Speaking at ECS 2026 - Come say hi in Cologne!

This week I'll be in Cologne for the European Collaboration Summit 2026 - one of the largest Microsoft 365 conferences in the world - and I'll be presenting a session together with my good friend Michaël Maillot on the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK. If you're attending, come find us!

Wait, what's ECS again?

European Collaboration Summit is the biggest Microsoft 365 conference in Europe, and one of the biggest on the planet! With over 3,000 attendees, 300+ sessions across three co-located summits (European Collaboration Summit, European AI & Cloud Summit, and European BizApps Summit), and quite the lineup of Microsoft executives, MVPs and Regional Directors, it's the kind of event where you run into someone interesting every time you turn a corner.

This year it's in Cologne, Germany on May 5-7, 2026. I've never had the chance to go before, and it's been on my bucket list for a while now, so I'm excited to finally be there as a speaker.

What will we be talking about?

Michaël and I are presenting together on Thursday, May 7th at 14:30 in room T - here's the session description:

Supercharge Your Copilot-Driven Collaboration with Microsoft 365 Agents SDK

Ready to geek out and supercharge your productivity? Join us for a hands-on session tailored for code-curious Teams power users!

Discover how to build smart, AI-driven agents using the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK. We'll guide you through creating agents that handle routine tasks - automating away the tedious tasks and making you more efficient.

If you're eager to boost your coding skills and dive into advanced automation, this is your chance to see just how intuitive - and occasionally, surprisingly tricky - it can be.

Who knows, by the end of the session, you might even be able to hack together a bot that saves you from having to talk to your coworkers...

As has been the case, we'll be talking about Microsoft 365 Agents SDK, which is Microsoft's framework for building custom AI-powered agents that slot right into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Think: smarter bots, deeper Copilot integration, and the kind of automation that actually saves you time instead of just shuffling tasks around.

This is a topic I've been digging into quite a bit lately - we did a session on it at Cloud Tech Townhall Tallinn earlier this year, and it's genuinely exciting stuff. Not just because the tech is cool (it is), but because there are real, practical applications that make a measurable difference in how teams work.

And instead of spending days clicking around in Copilot Studio, you can just vibe-code a completely custom agent that does exactly what you need it to do!

Well - there are some caveats. And we'll talk about them!

Why should you care about M365 Agents SDK?

Quick context, because naming in the Microsoft ecosystem is... an exercise in branding gymnastics:

• Microsoft 365 Agents SDK is for building custom agents that live in the Microsoft 365 platform - think Teams bots, Copilot extensions, and workflow automations.
• It's not the same, nor an alternative to Microsoft Agent 365 (which is for governance of Agents in the Microsoft 365 tenant), or Microsoft Agent Framework (which is a framework for the actual internals of your agents).

I know, it can be confusing - and the technologies, frameworks and tools evolve and get renamed constantly!

But the main takeaway is that if you've been wondering how to extend Microsoft 365 Copilot with your own business logic, this is the session for you.

We'll walk through the fundamentals, show some real demos (yes, including the parts where things don't go perfectly - that's always more instructive anyway), and give you a starting point you can take home and actually build on.

Come find us!

If you're at ECS 2026, please do come say hi - either at our session on Thursday, or just grab me in the hallway. I'll be there from Tuesday night all the way through Thursday (unless Lufthansa decides to mess with my flight or Gewerkschaft Deutscher Lokomotivführer goes on strike again!)

You can also check out the full ECS 2026 agenda at collabsummit.eu - there's a truly insane amount of quality content across all three summits, so even if you miss our session (which you shouldn't!), you won't run out of things to do.

See you in Cologne! 🍺