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Enterprises have spent the past two years rushing to make their workforces “AI-ready.” But many early training programs — focused on prompt writing and chatbot skills — are proving poorly suited to the realities of AI-powered work.

The reason is simple: the skills that matter most once AI enters real workflows have less to do with interacting with tools and more to do with judgment. The durable capabilities emerging in the AI era include output validation, data literacy, process understanding, and the ability to challenge automated recommendations. Tool-specific skills, by contrast, tend to age quickly as models and interfaces evolve.

“AI-ready is not defined by how many people took training or how many licenses you bought,” said Neal Sample, executive vice president and chief digital and technology officer at electronics retailer Best Buy. “It’s defined by whether you have redesigned real workflows, assigned accountability, and can show the technology is improving outcomes without introducing unmanaged risk.”

That shift — from tool proficiency to operational judgment — is forcing enterprises to rethink how they train employees for AI.

The illusion of AI readiness

The first wave of corporate AI training focused heavily on prompt engineering and basic familiarity with generative AI tools. That approach made sense early on, when employees needed help understanding the technology. But many organizations are discovering those skills have a short half-life.

“Prompt engineering aged the fastest,” said Rebecca Schalber, senior manager for generative AI at cosmetics company cosnova Beauty. As new models and interfaces appear, the effort invested in crafting perfect prompts quickly becomes obsolete.

When cosnova rolled out generative AI across its workforce, Schalber expected training to center on individual capability — understanding large language models, learning prompting techniques, and experimenting with tools. Early adoption looked promising. Within six months, a survey showed employees reporting productivity gains of nearly 10%.

Adoption alone was not enough. “You need broad adoption to move the needle,” Schalber said. “But what really matters is the workflow design.”

Instead of focusing on prompts, cosnova began examining how work actually happens inside teams — what tasks employees perform, where friction exists, and which parts of a workflow could be safely automated or augmented by AI. That shift forced employees to confront a different question: not how to use AI, but how to verify its output and integrate it into real business processes.

When AI hits real workflows

The distinction becomes clear once AI leaves experimental environments and enters operational workflows. In testing, outputs can be compared against known answers. In real business processes, however, the answer often isn’t known in advance. AI systems are deployed precisely because they help employees analyze complex situations, interpret data, or generate insights.

That’s where human oversight becomes critical. “Human oversight is not second-guessing every output from the AI,” said Sample from Best Buy. “It means being explicit about where judgment, escalation, and accountability must remain human.”

The closer a decision comes to customer trust, regulatory obligations, or significant financial risk, the more important that judgment becomes. Organizations deploying AI at scale must build guardrails into workflows and clearly define who is responsible for final decisions.

“For every AI-enabled workflow, you need to know who owns the decision, who handles exceptions, and where a human must intervene before the business takes action,” Sample said.

In other words, the challenge of AI readiness is not teaching employees to interact with a model — it’s teaching them how to supervise it.

From training programs to workflow design

At cosnova, Schalber’s team moved away from generic training sessions toward hands-on workshops where managers and employees map their daily workflows. During these sessions, teams identify tasks that could benefit from AI support and then redesign processes around those opportunities.

When AI was introduced as simply another tool, enthusiasm was limited. But when employees saw how the technology could remove tedious tasks or reduce friction in their work, adoption accelerated.

“It was no longer just another tool that management wanted people to use,” Schalber said. Instead, teams were solving their own problems — removing repetitive tasks or speeding up processes they disliked.

The company also began emphasizing transferable skills that apply across AI tools and models, including critical thinking, workflow design, and data literacy. These capabilities remain valuable even as the technology evolves and have proven far more durable than prompt-writing techniques.

Experimentation before formal training

Some organizations are taking a different approach: encouraging experimentation first and formal training later. At AI infrastructure company Turing, Taylor Bradley, vice president of talent strategy, deliberately began the company’s AI upskilling effort by encouraging non-technical employees to experiment with generative AI tools.

The goal was to spark curiosity rather than enforce compliance. Bradley compares the process to teaching his daughter to ride a bicycle. “The best way for her to learn was to actually have her ride the bike,” he said.

At Turing, employees experimented with AI through informal activities such as turning photos of pets into “royal portraits” or creating short AI-generated films for internal competitions. The exercises were designed to lower the barrier to experimentation. Once employees became comfortable with the technology, the company introduced practical workshops focused on real work tasks.

Bradley now sits down with teams to examine daily workflows and identify where generative AI could help. Employees often discover that AI can serve as a sounding board for ideas, a drafting assistant, or a way to accelerate communication.

Within weeks, those experiments often evolve into more formal systems. One early project began as a conversational tool helping HR specialists draft responses to employee support tickets before expanding into a broader internal knowledge system.

The key metric, Bradley said, is not course completion but whether teams develop useful AI applications. “We focus on quality use cases with measurable outcomes,” he said.

Learning inside the flow of work

For large enterprises, the challenge of AI skill development is even more complex. Traditional training models — where employees attend courses and then return to their jobs — are poorly suited to technology evolving as quickly as generative AI.

According to Margaret Burke, talent acquisition and development leader at professional services firm PwC, traditional training programs are inherently episodic. “Employees attend a course, return to work, and may or may not apply what they learned,” she said. “In an AI-accelerating environment, that model breaks down.”

PwC is embedding AI learning directly into everyday work. The firm still runs formal programs but is expanding apprenticeship-style learning and weaving AI capability development into routine business activities.

One example is the company’s “skills days,” where employees explore AI applications relevant to their work. During a recent session with advisory associates, participants documented how they were already using AI — or where they planned to apply it. Hundreds of ideas emerged. PwC then used AI to analyze the inputs, clustering them into categories and redistributing the results across the organization so teams could learn from one another.

Crucially, PwC pairs technical AI capabilities with what Burke calls “human edge” skills, including critical thinking, independent judgment, and storytelling. “We never teach an AI technical skill without teaching the human skill that goes with it,” Burke said.

As AI systems generate more content and analysis, those human capabilities become essential for interpreting results, spotting errors, and explaining insights to colleagues and clients.

Measuring real AI readiness

As organizations rethink AI capability, the metrics used to evaluate training programs are changing. Traditional learning programs often rely on course completion rates or certifications. But those metrics reveal little about whether employees can use AI responsibly inside real workflows.

Instead, organizations are looking for operational signals. Some track how frequently employees develop new AI use cases that improve productivity or decision-making. Others measure how quickly teams adapt when AI tools or models change.

For Bradley at Turing, the key indicator is whether employees continually find new ways to improve their work with AI. “If my team members come to me every week with ideas for improving or expanding AI use cases, that’s the signal that capability is growing,” he said.

From the CIO perspective, however, the ultimate measure is operational outcomes. AI readiness only becomes meaningful when organizations integrate AI into real workflows while maintaining accountability for the results.

“The most durable capabilities are not the current best prompt tricks,” said Best Buy’s Sample. “They are judgment, problem framing, systems thinking, and the ability to translate machine output into business action.”

But for CIOs deploying AI across the enterprise, workforce capability is only part of the equation. Organizations must also rethink how leadership defines accountability when AI systems influence decisions.

“An AI-ready workforce without an AI-ready leadership model is likely to stall,” Sample said. “AI can accelerate analysis and recommendations, but accountability doesn’t transfer to the model. Leaders still have to define guardrails, decision rights, and what success looks like.”

As enterprises move beyond early AI experimentation, that leadership clarity may prove just as important as any skill employees learn.

Related reading:

• What AI skills job seekers need to develop in 2026
• 5 things IT managers get wrong about upskilling tech teams
• Two-thirds of jobs will be impacted by AI
• How to keep tech workers engaged in the age of AI
• How to train an AI-enabled workforce — and why you need to

Identity management is a critical concern for any enterprise, and it’s becoming ever more complex and convoluted with the advent of AI agents.

World ID is taking a unique (and to some, controversial) approach to this challenge by building a ‘digital proof of human’ ecosystem for the internet. Today, at its “Lift Off” event, the Sam Altman co-founded initiative made a series of announcements, which included the launch of version 4.0 of its World ID protocol, a World ID app, World ID for Business, World ID for Agents, a new verification tool called Selfie Check, new monetization programs, and integrations with Zoom and Okta.

“It’s a re-engineering of the stack around a very simple idea: Humans should have a right to exceptional privacy and security,” Daniel Shorr, chief of staff to the CEO at Tools for Humanity, said at the event.

How ‘proof of human’ works

Billed as the infrastructure for the age of AI, World ID was co-founded by Altman and Alex Blania, and is being developed by technology company Tools for Humanity, whose iris imaging technology seeks to eliminate the need to provide emails, photos, or other personal details to prove identity.

World ID’s mission is to provide “proof of human” (POH), so that people know they are in fact interacting with another human being (or a bot on behalf of a verified human), rather than a deepfake or other unknown entity. The ideal is to reduce abuse, impersonation, fraud, and misinformation, and promote trust in online interactions.

POH ensures that only one account exists per user (‘one-person-one-ID’) via Tools For Humanity’s iris-scanning Orb device, which uses multispectral sensors and infrared light to capture high-res images of a human’s irises. These images are processed in seconds on-device to generate an ‘IrisCode,’ a unique cryptographic hash based on the iris’s unique details and textures.

IrisCodes are then compared to entries in the World Chain, a global blockchain-based database, to verify the user hasn’t previously registered. This check uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), a cryptographic prover-verifier mechanism, to confirm iris uniqueness without needing to link personal data.

If the IrisCode is identified as unique, the user receives a World ID that can be stored on their phone. IrisCodes are anonymized and fragmented across secure servers to minimize breach risks, preventing reverse engineering. The Orb also deletes original images by default.

Other World ID initiatives include Deep Face and Face Auth, which help identify deepfakes by performing private 1:1 face comparisons of selfies and Orb-captured images.

Tiago Sada, chief product officer at Tools for Humanity, emphasized the protocol’s open source nature, third-party auditing, and regular security updates. “It goes beyond standard end-to-end encryption, and it uses multiple primitives, including anonymized multi-party computation and zero knowledge proofs to protect you along the way,” he said at today’s event.

More than 18 million people across 160 countries have now verified their “humanness” via Orb and have used them more than 450 million times, execs said.

New World ID features

The new World ID 4.0 is a more scalable and powerful version of World ID that incorporates essential upgrades like key rotation (which detaches keys from identity), multi-party entropy (to ensure that every interaction is unlinkable), and finer credential controls (more ways to manage and protect information), Shorr explained.

It now includes a new verification method, “Selfie Check,” that can be used in lieu of Tools for Humanity’s Orb device. “Take a selfie and ‘boom, you’re in,’” Shorr explained. He noted that it’s not as robust as the Orb, but it’s “really, really compelling for specific use cases. Not every use case today requires the gold standard of Orb assurance.”

World ID also now includes agent delegation tools that essentially serve as what Shorr called “a power of attorney for your agent,” allowing it to perform actions on the user’s behalf.

“With the explosion of agents, the internet is fundamentally changing again,” he said. “How do you make sure the right humans are in the loop?”

This is especially important at critical moments where users or platforms need to ensure that a purchase or decision was intentional. At the same time, he said, “we don’t want Skynet.”

Security company Okta is now onboard, introducing Human Principal, a verification method based on World ID that is now available in beta.

World ID also announced upcoming new monetization efforts. Shorr noted that it’s difficult to monetize the network when you can’t share user data, but at the same time, being human is “incredibly valuable” in the age of AI, and the internet will want to know which users are human.

“We dug through the history books, and we came up with an inventively old approach: Fees,” he said. When services or developers ask for World ID proof, apps will pay a fee, not humans.

World ID and Zoom fighting deepfakes

Ensuring participants in Zoom calls are real people is another concern.

Brendan Ittelson, Zoom’s chief ecosystem officer, noted that deepfakes are more realistic than ever and the technology to create them is much more accessible, so it’s no longer a hypothetical ‘will this happen?’

Customers across Zoom’s user base are deeply concerned, he said, yet there are challenges with existing verification techniques and knowledge base options.

“The technology is evolving so fast, so doing detection techniques and all that is a constant cat and mouse game,” he said. “You really need a platform where you’re looking at [the question], ‘how can you validate someone and be privacy forward, but also have that strong human connection?’”

To address that problem, today’s announcements included the news that World ID is coming to Zoom. New capabilities will match live images with the Orb-verified ID on a user’s device when they log into a call. They can also verify themselves in real time; nothing leaves their device. World ID verification will be indicated by a badge in the user’s Zoom window.

Not everyone is convinced, though

While touted as a way to make the internet a safer, more democratic, and inclusive place, the ambitious initiative has been met with significant criticism.

Detractors, including the likes of notorious whistleblower Edward Snowden, warn of privacy and biometric data risks. They argue that storing iris data could create immense security problems, as well as the potential for its misuse and for unlawful surveillance.

Other criticisms are that World ID creates a central point of failure, requires blind trust in one company, and exploits vulnerable and developing nations. For instance, the initiative became massively popular in Kenya because iris scans were traded for Worldcoin cryptocurrency (WLD). This hinted at bribery, detractors note; the program has since been banned in the country, and is also either banned or suspended in Brazil, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Spain.

Further, the initiative raises concerns around data protection laws, credential theft (which can be particularly catastrophic because irises are immutable), and ‘function creep’ that could eventually restrict access to sites and force participation in the program.

Indeed, Orbs, which began shipping in the third quarter of 2025, are purchased from the private Tools for Humanity organization and are owned by “community operators,” who verify World IDs with their devices and receive WLD tokens for their efforts.

Protecting this kind of biometric data is crucial, said David Shipley of Beauceron Security: He pointed to Apple’s approach, where biometric data is securely stored on-device, and only a digital expression based on that data is transmitted, never the original biometric data itself.

“This feels like a super-bad idea,” he said of World ID. While having a secure, verified digital ID as a service that can be trusted is much needed, it shouldn’t be delivered by a private sector entity, he contended.

“Private sector control of personhood feels Hollywood-style cyber dystopian,” said Shipley. “Proof of being human and proof of being a citizen are public goods and should be delivered by public bodies that can be held accountable through democratic representation.”

Long before Taco Tuesday became part of the pop-culture vernacular, Tuesdays were synonymous with security — and for anyone in the tech world, they still are.  Patch Tuesday, as you most likely know, refers to the day each month when Microsoft releases security updates and patches for its software products — everything from Windows to Office to SQL Server, developer tools to browsers.

The practice, which happens on the second Tuesday of the month, was initiated to streamline the patch distribution process and make it easier for users and IT system administrators to manage updates.  Like tacos, Patch Tuesday is here to stay.

In a blog post celebrating the 20th anniversary of Patch Tuesday, the Microsoft Security Response Center wrote: “The concept of Patch Tuesday was conceived and implemented in 2003. Before this unified approach, our security updates were sporadic, posing significant challenges for IT professionals and organizations in deploying critical patches in a timely manner.”

Patch Tuesday will continue to be an “important part of our strategy to keep users secure,” Microsoft said, adding that it’s now an important part of the cybersecurity industry.  As a case in point, Adobe, among others, follows a similar patch cadence.

Patch Tuesday coverage has also long been a staple of Computerworld’s commitment to provide critical information to the IT industry. That’s why we’ve gathered together this collection of recent patches, a rolling list we’ll keep updated each month.

In case you missed a recent Patch Tuesday announcement, here are the latest six months of updates.

Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday release for April is a whopper

Windows admins are going to be busy this month, dealing with the largest Patch Tuesday cycle in memory. The April release involves 165 updates and roughly 340 unique CVEs from Microsoft — including two zero-days, one of which is already being actively exploited in the wild. 

The Readiness team is recommending “Patch Now” schedules for nearly every major product family this month: Windows, Office (with a zero-day), Microsoft Edge (Chromium), SQL Server, and Microsoft Developer Tools (.NET). April also brings Phase 2 of Microsoft’s Kerberos RC4 hardening with full enforcement set for July. There is a lot to cover, so the Readiness team built an infographic mapping the deployment risk for each platform.

More info is available here on Microsoft Security updates for April 2026.

For March, Patch Tuesday delivers fixes for 83 vulnerabilities

Microsoft’s March Patch Tuesday release addresses 83 vulnerabilities across Windows, Office, SQL Server, Azure, and .NET — with two publicly disclosed zero-days affecting SQL Server and .NET (though neither is being actively exploited in the wild.) Six additional vulnerabilities spanning the Windows Kernel, Graphics Component, SMB Server, Accessibility Infrastructure, and Winlogon are flagged as “Exploitation More Likely.”

The most significant change this month is the introduction of Common Log File System (CLFS) hardening with signature verification, which will affect how Windows handles log files across the operating system. More info on Microsoft Security updates for March 2026.

February’s Patch Tuesday release fixes 59 flaws, including 6 being exploited

The company’s Patch Tuesday release for February addresses 59 CVEs across the company’s product family — roughly half the volume of January’s 159 patches. Six vulnerabilities, affecting Windows Shell, MSHTML, Desktop Window Manager, Remote Desktop, Remote Access, and Microsoft Word, are already being actively exploited. (All five Critical-rated CVEs target Azureservices rather than Windows, however.) 

Both Windows and Office get a “Patch Now” recommendation, with CISA setting a March 3 enforcement deadline for all six exploited vulnerabilities. Two new enforcement timelines also take effect in April: Kerberos RC4 deprecation (CVE-2026-20833) and Windows Deployment Services hardening (CVE-2026-0386). More info on Microsoft Security updates for February 2026.

For January, Patch Tuesday starts off with a bang

The first Patch Tuesday release of 2026 addresses 112 CVEs across Microsoft’s product portfolio, including eight rated critical and three zero-day vulnerabilities. One zero-day (CVE-2026-20805), an information disclosure flaw in the Desktop Window Manager, is already under active exploitation, prompting CISA to add it to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog with a remediation deadline of Feb. 3, 2026. (Note: 95 of the vulnerabilities affect Windows.) More info on Microsoft Security updates for January 2026.

Ho ho ho! December’s Patch Tuesday delivers three zero-days

The December Patch Tuesday update addresses three zero-days (CVE-2025-64671, CVE-2025-54100, and CVE-2025-62221) but includes surprisingly few total patches (just 57). Notably, Microsoft has not published any critical updates for the Windows platform this month. That said, given the zero-days, we recommend a “Patch Now” release schedule for Windows and Microsoft Office. More info on Microsoft Security updates for December 2025.

Be thankful: November’s Patch Tuesday has just one zero-day

This November Patch Tuesday release offers a much reduced set of updates, with just 63 Microsoft patches and (only) one zero-day (CVE-2025-62215) affecting the Windows desktop platform. Windows desktops this month require a “Patch Now” plan, and while the severity of these security vulnerabilities is less than it was in October, the testing requirements are still extensive. More info on Microsoft Security updates for November 2025.

Windows admins are going to be busy this month, dealing with the largest Patch Tuesday cycle we can recall. The April release involves 165 updates and roughly 340 unique CVEs from Microsoft — including two zero-days, one of which is already being actively exploited in the wild. 

The Readiness team is recommending “Patch Now” schedules for nearly every major product family this month: Windows, Office (with a zero-day), Microsoft Edge (Chromium), SQL Server, and Microsoft Developer Tools (.NET). April also brings Phase 2 of Microsoft’s Kerberos RC4 hardening with full enforcement set for July. There is a lot to cover, so the Readiness team built an infographic mapping the deployment risk for each platform.

(More information about recent Patch Tuesday releases is available here.)

Known issues

Microsoft reports a single Windows 11 25H2 issue. It affects a narrow enterprise deployment group, but matters to anyone affected.

• KB5083769 – BitLocker recovery prompt on first restart (Windows 11 25H2/24H2). Devices with BitLocker enabled on the OS drive and the Group Policy “Configure TPM platform validation profile for native UEFI firmware configurations” set with PCR7 in the validation profile may be prompted for the BitLocker recovery key on the first restart after installing this update. Recommendation: Remove the PCR7 Group Policy configuration and run gpupdate /force before installing.

Issues resolved

April’s KB5083769 closes four issues, three quality-of-life and one multi-cycle reset failure:

• KB5083769 – Reset this PC (Windows 11 25H2/24H2). Resolves a defect that broke device reset on certain hardware and configuration combinations, taking the last-resort recovery path with it.
• KB5083769 – Secure Boot certificate rollout. The ongoing Secure Boot CA refresh picks up two improvements: the Windows Security app now displays certificate update status directly (Settings → Privacy & Security → Windows Security), and the quality update widens the device-targeting data for the staged rollout.
• KB5083769 – SMB compression over QUIC. SMB compression requests over QUIC now complete more consistently; the update addresses prior timeouts.
• KB5083769 – Remote Desktop anti-phishing. Opening a .RDP file now triggers a confirmation dialog listing every requested connection setting, each disabled by default. Users must explicitly opt in to local resource sharing before the connection is made; a one-time security warning appears the first time a .RDP file is opened after installing the update.

Major revisions and mitigations

Microsoft released no major revisions to Windows or Office. But Azure and Chromium/Edge have picked up several updates since the last month:

• Microsoft documented four critical Azure CVEs; no user action required.
• Microsoft re-published 141 Chrome/V8/WebGL/WebML/WebRTC fixes from the weekly upstream cadence; Edge picks them up through its own auto-update channel.

So Microsoft published 145 CVEs that affected Edge over the past 30 days. That averages out to around five reported security vulnerabilities per (working) day. Does anybody remember the good old days when we just had 10 critical-rated memory-related issues with IE — each month?

Windows lifecycle and enforcement updates

The saying that “April is the cruelest month” seems apropos, as we have three rather strict enforcements from Microsoft:

• Kernel driver cross-signed trust — evaluation mode begins April. Microsoft is dropping trust for legacy kernel drivers signed under the deprecated cross-signed root program, audit-only on Windows 11 24H2/25H2/26H1 and Server 2025.
• Kerberos RC4 hardening Phase 2 — April. Following November 2025’s Phase 1, domain controllers now default to AES-SHA1 encrypted tickets for accounts without an explicit Kerberos encryption type configured (CVE-2026-20833). The enforcement phase begins in July.
• Windows Deployment Services hands-free deployment — disabled by default from April. Hardening for CVE-2026-0386 (Unattend.xml over unauthenticated RPC) disables hands-free WDS deployment by default, beginning with the April update. Admins can override, but Microsoft does not recommend doing so.

Testing guidance

Each month, the Readiness team analyzes the latest Patch Tuesday updates and provides detailed, actionable testing guidance. April’s release covers 56 component updates across Windows. Microsoft flagged two as High Risk — Kerberos authentication and the Remote Desktop client — and delivered five patches to the Projected File System driver affecting cloud sync scenarios. Secure Boot and BitLocker validation expands to seven scenarios this cycle, including a new Windows Hello PIN persistence check. Prioritize Kerberos infrastructure, Remote Desktop stability, and cloud sync before broad deployment.

Kerberos and KDC

The Kerberos Key Distribution Center (kdcsvc.dll) and client library (kerb3961.dll) carry a High Risk flag this month. Microsoft’s guidance targets environments using keytab-based authentication with RC4 encryption — a legacy configuration common in mixed Windows and non-Windows service environments. The client-side update affects only Windows 10 1607, but server-side changes apply to all editions from Windows Server 2022 through 2025.

• After installing the update on domain controllers, open Event Viewer and review the System and Security logs for events with IDs 201–209.
• Capture full event details for any new events in that range: text, timestamp, and affected account or service.
• Focus testing on long-running services authenticating via RC4 keytabs, as these are most likely to surface failures after the update.

Remote Desktop client

Microsoft also flags the Remote Desktop ActiveX control (mstscax.dll) as High Risk. The update affects clipboard redirection, printer redirection, and session reconnection stability across all supported Windows versions. A separate update to mstsc.exe covers SmartScreen behavior for .RDP file handling, RemoteApp, and Hyper-V Enhanced Session mode.

• Connect to a remote device using mstsc.exe and check that the session establishes and remains stable.
• Copy and paste between local and remote sessions, both text and files, and expect correct transfer in both directions.
• Redirect a local printer into the remote session, print a test page, and confirm the job completes.
• Disconnect, reconnect, and verify clipboard and printer redirection survive the reconnection.
• Expect RemoteApp resources to launch normally and Hyper-V Enhanced Session mode to connect without error.

Secure Boot and BitLocker (continuing)

Secure Boot and BitLocker testing now expands to seven scenarios, including a new Windows Hello PIN persistence test. These validate Secure Boot state, BitLocker encryption, and key rolling related to the ongoing CVE-2023-24932 mitigation. Perform only on dedicated test devices with recovery keys backed up.

• Enable BitLocker on the OS drive, verify TPM protectors are present using manage-bde -protectors -get c:, then disable and verify the drive is fully decrypted.
• Enable BitLocker on a data drive, verify protectors, then disable and verify decryption completes.
• With Secure Boot enabled, enable BitLocker, trigger the recovery screen using reagentc /boottore, and verify the recovery key unlocks the drive.
• With Secure Boot disabled, enable BitLocker, force recovery via BCD test signing changes, unlock with recovery key, suspend BitLocker, and verify normal boot resumes.
• With both enabled, apply the Secure Boot key update (CVE-2023-24932) and verify the system boots without triggering recovery.
• Test hibernation with Secure Boot and BitLocker both enabled and verify clean resume without recovery prompts.
• On a device running March 2026, enable Windows Hello PIN and BitLocker, install the April update, and confirm the PIN still works.

Networking

April patches the Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock (afd.sys) twice — once paired with the TDX transport driver, once standalone — making it the most-patched network component this month. A separate patch to HTTP.sys affects HTTP/3 on Windows 11 23H2 and 22H2.

• Browse websites, download and upload files (including large files), and test VPN and Remote Desktop connections over both IPv4 and IPv6.
• Check that Teams, Outlook, and other messaging applications sign in, send messages, and reconnect after network blips.
• Test sandboxed and low-privilege processes — Edge, Store apps, and Electron apps — to confirm their network requests succeed.
• Generate sustained network load and confirm no BSODs, no new errors in Event Viewer, and no throughput degradation.

VPN and IPsec

April patches two VPN components: the Windows Filtering Platform driver (wfplwfs.sys) and the IKE Extensions service (ikeext.dll). The WFP update targets UWP VPN plug-in stability, sleep/wake recovery, and Always On VPN. The IKE update covers IKEv2 tunnels, IPsec security associations, and Connection Security Rules.

• Connect and disconnect your UWP VPN plug-in client repeatedly (10+ cycles) and confirm the client remains usable and the system stays stable.
• Keep the VPN connected for 30+ minutes during active use; verify it survives network changes (Wi-Fi to Ethernet) and sleep/wake cycles.
• If using Always On VPN, confirm it connects at sign-in and reconnects after network loss.
• Establish IKEv2 VPN connections and verify the tunnel is stable and internal resources are reachable.
• Validate that Connection Security Rules negotiate IPsec correctly and that protected traffic remains protected.

Authentication and security

Patches to the SSPI kernel drivers (ksecdd.sys, ksecpkg.sys) span NTLM, Kerberos, CredSSP, and TLS/SSL. The Windows Hello for Business stack also picks up updates for Enhanced Sign-in Security.

• Exercise end-to-end sign-in and resource-access flows for applications that use NTLM, Kerberos, CredSSP, or TLS/SSL authentication.
• Test both success and failure cases: correct versus incorrect credentials, allowed versus denied accounts, and expired certificates.
• Verify Windows Hello for Business authentication with Enhanced Sign-in Security across sign-in, lock, unlock, and reboot cycles.

Graphics, Shell and desktop

April updates span Direct3D, the Desktop Window Manager, and the graphics kernel (win32kbase.sys, win32kfull.sys). The Windows Shell (shell32.dll) picks up a patch affecting Mark-of-the-Web preservation for downloaded shortcuts, and COM Automation (oleaut32.dll) gets an update.

• Run stress tests with sustained UI activity: rapid open/close of windows, snap layouts, virtual desktop switching, and multi-monitor connect/disconnect.
• Test GPU-accelerated workloads — video playback, 3D applications, browser hardware acceleration — and check for visual artifacts or flickering.
• Download a .lnk shortcut file from the internet and confirm SmartScreen displays a warning when the shortcut is opened — verifying Mark-of-the-Web is preserved.
• Run COM Automation workflows — VBA, PowerShell, and Office automation — and confirm they execute correctly.

Hyper-V and virtualization

April patches both Hyper-V compute layers (computecore.dll, vmcompute.dll, vmwp.exe), along with the hypervisor binary (hvax64.exe) for Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2.

• Start, save, resume, and stop a VM using Hyper-V Manager or PowerShell and repeat the cycle multiple times.
• Export a VM, import it, and confirm the imported VM boots and runs normally.
• Launch Windows Sandbox and confirm it starts without error.

Windows Installer, Cloud Sync and MDM

April updates to Windows Installer (msi.dll), the Cloud Files filter (cldflt.sys), and the MDM management layer affect installation workflows, cloud sync, and device management.

• Install, uninstall, and repair MSI packages to verify Windows Installer functions correctly.
• Connect and disconnect your cloud sync provider (e.g. OneDrive) multiple times and confirm sync functions after restarts.
• Enroll a device in Intune or your MDM solution, verify compliance status, and trigger a policy sync.

Common Log File System and storage

The Common Log File System driver (clfs.sys) — subject of March’s major hardening change — picks up a follow-up patch. Storage Spaces (spaceport.sys) and app isolation file system drivers (bfs.sys, wcifs.sys) also receive updates this cycle.

• Run Windows Update install and rollback cycles, then power-cycle the machine multiple times to confirm the system boots normally each time.
• Install and uninstall a set of representative applications through multiple cycles and confirm each completes without error.
• Perform a backup using your normal solution, restore from it, and verify data integrity.
• If using Storage Spaces, create a pool with mirrored and thin virtual disks, write data, and verify clean deletion.

Office and SharePoint

April’s Office updates target MSI editions: Excel 2016 (KB5002860), PowerPoint 2016 (KB5002808), Office 2016 shared libraries (KB5002859), and SharePoint Server 2016, 2019, and Subscription editions. These will not install on Click-to-Run deployments such as Microsoft 365 Apps.

• Open and edit complex Excel workbooks with formulas, macros, and external data connections; save and reopen to verify integrity.
• Create and edit PowerPoint presentations with embedded media and transitions.
• Across all patched server editions, validate SharePoint document library operations, co-authoring, and workflow execution.
• Verify that Office add-ins and line-of-business applications integrating with Office continue to operate correctly.

April’s two High Risk components should top every testing queue. Kerberos changes could disrupt long-running services using RC4 keytabs; monitor event IDs 201–209 and keep rollback plans ready. The Remote Desktop client update warrants thorough validation of clipboard, printer redirection, and session reconnection, particularly in RDP-dependent environments. Secure Boot and BitLocker validation remains essential as CVE-2023-24932 key rolling continues. Five patches to the Projected File System driver elevate cloud sync testing this cycle. The dual afd.sys updates and VPN/IPsec patches warrant regression testing across remote-access infrastructure. Office updates are confined to MSI editions.

Each month, we break down the update cycle into product families (as defined by Microsoft) with the following basic groupings:

• Browsers (Microsoft IE and Edge)
• Microsoft Windows (both desktop and server)
• Microsoft Office
• Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server
• Microsoft Developer Tools (Visual Studio and .NET)
• Adobe (if you get this far)

Browsers

Microsoft’s browsers look quiet this month. Two Microsoft-authored Edge spoofing fixes both ride the standard Edge update channel: CVE-2026-33119 (Edge for Android, CVSS 5.4, moderate) and CVE-2026-33118 (CVSS 4.3, low).

The real story is upstream: 140+ Chromium fixes in the past month, including CVE-2026-5281 — a use-after-free in Dawn that Google has confirmed is actively exploited in the wild. We  recommend you patch now for all Chromium endpoints (here’s looking at you, Edge).

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft delivers 134 Windows CVEs across desktop and server — four critical, the rest important or moderate, with no zero-days or publicly disclosed flaws this cycle. Headline by raw CVSS is a 9.8 IKE/IPsec RCE; priority by exploitability is the Active Directory RCE — the only Windows critical Microsoft rates “Exploitation More Likely.” The four critical-rated issues are concentrated in three Windows areas: Active Directory, networking (two flaws), and Remote Desktop Client.

• Active Directory / Identity — CVE-2026-33826, RCE in Active Directory via improper input validation (CVSS 8.0, critical; Exploitation More Likely). An authenticated low-privilege attacker on an adjacent network can execute code on a domain controller – your entire directory service is the surface. This is a priority for anyone running AD on-prem.
• Networking (IKE/IPsec) — CVE-2026-33824, RCE in IKE Service Extensions via double-free (CVSS 9.8, critical; Less Likely). Highest CVSS in the cycle: unauthenticated, network-callable, no UI. Patch VPN concentrators and IPsec gateways first.
• Networking (TCP/IP) — CVE-2026-33827, RCE via race condition in the TCP/IP stack (CVSS 8.1, critical; Less Likely). Network-callable, but the race lifts attack complexity (AC:H).
• Remote Desktop Client — CVE-2026-32157, RCE via use-after-free (CVSS 8.8, critical; Less Likely). Triggered when a user connects to a malicious RDP server (UI:R) — the threat model is reverse RDP, not inbound. Flag for jump-host operators.

Beyond the criticals, the standout Windows flaw is CVE-2026-27912 — Kerberos elevation of privilege via improper authorization (CVSS 8.0, important). Authorized attackers on an adjacent network can elevate through the Kerberos handler. Coordinate domain-controller deployment with the Kerberos RC4 Phase 2 hardening covered in the lifecycle section; both touch domain controllers. The Kerberos flaw (CVE-2026-27912) pushes April’s Windows updates to Patch Now.

Microsoft Office

Office receives 14 security fixes, three rated critical and one actively exploited in the wild. The active SharePoint exploit forces Office to Patch Now, with SharePoint servers taking priority over the client push.

• CVE-2026-32201 – Microsoft SharePoint Server — Spoofing, actively exploited in the wild (CVSS 6.5, important). The score understates the urgency: exploitation has been confirmed, and a spoofing flaw inside SharePoint is a platform for credential theft and lateral movement regardless of internal-only posture. Patch immediately, ahead of the Office client push.
• CVE-2026-32190 – Microsoft Office — Remote code execution (CVSS 8.4, critical). The Preview Pane remains the attack vector; previewing a crafted file in Outlook or File Explorer is sufficient to trigger execution without further user action. As we’ve noted before, this keeps recurring.
• CVE-2026-33114, CVE-2026-33115 — Microsoft Word — Remote code execution (both CVSS 8.4, critical). Paired Word RCEs on the same release channel; affected surface matches CVE-2026-32190.

Excel carries the heaviest cluster — four additional RCEs: CVE-2026-32189, CVE-2026-32197, CVE-2026-32198, and CVE-2026-32199, plus an information-disclosure flaw in CVE-2026-32188. Microsoft Word picks up two fixes outside the critical pair: RCEs CVE-2026-33095 and CVE-2026-23657, and information disclosure CVE-2026-33822. This is a Patch Now release for Office, driven by the SharePoint zero-day. Organizations that cannot deploy Office clients quickly should consider disabling the Preview Pane in Outlook and File Explorer as a temporary mitigation against the critical RCE trio.

Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server

Exchange Server picks up zero CVEs this month, a rare quiet cycle, and the right window to clear any deferred CU work. SQL Server gets three, including a network RCE that grants SQL sysadmin on success:

• CVE-2026-33120 — Microsoft SQL Server — Remote code execution via untrusted pointer dereference (CVSS 8.8, important; Exploitation Less Likely). Authenticated attackers get full SQL sysadmin on success. Scope is unusually narrow: only SQL Server 2022 for x64-based Systems on the GDR servicing branch — CU 24 and every other supported version (2016 SP3 through 2025) are not listed as affected.
• CVE-2026-32167, CVE-2026-32176 — Microsoft SQL Server — Elevation of privilege via SQL injection (both CVSS 6.7, important). Paired flaws affecting SQL Server 2016 SP3 through 2025 on both GDR and CU branches. Local EoP, not remote — the concern is breadth, not blast radius.

The Readiness team recommends Patch Now for any SQL Server 2022 GDR operation. Schedule the wider SQL footprint with your normal database-maintenance window.

Developer tools

There are 10 CVEs in Developer Tools this month, headlined by a critical-rated .NET Framework DoS and two GitHub-attributed flaws that will affect developer workflows directly.

• CVE-2026-23666 — .NET Framework — Denial of service via improper input validation (CVSS 7.5, critical; Exploitation Less Likely). The critical rating despite a DoS impact reflects exploit-code maturity; the CVSS vector includes E:P (proof-of-concept).
• CVE-2026-32631 — Visual Studio — NTLM hash leak via git clone from manipulated repositories (CVSS 7.4, important). GitHub-attributed: cloning a malicious repo or checking out a branch that resolves to an attacker-controlled UNC path leaks the user’s NTLM hash. Affects Visual Studio 2017, 2019, and 2022 (17.12 and 17.14).
• CVE-2026-26143 — PowerShell — Security feature bypass (CVSS 7.8, important). Highest CVSS in the set, and PowerShell SFBs always merit attention.

Five more developer-related updates round out the cycle: four .NET / Visual Studio DoS or spoofing fixes (CVE-2026-26171, CVE-2026-32178, CVE-2026-32203, CVE-2026-32226) and a moderate TLS PSK/ALPN bypass (CVE-2026-21637). None have been disclosed or exploited. The Readiness team recommends Patch Now for .NET Framework and PowerShell.

Adobe (and third-party updates)

Microsoft no longer ships Adobe updates as part of its bulletin. Adobe ships APSB26-44 separately for Acrobat and Reader — two listed as critical. They are worth your attention, given Reader’s prevalence on enterprise desktops. For anyone packaging, testing and deploying these recent and rapid Adobe releases: we hear you. The packages are big, and the management effort keeps growing.

Has IPv6 finally reached its day of glory?

It’s fair to say that IPv6 has not had the level of take-up expected when the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) ratified it back in 1998. Take-up has been agonizingly slow, not reaching 5 percent of traffic until 2014. However, the use of IPv6 has been slowly climbing since, and according to Google statistics, briefly accounted for 50.1% of the internet traffic Google sees on March 28.

However, technology publication The Register, which spotted the tiny but significant blip in Google’s traffic graphic, quoted two other sources: Cloudflare and APNIC Labs as stating that IPv6 had yet to reach such an exalted level: Cloudflare tracked it at a high of 43 percent, while APNIC registered that 43.13% of network hosts across the world were IPv6 capable.

It has been a long climb to this point. IPv6, with support for around 3.4 x 1038  addresses, was developed due to fears that the 4.3 billion unique addresses available under the previous version of the protocol, IPv4, would be insufficient for a global population now numbering around 8 billion.

While the development of technologies such as Network Address Translation has extended the lifespan of IPv4 by allowing multiple devices to hide behind a single address, there is little doubt that IPv6 has gradually been growing in importance and there is every chance that the 50 percent usage line will be crossed for good at some point in the future.

This article first appeared on Network World.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, is building an AI version of himself.

The virtual CEO is being trained on Zuckerberg’s mannerisms and will be loaded with his views on corporate strategy, the Financial Times reported.

The idea is that employees will find the virtual Zuckerberg more accessible than they would the flesh and blood manifestation.

There are plenty of claims that AI will lead to jobs being eliminated but, until now, the CEO job has looked safe. If Zuckerberg’s experiment proves successful, though, even company leaders could be due for the chop.

In February, OpenAI’s Sam Altman warned that CEOs could be as vulnerable as other senior executives. “AI superintelligence at some point on its development curve would be capable of doing a better job being the CEO of a major company than any executive, certainly me,” Altman said. “On our current trajectory, we believe we may be only a couple of years away from early versions of true superintelligence.”

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has already tempted fate, using an AI version of himself to present the company’s financial results to analysts, and even to take customer calls. So far, though, he’s kept his job.

The UK government has created a Sovereign AI investment fund with up to £500 million (US$675 million) to spend on turning UK startups into national AI champions.

Its support could involve investments of up to £20 million per startup, or provision of up to 1 million GPU-hours of AI compute, and fast-tracking of visas to bring skilled workers to the UK.

The multi-million-pound budget sounds impressive, but it’s just 0.08% of OpenAI’s recent $852 billion valuation. That company just received fresh investment of $122 billion, dwarfing the UK’s sovereign fund.

Closer to home, that £500 million would buy about 5% of French AI startup Mistral, which has achieved its success by offering a European alternative for businesses that do not want to use American or Chinese AI providers.

The UK government does not have a great record when it comes to investing in national IT champions. In the 1960s and 1970s, the government ran the National Enterprise Board which provided funding to new technology companies, but even the biggest names helped in this way have slipped out of UK ownership: ICL, a mainframe challenger to IBM, eventually became part of Japan’s Fujitsu, while Inmos, an early innovator in parallel computing, is now part of Dutch chip giant STMicroelectronics.

Apple Business is aimed at small businesses coalesced around Macs, iPhones, and iPads. If that’s you, and all your systems are made by Apple, the service is likely to be all you need to run a small operation of up to a few dozen seats. 

But Apple Business isn’t really designed to handle the advanced needs of larger enterprises. And while it can provide a starting point for Mac deployments in mixed-platform environments, it probably shouldn’t be where you end up.

It doesn’t handle cross-platform device deployments, for which you’ll need full-strength MDM solutions (such as those from up-and-coming vendor Fleet). Another thing Apple Business doesn’t do is cover the full extent of compliance targets you might need to meet at your company. So, if you need to ensure compliance with standards/benchmarks such as HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO 27001, or CIS, you’ll need to choose something else.

This is also true if you need to ensure your endpoints are secured, or you require automated vulnerability scanning. 

A gift to small enterprise

That’s not to say Apple Business doesn’t have its uses. It clearly does. If you run a small business with up to, say, 50 staffers and you use Apple kit across the company, you’ll be able to manage your devices and app deployments yourself, no admin required.

That makes it a great tool for high-growth startups, many of which use Apple right from the start. Those businesses will be able to manage devices across their teams for free using Apple Business. They can always scale up once business is booming, making the service a gateway to tech success for many startups or small enterprises. The ability to streamline device management company-wide at no charge is a gift.

Setting the stage

Many might feel that with the international introduction of Apple Business, the company has torn a chunk out of the MDM industry. That’s less true than it sounds; many in the space already support small deployments for free, so what Apple is doing is winnowing away some of the smaller businesses who might use the resources provided by MDM firms but never become paying customers. 

Those customers are also an excellent market for the AppleCare support the company offers alongside Apple Business. It gives people the experience of device management, so that by the time they shift to a more advanced plan to support growth, they have a better understanding of what that involves.

Apple has drawn a line in the sand with the business. It’s basically saying that on the SMB side of that strip, it has you covered — and it has effectively defined its rapidly maturing MDM partners as focused on the needs of large customer deployments.

Market opportunity knocks

The good news there is that those large deployments do actually exist. In the last three years, Apple has confirmed huge Mac deployments (thousands of Macs) at SAP, Snowflake, Capital One, Coppel, Nubank, and elsewhere. Just last year, Apple CFO Kevan Parekh confirmed the best ever June quarter for Mac in the enterprise, and with the MacBook Neo, the company seems to be seeing dramatic growth in every one of the 200 markets in which you can now sign up for Apple Business.

So, while Apple nurtures tomorrow’s big businesses, its MDM partners can continue to meet the more diverse and demanding needs of larger enterprise entities. 

With the low-cost Neo arguably emerging to be the company’s iPhone moment for the Mac, Apple is also building business fast in emerging markets. Since use of Apple Business remains an integral component of working with any third-party device management partner (if only to assign the devices to an MDM system), the opportunity exits to scale up for business growth and scale down if that market contracts. It’s a world-class, ecosystem-based set of functionalities to support small business and enable corporations, all in one place.

You just need to know which problems it solves. Deployment? Yes. Compliance, edge security, and cross-platform support? No.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

No matter what type of Android phone you carry or how you usually use it, one thing is a near-universal constant:

You’re gonna spend a ton of time messing with messages.

The messages may be from clients, colleagues, or your cousin Crissy from Cleveland (damn it, Crissy!). But regardless of who sends ’em or what they’re about, they’re all poppin’ up on your phone and cluttering your weary brainspace.

My fellow Android adorer, I’m here to tell you there’s a better way.

Google’s Android Messages app has gotten surprisingly good over the years. That’s no big secret. If you only rely on what you see on the surface, though, you’re missing out on some of Messages’ most powerful and underappreciated efficiency-enhancing options.

[Hey: Want even more advanced Android knowledge? Check out my free Android Shortcut Supercourse to learn tons of time-saving tricks — for messaging and beyond!]

Today, we’ll explore the Android Messages app’s most effective out-of-sight superpowers. They may not be able to cut down on the number of messages you send and receive on your phone (DAMN IT, CRISSY!), but they will help you spend less time fussing with ’em. And they might just help you have a more pleasant experience, too.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

(Before you splash forward, take note: The tips on this page are all specific to the Google Messages app for Android. If you’re using a phone where that exact app wasn’t preinstalled or set as the default, you can download it from the Play Store and give it a whirl. You might be pleasantly surprised by what you find.)

Android Messages trick #1: Message resurrection

We’ll start with a freshly added fix for one of the longest-standing Android messaging frustrations — and that’s the app’s inability to let you bring back a messaging thread you inadvertently deleted.

As of just this month — April 2026 — Google is finally in the midst of adding an overdue “Trash” section into the Messages app that lets you see and optionally restore any conversation you’ve killed within the past 30 days. Can I get a halle-frickin’-lujah?!

Once the feature is available to you, it couldn’t be much easier to find and manage:

• Just tap your profile picture in the Messages app’s upper-right corner.
• And look for the newly added “Trash” option in the menu that appears — directly beneath “Archived.”

At last! A place for finding and optionally restoring deleted messages within the Google Messages app on Android.

JR Raphael, Foundry

Tap that, and you’ll be taken to a special section of the app where every axed thread lives for about a month before being permanently deleted. There, you can tap any thread and then tap the circular clock icon at the top of the screen to restore it — or tap the trash icon to delete it permanently (and irreversibly) from your phone. You can also restore or delete all threads in that area together, if you want.

Thank goodness.

Android Messages trick #2: Text editing

In addition to recovering a deleted message, Google Messages on Android also now allows you to edit your own sent message — for those mortifying moments when you realize you’ve made a mistake or sent the wrong thing to the wrong person (egad!).

The option is available only in messages where everyone involved is using the current RCS messaging standard. You’ll know that’s the case if you see “RCS message” in the text box at the bottom of the thread.

Provided that’s present, just press and hold your finger onto any individual message you’ve sent, then look for the pencil-shaped editing icon along the app’s upper edge — and, last but not least, swear to yourself you’ll never hit send without reading over what you wrote again. (Right…)

On that note, I’d be remiss not to inform you that anyone’s original, pre-edited messages are always accessible for anyone else in the conversation to see — if they know where to look.

Android Messages trick #3: Custom icons

Up next is what might be my favorite little-known trick within Google’s Android Messages app: With a couple quick adjustments, you can turn any of your contacts’ faces into a custom notification icon. That icon will then show up at the top of your phone whenever that person messages you for extra-easy visibility and access.

See?

A quick bit of simple setup, and bam: Anyone’s face can become their notification icon (for better or for worse!) on your phone.

JR Raphael, IDG

The only catch is that your phone needs to be running 2020’s Android 11 operating system or higher for the feature to be available. (And honestly, if your phone isn’t running Android 11 at this point, you’ve got bigger fish to fry, Francesco.) Also, Samsung has screwed around with this system for no apparent reason — a frustratingly common theme with Samsung’s heavily modified approach to Android, especially as of late — so you may or may not be able to take advantage of this on a Galaxy gadget, depending on how recently its software has been screwed up updated. (Exaggerated sigh. What more can I say?!)

On any reasonably recent Android device that sticks close to Google’s core Android interface, though, here’s how to make the magic happen:

• The next time you get a message from someone, press and hold your finger to the notification.
• That’ll pull up a screen that looks a little somethin’ like this:

Android’s Priority conversation setting is the key to creating custom notifications that really stand out.

JR Raphael, IDG

• Tap the “Priority” line, then tap “Apply” to save the changes.

And that’s it: The next time that person messages you, you’ll see their profile picture in place of the standard Messages icon in your status bar, and the notification will show up in a special section above any other alerts.

Hip, hip, hoorah!

Android Messages trick #4: Custom sounds

In addition to making it easier to spot an important contact by their notification icon, you can also create a custom alert sound for messages coming in from different people — or even from specific threads within the Google Messages app — so you immediately know what they are before you have a chance to look.

This is one of those things that’s super-basic but also awkwardly out of sight and consequently unknown to an awful lot of Android-owning organisms. But once you know where to find it, it really couldn’t be much easier to get going. And it’s all connected to Android’s notification channels, which let you get incredibly nuanced on how different types of notifications within apps behave.

The quickest way to zip where you need to be is to open the thread you want to customize within Messages itself — whether it’s a one-on-one text with an individual person or a group conversation with multiple contacts. Once you’re inside the thread, tap the three-dot menu icon in its upper-right corner and select “Details,” then select “Notifications” on the screen that comes up next.

And hey, wouldya look at that? You should now be staring at a series of options about how that exact notification behaves — including, at least in the standard Google version of Android, the all-important “Sound” setting.

width="1024" height="923" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px">A special sound for every conversation is no more than few fast taps away.

JR Raphael, Foundry

Tap that, then find and select any sound you like. The next time a new message comes in for this conversation, there’ll be no mistaking what awaits you from the second it arrives.

Android Messages trick #5: Contact prioritizing

While we’re thinking about making certain conversations stand out, ever wish you could keep your most important messaging threads at the top of the list for easy ongoing access?

Poof: Wish granted. No matter what kind of Android phone you’re holding or how needlessly meddled with its software may be, just hold your finger onto the conversation in question on the main Messages app screen, then tap the pushpin-shaped icon in the app’s upper bar.

You can now pin up to 20 conversations that way, and they’ll always appear above all other threads in that main inbox view.

Android Messages trick #6: Short-term tune-out

Some incoming messages always require your immediate attention. Others, in contrast, are best tuned out and caught up with much later.

Surely you’ve been in that type of thread before, right? Y’know, the one where people are getting just a little too active — sending message after message, typically either during your workday or while you’re trying to focus on anything other than their uninteresting missives?

Google’s Android Messages app actually has a great way to deal with such struggles. It’s a temporary snoozing mechanism that lets you opt out of notifications from one specific conversation and that conversation only and stop receiving alerts from it for a set amount of time.

To try it out, press and hold your finger onto any thread in your main Messages list, then look for the clock icon with a “z” inside of it at the top of the screen. Tap that, and you can then decide to snooze notifications from that single conversation for one hour, eight hours, 24 hours, or — if you really want to tune it out — forever.

The sanity-saving Android Messages snooze option. (Don’t worry: I won’t tell.)

JR Raphael, Foundry

You’ll continue to get notifications from all other conversations in the meantime, and you’ll still be able to see new activity from the snoozed thread by opening up Messages and actively looking at it. But you won’t be interrupted by its alerts again — for a little while, at least.

Android Messages trick #7: Gemini be gone

Speaking of tuning out distractions, if you rarely to never interact with Google’s Gemini chatbot from inside the Messages app — perhaps because, y’know, it’s also available in approximately 7 gazillion other in-your-face places — you might appreciate the distraction-free satisfaction of an interface without a prominent Gemini button begging for you to caress it every frickin’ time you open up your messages.

(The Gemin icon is that starbust-shaped symbol that sits perpetually above the “Start chat” button, in Messages’ lower-right corner, if you haven’t ever tapped it to find out.)

And good news: You can actually send that icon a-packin’, if you’re so inspired: Just tap your profile picture in Messages’ upper-right corner, select “Messages settings,” then tap “Gemini in Messages” and flip the switch on the screen that comes up next into the off and inactive position.

All that’s left is to pat yourself on the back and celebrate the fact that you’ll only have to see Gemini in 6.9 gazillion other places from this point forward.

Android Messages trick #8: Free in-flight Wi-Fi

Gemini may be little more than a distraction within Messages most of the time, but one moment when that capability can actually come in handy is while you’re flying the allegedly friendly skies.

A while back, a crafty reader alerted me to the fact that you could use Gemini’s Messages integration to effectively give yourself free in-flight Wi-Fi access even when you haven’t paid for the privilege. It’s a heck of a clever hack and a moment when you genuinely may want to activate Gemini within the Messages app, at least for a little while.

I’ve got a complete breakdown of how it works and how you can put it to use on your next flight.

Android Messages trick #9: Calendar connection

Whether from the sky or on the regular ol’ ground, the next time you’re working to plan a meeting or event with a fellow Homo sapien in Messages, make yourself a mental note of this:

Anytime someone sends you a message that includes a specific date and time, the Messages app will underline that text. See it?

That underlined time is a covert link from an incoming message to your Android calendar agenda.

JR Raphael, IDG

You’d be forgiven for failing to realize, but you can actually tap that underlined text to reveal a shortcut for opening that very same day and time in your Android calendar app of choice. It’s a great way to get a quick ‘n’ easy glimpse at your availability for the time you’re discussing.

And if you then want to create a calendar event, just look for the “Create event” command that should appear right below that very same message. That’ll fire up a new calendar event for you on the spot, with the appropriate day and time already filled in.

That button to the left of the text suggestions is a spectacular time-saver for on-the-fly event creation.

JR Raphael, IDG

Don’tcha just love simple step-savers?

Android Messages trick #10: Seamless scheduling

If you’re ready to hammer out a response to a message right now but don’t want your reply to be sent for a while, follow the advice shared by a reader in my Android Intelligence newsletter recently and simply schedule your message for some specific future time.

The Android Messages app’s scheduling system is spectacularly useful. You can rely on it for setting reminders to be sent to clients, business-related messages to be pushed out the next morning, or context-free middle-finger emojis to be delivered to your cousin in Cleveland at ungodly hours in the middle of the night.

To tap into this productivity-boosting power, just type out your message normally — but then, instead of tapping the triangle-shaped send icon at the right of the composing window, press and hold your finger onto that same button when you’re done.

No reasonably sane person would possibly realize it, but that’ll pull up a hidden menu for selecting precisely when your message should be sent.

Send any message, anytime — no matter when you actually write it.

JR Raphael, IDG

And the person on the other end will have no way of even knowing you wrote the thing in advance.

Android Messages trick #11: Swift saving

When you run into a message you know you’ll want to reference again, save yourself the trouble of trying to dig it back up later and instead star it on the spot to make it fast as can be to find in the future.

It couldn’t be much easier to do: Whilst viewing an individual message thread, just press and hold your finger onto the specific message you want to save, then tap the star-shaped icon that appears in the bar at the top of the screen.

Then, when you want to find the message again, tap the search icon at the top of the main Messages screen and select “Starred” from the menu that comes up. That’ll show you every message you’ve starred for exceptionally effortless resurfacing.

Android Messages trick #12: Smart searching

Speaking of that Messages search system: Starring is sublime, but sometimes, you need to dig up an old message that you didn’t go out of your way to save.

The Android Messages app makes that even easier than you might realize. Tap that same search icon at the top of the app’s main screen — and in addition to searching your entire history message for any specific string of text, take note:

• You can start typing out the name of anyone in your contacts, then select them from the suggestion that appears — and then type in some text to look for something specific only within messages from that one person.
• You can use the options within the main Messages search screen to look specifically at images, videos, locations, or links people have sent you.
• And you can combine any of those variables for even more granular finding — looking for links you sent to a particular client, for instance, or locations an out-of-town colleague sent to you.

The Android Messages app’s search system is chock-full of helpful info.

JR Raphael, IDG

How ’bout them apples?!

Android Messages trick #13: Instant marking

I don’t know about you, but I find it impossibly irksome to see messages sitting with bold emphasis in my Android Messages inbox. That, to me, is a marking that means I need to read (and possibly also respond) to the message in question. And I can’t possibly rest for the day until I know that everything in my Messages inbox is open, addressed, and dealt with (or at least opened and with a reminder set to deal with it at some specific future time).

Sometimes, though, it’s all too easy to fall behind and get a backlog of bolded messages — and in such scenarios, sometimes, you need a quick ‘n’ easy one-switch reset button to bring everything back to read status and give yourself a fresh start.

Well, surprise: Messages has such an option! Tap your profile picture in the app’s upper-right corner and look for “Mark all as read” in the menu that comes up to find it — then let yourself rest easy as all that attention-demanding boldness melts away once and for all.

Android Messages trick #14: Easier-to-read text

On the subject of more noticeable text, file this next Android Messages feature under “accidental discoveries”: The next time you find yourself squinting at something in a messaging thread on your phone, try a good old-fashioned zoom gesture on the screen — placing your finger and thumb together and then spreading ’em slowly apart.

You’d never know it, but the Messages app supports that standard gesture for zooming into a conversation. The inverse applies, too: When you’re ready to zoom back out and make everything smaller, just bring your two fingers closer together.

And if those actions aren’t working for you, tap your profile picture in the upper-right corner of the main Messages screen and select “Messages settings,” then make sure the toggle next to “Pinch to zoom conversation text” is in the on position.

Android Messages trick #15: Custom colors

While we’re thinkin’ about easier reading, a relatively recent Android Messages addition can let you create a custom color palette for any conversations you’ve got goin’.

That way, you can always remember that texts with your significant other are in, say, purple, whereas messages with your most important client are in red. (Best not to get those two threads confused.)

This one works only with messages sent using the modern RCS messaging platform, which basically means messages that don’t involve pesky people still carrying around iPhones with outdated software on ’em. (It’s always the iPhone people, isn’t it?!)

With any currently supported conversation, open up the thread within Messages — then:

• Tap the three-dot menu icon in the screen’s upper-right corner.
• Select “Change colors” from the menu that appears.
• Pick the color scheme you prefer, then tap the Confirm button at the bottom.

Every Android Messages conversation can have its own distinctive color, if you take the time to set it up.

JR Raphael, IDG

Repeat for any other compatible conversations, and you’ll always know exactly what you’re looking at even with a fast glance — and without having to give it an ounce of active thought.

Android Messages trick #16: Meatier media

You know a fantastic way to waste time? I’ll tell ya: moving from one app to another just to glance at something someone sent you (like those blasted Bangles video Crissy is always blasting your way).

But get this: Google’s Android Messages app can let you preview and get the gist of both text articles and even YouTube videos without ever leaving your current conversation — from right within the app and that very same message thread.

The key is to make sure you’ve got the associated options enabled:

• Tap your profile picture in the upper-right corner of the main Messages screen.
• Select “Messages settings,” then tap “Automatic previews.”
• Make sure the toggle next to “Show all previews” is on and active.

Now, the next time someone sends you a link, you’ll see the associated item’s thumbnail and description right then and there, within the Messages conversation:

Videos expanded in-line within Messages — easy peasy.

JR Raphael, IDG

With web pages, Messages will show you just enough of a preview to let you make an educated decision about whether you want to tap the link or not.

Web links gain useful extra context once you enable the right option within the Android Messages settings.

JR Raphael, IDG

Almost painfully sensible, no?

Android Messages trick #17: Smarter shortcuts

If I had to pick the simplest Android Messages trick for enhancing your efficiency, it’d be embracing the built-in shortcuts Google gives us for faster message actions.

From the main Messages screen, you can swipe left or right on any message to perform an instant action — archiving the conversation, deleting it, or toggling it between read and unread status.

All you’ve gotta do is mosey your way back into the Messages app’s settings areas and tap on the “Swipe actions” item to set things up the way you want…

Step-saving swipes within Messages — now available for your customization.

JR Raphael, IDG

…and then, just remember to actually use those gestures moving forward. (That part’s on you.)

Android Messages trick #18: Quicker cleanup

Certain services love to send confirmation codes via text messaging when you sign in or try to perform some action. It may not be the most advisable or effective form of extra security, but — well, it’s better than nothing. And for better or for worse, it’s a pretty common tactic.

Core security considerations aside, the most irksome part of these confirmation codes is having ’em clutter up your messages list at every Goog-forsaken moment. But the Google-made Android Messages app can actually take care of that for you, without any ongoing effort — if you take about 20 seconds to make the right tweak now.

Here’s the secret:

• Tappity-tap that comely character in the upper-right corner of the main Messages screen (y’know, the one whose appearance has a striking resemblance to your oversized head).
• Tap “Messages settings” in the menu that comes up, then select “Messages organization.”
• Within that curiously created section, you’ll see only one option: “Auto-delete OTPs after 24 hrs.” OTP may not exactly be an everyday, universally known abbreviation, but fear not — for it isn’t an erroneous reference to an early 90s rap hit with equally ambiguous meaning. Nope: It stands for one-time password, which is the same thing we’re thinking about here.
• Flip that toggle into the on and active position, then flip a finger of your choice to all the confirmation codes in your messages list with the knowledge that they’ll be auto-purged a day after their arrival from that point forward.

Who’s down with OTP? Every last homie. (I apologize.)

Android Messages trick #19: Readable reactions

Slack-style reactions may seem silly on the surface, but they serve an important communication purpose in allowing you to quickly acknowledge a message without having to carry the conversation on further. Whether it’s a thumbs-up, a clapping hands symbol, or even perhaps an occasional burrito emoji, it really can be a handy way to say “Yup, got it” (or “Yup, want beefy goodness”) without having to use a single word.

You probably know you can summon a reaction within the Android Messages app by pressing and holding a specific message within a conversation and then selecting from the list of available emoji options — right? But beyond that, Messages packs an even faster way to issue a reaction in the blink of an eye.

And here it is: Simply double-tap your finger onto any individual message within a conversation. That’ll apply the thumbs-up reaction to it without the need for any long-press or symbol selection.

It’d be nice if there were a way to customize which reaction is used for that action by default — so that, obviously, we could all change it to the burrito emoji, since that’s what any sane person uses most often — but if and when an upward thumb will do the job, now you’ve got a super-easy way to bring it into any conversation with a fast finger tap.

Android Messages trick #20: iRritation elimination

Last but not least in our list of magnificent Messages enhancements is something specific for your conversations with the Apple-adoring animals in your life. And it relates to those very same sorts of reactions we were just going over.

One obnoxious side effect of Apple’s “no one exists outside of iOS” mentality, y’see, is the way the iPhone’s equivalent of those reactions show up on Android. Plain and simple, they show up as — well, plain and simple text messages, instead of coming through as reactions.

Surely you’ve encountered this, right? Those pointless messages you get from iGoobers that say stuff like “Loved ‘Please stop texting me, Crissy'”?

Well, scribble this on your metaphorical mental iPad: Google’s Android Messages app is actually able to intercept those absurd platform-specific reactions and turn ’em into standard reactions instead of plain-text interruptions. And it’ll take you all of 12 seconds to enable the option:

• Head back into the Messages app’s settings.
• Tap “Advanced.”
• Look for the line labeled “Show iPhone reactions as emoji” and make sure the toggle next to it is in the on position.

All that’s left is to breathe one final heavy sigh of relief — and to send Crissy a well-deserved burrito reaction.

Hey: Don’t let the learning stop here. Get six full days of advanced shortcut knowledge with my free Android Shortcut Supercourse. Tons of time-saving tricks await!

The productivity gains from AI are so great, companies can lay off thousands of employees and still get the same amount of work done — right? Or maybe it’s the opposite: despite all the hype, any supposed AI productivity boom is a mirage, causing employees, even  developers, to experience heavier workloads.

At the moment, the jury’s still out on whether AI use boosts or busts productivity across the workforce, despite the prediction that American business spending on AI will exceed $200 billion by the end of the year, according to one analysis. 

There’s no doubt workers are turning to AI in a variety of ways. Gallup, for instance, says nearly half of all US workers now use AI. And Hubstaff data published by Worklytics shows that 85% of professionals use the technology— but only for about 4% of their actual work time. That means 96% of work is 100% human. 

Mileage varies according to how you group employee types, too. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that workers using AI saved 5.4% of their work hours, a 1.1% overall increase in productivity. That’s an average, with math and computer workers and within the information services industry reporting higher productivity gains. 

The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, meanwhile, uncovered what it called a “productivity paradox,” in which the productivity gains people think they see aren’t reflected in measurable gains. (It sounds like AI isn’t the only one hallucinating.)

And research from Harvard Business Review (February 2026) found that AI often increases the intensity of work rather than reducing the total workload as originally promised. I’ve heard software developers, in particular, expressing this view and finding that AI is a major source of job burnout. 

All this talk about productivity can miss the qualitative dimension. A 2025 study found that using AI makes employees more innovative by giving them confidence they can handle more complex problems. 

The research goes on and on and, taken together, is more or less inconclusive. However, it’s reasonable to assume that productivity gains from any kind of new technology are likely to take time to show up. It took a decade or more with the PC revolution, for example. While these early days for AI present a mixed picture, productivity gains will surely come, and probably on a massive scale. 

Meanwhile, one slice of the American workforce is already seeing giant gains — remote workers. 

Why AI is working for those working from home

As I’ve argued in this space many times, remote work is a boon for companies in most circumstances. The reasons for this bullish stance are both numerous and, to me, intuitive to the point of being obvious. 

Here are three: 

• Employees have more time because they don’t waste time commuting
• Flex hours are more likely with remote work, so employees can better manage work-life balance, making them happier and more committed to their jobs
• Remote work reduces interruptions, facilitating “deep work,” which, according to deep work expert Cal Newport, is the more valuable type of work for companies 

Now, a new study has added another major benefit for companies in allowing employees to work remotely: AI. 

The study by Michael Blank, a faculty fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and colleagues found that AI has a much higher impact in the home than in the office. The study looked at internet browsing data of more than 200,000 U.S. households. 

One reason is surprising: AI helps work-from-home (WFH) employees with both professional and personal tasks, making them more productive at both. The study shows that AI helps people save time and complete tasks much more efficiently when working, planning travel, shopping, figuring out how to fix things around the house and more. 

WFH employees have an AI advantage over office workers, according to the study, because they have the autonomy to integrate AI into their flow without corporate oversight and control. 

Also: Remote employees are more likely to task-switch during the day, alternating between work and personal tasks, something AI facilitates through increased automation. 

Interestingly, the researchers found that employees are taking time saved and using it for more leisure time, as opposed to doing more work or learning new skills. This particular fact is a mixed bag for employers, because while they’re not realizing productivity gains in terms of work performed, they are benefiting from happier employees less prone to dissatisfaction and burnout. 

Blank’s major note of caution is that he found younger people with higher incomes saw the highest productivity gains with AI use at home. He fears a growing “digital divide” between higher and lower income groups and younger and older workers.

It’s about the autonomy as much as the technology

I want to be very clear about the great revelation of this study. It does not look directly at higher productivity with the use of AI for work tasks. Nor does it necessarily conclude that only WFH remote employees can see these gains. 

What it found is that people with high autonomy are the ones who see  the biggest productivity gains from the use of AI in general. WFH employees have the highest autonomy, so they’re seeing real improvements in increased leisure time. 

Just as the benefits of “flex work” are not about flexibility in location but in the use of time, flexibility in the use of AI drives productivity. 

I’ve been beating the flex work drum for years, and now during the AI revolution I’d like to add autonomy to that mix. Whether employees are working in offices full or part-time, from home full or part-time or as digital nomads full or part-time, in 2026 it appears that the highest productivity and employee satisfaction gains come from maximizing flex work and AI autonomy. 

AI disclosure: I don’t use AI for writing. The words you see here are mine. I do use a variety of AI tools via Kagi Assistant (disclosure: my son works at Kagi) — backed up by both Kagi Search, Google Search, as well as phone calls to research and fact-check. I use a word processing application called Lex, which has AI tools, and after writing use Lex’s grammar checking tools to find typos and errors and suggest word changes. Here’s why I disclose my AI use and encourage you to do the same.

Anthropic has today released a new, improved Claude model, Opus 4.7, but has deliberately built it to be less capable than the highly-anticipated Claude Mythos.

Anthropic calls Opus 4.7 a “notable improvement” over Opus 4.6, offering advanced software engineering capabilities and improved visioning, memory, instruction-following, and financial analysis.

However, the yet-to-be-released (and inadvertently leaked) Mythos seems to overshadow the Opus 4.7 release. Interestingly, Anthropic itself is downplaying Opus 4.7 to an extent, calling it “not as advanced” and “less broadly capable” than the Claude Mythos Preview.

The Opus upgrade also comes on the heels of the launch of Project Glasswing, Anthropic’s security initiative that uses Claude Mythos Preview to identify and fix cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

“For once in technological history, a product is being released with a marketing message that is focused more on what it does not do than on what it does,” said technology analyst Carmi Levy. “Anthropic’s messaging makes it clear that Opus 4.7 is a safer model, with capabilities that are deliberately dialed down compared to Mythos.”

‘Not fully ideal’ in some safety scenarios

Anthropic touts Opus 4.7’s “substantially better” instruction-following compared to Opus 4.6, its ability to handle complex, long-running tasks, and the “precise attention” it pays to instructions. Users report that they’re able to hand off their “hardest coding work” to the model, whose memory is better than that of prior versions. It can remember notes across long, multi-session work and apply them to new tasks, thus requiring less up-front context.

Opus 4.7 has 3x more vision capabilities than prior models, Anthropic said, accepting high-resolution images of up to 2,576 pixels. This allows the model to support multimodal tasks requiring fine visual detail, such as computer-use agents analyzing dense screenshots or extracting data from complex diagrams.

Further, the company reported that Opus 4.7 is a more effective financial analyst, producing “rigorous analyses and models” and more professional presentations.

Opus 4.7 is relatively on par with its predecessor in safety, Anthropic said, showing low rates of concerning behavior such as “deception, sycophancy, and cooperation with misuse.” However, the company pointed out, while it improves in areas like honesty and resistance to malicious prompt injection, it is “modestly weaker” than Opus 4.6 elsewhere, such as in responding to harmful prompts, and is “not fully ideal in its behavior.”

Opus 4.7 comes amidst intense anticipation of the release of Claude Mythos, a general-purpose frontier model that Anthropic calls the “best-aligned” of all the models it has trained. Interestingly, in its release blog today, the company revealed that Mythos Preview scored better than Opus 4.7 on a few major benchmarks, in some cases by more than ten percentage points.

The Mythos Preview boasted higher scores on SWE-Bench Pro and SWE-Bench Verified (agentic coding); Humanity’s Last Exam (multidisciplinary reasoning); and agentic search (BrowseComp), while the two had relatively the same scores for agentic computer use, graduate-level reasoning, and visual reasoning.

Opus 4.7 is available in all Claude products and in its API, as well as in Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry. Pricing remains the same as Opus 4.6: $5 per million input tokens, and $25 per million output tokens.

What sets Opus 4.7 apart

Claude Opus is being branded in the industry as a “practical frontier” model, and represents Anthropic’s “most capable intelligent and multifaceted automation model,” said Yaz Palanichamy, senior advisory analyst at Info-Tech Research Group. Its core use cases include complex coding, deep research, and comprehensive agentic workflows.

The model’s core product differentiators have to do with how well-coordinated and composable its embedded algorithms are at scaling up various operational use case scenarios, he explained.

Claude Opus 4.7 is a “technically inclined” platform requiring a fair amount of deep personalization to fine-tune prompts and generate work outputs, he noted. It retains a strong lead over rival Google Gemini in terms of applied engineering use cases, even though Gemini 3.1 Pro has a larger context window (2M tokens versus Claude’s 1M tokens), although, he said, “certain [comparable] models do tend to converge on raw reasoning.”

The 4.7 update moves Opus beyond basic chatbot workflows, and positions it as more of “a copilot for complex, technical roles,” Levy noted. “It’s more capable than ever, and an even better copilot for knowledge workers.” At the same time, it poses less risk, making it a “carefully calculated compromise.”

He also pointed out that the Opus 4.7 release comes just two months after Opus 4.6 was introduced. That itself is “a signal of just how overheated the AI development cycle has become, and how brutally competitive the market now is.”

A guinea pig for Mythos?

Last week, Anthropic also announced Project Glasswing, which applies Mythos Preview to defensive security. The company is working with enterprises like AWS and Google, as well as with 30-plus cybersecurity organizations, on the initiative, and claims that Glasswing has already discovered “thousands” of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser.

Anthropic is intentionally keeping Claude Mythos Preview’s release limited, first testing new cyber safeguards on “less capable models.” This includes Opus 4.7, whose cyber capabilities are not as advanced as those in Mythos. In fact, during training, Anthropic experimented to “differentially reduce” these capabilities, the company acknowledged.

Opus 4.7 has safeguards that automatically detect and block requests that suggest “prohibited or high-risk” cybersecurity uses, Anthropic explained. Lessons learned will be applied to Mythos models.

This is “an admission of sorts that the new model is somewhat intentionally dumber than its higher-end stablemate,” Levy observed, “all in an attempt to reinforce its cyber risk detection and blocking bona fides.”

From a marketing perspective, this allows Anthropic to position Opus 4.7 as an ideal balance between capability and risk, he noted, but without all the “cybersecurity baggage” of the limited availability higher-end model.

Mythos may very well be the “ultimate sacrificial lamb” at the root of broader Opus 4.7 mass adoption, Levy said. Even in the “increasing likelihood” that Mythos is never publicly released, it will serve as “an ideal means of glorifying Opus as the one model that strikes the ideal compromise for most enterprise decision-makers.”

Palanichamy agreed, noting that Opus 4.7 could serve as a public-facing guinea pig to live-test and fine-tune the automated cybersecurity safeguards that will ultimately “become a mandatory precursory requirement for an eventual broader release of Mythos-class frontier models.”

The European Commission this week requested, but did not order Google to allow third party search engines in Europe access to its search data as a means to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), legislation the Commission describes as a law designed to “make the markets in the digital sector fairer and more contestable.”

Google was sent a set of proposed measures on Wednesday that, according to a release, would grant third party search engines, including Qwant from France, Mojeek, based in the UK, swisscows from Switzerland, and Ecosia, Good, and metaGer, all headquartered in Germany, the ability to access search data, such as ranking, query, and click and view data “on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.”

In a statement, Teresa Ribera, executive vice-president for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition with the Commission, said that the decision “sets out the specifications we expect Google to follow to comply with its obligations under the [DMA]. Data is a key input for online search and for developing new services, including AI.”

The measures themselves cover several areas, including the scope of the search data Google must share, the means and frequency by which it must happen, and parameters for “setting fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory prices for search data.”

Move ‘far exceeds DMA’s original mandate’

In response to the Commission’s request, Clare Kelly, senior competition counsel for Google, said Thursday in a statement, “hundreds of millions of Europeans trust Google with their most sensitive searches, including private questions about their health, family, and finances, and the Commission’s proposal would force us to hand this data over to third parties, with dangerously ineffective privacy protections.”

The company, she said, “will continue to vigorously defend against this overreach, which far exceeds the DMA’s original mandate and jeopardizes people’s privacy and security.”

Phil Höfer, board member of SUMA-EV, which develops and runs MetaGer, said, “the planned measure might help with optimizing and developing European competitors to Google’s search service, but is not what’s needed most at this time. As long as the Commission isn’t planning on forcing Google to share their index data as well, this will not do much.”

Even better, he said, would be for the Commission “to decide to continue funding the European Open Web Index and allow European actors to build a competing infrastructure. We are convinced that without a European index, the EU will not be able to compete with American search engine giants.”

Forrester Senior Analyst Dario Maisto said the decision from the Commission is “not too timely but definitely in line with the measures Europe needs to free up businesses and citizens from risky dependencies on foreign organizations, vendors, and technologies. The final outcome is truly uncertain, though: one thing is to provide access to data to other players, one other thing is to modify users’ behaviors. We have to remember that the synonym for doing a search on the internet is actually: Google it.” 

Brian Jackson, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, said that opening Google’s search data to third parties could make search more specialized again, especially in high-value verticals where users want results tailored to a specific industry or service need.

Enterprise digital teams, he said, may need to optimize for multiple discovery environments rather than relying just on Google alone, and software buyers could see more choice as search and intelligence vendors build on shared data.

In addition, said Jackson, “it could revive domain-specific search models, but I think a more fragmented search ecosystem might raise manipulation risks, fraud, and poisoned results. That would make governance and monitoring much more important.”

Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, noted that, in terms of the impact on enterprises if Google shares search data under DMA, “this is being framed as a competition move, but that is not where the real impact sits. What is actually shifting here is control over how enterprise information is interpreted by machines.”

Definition of optimization is changing

For a long time, he said, “enterprises have quietly relied on the stability of a dominant discovery layer led by Google. That stability shaped everything from how content was written to how digital performance was measured. What is changing now is not just who has access to data, but how many systems can interpret that data.”

Gogia pointed out, “as alternative engines improve and start to matter, enterprises will find themselves operating in an environment where the same content can be surfaced differently, depending on which engine or AI system is doing the interpreting. That creates inconsistency, and over time, inconsistency becomes risk.”

There is, he said, also a deeper shift underneath all this: “Search is no longer just about helping users find information. It is increasingly the layer that feeds AI systems, copilots, and automated decisions. Once that layer fragments, enterprises no longer have a single reference point for how they are represented externally. That loss of coherence is subtle at first, but it builds into something much more material.”

Addressing the question of whether or not enterprises will need to optimize for multiple algorithms, he said, “the short answer is yes, but the bigger point is that the definition of optimization itself is changing. Enterprises are moving away from a world where they could tune for one dominant system into one where relevance is decided differently across multiple engines that do not follow the same rules.”

Search engines such as Qwant, Ecosia, and Mojeek, “each approach indexing and ranking differently,” Gogia said. “Some rely on their own infrastructure, others blend multiple data sources. The result is that the same piece of content can behave very differently across environments, even when nothing about the content itself has changed.”

What complicates this further, he said, “is the rise of AI-generated answers. Enterprises are no longer competing for links, they are competing to be included in summaries that may not even reveal where the information came from. That shifts the focus away from keywords and toward clarity, context, and credibility. The organizations that do well will be the ones whose content holds up across systems, not just within one.”

Interested parties have until May 1 to submit views on the proposed measures prior to a final decision, which will be binding on Google and must be adopted by July 27.

Admins who use Cisco Webex Services configured to use trust anchors within the SSO integration with Control Hub must install a new identity provider certificate to close a critical vulnerability, or risk losing access control.

Cisco said in an advisory this week that admins must upload a new identity provider (IdP) SAML certificate to Webex Control Hub, the web-based management portal where IT administrators can control all Cisco Webex services, including certificate management, meetings, messaging and calling. Failure to close this hole will allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to impersonate any user within the service.

The vulnerability, CVE-2026-20184, carries a CVSS score of 9.8.

Because Webex is a cloud service, Cisco can, and has, patched its side of the application. But admins using single-sign on (SSO) still need to install the new certificate. There are no workarounds.

A Webex support article on managing SSO integration says that information about certificates is found in the Webex Control Hub Alerts center, where customers can view which ones are installed, and their status. The Control Hub also contains an SSO wizard to aid in updating certificates. The article contains step-by-step details on the process.

Asked for comment, and for more details about the vulnerability, a Cisco spokesperson didn’t go beyond the advisory. “Cisco published a security advisory disclosing a vulnerability in the integration of single sign-on with Control Hub in Cisco Webex Services,” the spokesperson said. “At the time of publication (April 15) Cisco had addressed the vulnerability, and was not aware of any malicious use of this vulnerability. Affected customers must update their SAML certificate to ensure uninterrupted services.”

Gartner analyst Peter Firstbrook noted in an email that, since Cisco has applied the patch to the cloud service, this is more of a configuration change. But that doesn’t minimize the possible damage. “While we are not aware of exploits using this vulnerability, users can lose SSO access to Webex without this change,” he said. 

“This does illustrate a bigger trend that identity and access management is the corporate perimeter,” he added, “and the majority of attacks include an identity and access management component. CISOs must increase their focus on IAM hygiene, particularly as agentic computing is accelerating.” 

Identity and access management is, of course, the keystone of cybersecurity. As Crowdstrike observed in its 2026 Global Threat Report, abuse of valid accounts accounted for 35% of cloud incidents it investigated last year, “reinforcing that identity has become central to intrusion.” Single sign-on allows a user to authenticate to multiple applications through one set of credentials. It’s efficient, and, of more importance to a CSO, strengthens security.

Additional critical fixes

The Webex flaw is one of three critical vulnerabilities Cisco identified and issued patches for this week. In addition, multiple vulnerabilities have to be patched in Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) and Cisco ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC).

These holes (CVE-2026-20147 and CVE-2026-20148, which carry CVSS scores of 9.9), could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to perform remote code execution or conduct path traversal attacks on an affected device. To exploit these vulnerabilities, the attacker must have valid administrative credentials, and send a crafted HTTP request to an affected device. There are no workarounds.

Separately, two more vulnerabilities were found in ISE that could lead to remote code execution on the underlying operating system of an affected device. To exploit these vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-20180 and CVE-2026-20186), the attacker would only need Read Only Admin credentials.

This article originally appeared on CSOonline.

The soap refill dispenser at a cafe in TRACE Expert City — a technology hub in Colombo, Sri Lanka — boldly declares that it was delivered by ”USAID, from the American people.”

The device is a relic from the past, reflecting goodwill that once existed between the US and Sri Lanka. Now, as external aid through USAID and other entities dries up, the island nation is looking inward for its future.

You’ll find some of that focus at TRACE’s campus, where energetic AI entrepreneurs with international ambitions brim with fresh ideas. Startup Jendo Innovations is already deploying AI-driven medical technology internationally. “We have the best affordable talent in the region to develop applications on AI,” said Heminda Jayaweera, executive director of TRACE.

Meanwhile, in Kathmandu, Nepal, venture capitalist Preeti Adhikary and medical doctor Kisu Rawal beam with joy as women entrepreneurs wrap up a series of AI training sessions. Adhikary sees in the women newfound confidence and fresh ideas about how to expand and streamline their businesses.

While much of the chatter about AI in the US carries with it an element of danger — hallucinations, rogue AI agents, leaked or stolen data — in Nepal the conversation centers around empowerment and upward mobility.

“While AI has been an equalizer…, it’s on us to find underserved communities and demographics to educate and enable,” said Adhikary, who is a general partner at Momo VC. She works to connect the Nepal tech ecosystem through initiatives like The Great Nepali Diaspora, a global network of Nepali talent, and The Empowered Women Network, which organized the recent AI training session.

Preeti Adhikary, venture capitalist and a general partner at Momo VC.

The Empowered Women Network

To be sure, AI is still in the Wild West phase in Nepal, Sri Lanka and many developing economies — just as it is elsewhere in the world. Locally, some startups have focused  AI tools on their unique cultures, demographics and business environments.

Some are focused on AI for good, especially in rural areas, where 33% of the population resides, according to the World Bank. 

Mobile devices are ubiquitous in those areas, which opens the door for AI-driven healthcare that can quickly diagnose diseases and reduce long lines in remote hospitals.

But culture also presents unique data challenges. Literacy remains an issue, and locals prefer interacting with AI using voice-driven methods rather than text, which changes customer feedback and service flows. 

Product recommendations are also made by word-of-mouth, cutting off one layer of product discovery and reshaping how AI models are built.

Because workforces in Nepal and Sri Lanka are still emerging, the concern over AI-driven job losses is not as dire as in the US, where job cuts have been attributed to automation via AI. And unlike in the US, legacy systems and technical debt are not a burden here. 

Enterprises with lean IT budgets have little appetite for digitizing legacy data, which could slow AI adoption. So, bootstrapped startups, facing limited hardware, capital and talent, hope to make their workflows and processes AI-native from the start.

Even so, the lack of resources makes innovation and skills development difficult. Nvidia GPUs, for instance, are particularly scarce in Nepal and Sri Lanka and prohibitively expensive. 

To work around the challenges, startups have turned to small language models (SLMs) and popular AI tools. “AI tools — which are powerful even at the free version — and open-source models have meant AI is truly democratized now,” Adhikary said.

AI adoption is poised to grow in both Nepal and Sri Lanka, both of which have Gen-Z-inspired governments that grew up on social media and are AI-ready. Nepal last year published a national AI strategy outlining plans to boost infrastructure, skills readiness and countrywide awareness.

It has room to grow. Nepal ranks 106 out of 190 countries in Oxford Insights’ 2025 Government AI Readiness Index. The nation’s goal is to reach the top 50.

Meanwhile, Sri Lanka is ranked 80th and is pushing AI adoption. The country in 2024 established the Ministry of Digital Economy and has an AI strategy to boost the local ecosystem.

And Sri Lanka’s new digital nomad program could bring diaspora and foreign tech workers back onshore to help bolster local AI development and adoption.

As in other parts of the world, there is an ongoing need for mentorship, domain expertise and access to networks to grow and scale, according to Adhikary. But AI  entrepreneurs in Nepal recognize the benefits of collaboration. 

“I’m pleasantly surprised … that a nation with a newish tech ecosystem can compete with New York and Silicon Valley in terms of ideas and technical acumen,” Adhikary said.

Microsoft’s Windows Recall feature remains vulnerable to complete data extraction despite a major security overhaul, according to a cybersecurity researcher who says malware running in a user’s context can quietly siphon off everything Recall has captured, without administrator privileges, kernel exploits, or breaking encryption.

Alexander Hagenah, executive director at Zürich-based financial infrastructure operator SIX Group, made the claim in a LinkedIn post, where he also published a proof-of-concept tool called TotalRecall Reloaded to demonstrate the issue.

Hagenah first exposed Recall’s security flaws in 2024, forcing Microsoft to pull the feature from preview and rebuild it. Microsoft relaunched Recall in April 2025, saying the new architecture would restrict “attempts by latent malware trying to ‘ride along’ with a user authentication to steal data.” Hagenah said it does not.

“When you use Recall normally, TotalRecall Reloaded silently holds the door open behind you and then extracts what Recall has ever captured. That is precisely the scenario Microsoft’s architecture is supposed to restrict,” he wrote in the post.

Hagenah wrote in the post that he disclosed the research to Microsoft’s Security Response Center on March 6, submitting full source code and reproduction steps. Microsoft reviewed the case for a month and closed it on April 3, telling him the behavior “does not represent a bypass of a security boundary or unauthorized access to data.”

“Microsoft says this is by design,” Hagenah wrote. “That worries me.”

In an email response to CSO, a Microsoft spokesperson said, “After careful investigation, we determined that the access patterns demonstrated are consistent with intended protections and existing controls, and do not represent a bypass of a security boundary or unauthorized access to data. The authorization period has a timeout and anti-hammering protection that limit the impact of malicious queries.”

Hagenah’s research does not challenge Microsoft’s encryption, which he said is sound. The gap, he told CSO, is in how decrypted data is handled once it leaves the enclave.

“Plaintext screenshots and extracted text end up in an unprotected process for display,” he told CSO. “As long as decrypted content crosses into a process that same-user code can access, someone will find a way in.”

What a fix would require

A fix is technically feasible, Hagenah said.

“The short-term fix is fairly straightforward. Microsoft could add stronger code integrity and process protections to AIXHost.exe, the process that renders the Recall timeline. Right now, it has none, which makes the injection path possible. That would block the specific technique I demonstrated and materially raise the bar,” he said.

The longer-term problem runs deeper, he said. “Microsoft should rethink how decrypted data is handled after it leaves the enclave. The cryptography and enclave design are genuinely well done, and I want to be clear about that. The problem is that plaintext screenshots and extracted text end up in an unprotected process for display. As long as decrypted content crosses into a process that same-user code can access, someone will find a way in,” he said.

“A durable fix would mean either rendering inside a protected process or adopting a compositing model where raw data never leaves the trust boundary. That is a bigger effort, but it is the only way to close this class of issue properly,” he said.

Exploitation risk

The barrier to weaponizing this technique is lower than Microsoft’s security messaging would suggest, Hagenah said.

“They only need code running in the user’s context and a way to reuse the authorized Recall session,” he said. “That is a much lower bar than many people would assume from Microsoft’s security messaging.”

While Recall’s limitation to Copilot+ PCs and its opt-in status reduce the scale of exposure, targeted abuse is a realistic near-term risk, he said. “For targeted abuse, surveillance, or high-value user collection, this is absolutely realistic,” he said.

Hagenah said he published the source code deliberately so defenders, EDR vendors, and security teams could build detections before threat actors operationalize the technique independently. “In my view, that gives the defensive side a valuable head start,” he said.

Independent security researcher Kevin Beaumont reached a similar conclusion after separately testing the current Recall implementation. “Yep, you can just read the database as a user process,” Beaumont wrote on Mastodon on March 11. “The database also contains all manner of fields that aren’t publicly disclosed for tracking the user’s activity. No AV or EDR alerts triggered,” he wrote.

The article originally appeared in CSO.

If your organization uses Microsoft 365 (a.k.a. Office), chances are you’ve encountered Teams, at least for video meetings. But it’s capable of a lot more, providing an effective way for groups of people to collaborate on work and advance business objectives.

Teams is, at its core, group chat software with videoconferencing capabilities and some interesting features around working with documents and spreadsheets, especially those stored in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business. In other words, it’s a collaboration hub. Teams can be bundled with Microsoft 365 plans, and it’s also available as a standalone subscription for both enterprise and small business customers.

Once you get to know it, Teams is a genuinely helpful tool for teams in companies that use Microsoft 365, since it brings together a bunch of suite components and surfaces them in one convenient place.

It’s available as a web app, desktop application (Windows, macOS, Linux), and mobile app (iOS, Android). Microsoft regularly releases updates to the Teams apps, usually with minor user interface refreshments, but sometimes they’re major updates with significant performance improvements, UI changes, and/or new features.

This guide covers the essentials for getting started with Teams and working efficiently within the platform. We also cover extras such as using Microsoft Loop components in Teams and practical use cases for Microsoft’s ubiquitous generative AI tool, Copilot. In this story we’ll demonstrate in the Mac app, but you’ll find that Teams works similarly in any environment.

In this article:

• Getting around Teams
• Joining and creating teams
• Understanding channels
• Chat: Direct messages and group conversations
• Video and audio calls
• Working with files and OneDrive
• Microsoft Loop within Teams
• Copilot Chat in Teams
• Tips for using Teams effectively

Getting around Teams

The navigation bar on the left side of the Teams window is your primary way to move through the app.

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The Teams navigation bar.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Understanding these core sections will help you navigate Teams effectively. Note that, depending on your organization’s configuration, not all of these options may be available to you:

• Activity: Shows notifications about mentions, replies, and other updates relevant to you.
• Chat: Your hub for one-on-one conversations, group chats, and (with recent updates) access to your teams and channels. The unified interface now combines what were previously separate Chat and Teams/Channels sections.
• Calendar: View and schedule meetings, linked to your Outlook calendar.
• Calls: Make and receive voice calls, access voicemail, and view call history, if your organization has a Teams Phone license assigned to your account. (This is not terribly common.)
• Files: Quick access to recent files, OneDrive files, and downloads.
• Apps: Browse and add applications that integrate with Teams.

The navigation bar is customizable — you can reorder items by dragging them or pin frequently used apps for quick access. You can also add things to the navigation bar by clicking the three dots. A few minutes spent rearranging and adding/removing can make your regular daily Teams use much more snappy, without a lot of friction.

Access your chats, teams, and channels in one place

One of the most significant recent changes to the Teams app is the unified chat and channel interface. In Teams, chats are private conversations (one-on-one or with a small group) that you start on the fly, whereas teams are set up for specific groups of people who need to collaborate on an ongoing basis. A team can be a small group you’re working with on a project, your whole department, or in some cases even the entire company. Each team has one or more channels where members collaborate (more on this later in the story).

Until recently, Chats and Teams/Channels were entirely separate sections in Teams, but an interface update has put all conversations in the same place. Here’s how to navigate:

1. Click Chat in the left navigation bar.
2. Next to the “Chat” header at the top of the left sidebar, click the three-dot menu icon.
3. Select Your teams and channels.
4. From here you can browse and access your individual teams and channels.

The unified interface for chats, teams, and channels.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

This change initially confused many users, but the unified approach aims to reduce switching between chats and channel conversations.

Use search as a navigation shortcut

The search bar at the top of Teams is one of its most powerful features for finding messages, files, people, and more. You can search for messages in chats and channels, files and documents stored in your OneDrive for Business or any linked SharePoint libraries, interactions with people in your organization, and “@mentions” of yourself.

Here are some tips to make search more useful:

•  Use / commands in the search box for quick actions (e.g., /call to start a call, /files to find files). If you use Cmd-space in macOS to launch Spotlight, this is similar, but for Teams.
• Filter results by category using the tab buttons that appear across the top (e.g., Messages, People, Files).
• Use keywords like from: to search for messages from specific people.
• If you perform the same searches over and over again, you will find that recent searches appear as suggestions when you click the search box, so just grab the one you want in a single click.

Searching for instances of the word “report” from within the Teams client. Use the tab buttons to filter search results to just messages, just people, just files, and so on.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Joining and creating teams

Your organization probably already has several teams that appear in your Teams client. To join an existing team, click Chat in the left navigation, and then under “Teams and channels,” click See all your teams. You’ll see teams you’ve already joined as well as public teams available in your organization for immediate membership.

Private teams are invite only; to join one, you respond to an invitation that comes from a current manager of the team.

You can also create teams ad-hoc (unless your administrator has disabled this option) to facilitate working together. When you create a team, Microsoft 365 automatically sets up a bunch of supporting apparatuses:

• A Microsoft 365 Group
• A SharePoint site for file storage
• A shared OneNote notebook
• Microsoft Planner integration
• An Exchange mailbox for the group

To create a new team:

1. Click Chat in the left navigation.
2. Under “Teams and channels,” click See all your teams.
3. Click Create team in the top right.
4. By default, you’re building a new team from scratch. You can click the More create team options link to pick an existing team as a template on which Teams can model the new team you are creating.
5. Name your team and add a description.
6. Select Private (invite-only) or Public (anyone in the organization can join).
7. Add a first team channel. If you don’t know what you want, just click the dots on the side of the field and it’ll set the name to General.
8. Click Create.

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Creating a new team.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

9. On the next screen that pops up, add members by typing their names or email addresses.

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Adding members to the new team.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

If Microsoft 365 is configured appropriately in your company, you can even invite guests from outside your organization, such as vendors and contractors, simply by typing their email addresses into the team-picking screen. Their “guest” status will be clearly denoted in all of their actions. (If you don’t have permission from your administrator to do this, Teams will report back that you are not authorized.)

To manage your team at any time, click the three-dot icon next to its name in the sidebar on the left. You’ll see a pop-up menu where you can add or remove members, create channels for the team (more on that below), change the team name or description, and more.

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Options for ongoing management of the team.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Understanding channels

Channels are where you converse and collaborate within a team. The General channel is meant to be a catch-all place where you go to start conversations when you first begin using the Teams product; usually more specific topic-related channels will spring from there.

You can create multiple channels for any given team — the Widget Launch team might want to have sales, production, and marketing channels, for example. To add a channel, click the three-dot icon next to the team name in the navigator bar on the left. You’ll see a pop-up menu, and then click Add channel. On the screen that appears, type in a name and a description for the channel, pick a privacy option if you want to limit the people who can access the channel, and click the Create button. All the channels for a team appear underneath the name of the team in the left pane.

Each channel has different pages that let you bring documents, apps, and websites directly into your channels for quick access. From the channel name, click the down arrow icon underneath, and you can choose from a new page, an existing page, other embedded Teams apps, conversations, files in the related SharePoint library, notes in a OneDrive shared notebook, or other items.

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Creating new pages within a channel for files, notes, and more.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Common uses include pinning a specific Excel spreadsheet that your team updates frequently, a OneNote notebook for meeting notes, or a Power BI dashboard for tracking metrics.

The Posts tab in a channel kind of works like Facebook or LinkedIn in that you can comment to your teammates in an ongoing conversation. Channel managers can choose to have a traditional channel, where you just have posts, or a channel organized by threads where you can follow conversations and related activities. (See more on the new threads layout from Microsoft.)

Composing messages is straightforward: Just click the Start a new conversation text box, or click Reply below an existing conversation and start typing.

You can call teammates’ attention to certain parts of the conversation by tagging them with an @ sign when typing, like this: @Adele Can you share the latest workback grid? Users who have been tagged will see, in their own copies of the Teams clients, those tagged parts of the conversation highlighted in bright red so they can easily see and respond to messages. You can use emoticons, emojis, and GIFs as well — that’s what I mean by thinking of this area like Facebook.

Other useful features:

• Formatting: Use the toolbar to add bold, italics, highlights, bullet points, numbered lists, and more.
• Attachments: Click the paperclip icon to attach files.
• Emojis and GIFs: Click the emoji or GIF icons beneath the compose box. Everyone loves a funny meme at work. OK, perhaps not everyone, but sometimes they’re a needed relief.
• Important/Urgent: Mark messages with priority flags using the ! icon.

Chat: Direct messages and group conversations

While channels are great for team-wide or topic-specific discussions, chat provides space for smaller conversations.

To start a one-on-one or group chat:

1. Click Chat in the left navigation.
2. Click the New chat button (pencil icon).
3. Type the name(s) of the people you want to include.
4. Type your message and press Enter.

Chats persist, so you can return to them anytime. They won’t vanish when you close Teams or log off for the day.

If you have an ongoing conversation and find you might want to add someone to a conversation, you can easily start a group chat: head up to the top right of your chat window, hit the three dots, click Participants, and from the pop-up submenu select Start a group chat.

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Starting a group chat from a chat between two individual users.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

You might be wondering when it’s appropriate to use a chat as opposed to convening everyone involved in a Teams channel. I suggest using channels for topics that need transparency and team-wide visibility. In contrast, use chat for quick questions, sensitive discussions, or conversations involving people outside your main team.

Video and audio calls

Teams offers robust calling and meeting capabilities, from quick calls to scheduled meetings with dozens of participants.

To make an immediate call, click Calls in the left navigation. On the Calls screen, start typing the name of the person you want to call, then select their name from the list that appears. Then click the Call button.

To schedule a call or meeting in advance, click Calendar in the left nav and click the New button in the top right corner. A “New event” pane pops up, where you can add a title, invite attendees, type a message, and add other information if desired. Alternatively, you can set up the meeting from Outlook. Either way, “Teams meeting” is selected by default as soon as you add attendees. You can also book a conference room or other shared resource here, too.

Scheduling a meeting from within Teams.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

If you’ve been invited to a meeting or call, you’ll typically receive an email or other notification message with a meeting link or Join button. Click the button or link to join the call. For scheduled meetings, you can also click Calendar in the left navigation bar, click on the meeting, and click Join. If you have been sent a meeting invitation with an ID number, you can use the Join with an ID button at the top of the Calendar screen. Or if someone is just calling you ad-hoc, then you can choose to either accept the call without video, accept the call with video, or decline it on the pop-up that appears while the call is “ringing.”

Note: The first time you start or join a call in Teams, you’ll be prompted with a screen to help you set up your audio and video settings for that call. Also, on some systems, particularly Macs, you may be prompted to give Teams permission to record your screen, camera, or microphone. On Windows, your organization may have already given permission to Teams through its systems management software, and you may not be prompted. But if Teams is asking, click Allow to let Teams get the necessary access to each device.

Once you have accepted a call, you can control it using the buttons on the top of the call window, including a dial pad (for voice calls that need key presses); hold; transfer; chat; turn the camera and mic on or off; share content like an app, window, or screen; and then of course hang up the call.

The Teams call window, with controls at the top.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

If you have a webcam connected, Teams will grab that camera feed automatically. You can adjust cameras and backgrounds using the Camera button on the top bar. Blurring your messy room or switching to a solid color can often help reduce distractions in meetings. If you want to start the meeting with your camera off, just click the Camera button.

Using the Mic button and dropdown, you can select your audio devices, including your speaker volume. In most cases, Teams selects this correctly, but if you want to switch to a Bluetooth or USB headset, for instance, choose the right device from the Speaker and Microphone section of the right pane. (For headsets, you’ll most likely choose the same device for speaker and microphone.) If you want to start the meeting with your mic off, just click the button.

Under the More control, you can opt to record and transcribe a call, insert video effects, change audio, ask for translation options, and other settings.

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More options to control a call in progress.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

To share other content with participants, click Share. You can then elect to share your screen, collaborate on a shared digital whiteboard, present a PowerPoint slide deck, or share individual files to your meeting participants without broadcasting them on the screen.

Working with files and OneDrive

Teams integrates deeply with SharePoint and OneDrive, making file collaboration seamless throughout the platform. When you share files in a channel, those files are automatically stored in the team’s SharePoint site. Similarly, files that are shared in a chat are stored in your OneDrive for Business account.

The Files menu in a Teams channel offers several useful features for document management. It displays all documents that have been shared in that particular channel, allowing you to create new folders to organize your content, upload files from various sources, and open relevant libraries in SharePoint when you need to do so.

To upload files to Teams, you can navigate to the Files menu within a channel (remember, that’s the dropdown menu under the channel name). You can upload a file with the three-dot menu or create a new file of a typical type, like a Word document or Excel spreadsheet, using the + New menu. Alternatively, you can drag and drop files directly into the Files tab or even into a conversation thread for quick sharing.

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Working with files inside a channel.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

When you need to work with files in Teams, you can edit them directly within the application. Office files can be edited right in Teams by simply clicking on a file to open it. If you prefer the full desktop experience, you can choose to open files in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint by selecting the Open in Desktop App option. Teams also supports co-authoring, which means multiple people can edit the same document simultaneously. Additionally, you can access the version history to review previous versions of documents through the three-dot menu.

Teams recently updated its interface to bring OneDrive functionality directly into the Teams environment. This integration allows you to access your personal OneDrive files without having to leave the Teams application, streamlining your workflow.

To access OneDrive within Teams, you can click on the OneDrive option in the left navigation panel. This integration makes it significantly easier to share personal files in Teams conversations without the inconvenience of switching between different applications.

Microsoft Loop within Teams

Microsoft Loop components are collaborative blocks of content that can be shared and edited across Microsoft 365 apps, including Teams. These components function as living, shared content blocks that operate similarly to a task list, table, or paragraph, but with a key difference: they stay in sync across applications. When you create a Loop component in Teams and share it in Outlook, any edits made in either location will update everywhere the component appears.

There are several common types of Loop components available for different collaboration needs, such as:

• Lists allow you to create shared to-do lists with assignments and due dates, making task management more efficient.
• Tables serve as collaborative data grids where team members can input and organize information together.
• Paragraphs function as shared notes and content that multiple people can edit simultaneously, enabling real-time collaborative writing and brainstorming.

To create a Loop component within your workflow, you begin by typing /loop directly into the compose box of a chat or conversation to access the component creation menu. Next, you choose the specific type of component you want to create based on your needs, whether that’s a list, table, paragraph, or another option. After selecting your component type, you add your content and click Send to share it with your team members.

A checklist loop component in a Teams conversation.

Howard Wen

Once the component has been shared, team members can click on the component to edit it collaboratively, with all changes syncing in real time across all instances of that component throughout Microsoft 365.

For a deep dive on Loop components, see “How to use Loop components in Microsoft 365 apps.” (There’s also a standalone Loop web app — see “Microsoft Loop cheat sheet” for details.)

Copilot Chat in Teams

Copilot Chat offers several powerful generative AI capabilities to enhance your productivity within Teams using Microsoft’s favorite new child, Copilot.

It can summarize recent chats and channel conversations, helping you quickly catch up on discussions you may have missed. The tool can also answer questions about your Teams activity, providing insights into your communication patterns and interactions. Additionally, Copilot Chat can help draft messages for you, saving time when composing communications. Beyond these specific functions, it provides general information and assistance across a wide range of topics and tasks.

To access Copilot Chat within Teams, you need to look for the Copilot icon, which can be found either in the left navigation panel or at the top of the Teams interface. Once you locate the icon, click it to open a chat window with Copilot. From there, you can ask questions or request assistance with whatever you need help with, and Copilot will respond to your queries.

Copilot Chat within Teams.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

There are many practical ways to use Copilot Chat in your daily work.

• For example, you might ask it to “Summarize the Project Alpha channel from the last week” to get a quick overview of all the important discussions and decisions made in that channel.
• You could inquire “What did Sarah say about the budget?” to find specific information from past conversations without scrolling through lengthy message threads.
• Another useful application is asking “Help me write a message asking the team for status updates” when you need assistance crafting clear and effective communications to your colleagues.

This basic Copilot functionality is distinct from the more advanced Microsoft 365 Copilot integration which happens only with an additive license beyond the standard Microsoft 365 subscription. For organizations with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses, Teams offers more advanced AI capabilities:

• Meeting-related features: Real-time meeting summaries and transcription, automated action items and follow-ups, and chat-like answers to questions about what was discussed during the meeting (even if you joined late).
• Chat and channel features: Comprehensive conversation summaries across multiple channels, suggested replies and message composition, and key highlights extraction from long conversation threads.
• Productivity features: Meeting preparation briefs based on related emails and documents, intelligent recaps for meetings you missed, and follow-up task identification and tracking.

You might not have this level of license, as they’re relatively expensive — $30 per user per month at the enterprise level or $21 per user per month for companies with fewer than 300 employees. That’s on top of what your organization is already paying for Microsoft 365. Microsoft recently reported 15 million paid M365 Copilot seats — just 3.3% of the Microsoft 365 user base.

Tips for using Teams effectively

Here are some battle-tested tips for getting the most out of Teams and, perhaps more importantly, not letting Teams eat your workday and become the place where knowledge goes to die.

Tamp down notifications and activity settings

Managing notifications prevents Teams from becoming overwhelming. If you go with the defaults, Teams will buzz you — and your phone, too, if you have the companion app installed and set up — every time you get a call, message, or chat with an @mention to you. In a busy organization, this can drive you up the wall or result in your entire day being swallowed by Teams notifications.

To customize notifications:

1. Click your three-dot menu in the upper right and select Settings.
2. Go down to Notifications and Activity on the left side.

Adjust everything to your preference. Teams is a very chatty app, so you may want to play around with these settings over time to find your particular sweet spot.

Add apps to Teams

In addition to its built-in integrations with Microsoft 365 tools like OneDrive, Loop, and Copilot, Teams lets you bring a variety of Microsoft and third-party apps right into a channel or group chat. You can add apps for brainstorming, project management, polling, training, data visualization, sales, customer support, and countless other uses, allowing you to work in them without having to leave the Teams environment.

See “18 Microsoft Teams apps for content collaboration and management” for complete instructions on finding and installing apps, but in a nutshell, you click the Apps button in the left navigation bar, browse or search the available apps, and then install the one you want. (Note that your organization may restrict which apps you can install in Teams.)

5 more quick tips

• Keep channels focused: Create channels for specific topics, projects, or workstreams rather than having everything in General.
• Use @mentions strategically: Mention individuals when you need their input, @channel when everyone in the channel should see it, and @team sparingly for truly urgent, team-wide announcements.
• Pin important messages: Hover over any message and click the three dots (…) to pin it to the top of the channel for easy reference.
• Save messages: Click the bookmark icon on messages you want to find later, then access them through the Saved item on the left navigation bar, toward the top.
• Use status messages: Update your status with custom messages like “In a meeting until 3pm” or “Working from home today” to keep teammates informed.
• Use keyboard shortcuts: Press Ctrl + / (Windows) or Cmd + / (Mac) to see a list of keyboard shortcuts that can speed up your work.

What to avoid

Teams is definitely a big step up over endless email chains, but that doesn’t mean it’s suitable for everything. Here are two things to avoid:

Trying to replace all emails with Teams conversations and links. Sometimes we humans have a tendency to gravitate to whatever new features and tools there are, proclaiming them the “killer” of whatever came before and trying to force old square pegs into shiny new round holes. Teams is no different.

As an instant messaging platform, Teams is ideal for back-and-forth quick hits. If your message is longer than a paragraph, chances are, it should go back to email. Longer conversations, project planning, longer term development, all of those types of deep thinking and analysis are best suited for email. In email, you can sort, filter, set up rules, and do other automated things to manage how you see and find information. It’s not impossible to use Teams for longer conversations, but it’s suboptimal.

Trying to send emails to external folks. Unfortunately, there is no way for Teams to send email out to the internet, so unless you want to invite external users as guests into your team (assuming you have permission to do that), you will need to handle some subjects that involve people outside of your organization via old-fashioned email messages. That, of course, limits the utility of using Teams in projects or environments with a lot of collaboration with external users when they’re not a part of your Teams environment.

Your organization may restrict how external users can interact with your Microsoft 365 setup, usually via data loss prevention policies and prohibitions on folks outside your organization accessing Teams chats and channels. Ask your IT department if you have questions.

This article was originally published in March 2018 and most recently updated in April 2026.

In the space of one week, OpenAI has pulled out of two European Stargate data center deals, one in the UK and the second in Norway. Observers attribute the move to the company taking a more disciplined approach to its massive expenses, with OpenAI executives trying to make their books look better in a common move among companies preparing to go public with an imminent IPO.

In Norway, OpenAI had been in talks with neocloud provider Nscale, but pulled out of those talks and the data center was instead leased by sometime-OpenAI partner Microsoft, according to sources involved in the discussions. 

Nscale and Microsoft on Wednesday confirmed the Norway deal, with a source familiar with the negotiations saying that Microsoft will rent the facility in Narvik, Norway, and will then provide compute power to OpenAI through an unspecified agreement.  

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comments.

The UK data center pullout also seemed to reflect some financial belt tightening. 

Jeremy Roberts, senior director at Info-Tech Research Group, said the move makes sense from an accounting perspective.

“OpenAI is embattled on several fronts. Anthropic has been doing very well in the enterprise, and OpenAI’s cash burn might be a problem if it wants to go public at an astronomical $800 billion+ valuation. This is especially true with higher energy prices due to geopolitics, and the public and regulators increasingly skeptical of AI companies, especially outside of the United States,” Roberts said. “I see these moves as OpenAI tightening its belt a bit and being more deliberate about spending as it moves past the interesting tech demo stage of its existence and is expected to provide a real return for investors.”

He added, “I expect it’s a symptom of a broader problem, which is that OpenAI has thrown some good money after bad in bets that didn’t work out, like the Sora platform it just shut down, and it’s under increasing pressure to translate its first-mover advantage into real upside for its investors. Spending operational money instead of capital money might give it some flexibility in the short term, and perhaps that’s what this is about.”

All in all, he noted, “on a scale of business-ending event to nothingburger, I would put it somewhere in the middle, maybe a little closer to nothingburger.”

Acceligence CIO Yuri Goryunov agreed with Roberts, and said, “OpenAI has a problem with commercialization and runaway operating costs, for sure. They are trying to rightsize their commitments and make sure that they deliver on their core products before they run out of money.”

Goryunov described OpenAI’s arrangement with Microsoft in Norway as “prudent financial engineering” that allows it to access the data center resources without having to tie up too much capital. “It’s financial discipline. OpenAI [executives] are starting to behave like grownups.”

Forrester senior analyst Alvin Nguyen echoed those thoughts. 

“Microsoft picking up the capacity [in Norway] makes sense. It is a quick way to gain additional capacity for in-demand services without a heavy investment [given that] they are renting the capacity, not building out new data centers,” Nguyen said. “For Nscale, this shows that the demand for AI infrastructure remains high, regardless of OpenAI pulling away from these projects. Hyperscalers are willing to absorb the GPU tranches to preserve Nscale’s pricing power and financing terms.”

Nguyen also saw the move as one of financial discipline at OpenAI. “[They are] being more selective about where they deploy, and seem to be moving from splashy deployments to growing incrementally and intentionally,” he said.

Independent technology analyst Carmi Levy said he also sees OpenAI’s abandonment of these two data center deals as evidence of “the wide gulf between promising to spend on data centers and actually seeing those projects through to completion. OpenAI isn’t the only AI player following the build-it-big strategy, of course, with all major vendors falling all over themselves to announce ever larger projects in what has become a race for long-term AI infrastructure dominance.”

However, he noted, data center capacity means nothing without equivalent power generation. “Local and regional regulatory pushback is strengthening, often turning what initially promised to be straightforward data center builds into risky, complex projects, sometimes with no realistic end date,” Levy said. “Supply chain challenges arising from unrest in the Middle East and tariff worries everywhere else don’t help matters, either. As individual projects turn red amid this increasingly turbulent environment, OpenAI is making the logical decision to cut its losses and find another way to scale up.”

And although the deal with Microsoft to lease back data center space at the Norway facility may temporarily pretty up OpenAI’s financial books, he pointed out that it might cost OpenAI down the road if Microsoft continues to become more of a competitor than a partner.

“Allowing partners like Microsoft to bear the brunt of data center construction and management headaches is a pragmatic change in direction, [but] it leaves OpenAI less in control of that same compute capacity in the long-term,” Levy said. “It’s a lot like IT decision makers deciding to leverage existing cloud services platforms for compute capacity instead of building the infrastructure themselves.”

It avoids headaches around capex, he noted, as well as removing the distractions of managing infrastructure instead of focusing on more salient AI-related core competencies, and it also allows for more timely and cost effective management of capacity-related investment as demand grows at often unpredictable rates.

“But,” he said, “it means less independence, as well, as whoever built and owns the infrastructure gets to make the rules.”

This article originally appeared on NetworkWorld.

Microsoft will cut the price of Windows 365 subscriptions for small and mid-sized businesses by 20% next month, though analysts expect little impact on uptake of the Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform. 

The price change for Windows 365 Business takes effect May 1, 2026 for new subscriptions; existing subscribers will receive updated pricing at renewal, Microsoft explained on its Partner Center page.

The company first introduced the lower rate as a promotional offer last October and is now making that reduction permanent.

At the same time, Microsoft will also introduce a new “on-demand start experience” that will result in longer time to start up Cloud PC virtual desktops when they’ve been disconnected for more than an hour.

“The impact on user experience will likely be minimal, spare a slightly longer startup time on the first connection after hibernation,” said Gabe Knuth, principal analyst at Omdia.

The Windows 365 price change comes as PC prices are set to rise this year due to global memory chip shortages.

Even so, Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, doesn’t expect the Windows 365 price cut to result in a significant boost in adoption among small to mid-sized businesses.

“I do expect that the price decrease is an incentive move to get companies to move to Windows 365, but I’m not convinced it will make that much difference,” Gold said. “TCO [total cost of ownership] is a major component of enterprise concerns about deploying PCs — in that sense this helps. But whether or not it’s enough to move adoption rates remains to be seen.”  

Windows 365 currently represents a “small minority of enterprise PC installations,” he said. 

Knuth said that while businesses will likely appreciate the lower pricing, “the use case will still dictate Windows 365 adoption more than cost.” 

The overall market for DaaS tools is set to increase from $4.3 billion in 2025 to $6 billion by 2029, according to Gartner. The analyst firm also forecast in its 2025 Magic Quadrant for Desktop-as-a-Service report that virtual desktops will become cost-effective for 95% of workers by 2027, compared to 40% in 2019. 

In that same time frame, virtual desktops will become the primary workspace for 20% of workers by 2027, Gartner expects, up from 10% in 2019.

Related reading:

• Cheap enterprise PCs? Not anytime soon — analysts
• Is it time to reconsider DaaS?
• The Windows PC is dying, thanks to cloud-based services and AI

While sales of new Macs are surging the second-user market is also seeing strong momentum, prompting Blancco Technology Group and Cambrionix to introduce a new solution to help quickly erase and prepare large numbers of Macs for sale.

Why would there demand for such a solution? Does its existence really represent a shift toward the use of Apple hardware in the enterprise? I spoke with Kon Maragelis, senior lead, mobile & ITAD at Blancco, who confirmed continued growth in Mac reuse across secondary markets. 

“Demand is being driven by a combination of factors, including the high residual value of Apple devices, longer product life cycles, and increasing interest from both businesses and consumers in more sustainable and cost-effective alternatives to new hardware,” he said. 

More Macs are entering refurb sales channels

The inherent value of the platform brings its own reward. “Macs, in particular, tend to retain their value longer than many other laptops, making them highly attractive in second-user markets,” he said. “As a result, we’re seeing growing volumes entering refurbishment and resale channels.”

The new solution combines Blancco Eraser for Apple Devices software with the Cambrionix ThunderSync5-C16 industrial-grade hub. The system lets IT remove data from 16 Macs simultaneously in less than 20 minutes, certifying the results to industry standards. You can expand the number of Macs handled with the addition of an extra hub and the companies claim to offer the fastest such data-compliant system in the business.

While existing tools usually process Macs at a rate of three to 10 per hour, the combined solution can process as many as 48 Macs each hour — more if you add additional hubs. The system will even reinstall the operating system, which means IT can quickly and securely delete and prepare Macs for reuse or sale.

These kinds of tool matter for any business managing large fleets, particularly those with high data compliance burdens. They also matter to IT asset disposal (ITAD) firms, educational districts, health technology deployment, and more.

Holding value

Typically, larger organizations rely on third-party firms to handle erasure, reimaging, and sale to second-user markets, but there is growing interest in bringing solutions like this in-house. As Mac adoption increases in corporate environments, it’s reasonable to expect the demand for secure, scalable processing to grow.

Maragelis characterized Mac deployment in the enterprise, as being championed by cloud-first, developer-led, modern workplace environments. “As these devices enter refresh cycles, we expect continued growth in enterprise-driven reuse,” he said.

Macs have always retained value in second-user markets, meaning that strength reflects popularity in brand new markets. If there’s strong demand for the latest Mac, you’ll probably also find a surge in demand for an older model. Take the MacBook Neo; its introduction prompted many potential customers to look at slightly older MacBook Airs instead. (Apple doesn’t mind as it sells plenty of both.)

Logically then, shouldn’t growing Mac market share be reflected in second-user sales? “Yes, we are seeing continued growth in Mac reuse across secondary markets,” Margelis said. “We’re also seeing growing demand for faster, higher-volume refurbishment and resale of Mac devices.”

What comes next?

While it’s hard into the future, he did note how the adoption of Apple Silicon in Macs and mobile devices may make for other synergies: “One key shift is the need for more unified processing across Macs and iPhones, where similar architectures allow for more consistent workflows across diagnostics, secure data erasure, and validation. This opens up new opportunities to apply mobile-scale automation approaches to Mac processing.”

That’s nice if that’s your business. But for the rest of us, the very existence of products like these signifies a rapidly growing demand for Macs, even as Microsoft increases prices for its own hardware. 

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Psst: Come close. I’ve got something to share with you, and I don’t want everyone around here to hear it.

Oh — hi! Sorry, I didn’t realize you were here. I was actually talking out loud to my phone just now, as one does, thanks to a nifty new air gesture I set up that activates my device’s voice search anytime I bring the thing close to my face.

Kinda wild, right? It is — and it’s also a massive efficiency-enhancer for those of us enlightened enough to be using Android. (Sorry, iPhone pals. But hey, Apple might give you a watered down version of something similar in another seven to 17 years, and it’s sure to be ~completely magical~. Hang tight!)

Usually, when we think about Android gestures, we think about the standard on-screen swipes and taps that help us navigate our devices — or maybe even the advanced maneuvers that make it even faster to fly around a phone like a total nerd wizard. Today, though, we’re gonna broaden our view of “gesture” to include a simple kind of physical movement that doesn’t even involve any direct device contact.

It’s a brilliantly easy way to interact with your Googley gizmo and open up new productivity-boosting possibilities — and, oh yes: It’s yet another fantastic feat you’d only be able to accomplish here in the land of Android.

[Oh, hey — love shortcuts? My free Android Shortcut Supercourse will teach you tons of advanced time-savers. Start here!]

Your Android air gesture advantage

All right — first things first: The wand we need for this fancy feat of ours is a splendidly useful Android power-user tool called MacroDroid.

MacroDroid is an advanced automation app that’s been appreciated by advanced Android phone owners for many a moon now. It can help you set up all sorts of experience-enhancing awesomeness, and the purpose we’re using for it today represents just a tiny fraction of its potential.

But it’s a good one. So to start, go grab the app, if you don’t already have it installed. It’s free with an optional premium upgrade that eliminates ads throughout its setup interface and enables some extra capabilities (which aren’t required for anything we’re about to go over). It doesn’t sell or share any sort of user data or require any disconcerting permissions.

Got it? Good. Now:

• Open up MacroDroid and make your way through its initial welcome screens.
• Once you see the app’s main menu screen, with a bunch of colorful boxes, flip the toggle in the upper-right corner into the on and active position to activate MacroDroid and get it up and running.
• Then, tap the first box in the list — the one that says “Add Macro.”

width="1024" height="1018" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px">That first box is the only one you need to mess with on the main MacroDroid menu screen.

JR Raphael, Foundry

• Now, in the red box labeled “Triggers,” tap the little plus symbol and then select “Sensors” followed by “Proximity Sensor.”
• Make sure “Near” is selected in the pop-up that appears and tap “OK.”
• Then, in the blue box labeled “Actions,” tap the little plus symbol and then select “Device Actions” followed by “Voice Search.”

At this point, your screen should look a little somethin’ like this:

Your Android air gesture recipe — almost ready to serve you.

JR Raphael, Foundry

And, guess what? Our work here is almost done! Give yourself a preemptive pat on the back for encouragement, and let’s wrap this bad boy up so you can start putting it to proper use:

• All that’s left now is give this macro we created a name by tapping the “Enter macro name” line at the tippity-top of the screen and typing in any title you like — “Raise,” “Raise for input,” “Herman T. Schmidthopper,” or anything at all, really. It doesn’t make much difference, and you’re the only one who’ll ever see it.
• Last but not least, with that out of the way, tap the left-facing arrow in the upper-left corner of the screen and confirm you want to save your creation.

You should then see it showing up and activated in the MacroDroid macro list:

Your custom Android air gesture is there and active. Excelsior!

JR Raphael, Foundry

And with that, take a deep breath: You did it! Look at you, you splendid little virtual sorcerer, you.

At this point, all that’s left is to test out your awe-inspiring new air gesture by raising your phone up close to your forehead, as if you’re about to whisper a saucy secret into its screen. (Don’t worry. I’m not listening.)

Once the phone gets close enough, the proximity sensor should detect your closeness (ooh, baby…) — and you should see a prompt for your voice search show up on the screen.

The very first time that happens, you’ll probably have to tell it that you want this action to use Google — or whatever virtual assistant you prefer, if you’ve got others installed — for your voice search.

Then, every subsequent time you bring the phone close to your suspiciously shiny mug, it’ll instantly fire up your preferred voice input companion, and you can just yap away with whatever question or command you want.

width="800" height="825" sizes="auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px">This is me bringing my phone close to my face. Can you feel my excitement?!

JR Raphael, Foundry

The interesting twist here is that recent signs suggest Samsung is developing a similar sort of setup for its future Galaxy gizmos — but there, it looks like the air gesture will be limited to letting you raise your phone to talk to Bixby, which obviously isn’t something anyone actually wants.

The beauty of this approach is that (a) you can use it this instant, on any Android device, no matter who made it — and (b) you’ve got complete control over how it works. You could play around with having a totally different kind of action launch when you move your phone close to your face, or you could even shake up the gesture itself to involve something else entirely (like, for instance, shaking) instead of the proximity move.

Here on Android, the power is squarely in your hands. And now, you know exactly how to embrace it.

Air five!

Get even more advanced shortcut knowledge with my free Android Shortcut Supercourse. You’ll learn tons of time-saving tricks!