How Priyanka Kuvalekar is Shaping Enterprise AI Collaboration and Communication

Enterprise AI is crossing a threshold. For years, voice capabilities have been assistive, transcribing meetings, summarizing calls, surfacing action items. Now, voice AI can do much more. AI agents are beginning to answer calls, triage requests, and take actions without waiting for permission.

For enterprises deploying these systems, this shift raises questions that traditional UX research never had to answer. How should an AI agent ask before acting? How should it explain what it did? How do you design for trust when the user wasn't even in the room when the AI made a decision?

Making that intelligence dependable requires more than automation. It demands deep understanding of AI integrations, real workflows, human expectations, and the risks of getting AI wrong in high-stakes environments.

Priyanka Kuvalekar's specialized UX research expertise sits at this intersection. She is the UX research Lead for Microsoft Teams Calling and AI Experiences, the enterprise communication platform used by over 320 million people monthly. Her UX research and AI expertise, hands-on research delivery, and experience working in this cutting-edge space shape how AI behaves inside enterprise calling and collaboration systems at scale.

For US enterprises competing on their ability to adopt AI effectively, Priyanka's research translates directly into shaping products that drive operational efficiency, reduce costs, and sustain competitive advantage in a global market increasingly shaped by AI-powered collaboration and productivity tools.

Leading UX Research for AI-Powered Enterprise Collaboration at Microsoft

As a Research Lead at Microsoft, Priyanka leads UX research for Microsoft Teams Calling and Agentic AI. Microsoft Teams Phone, used by 80 million monthly active users with over 20 million PSTN-enabled enterprise users, is the voice backbone of Microsoft's collaboration platform.

Microsoft Teams adoption spans 93 percent of Fortune 100 companies, with strong penetration in finance, healthcare, education, and IT sectors, all critical to the US economy. Major global customers include Amazon, Walmart, Apple, Google, CVS Health, Pfizer, and Kaiser relying on Teams for collaboration and calling.

Because these organizations represent a substantial share of global enterprise activity and essential services, improvements to AI-powered calling and collaboration at this scale drive productivity, operational resilience, and continuity across the AI and tech landscape. The timing matters.

According to McKinsey's 2025 Global Survey on AI, 78 percent of organizations now use AI in at least one business function. Voice AI is a key frontier, with enterprises deploying AI agents to handle calls, triage requests, and take actions autonomously. But building voice AI that users trust, adopt, and rely on in high-stakes workflows requires specialized UX research.

Priyanka's research shapes the AI experiences these enterprises depend on, working across nine cross-functional teams and collaborating with 30+ stakeholders to lead AI research initiatives and workstreams.

What sets Priyanka apart is her specialized expertise across the breadth of end-to-end AI product development. Strategic research that shapes long-term product direction. Tactical research that answers immediate design and engineering questions.

Evaluative research that assesses whether AI features meet the bar for usefulness, trustworthiness, and accessibility before shipping to customers. For enterprises under pressure to adopt AI faster than global competitors, this combination of expertise is consequential. It is especially critical for regulated and high-stakes industries, where trustworthy AI is a prerequisite to scaling adoption without compromising reliability or compliance.

Central to her role is leading customer-facing research directly with enterprise clients across telecommunications, healthcare, and financial services. This hands-on engagement with customers informs how Microsoft builds AI experiences that are useful, accessible and trustworthy. Her work ensures the product truly aligns with customer needs: identifying pain points, evaluating product-market fit, and leading the improvements that follow.

This involves extensive AI evaluation work: qualitative interviews with enterprise users, large-scale survey research, and rigorous assessment of AI experiences to drive user-centric outcomes.

Her recommendations have driven impact across multiple levels: at the business level, informing product strategy and investment decisions; at the product level, shaping roadmap priorities and feature direction; at the user experience level, improving how customers interact with and trust AI features; and at the UI level, driving targeted changes in call flows, prompts, and in-product guidance. This also ensures Microsoft is building the right product and continuously refining it based on real user needs.

Priyanka's Contribution to Designing Products That Work for All Users

Priyanka also leads accessibility research efforts for Teams Calling and Meeting experiences, evaluating whether AI-powered features meet benchmarks established by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Her work ensures that every type of user, regardless of ability, can fully use the product. This builds on a track record of accessibility research spanning both Microsoft and Cisco. She has led UX research with low-vision users, screen reader users, neurodivergent participants, and other disability communities to ensure AI-powered collaboration tools work for everyone.

Driving Product Innovation at Cisco

Before Microsoft, Priyanka spent almost four years at Cisco, leading UX research for Webex collaboration products serving 40 million monthly active users and over 600 million monthly meeting participants. She led alignment across engineering, data science, UX, and product teams to deliver research that shaped product strategy.

A key contribution was her foundational research on Webex Meeting AI Summaries, studying how users interpreted and acted on AI-generated content at a time when Generative AI was just entering enterprise products. Webex Meetings serves over 650 million meeting participants monthly across industries including healthcare, finance, education, and government. Her findings shaped how Webex structured and presented AI summaries across its platform.

This influenced the experience for millions of global meeting participants. By helping define how generative AI is presented and trusted in enterprise collaboration, her research has contributed to workflows that strengthen competitiveness for AI-powered collaboration platforms.

She also led strategic research for Webex Contact Center, Cisco's omnichannel cloud contact center platform used by enterprises across healthcare, financial services, and telecommunications sectors.

Her research identified supervisor pain points, prioritized task workflows, and helped product teams shape their AI roadmap around true customer needs, ensuring the right features were being prioritized.

According toGartner Peer Insights, 95 percent of Webex Contact Center customers rated the platform four or five stars in 2024. Her research efforts contributed to product investment decisions and feature prioritization, informing measurable improvements in supervisor productivity and operational AI workflows.

As accessibility champion for her product area, Priyanka ensured AI-powered collaboration experiences met ADA and WCAG standards. In her role as lead researcher for the full collaboration spectrum (calling, meeting, and messaging), she connected directly with users across different disability profiles, tested AI features with assistive technology, and evangelized accessibility priorities with product and executive teams. Her contributions were recognized in a Cisco-wide accessibility spotlight, highlighting her impact across the organization.

The Business Case for Enterprise AI That Earns Trust

Enterprise AI fails expensively. When a voice AI agent misroutes a call, a supervisor wastes time on manual workarounds, or an AI feature ships without meeting accessibility requirements, the costs show up in support tickets, escalations, and lost productivity. For platforms deployed across thousands of enterprise customers, including healthcare systems coordinating patient care and financial institutions handling sensitive transactions, these failures carry operational and compliance consequences.

Priyanka's research sits upstream of these failures. By identifying where AI experiences break down, evaluating whether features meet real customer needs, and ensuring products are accessible to all users, her work reduces the friction that slows enterprise AI adoption. For platforms deployed at this scale, that research translates into AI tools that actually work for the enterprises that depend on them. Among enterprises competing on their ability to integrate AI into operations, that's the difference between AI that delivers value and AI that creates more problems than it solves.

Priyanka's Impact Beyond Microsoft: Recognition, Thought Leadership and Community Building

Priyanka's expertise extends beyond her employer through speaking, writing, and mentorship. She was invited as a speaker at the Grace Hopper Celebration 2025, the world's largest gathering of women technologists with over 30,000 attendees, presenting on influencing AI product teams with strategic research.

The conference accepts a limited number of speaker proposals each year, selecting presenters based on expertise and relevance to the field. Also, She previously spoke at the Women in Tech Global Conference 2024, addressing AI and accessibility in digital collaboration, and is a featured speaker for an upcoming January 2026 webinar on UX research in the age of AI.

Her writing on UX research and AI product development has been published in HackerNoon, DZone and Builtin, where she has contributed articles on research methods for AI agents and agile AI product development.

Priyanka also invests in developing the next generation of UX and AI professionals. She runs @uxr.pri, an Instagram account with over 5,000 followers focused on practical guidance for researchers working in AI product teams.

She has created free resources, including templates for breaking into UX and frameworks for weekly planning, that have been requested by over 200 people across her platforms. Through ADPList, LinkedIn, and Instagram, she has mentored over 100 aspiring and early-career professionals navigating the transition into UX research.

Shaping the Future of Voice AI and Enterprise Collaboration

Voice AI is moving beyond simple tasks like transcription and summarization. AI agents are now taking actions on behalf of users: answering calls, triaging requests, and making decisions in real time. As enterprises push these systems to do more, the margin for error shrinks. A misrouted call or an unexplained AI decision doesn't just frustrate users; it erodes user trust and slows adoption that enterprises are counting on.

Priyanka's current research focuses on exactly this space: cutting-edge agentic AI experiences that don't just assist users but act on their behalf. Her work addresses questions that traditional UX research hasn't had to answer: How should an AI agent ask for permission before acting? How should it communicate what it did? How do you design for trust when the AI is making decisions?

These questions don't have established answers yet. Priyanka's specialized UX research expertise, combined with her direct engagement with enterprise customers and commitment to accessibility, positions her to investigate, validate, and operationalize those answers. Her work helps teams ship leading AI-powered collaboration products that work reliably at enterprise and global scale. For the users who depend on those platforms every day, it means technology designed to earn their trust.

Priyanka's research has contributed to shaping AI-powered communication tools at two of the world's largest technology companies, influencing products used by tens of millions of users globally. In a field where most researchers specialize in either accessibility or AI, she has built advanced expertise in both, a combination that places her at the forefront of UX research and trustworthy AI design, shaping how enterprises worldwide will interact with AI-powered collaboration tools.