Keep your current contact center platform and let Microsoft's agents handle the calls on top of it, which is the offer in Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence, in public preview since October 21 and built to work with platforms from other vendors. The launch blog names Five9 and Cisco Webex Contact Center as connector targets and adds Avaya to the list, and Siemens Healthineers, a customer quoted in the blog, said it is building toward agents that resolve remote support issues on its Genesys and ServiceNow platforms.

The connector gives Microsoft the first conversation on platforms built by other vendors

In the design Microsoft describes, your existing platform continues to carry the call and staff the human queue, while the Customer Assist Agent takes the first conversation using fixed flows for calls that must follow a set path and generative answers for open-ended questions. When your criteria call for a person, a built-in handoff passes the customer to a representative through the contact center or Microsoft Teams.

The platform that runs the first conversation holds the customer context that every later conversation depends on, and Microsoft IQ is where Microsoft combines your customer relationship management data, contact center insights, and organizational knowledge into the real-time context its agents reason from. Voice biometrics sit at that same first step, and Microsoft says a verified identity carries over when the call reaches a human representative.

The preview covers self-service and quality scoring, with the rest on the roadmap

The briefing email lists the capabilities together while the launch blog separates what runs now from what is coming: the self-service agent is available, and quality scoring evaluates historical self-service conversations, where Microsoft says it can measure up to 100% of conversations instead of sampling a share of them (Microsoft, 2026). Real-time evaluation, coaching, and agent assist for human representatives are listed as coming soon, together with a Service Operations Agent that configures and monitors the contact center, and the preview is open worldwide with Austria as the exception.

Thomas Jefferson University, another customer in the blog, began the preview in September and said it was preparing to go live six weeks later (Microsoft, 2026), using the product for a human resources service desk with subjects such as enrollment and billing. That timeline gives you a useful benchmark for a contained internal scope, and your own pilot can name its first scope with the same discipline.

Two meters run on every call, one with Microsoft and one with your current vendor

Heidi Elmore, head of product marketing for Dynamics 365 Contact Center, said in her LinkedIn launch post that the product carries “usage-based pricing that gives customers flexibility in how they get started,” and the launch blog explains the mechanism: agentic capabilities are billed through Copilot Credits, so cost grows with adoption. A footnote adds that some contact center vendors charge for application programming interface access or for licenses to use their voice channel, and those fees sit outside Microsoft's pricing.

Cost per resolved contact therefore combines Microsoft's credit consumption with the access fees your platform vendor charges once agents answer first, and the second figure sits in contract terms you have already signed.

The migration path makes the pilot a decision about your next platform too

Microsoft lists a path to its own Dynamics 365 Contact Center for customers who decide to move later, and the launch blog says the product extends agentic capabilities built into that platform to other contact centers. A buyer can treat the connector as a standalone product or as a first step on that path, and your legal team can confirm which one you are buying by reviewing the data export and termination terms before the pilot starts.

Agent 365 puts contact center agents under the same control plane as your other agents

Microsoft handles governance through Agent 365, which it describes as a central place to deploy, monitor, and govern agents, and it reported close to 40 million registered agents across tens of thousands of companies as of July 2026 (Microsoft, 2026). Agent 365 is sold standalone or as part of Microsoft 365 E7, so teams that already govern agents there extend a practice they run, and teams on another governance tool plan for a second system.

Three details are worth confirming during the preview

• Price per conversation. Microsoft has described the credit mechanism, and a credit count for a typical resolved contact would complete your cost model.
• Connector depth. The materials name supported platforms, and confirming that voice and digital channels behave the same on each one will shape your pilot scope.
• General availability. A date for the end of the public preview would let you align the pilot with your contract renewal calendar.

Congratulations to Heidi Elmore and to the team behind the launch. In her LinkedIn post she thanked that team for the long hours and repeated revisions that went into the product, naming Sherwin Pereira, Shannon Reese, and Karan Nigam.