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The AI Transformation 100: 100 Concrete Ideas for Fixing How We Work
The surest sign that a tech company is losing a battle is when it announces a partnership. Two rivals declare that their products will now work together, that the walls are coming down and the era of lock-in is giving way to something more enlightened. The handshake gets the headlines. The fine print does not. The recent wave of interoperability moves between Google and Microsoft is the latest version of this ritual.
The Google-Microsoft Announcements
On Feb. 3, two-way meeting room interoperability between Google Meet hardware and Microsoft Teams Rooms began rolling out, the first direct, first-party, bidirectional room experience between the two companies. Announced at ISE 2026 in Barcelona, the capability lets users join Teams meetings from Chrome OS-based Meet hardware and Meet meetings from Windows-based Teams Rooms devices, on by default and manageable at the organizational unit level.
Beneath the product-level move, a more structurally significant development has been underway in the AI infrastructure layer. In April 2025, Google launched the Agent2Agent protocol, an open standard allowing AI agents, regardless of vendor or framework, to discover one another, delegate tasks and coordinate actions across enterprise platforms. Built on HTTP and JSON-RPC, it launched with more than 50 partners including Salesforce, SAP and Workday, before governance was transferred to the Linux Foundation in June 2025 to keep it vendor-neutral. By July, it had grown to more than 150 organizational supporters.
In September 2025, Microsoft formally committed to A2A support in Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio, declaring that "the best agents won't live in one app or cloud; they'll operate in the flow of work, spanning models, domains and ecosystems."
Taken together, this looks like a meaningful shift. What it represents is a carefully managed retreat: vendors opening where resistance became commercially expensive, while everything else stays firmly shut.
The History Google and Microsoft Hope You Forgot
Any assessment of these moves must reckon with what came before them — specifically, more than two decades of document format conflict that show how the industry's stated commitments to openness tend to play out once competitive incentives reassert themselves.
At the beginning of the century, there was a collective effort to build an XML-based open document standard, ODF, that would allow users to move freely between office suite products. The first version was approved as an OASIS standard in 2006 and later ratified by ISO.
Rather than adopt it, Microsoft created a competing format, OOXML, covering the range of common office documents: DOCX for word processing, XLSX for spreadsheets and PPTX for presentations. OOXML was fast-tracked through ISO approval in 2008, but arrived in two varieties: ISO 29500 Strict, a compliant version, and ISO 29500 Transitional, a looser standard preserving proprietary elements for backward compatibility. Microsoft argued that partners and customers needed the Transitional variant to give them time to adapt. Almost twenty years later, Transitional remains the default for Microsoft Office documents.
"Document interoperability remains a battleground where obstacles continue to be thrown into the path of open source and alternative office suites,” said Michael Meeks, chief executive officer of Collabora Productivity.
The OOXML specification runs to more than 7,000 pages, not including the implementer notes Microsoft publishes separately for features added in Office 2010 and beyond. The ODF 1.4 specification, by comparison, runs just over 1,000 pages. New ODF features are incorporated into successive editions through an open standards process. New OOXML features are added to Microsoft's implementation first and documented on Microsoft's website separately, a structural asymmetry that makes third-party interoperability difficult.
Take the handling of table of contents fields in DOCX. A parameter for built-in styles was coded to rely on style names translated to the Windows locale, meaning a document written in Word 2013 in one locale could fail when opened in Word 2013 in another. The problem is documented in Microsoft's online help. It is not in the OOXML specification. "Collabora Office's OOXML support is superior to Microsoft's ODF support,” Meeks said.That a third-party open source product outperforms Microsoft on its own nominal standard tells you most of what you need to know about how seriously these commitments to openness have been pursued.
The document format story is not ancient history. It is the template. Lock-in strategies do not disappear when a market matures, but migrate to wherever enterprises are most dependent.
Which, in 2026, means AI.
A Stopgap, Not Meeting Room Interoperability
With that history in mind, what Google and Microsoft implemented is room-device Direct Guest Join, not user-to-user federation. The distinction matters.
"This is not a clean 'openness' story,” said Dheeraj Bansal, technical consultant at Wipro. “It's a narrow interoperability carve-out aimed at reducing meeting-room friction, while keeping the real lock-in levers intact.” Those levers — identity, calendaring, policy controls, AI layers and data — remain untouched. Chat, presence, calling and identity are still siloed. Advanced meeting controls, AI-generated transcriptions, whiteboarding and layout features degrade the moment you cross the interoperability boundary.
“Native" interoperability also appears to remain tied to the established Pexip-based pathway for Meet hardware joining Teams, making this less about open protocols and more, in Bansal's words, "commercial interoperability productized."
Three factors drove the timing.
- Procurement reality has shifted: Hybrid work is normalized, and enterprise buyers penalize visible friction more than they did during the 2021-22 experimental phase.
- Platform maturity has caught up, with Teams Rooms and Meet hardware now stable enough that vendors absorb the support costs of cross-join functionality.
- Regulatory pressure is rising, from the EU's Digital Markets Act forcing messaging interoperability on WhatsApp to the EU Data Act tightening cloud switching obligations from September 2025, changing default expectations even where no mandate applies.
The single-vendor enterprise stack has always been more aspiration than reality, said Boris Kolev, global head of technology at JA Worldwide. He sees mixed environments as the default in the technology he manages across 115 countries and 380 locations, shaped by different regions, procurement histories, regulations and budgets. "I don't see this as some ideological shift to openness," he said. "I see it as vendors accepting reality." Vendors are not leading enterprises toward openness. They are following where enterprises already went.
The Microsoft-Google Battle Is Just Beginning
The meeting room was the pain point that became too costly to leave unaddressed. The AI layer is where the same logic will play out next, at higher stakes.
The emergence of A2A and Model Context Protocol has been used to demonstrate a new openness in the AI ecosystem. A more accurate description is that it represents the industry trying to establish the rules of the road before regulators do. Both protocols address problems: A2A helps agents from different vendors discover and communicate with each other; MCP standardizes how those agents interact with external tools and data sources. But standards adoption and interoperability are not the same thing, as the OOXML story demonstrated.
Gartner analyst Jason Wong, quoted by CIO Dive, is clear about where the uncertainty lies: security, performance and agent pricing models are "the wild card factors." Protocols exist. Commercial incentives that determine how they are implemented do not yet favor the customer.
The growing multi-LLM expectation among enterprise buyers does not eliminate lock-in. It relocates it to proprietary agent tooling and workflow graphs, to evaluation and telemetry infrastructure and to data connectors and access entitlements that are the hardest to unwind. "The lock-in strategy isn't dying,” Bansal said. “It's evolving from 'can you join the meeting?' to 'where do identity, documents, policies and AI workflows live?'"
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It is a question that maps onto the organizational reality Kolev described. Calendars remain separate. Chat ecosystems remain separate. AI assistants do not operate across platforms. Compliance logging is not unified.
"Vendors open where resistance became commercially expensive, and reinforce where strategic value is highest,” Kolev said. The meeting room was the former. Everything listed above is the latter. "Organizations that will win are not the ones choosing a vendor side,” he said. “They're the ones designing leverage into their architecture from day one."
Three decades of enterprise software history suggest that vendors support openness when resisting it costs more than conceding it. The document format wars followed that rule. The meeting room interoperability announcement follows it too. The ground being conceded is ground that was already lost. Enterprises that mistake that for a shift in vendor philosophy will find themselves, a few years from now, navigating a new set of constraints as binding as the old ones, only dressed in the language of openness and sold as progress. The walls are not coming down. They are just being rebuilt in the next technology battleground.
Editor's Note: Catch up on more vendor frenemy stories:
- Salesforce's Slack API Restrictions Spark Broader Questions on Future of AI — The Slack API decision is more than a product tweak: it’s a signal. It reflects deep tensions playing out across the digital workplace.
- Google Opens Workspace to Claude, Part of Open Ecosystem Approach to AI — Google is unleashing third-party AIs like Anthropic’s Claude into Workspace to challenge Microsoft’s AI power grab. Could this be the future of work?
- Microsoft Prepares for Life After OpenAI. What Comes Next for Copilot? — Microsoft and OpenAI's partnership, forged in 2019 and expected to last until 2030, is showing signs of strain. A look at Copilot's future, without OpenAI.