How to Use Copilot in Microsoft Teams Meetings (Step-by-Step Guide)

If you’ve ever sat through a long Teams meeting, scrambled to take notes, missed an action item, or joined late and had no idea what you missed — Copilot in Microsoft Teams is built exactly for situations like that.

I’ve been using it regularly now, and honestly, it changes how meetings feel. You stop stressing about capturing every word and actually focus on the conversation. In this guide, I’ll walk you through everything — from setting it up to using it live during a meeting and reviewing your recap after.

Let’s get into it.

What Is Copilot in Teams Meetings?

Copilot is Microsoft’s AI assistant built directly into Teams. During meetings, it listens to everything being said, understands the conversation in context, and helps you by:

• Summarizing what’s been discussed so far
• Identifying action items and who’s responsible
• Answering questions you type in — like “What did Sarah say about the budget?”
• Catching you up if you joined late
• Generating a full meeting recap after it ends

It’s not a bot that jumps into your meeting uninvited. You control when it turns on and what it does. It runs inside regular scheduled meetings, so it helps to know how to schedule a video call in Microsoft Teams first.

What You Need Before You Start

Before you can use Copilot in Teams meetings, a few things need to be in place:

• A Microsoft 365 Copilot license — This is required. Copilot in meetings is not available on standard Microsoft 365 plans without the Copilot add-on. If you’re unsure, check with your IT admin, and if you’re still picking a plan, compare Microsoft Teams free vs paid plans.
• Microsoft Teams (desktop app) — Some features like popping out the Copilot pane work best on the desktop version.
• Meeting organizer settings — The meeting organizer controls whether Copilot is allowed in the meeting. Even if you have a license, if the organizer has turned it off, you won’t be able to use it.

One important note: Copilot will not work in meetings hosted outside your organization. It only works in meetings within your own tenant. If you’re the host and need outside people in the call, here’s how to create a Teams meeting link for guests.

Step 1: Set Up Copilot Before the Meeting

If you’re the meeting organizer, you get to decide how Copilot works in your meeting. This is done when you’re scheduling the meeting.

Here’s how:

1. Open Teams and go to your Calendar.
2. Select New to create a meeting (make sure the Teams meeting toggle is on), or open an existing one.
3. Select Options next to the Teams meeting toggle to open Meeting options.
4. Select Copilot and other AI in the list on the left.
5. Under Allow Copilot and Facilitator, pick one of these three options:

Setting	What It Means
During and after the meeting	Copilot is available live and also after the meeting ends — but transcription must be turned on.
Only during the meeting	Copilot works live without saving a transcript. Once the meeting ends, everything is gone.
Off	Copilot is completely disabled. Recording and transcription are also turned off automatically.

Without a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, the label just says Allow Copilot, which is what my test tenant shows below. The three choices are the same.

If you can’t change the dropdown, your admin’s meeting policy is probably on On with saved transcript required (the default). That locks the option to During and after the meeting. When you do change it, select Apply before you save the meeting.

My recommendation? Go with During and after the meeting whenever possible. That way, you can revisit the Copilot recap and conversation history after the call ends. It’s especially useful for longer meetings or anything with follow-up tasks.

Step 2: Turn On Copilot During the Meeting

Once you’re in the meeting, turning on Copilot is simple.

1. In the meeting controls at the top of your screen, look for the Copilot icon (it looks like a small sparkle or star icon).
2. Click it.
3. If your organizer set it to During and after the meeting, Teams will prompt you to start transcription. Confirm it, and Copilot will start listening.
4. If it’s set to Only during the meeting, Copilot will ask you to confirm the spoken language and then start right away — no transcript saved.

The Copilot pane opens on the right side of your meeting window. This is where you’ll interact with it throughout the meeting.

Pro tip: If you’re on the desktop app, click Open private Copilot in new window. This lets you pop Copilot out into its own window so you can multitask without it overlapping your video tiles.

Step 3: Use Copilot Live During the Meeting

This is where the magic happens. Once Copilot is active, you can ask it questions at any point in the meeting — just type in the compose box inside the Copilot pane.

Here are some prompts that actually work well in real meetings:

• “Summarize what’s been discussed so far.”
• “What are the action items mentioned?”
• “Where do we disagree on this topic?”
• “How did [name] respond to the proposal?”
• “What questions can I ask to move the meeting forward?”
• “Create a table with the ideas discussed and their pros and cons.”
• “List the ideas, including people’s feedback, from transcript and chat.”

Let me give you a real-world example. Say you’re in a product planning meeting and the team has been debating two feature options for 20 minutes. You can ask Copilot: “Create a table with the ideas discussed and their pros and cons.” It’ll pull from everything said in the meeting and return a clean, structured table — right there, live.

You can also click View prompts in the Copilot pane if you want pre-suggested questions to get started quickly.

What If You Join Late?

This is one of my favorite features. If you join a meeting more than 5 minutes after it started and Copilot is already active, it automatically sends you a notification offering to catch you up. Just click Open Copilot and it generates a quick summary of what you missed — no need to awkwardly ask “wait, what did I miss?”

Step 4: Export Copilot Responses to Word or Excel

If Copilot gives you a detailed response — like a summary, a list of decisions, or a comparison table — you don’t have to copy-paste it manually.

• If the response is longer than 1,300 characters, you’ll see an Open in Word button. Click it and the response opens directly in Microsoft Word, ready to format and share.
• If the response is a table, you’ll see an Open in Excel button instead. Click it to export the table into Excel.

This is really handy for generating first-draft meeting minutes on the spot. I’ve used this to walk out of a meeting with a near-finished Word document ready to send to stakeholders.

Note: This export feature won’t work if the meeting has sensitivity labels that restrict content sharing, or if the organizer turned off copying of meeting content.

Step 5: Use Copilot from the Meeting Chat

Copilot isn’t only available inside the meeting window. You can also use it from the meeting chat — both before and after the meeting.

Before the meeting: Go to the meeting’s chat thread in Teams. You can use Copilot here just like any regular chat. If transcription gets turned on during the meeting later, Copilot will also pull in up to 24 hours of pre-meeting chat data to give more complete answers.

After the meeting: Open the meeting chat and click Open Copilot in the upper-right corner of the chat. From here you can ask things like:

• “What were the key decisions from this meeting?”
• “Who was assigned to follow up on the design review?”
• “Give me a 3-sentence summary of what was discussed.”

Copilot uses both the chat messages and the meeting transcript (if one exists) to answer your questions. It even tells you which source — chat or transcript — it pulled the answer from.

Step 6: Review the Intelligent Recap After the Meeting

If transcription was running during the meeting, you get access to the Intelligent Recap — this requires either a Teams Premium license or a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

Here’s how to access it:

1. After the meeting ends, go to the meeting chat in Teams.
2. Click on the Recap tab.
3. You’ll see AI-generated notes, action items, and mentions — all organized automatically.
4. You can also browse the recording by speakers and topics, making it easy to jump to a specific part of the conversation. If you need an offline copy, you can also download the Teams recording.
5. Open the Copilot section within the Recap tab to continue asking questions using the meeting transcript.

The Intelligent Recap is also now available for instant meetings (those ad-hoc calls you start directly without scheduling). So even quick calls don’t go unrecorded in terms of AI insights.

One thing to keep in mind: In recurring meetings, if a later meeting in the series is transcribed, the Copilot conversation history from earlier meetings in that series will no longer be available. So if you want to preserve specific Copilot insights from a recurring meeting, export them to Word right after the meeting.

Using Copilot in a BYOD Room

If you’re working from a meeting room that uses a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) setup — meaning you plug your personal laptop into a room display — Copilot still works, as long as your admin has enabled it.

To get the most out of it in this scenario, set up your voice profile:

1. Open the Teams desktop app.
2. Go to Settings > Recognition.
3. Set up your voice profile.

This helps Teams correctly attribute who said what in the transcript, making Copilot’s summaries and recaps far more accurate.

Quick Tips for Getting the Most Out of Copilot in Meetings

• Always turn on transcription if you want to access Copilot recap after the meeting ends. Without it, everything disappears when the call ends.
• Ask specific questions — the more specific your prompt, the better the answer. “What did we decide about the launch date?” works better than “What was discussed?”
• Use the table prompt for decision logs. “Create a table of decisions made and who owns each one” is incredibly useful for project meetings.
• Export to Word immediately after the meeting while the context is fresh — especially for client calls or anything that needs a follow-up document.
• Check the Recap tab before your next meeting in a series. It saves you from re-reading long threads to remember what was agreed last time.

To make transcription automatic, open Meeting options > Recording & transcription and set Record and transcribe automatically. There are a few other ways to set Microsoft Teams to record automatically.

Common Issues and What to Do

Copilot icon is greyed out or missing: This usually means either you don’t have a Copilot license, or the meeting organizer has set Copilot to “Off” for this meeting. Check with your IT admin about licensing. Admins control the default in the Teams admin center under Meetings > Meeting policies: open the policy and find the Copilot setting (it now sits in its own Copilot and other AI section). The choices are On, On with saved transcript required, On with transcript saved by default and Off, and Off only sets the organizer’s default to Off.

Can’t see Copilot after the meeting ends: Make sure transcription was turned on during the meeting. If it wasn’t, Copilot has no data to work with once the call ends.

Copilot is not available in this meeting: This happens when the meeting was organized by someone outside your organization. Copilot only works for meetings hosted within your own organization’s tenant.

Recap tab is missing: Intelligent Recap requires Teams Premium or Microsoft 365 Copilot license. If you don’t see it, your current license likely doesn’t include it.

Copilot in Teams meetings is genuinely one of the more practical AI features Microsoft has shipped in recent years. It doesn’t try to do too much — it just quietly takes care of the note-taking and catch-up work so you can stay in the conversation. Once you start using it, going back to manual notes feels like a step backward.

Want to keep going? These are good next reads:

• Running bigger sessions? Learn how to create breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams.
• Need to know who showed up? Here’s how to download the attendance list from a Teams meeting.
• For everyday habits, check these Microsoft Teams best practices.