow in importance and gain new features, such as real-time translation of speech from foreign-language participants. Copilot’s AI capabilities will evolve further, enabling it to take accurate notes, analyze discussions, and help steer conversations in the right direction. In addition, Copilot Actions and Agents will automate tasks and generate the desired content. 2025 is set to be a busy year, full of updates that enhance productivity and improve the quality of working life.