Microsoft has opened 2026 with a landmark quarter that firmly positions them as the global leader in enterprise cloud and AI adoption. In the earning report, Microsoft has achieved milestones with cloud revenue surpassing $50 billion for the first time, record growth in Copilot usage, and major acceleration in commercial bookings, this earnings report signals a new era for Microsoft’s growth and might put the AI Bubble Burst chats to bed?

Microsoft has announced some big changes to the Teams licensing model, aimed at making more  advanced features available to everyone along with updates to their Places products set which is now firmly more rooted as a key part of Teams. These changes reflect Microsoft’s commitment to democratising advanced collaboration tools and to keep adding value to their core products without the need for premium licenses to unlock core value.

Microsoft has kicked off 2026 with two significant enhancements to Microsoft 365 Copilot - both providing a clear signal to how improvements in multi-media creation in AI will support creativity, communication, and knowledge sharing across the workplace. The first is a major upgrade to Copilot’s image generation capabilities with the rollout of OpenAI’s GPT‑Image‑1.5 model. The second is a new capability that turns Copilot Notebooks into…

Following Satya Nadella's looking forward to 2026 post, this blog explores the detail behind it and why 2026 must move beyond AI slop and shift toward trusted, outcome‑driven AI projects and systems that deliver real organisational value rather than just re-writing docs and emails!

Microsoft and PayPal have officially joined forces to launch Copilot Checkout, a groundbreaking integration that redefines the online shopping experience. This collaboration merges Microsoft’s conversational AI capabilities with PayPal’s trusted payment infrastructure, creating a seamless journey from product discovery to purchase all within the Copilot interface on Windows, app and the Web. Intelligent Discovery Meets Trusted Payments Copilot Checkout will allows users to browse, evaluate, and complete purchases (check out) directly from within Microsoft Copilot experience, eliminating the need to switch between different apps, devices or websites.

Back at the "Fall update in October", Microsoft announced that a new talk mode called "Real Talk" was coming to Copilot. This has been available in the US for a while in preview but is now available in the UK. This (currently) optional chat mode allows Copilot to better adapt to the user’s tone by adding more personality, wit, and even "playful" challenges in its responses.

Microsoft has begun rolling out GPT‑5.2 across Copilot on the web, Windows, and mobile as a free upgrade. It sits alongside GPT‑5.1 rather than replacing it, giving users a clear choice between speed and deeper reasoning. GPT‑5.2 is described as OpenAI’s strongest model series so far, designed to accelerate real work: building spreadsheets and presentations, writing and reviewing code, analysing long documents, using tools, and working with images.

Microsoft has rolled out a useful update to the Office Suite apps like Word, Excel and PowerPoint which creates automatic, "on‑device" Alt Text generation for images. This is a great way of helping content become more inclusive by providing automatic (but editable) descriptions of images, graphics, graphs etc. This helps screen readers and also AI tools better understand documents. Alt Text Auto Generation is for Copilot + PCs only…

YouTube video by Rob Quickenden

If you are a home/consumer user using Windows 10 - because you are unwilling to, or unable to (due to hardware restrictions) to upgrade to Windows 11, and not able or wanting to buy a new modern PC, this blog shows you how to take advantage of Microsoft's free Security updates for Windows 10 until 13th October 2026. First...head over to…

Microsoft has just (11th Dec) started rolling out OpenAI's GPT‑5.2 across Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio, marking another significant leap in AI-powered productivity. The differences between GPT5 and GPT5.2 provide "a significant upgrade in performance across various metrics". For example, GPT-5.2 has achieved higher scores on benchmarks like ARC-AGI2 and GPQA Diamond which indicate improved abstract reasoning and scientific knowledge. 

The past few months have been a bruising reminder that even the biggest cloud providers can stumble. AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Cloudflare have all suffered major outages, disrupting any services that rely on them from websites to shopping sites to CRM and Finance systems and AI tools. For businesses (and their customers / users) there cause huge problems, lower confidence, impact services and reputation.

Microsoft is making a major change to how AI models are integrated into Copilot experiences. From 7 January 2026, Anthropic’s models will be enabled by default for Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed users, moving away from the current opt-in setting to a standard feature under Microsoft’s own contractual terms rather than Anthropic’s. What’s Changing? Default Enablement: Anthropic models, which were previously optional, will now be switched on by default for…

With over a 1,000 new features and updates across the Microsoft 365 stack in the last couple of years, Microsoft has confirmed that the commercial Microsoft 365 suite will undergo pricing increase from July 1, 2026. This follows "adjustments" to Personal and Home subscriptions at the end of the summer, and now the Enterprise/Commercial side is being reshaped to reflect the growing set of features delivered in the suite especially around AI and Security which have both had significant investments and updates.

Microsoft used Ignite 2025 to tell the world that "agents are now the primary interface for enterprise work". The focus throughout Ignite was about evolution from chat-bots to multi-discipline teams of agents across organisations and the unlaying architectural envelopments being done to make this work. Agents are already changing how people work, and IDC predicts there will be 1.3 billion agents by 2028. 

Microsoft Ignite 2025 focus this year saw Microsoft fully committed to Agentic AI as the next platform layer. Across all of the briefings, keynotes, technical sessions, and partner announcements, Microsoft repeatedly emphasised that AI is no longer an add-on - and that is becoming the "operating system" for modern work. Alongside this was the announcement of Work IQ at Ignite 2025 was probably one of the biggest impact announcements - which was announced during the day 1…

It was Forty years ago (now that makes me feel. Old) that Microsoft launched Windows 1.0. This was a graphical shell that was layered over MS-DOS. Whilst it was clunky, slow, and barely usable - it created the framework and vision for what would become the Windows that has powered work and creativity for decades. 40 Years ago, was the time…

At Ignite this week, Microsoft announced that Security Copilot will now be included in Microsoft 365 E5 (and E5 Security) at no additional cost. Security Copilot delivers "AI-powered, integrated, cost-effective, and extensible security capabilities" that elevate an organisations IT Security Operations or SOC’s efficiency and resilience. So, what does it actually include and what are the catches? 1. Integrated AI-driven defense across the Microsoft stack…

At Ignite 2025 this month, amongst a long list of AI and Security updates, Microsoft announced that OpenAI’s Sora 2 text-to-video model is now integrated into Microsoft 365 Copilot in their Create Agent bringing AI video into enterprise productivity. Sora 2 can make content much more realistic than the previous version of Sora and has earned both praise and criticism, since 

Microsoft has just announced a much more affordable aka cheaper (but fully featured license) for small and medium businesses. From December 1st, Microsoft 365 Copilot Business becomes available to organisations with fewer than 300 users. It’s priced at $21 per user/month, and can be added to organisations with  sBusiness Standard or Business Premium plans up to 300 seats. This is $9 pupm than the enterprise version of M365 Copilot but with all the same features.

As Windows 365 settles well into its forth year, there have been huge advancements in capability, connection methods, endpoint innovation, and licensing options - with even more expected as Microsoft Ignite approaches next week In my role, I spend a lot of time talking with clients about Modern Work solutions and where Windows 365 fits within their organisation: how it can be adopted and leveraged for simplicity, security, governance, access & management, contractors, and frontline staff.

Artificial intelligence, whilst a phrase used in most of our daily lives, can feel huge, strange, unknown, scary, exciting and sometimes even intimidating. In this post I decided I would strip back the noise and waffle and share nine crisp, usable concepts. I've aimed to provide clarity over jargon and give some practical examples over theory. Before I start, many and to put into familiar brands, here are a few AI tools and brands you will of already know or at least of have heard of:

This blog summarises the key updates from Cisco Partner Summit 2025 regarding the Cisco 360 Partner Program and its impact on partner profitability, customer value, cross-selling, AI specialisations, and new pathways. This new partner programme takes much inspiration from the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Programme, which has successfully aligned partner incentives with their strategic priorities like AI Adoption, Cloud Transformation and Customer Success (through growth of usage and adoption).

Last night I tuned into aspects of the Global Cisco Partner Summit on demand, (the live event taking part in San Diago this week). Day one messaging to partners was firmly on monetising AI and driving the next wave of digital transformation with Cisco. Cisco were not just talking about AI as a buzzword - they were clearly (re)positioning themselves as the backbone of this revolution with…

Yes, the Copilot Researcher Agent, once focused purely on gathering and summarising information, can now take action on your device through a capability called Computer Use.  This provides secure interaction with both public and gated web content through a virtual computer which allows human and Copilot control. It requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, supports advanced content creation. It can be disabled by IT admins, but comes enabled by default.