Microsoft Viva Glint February 2026 Update: AI Integration, Enhanced Reporting, and Global Accessibility

Microsoft Viva Glint continues to evolve as a comprehensive employee listening platform with its February 2026 update, introducing a range of enhancements designed to support organizations in their AI transformation journeys and improve employee engagement measurement. The update focuses on three key areas: enhanced accessibility for global teams, improved data management and reporting capabilities, and the integration of AI-powered features to provide deeper insights.

Enhanced Global Accessibility

One of the most significant updates is the localization of Teams bot notifications. Viva Glint Teams bot notifications are now delivered in each user's preferred language, improving accessibility and engagement for global, non-English-speaking audiences. This update aligns Teams bot notifications with existing Viva Glint email and platform localization capabilities, ensuring a consistent experience across all communication channels.

This enhancement is particularly valuable for multinational organizations that need to ensure consistent employee engagement measurement across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. By delivering notifications in users' preferred languages, organizations can expect higher response rates and more accurate feedback collection from their global workforce.

Improved Data Management and Reporting

Viva Glint has introduced several enhancements to its data management and reporting capabilities. The audit activity log enhancements provide richer visibility into automated data imports, making it easier for administrators to reconcile data across systems. Starting this month, in addition to failed uploads, admins can now access advisory files for partial ingestions where only some records from an import were processed successfully.

Later this year, for supported automated imports including SFTP and Organizational Data in Microsoft 365, audit logs will include downloadable details that summarize which records were added, updated, skipped, or moved to inactive status. These improvements enable administrators to diagnose issues more efficiently and act with greater confidence when managing employee data.

The Export to PowerPoint feature now applies the custom PowerPoint template selected in General settings to the exported PowerPoint file for all reports that support the new export. This includes Team summary reports and Executive summary reports, ensuring brand consistency across all exported materials.

Navigation improvements have also been implemented, allowing Viva Glint Reporting users to retrace their navigation flow by drilling down and drilling up in reports without losing context. The "Go Back" action has been replaced with an alternative clickable experience that enables users to return to the last Reporting page they were in, supporting improved back navigation within Reporting.

AI Integration and Advanced Features

Viva Glint is embracing AI integration with several new features designed to enhance the platform's analytical capabilities. Copilot in Viva Glint will default to ON starting in March 2026, and the existing Glint admin toggles for Copilot access will be removed. From that point forward, Copilot access will be managed exclusively through Viva Feature Access Management (VFAM), providing a single, streamlined control consistent with other Microsoft Copilot experiences.

This change reduces admin workload and ensures a more consistent governance experience across Microsoft's ecosystem. Organizations are encouraged to review their VFAM settings to prepare for this update.

Dynamic Topics with Copilot is entering private preview in March, designed to enhance the relevance and context of comment themes by extending beyond the current static set of topics and identifying customer-specific topics that can be tracked over time. These custom topics will remain confined to each organization's platform and will not be accessible to Microsoft or other customers.

The private preview of Copilot Highlights is now live, offering a dashboard feature that instantly summarizes survey results, highlighting team strengths, opportunities, and engagement trends. This feature helps managers and leaders quickly assess team status, pinpoint focus areas, and celebrate achievements.

Continuous Employee Engagement

Viva Glint is introducing several features to support continuous employee engagement beyond traditional survey cycles. The Continuous Employee Engagement with Workplace Metrics feature allows organizations to improve actionability for focus areas like "Work-life balance" and "Collaboration" by bringing in workplace metrics from Viva Insights. This feature helps senior leaders look at supplementary data points to understand survey responses and have more data-driven discussions with their organizations on what can be improved in these areas.

Between survey cycles, this continuous data will help organizations keep their teams on track and maintain momentum in addressing employee experience issues. The feature is targeted for private preview in March 2026, but earlier builds are available starting in January.

Employee Feedback Agent

The Employee Feedback Agent represents a significant advancement in employee listening capabilities. This dynamic, AI-powered conversation tool allows employees to share what matters most through natural, chat-like interactions, whether prompted or always-on, enabling real-time feedback and deeper insights into the drivers behind their experiences.

Unlike traditional Copilot tools that simply summarize information, the Employee Feedback Agent collects experiential data through probing questions and back-and-forth conversations with employees. Future capabilities will expand impact with an actionable insights reporting experience, accelerating the "feedback-to-action" cycle.

Organizational Data Integration

Viva Glint is introducing integration with Organizational Data in Microsoft 365, providing an enterprise-grade approach to connecting people data across Viva experiences. This preview establishes a consistent, governed data foundation that supports trusted insights today and prepares organizations for future Copilot experiences—aligned with Microsoft 365-level controls and management.

Role and Permission Enhancements

In the March release, Microsoft will be making changes to roles and permissions in Viva Glint to increase security and flexibility for enterprise organizations. The new Survey Designer Role will empower organizations to assign users only the access they need to create and deploy Glint surveys, without granting broader administrative permissions.

This targeted role is especially valuable for initiatives like AI transformation, hybrid work, and other change management employee listening programs. New permissions for Advanced Configuration, Question Library, Service Configuration, Nudges, and Viva Integrations will offer more granular control over platform access and management.

The Company Admin role has been renamed to Viva Glint Service Admin, and assignment of new service admins will now be restricted exclusively to the Microsoft Admin Centre (MAC), ensuring tighter governance and streamlined administration.

External Benchmarks

Enabling external benchmarks gives organizations valuable context by showing how their results compare to global and industry peers. With a single opt-in step, Viva Glint unlocks a rich set of benchmark suites including Global, Industry, Country/Region, High-Performing, and more.

Customers who opt in consistently report that benchmarks strengthen storytelling, deepen insight quality, and accelerate action planning. Organizations are recommended to turn on this feature to get the full value of Viva Glint reporting. Without enabling this feature, customers will not be able to see any external benchmark comparisons and will only have access to internal comparators.

Thought Leadership and Customer Success

The February update includes new thought leadership research on "Fighting AI Slop with Meta-Cognition Around AI," highlighting how organizations can move beyond simple AI adoption to thoughtful, intentional use that delivers real value. The research shows that the difference between employees who get real value from AI and those who don't isn't how often they use it, but how thoughtfully they use it.

A customer success story featuring HRIZONS demonstrates how a global skin care company transformed its employee listening program from a traditional high-engagement survey model into a continuous engine for manager enablement, organizational alignment, and workforce effectiveness. The program moved from periodic measurement to continuous improvement, embedded self-sustaining capabilities across survey cycles, and unlocked efficiencies through early use of Microsoft 365 Copilot with Viva Glint.

Community Engagement

The Viva Customer Connection Program (VCCP) has evolved into the Employee Experience Customer Connection (EECC) program, reflecting the expanded scope and value of this community as employee experiences continue to evolve with Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot. The program continues to offer forums for influencing product direction, early insight into product roadmaps, private preview engagement opportunities, and connection with other enterprise customers.

Upcoming sessions include discussions on Copilot Highlights, Copilot default ON and VFAM controls, and the journey to becoming a frontier firm with AI and agentic workflows. These sessions provide valuable opportunities for customers to learn about new features and provide feedback to shape the platform's future development.

The February 2026 update demonstrates Microsoft's commitment to evolving Viva Glint as a comprehensive employee listening platform that supports organizations through their AI transformation journeys while maintaining the core focus on improving employee engagement and experience.