Microsoft named a Leader in 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Unified Communications as a Service
Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Unified Communications as a Service—our eighth consecutive year with this recognition. We’re also excited to share that we are again positioned highest on the evaluation's Ability to Execute axis and furthest on the Completeness of Vision axis. Microsoft Teams is the AI-powered platform for work, and we’re grateful to the hundreds of millions of people who turn to it every month to get their work done. We’re also thankful for our global community of partners, whose expertise and dedication carry that impact even further into every industry and region we serve. It’s the trust our customers and partners place in us that makes a recognition like this possible. We believe this recognition reflects the past year of innovation we’ve delivered to make Teams simpler, smarter, more secure, and where humans and agents collaborate to get work done. Here’s a look at some of the key releases along that journey. Getting more from Copilot in Teams Copilot is AI built for work. This year we invested in innovations across the entire Teams experience so that Copilot feels like one connected assistant everywhere people work. Unified Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat experience: We unified the Copilot Chat experience in Teams across chats, channels, meetings, and calls, aligning it with the experience across other Microsoft apps. That gives people one consistent, familiar way to chat with Copilot, along with a single shared history of their conversation insights accessible within Teams or other Copilot Chat surfaces. Work IQ + Teams: AI is only as good as its context. Without it, even the best AI can give generic answers instead of ones grounded in how a person actually works. This year we rolled out Microsoft Work IQ, the intelligence layer that helps Copilot understand how work gets done across an organization by drawing on Microsoft 365 data, organizational context, and the tools people use every day. Teams is a crucial part of Work IQ, since the information exchanged through meetings, calls, and chat make up some of the richest signals of collaborative work in motion. Engage customers with AI-powered communication Much of the important communication in an organization happens beyond its own walls—with the customers it serves as well as external partners and vendors. Teams Phone brings more intelligence and simplicity to those conversations. These capabilities can help reduce missed connections and support faster issue resolution. Teams Phone Agent: During customer call surges, many businesses can’t answer every call right away, which can result in frustrating hold times for customers. Teams Phone Agent, now available in Frontier public preview, quickly greets callers and can resolve many requests on its own, such as answering common questions, scheduling appointments, and routing calls with full conversational context to the right human or department when assistance is needed. Teams Phone Agent also integrates with custom voice agents that organizations build in Microsoft Copilot Studio for specialized workflows, like paying bills over the phone. Multi-line calling: People juggling roles or regions often needed more than one phone number, but managing them meant separate devices or accounts. Admins can now assign up to ten numbers to a single user, with each appearing as its own tab in the Calls app, for one unified calling experience. Intelligent call delegation: Incoming calls don’t wait for a break in your day. Every incoming call forces a choice between losing momentum or missing something important. Intelligent call delegation, available in Frontier public preview, answers calls on a person’s behalf, engages the caller to determine intent, filters spam, and can schedule a follow-up via Microsoft Bookings when the person is unavailable. Unified call history in the Queues app: Without a shared view of call activity, customer service teams can struggle to track who had followed up on missed calls and voicemails, which can lead to duplicated effort and dropped follow-ups. The Queues app now offers shared call history, giving teams a unified view of that activity so that everyone can see what has been handled and what still needs attention. This can reduce duplicated effort and help teams respond to customers more quickly. Smarter collaboration that scales Teams brings people together to meet and collaborate. New AI-powered experiences help move work forward during meetings, while a redesigned Events experience means you no longer need a separate platform for your biggest moments. Organizations can run everything from team meetings to large-scale broadcasts on a single platform, reducing tool sprawl and operational overhead. Facilitator agent: Keeping a meeting on track while also capturing decisions and follow-ups is hard for any one person to do alone. Facilitator builds and tracks agendas, answers questions, and tracks tasks on behalf of everyone in the meeting. This enables participants to stay focused on the conversation instead of managing the mechanics of the meeting. Audio and video meeting recaps: Intelligent recaps with AI-generated notes are a great way to catch up on a missed meeting, but sometimes you need more flexibility, like when you’re on the go during your commute and can’t sit down to read through notes. Meeting recap now offers audio recap, which turns notes into a podcast-style narrated summary for up to eight meetings. Or want a short highlight reel of the most important meeting moments? You can now watch a video recap with narrated highlight clips from the meeting recording. New Teams events experience that scales for your largest meetings: Planning and producing webinars and employee town halls often meant juggling separate tools for each format, with configurations that didn’t carry over from planning to delivery. The new Teams events experience unifies these different experiences into one streamlined flow that supports the full event lifecycle, from setup and presenter prep, to live delivery and post-event follow-up. With Attendee Capacity Packs, Teams events can also support up to 100,000 concurrent attendees, which can help organizations scale communications and reduce tool sprawl. Built-in security and trust AI creates new opportunities for productivity, but it also opens up potential risks from bad actors looking to exploit it. Security remains our top priority. This year, we continued to build on this commitment through delivering new protections and controls that can help people meet, call, and collaborate more securely. Trust Indicators: As collaboration expands to external partners like customers and vendors, it can be hard to know at a glance who you’re really talking to. Trust Indicators now appear as visual badges next to external people across Teams, labeling them as external-familiar, external-unfamiliar, guest, email-verified, or unverified, so people can make informed decisions about what they share. Meeting bot detection and organizer controls: Unwanted bots slipping into a meeting can go unnoticed until after sensitive information has already been discussed. Teams can now detect bots and flag them to organizers in the lobby before anyone is admitted, with stronger controls to manage access and permissions throughout the meeting. This can help organizers limit sensitive conversations to the intended audience. Brand impersonation detection in calling: Scammers impersonating trusted brands put both employees and customers at risk. When a call shows signs of brand impersonation—someone posing as your IT helpdesk, for example—Teams can surface a warning that prompts you to verify before you act. You can also report a suspicious call directly from your call history. The AI-powered workplace This year marked a big leap forward for AI in the physical workplace. Microsoft Teams Rooms delivered new AI-powered experiences that help everyone participate more fully in hybrid meetings, while Microsoft Places continued to evolve with new capabilities for coordinating in-office work. Together, they can make time in the office easier to plan and meetings held there more inclusive for everyone joining, whether in the room or remote. Hybrid meetings where everyone is seen and heard: Remote attendees often squint at a wide room shot, unsure who is speaking. Cloud IntelliFrame now spans Windows and certified Android devices, giving remote participants individual gallery tiles that follow the conversation, and multi-camera switching brings the same clarity to larger spaces where a single camera can’t frame everyone naturally, to provide more meeting context for all. Speaker recognition, easier to roll out: AI-generated meeting notes from a room are only as useful as their attribution. Without knowing who said what, discussion summaries and action items can be hard to understand and act on. Speaker recognition now identifies individuals by name in live transcription on both Windows and Android, so Copilot, intelligent recap, and Facilitator can credit in-room contributions to the right people. Express enrollment makes setting up a voice and face profile fast and simple for users. And a new enrollment dashboard shows admins who is enrolled and where the gaps remain, so they can drive adoption across the organization. Microsoft Places, enhancing workplace experiences: Coordinating in-office days used to be guesswork. People can now book desks from an interactive map, see where colleagues plan to sit, or just plug into a desk’s peripherals to reserve it automatically. Copilot AI room booking turns finding the right space into a conversation and rebooks when plans change, while a new management portal and full Microsoft Graph API support for buildings, floors, rooms, and desks let IT manage the workplace at greater scale and connect with integration partners. User momentum This recognition rests on the trust of a growing community of customers. More than 320 million people rely on Teams each month as their AI-powered platform for work. That momentum extends into our advanced calling and meeting room capabilities as well. Over the past year, Teams Phone surpassed 26 million PSTN-enabled users. These are customers who have a Teams Phone license and an active phone number assigned. Microsoft Teams Rooms licenses now exceed 1.5 million, reflecting continued demand for modern, connected meeting spaces. Looking ahead We are grateful for this current recognition, and even more energized by what comes next. We remain committed to making Teams ever simpler, smarter, and more secure. As AI becomes a natural part of every workflow, Teams will continue to serve as the surface where people and agents collaborate together to communicate and move work forward. Thank you to the customers and partners who shape that direction with us. We’re just getting started. Start using Microsoft 365 Copilot today. Visit https://www.microsoft365.com/copilot or download the Microsoft 365 Copilot app for your desktop or mobile device. Enroll your organization in the Frontier program for early access to AI features. Upgrade to Teams Premium for more protected, engaging, and personalized meetings and calls. Read the full 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) report. ---------------------------------------------------------- Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, Worldwide, Pankil Sheth, Megan Fernandez, Rafael Benitez, Nitin Narang, 28 July 2026. Gartner and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates. *This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request here.
