Your organization has Viva Engage. It might even have Copilot enabled in it. And there's a good chance that when someone asks Copilot to summarize what was discussed in the internal communities last week, the answer will be: nothing relevant.
Not because Copilot failed. Because nobody posted anything.
The Graveyard Microsoft Never Announced
Between February 2025 and April 2026, Microsoft quietly retired three products from the Viva ecosystem:
Viva Topics left in February 2025. It was the product that used AI to identify experts and automatically create knowledge pages. It was replaced by a simpler model with no AI, no cards, no automation.
Viva Goals closed in December 2025. The corporate OKR product, which many organizations had enthusiastically adopted, was discontinued with no native replacement.
Live Events in Viva Engage were retired in April 2026. Live broadcasts migrated to Teams Town Hall, in another experience merger that simplifies the portfolio but confuses those who had already built workflows on the previous platform.
| Product | Retired |
|---|---|
| Viva Topics | February 2025 |
| Viva Goals | December 2025 |
| Live Events in Viva Engage | April 2026 |
Three products. Sixteen months. Almost no coverage.
What Survived and Why
What remained standing was what Microsoft can measure: engagement, reactions, comments, views.
- Viva Engage survived because it has social network metrics
- Viva Connections survived because it's the entry point in Teams
- Viva Insights survived because it measures productivity and now measures Copilot adoption
What left was everything that depended on human behavior to work: creating topics, updating goals, producing content. AI cannot fill the void left by an organization that stopped communicating internally.
When AI Adoption Became the Only Adoption Project
At some point in 2025, adoption and change management teams at almost every organization had to answer a new question from leadership: "What is our Copilot adoption plan?"
And that question swallowed all the others.
Internal communication projects were paused. Change champions who used to energize communities on Viva Engage moved on to prompt training workshops. Adoption dashboards that used to measure SharePoint and Teams usage now measure Copilot sessions.
Viva Insights in March 2026 added native Copilot metrics: actions executed per app, adoption trends, group comparisons. It's an elegant dashboard. It measures very well the usage of a tool that, according to Microsoft's own data, only 4% of users actively use.
What Copilot Is Going to Find
Copilot in Viva Engage can do useful things: summarize community conversations, identify trending topics, help draft posts. It's a functional AI layer on top of a corporate social network.
The problem is what's underneath that layer.
If your organization's "Digital Transformation" community has three posts from the last six months, Copilot will summarize three posts. If the "SharePoint Best Practices" channel has content from 2023, Copilot will summarize content from 2023. If nobody posts, nobody replies and nobody engages, Copilot will summarize the silence with great elegance.
AI amplifies what exists. It doesn't create what never was.
The Garden Nobody Watered
There's an implicit belief that AI solves the content problem. That with better tools, people will communicate more and better. But Viva Topics already promised that and was shut down because it depended on something AI cannot replace: people who consider it relevant to share what they know.
The internal content challenge is a culture problem, not a platform problem.
And as long as all adoption resources are pointed at Copilot usage, the garden will keep drying out.
The irony is that Copilot will only be worth it when there's something to find, summarize and connect. And that requires an internal content strategy that, at this moment, almost no organization is building.
If you want to keep thinking about this, MacarenoNet's newsletter brings this kind of analysis every week.
Sources
- Embracing a Fully Modern Viva Engage Experience, Microsoft Tech Community
- What's new for Microsoft Viva – March 2026, Hands On Teams
- Viva Goals retirement, Microsoft Learn
- Viva Engage Events – April 2026, IT Trip
- What Is Viva Engage in 2026?, Orchestry