Gartner projects that 40 percent of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5 percent in 2025. That acceleration is already underway inside enterprise collaboration platforms, particularly in voice and calling, where AI agents are summarizing sensitive meetings, handling calls, and acting on behalf of employees, often before anyone has evaluated whether those systems are ready.
That rapid deployment raises a hard question. Companies are investing heavily to make these agents functional, but earning the trust of clinicians, financial advisors and operations teams requires a different kind of work. At Microsoft, the company behind the largest enterprise collaboration platform in the world, Priyanka Kuvalekar is leading that work for MS Teams Calling and AI experiences.
Kuvalekar holds a Master’s degree in User Experience and Interaction Design and has spent over eight years leading and executing research at Microsoft, Cisco Webex, Global Payments, and Korn Ferry. As a Senior UX Researcher at Microsoft, she leads research for Microsoft Teams Calling and Agentic AI Collaboration Experiences. Teams Calling serves over 80 million users, adopted by 93 percent of Fortune 100 companies.
Priyanka’s research shapes how AI behaves across calling workflows, voice agents, and the autonomous capabilities enterprises now treat as core infrastructure.
Shaping How Enterprise AI Gets Built, Tested, And Trusted
Kuvalekar built her expertise inside enterprise technology environments, where communication tools are operational lifelines. Translating complex human behavior into clear and trustworthy product direction for AI systems, a skill she developed across Microsoft and Cisco Webex, is exactly what the industry now needs at scale.
She leads UX research across multiple cross-functional product teams at Microsoft, working with more than 30 stakeholders in product management, engineering, design, and executive leadership. Kuvalekar’s research work influences AI product roadmaps, design decisions, and the AI experiences that are built, shipped, and used by millions globally. She brings technical acumen to structured analysis and synthesis of Generative AI system behavior while researching and testing agentic AI experiences alongside end users in real enterprise workflows to identify where the experience breaks down. The goal is to make these systems useful, trustworthy, accessible, and accurate, because an AI feature that users cannot trust is one they will not use, regardless of how well it performs on technical benchmarks. That risk applies wherever AI touches user experience and decision making; whether the concern is regulatory compliance, security, reputational damage, or losing the confidence of the people the tool was built to serve.
Voice AI And The Role Kuvalekar Plays In Getting It Right
Voice AI agents are one of the most consequential areas of enterprise AI collaboration. Deloitte’s 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise report, surveying 3,235 leaders across 24 countries, found that 85 percent of companies expect to customize AI agents to fit their business needs, with agentic AI expected to have its highest impact in customer-facing communication and support. But unlike text-based AI, voice agents operate in real time, inside live conversations where timing, tone, and context all matter. A voice agent that interrupts during a patient care call, or misrepresents a financial discussion in its summary, creates problems that cannot be reversed. Kuvalekar’s UX research addresses this by optimizing the user interactions and workflows through which voice AI agents respond to people, ensuring tasks like call routing, scheduling, and real-time summarization work accurately in high-pressure environments.
At Microsoft, her research on Teams Calling is driving how voice AI agents and conversational AI behave in enterprise calling workflows: when an agent should engage, how it should respond and route a conversation, and what context it should surface to the human who takes over. Before Microsoft, she led UX research at Cisco Webex, a platform with over 40 million monthly active users and more than 650 million monthly active meeting minutes. There, her research on AI-powered collaboration features, including voice-driven meeting summaries and intelligent meeting workflows, uncovered gaps between what the AI captured and what users understood, leading the team to redesign how these features were presented.
Evaluating AI In Enterprise Collaboration: Safety, Accessibility, And User Trust
McKinsey’s 2026 State of Organizations report, surveying 10,000+ senior executives across 15 countries, identifies collaboration between humans and AI agents as one of nine forces reshaping how organizations operate. This is the problem Kuvalekar’s UX research addresses daily.
Kuvalekar’s evaluation work connects AI safety, trust, security, and responsible use in ways that sit at the intersection of AI innovation in the tech industry. She brings hands-on experience researching with users with disabilities, work she developed at Cisco Webex and continues at Microsoft, examining whether Generative AI systems behave predictably and equitably for everyone who uses them. Her research identifies where AI fails real users, and those findings directly inform whether a feature is responsible enough to ship. That approach to AI assurance, grounded in real user evidence, is essential as enterprise collaboration platforms scale AI across global users.
As an accessibility champion, Kuvalekar has designed studies with people with disabilities examining how users interact with assistive technologies and how users with hearing impairments interpret generated summaries. Her findings have pushed teams at both organizations to prioritize inclusive design from the start, ensuring alignment with ADA and WCAG standards.
Established Recognition Across The Industry
Outside her product work, Kuvalekar has become a frequent voice on AI-driven UX research and enterprise collaboration. She has spoken at the Grace Hopper Celebration 2025, the world’s largest gathering of women in technology, and has been a featured speaker at the Women in Tech Global Conference in both 2024 and 2026, presenting on AI, accessibility, and UX research for enterprise collaboration. She has appeared on industry podcasts with global reach, including User Interviews’ Insights Unlocked, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, where she discussed UX research for AI in enterprise collaboration and communication. She was also invited as a Guest Speaker at the University of Washington through both the Global Innovation Exchange Program and the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering.
Kuvalekar writes thought leadership on AI-driven UX research, enterprise collaboration, and intelligent systems, with published work in InfoWorld, Built In, and Entrepreneur.com. The International Business Times profiled her contributions to enterprise AI collaboration, and Entrepreneur UK published a feature on her research and its influence on AI-powered communication.
Why Kuvalekar’s Work Matters
Collaboration platforms are shipping voice agents, intelligent meeting capabilities, and autonomous workflows to millions of users globally, including regulated industries where failure is measured in safety, security costs, penalties and trust.
Kuvalekar’s UX research has directly shaped how Microsoft Teams Calling and Cisco Webex Collaboration Platforms build and deliver AI experiences to these industries. The voice AI agents that handle enterprise calls, the AI summaries that users rely on the accessibility standards that determine whether these tools work for people with disabilities – her research has spanned across all core touchpoints. When those features work well, the effect reaches millions of people across industries, who depend on these platforms for their daily work. She treats accessibility and responsible AI as requirements that belong at the foundation of product development, and the teams she works with have built accordingly.‘It is about making communication clearer, fairer, seamless, value-driven and more accessible,’ Kuvalekar has said, ‘so that people and organizations can do their best work.’
