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

TL;DR

To use Copilot in a Teams meeting, you need a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, the meeting must be hosted inside your own organisation, and transcription must be turned on. Join the meeting. Click the Copilot icon in the meeting toolbar. Then prompt it in the side panel — for example, “Recap the meeting so far” or “List action items”. Copilot answers from the live transcript and the meeting chat.

Learn Copilot across all of Microsoft 365 in our WSQ-funded course if you want a structured, hands-on path through Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams.

What Copilot in Teams actually does (and what it doesn’t)

Think of Copilot in Teams as an extra colleague who joins every meeting with one job: take notes, keep track of who agreed to do what, and never get bored. That is it. Not a recording, not a meeting bot, not a decision-maker. A patient note-taker who reads the live transcript and the chat, and answers your questions about both.

It works the same way whether you search for “how to use Copilot in Teams”, “how to use Copilot on Teams” or “how to use Copilot in Microsoft Teams”. Same product. Different phrasing in the search box.

Here is what it can do for you:

• Summarise what has been said so far.
• List action items, decisions, and unresolved questions.
• Catch you up if you join the meeting late.
• Draft a follow-up email, a pros-and-cons table, or a set of meeting minutes.
• Answer questions about a Teams chat thread or a channel post you missed.

Here is what it cannot do:

• Record a meeting. Recording is a separate feature in Teams.
• Work in meetings hosted outside your organisation. Internal-only.
• Make a decision for you. It tells you what was discussed. The call is still yours.

The rest of this guide walks through the set-up, the live workflow, the post-meeting recap and minutes, the chat and channel bits the other articles skip, the prompts that actually earn their keep, and what to do when something is greyed out. If you also want to use Copilot to draft documents and decks straight from a meeting summary, our companion guides on Copilot in Word and Copilot in PowerPoint show the rest of the workflow.

Before you start — licence, transcription, and the three things most teams get wrong

After 24 years of training in Singapore, I see one pattern repeat in every Copilot class: two out of three first-time users hit the same three problems at the start. No licence. No transcription. No idea who controls the meeting-organiser settings. Fix these three and the rest takes ten minutes.

1. You need a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence.

Copilot in Teams is part of the Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on. It is not included in any base Microsoft 365 plan. The add-on is sold per user, on top of a qualifying plan — Business Standard, Business Premium, E3, or E5. List price is US$30 per user per month. Through a Singapore CSP, it works out to roughly SGD 40 per user per month. For a 20-person team that is around SGD 800 a month before any volume discount. Worth knowing the number before the conversation with your IT admin.

2. Transcription must be on for the meeting.

If transcription is off, Copilot still works in some modes, but with limits. Live transcription is what gives Copilot the meeting content to reason over. Without it, you can prompt Copilot in the chat thread only — you cannot ask anything about what people actually said during the call.

3. The meeting organiser controls Copilot for that meeting.

Inside the meeting scheduler, the organiser opens Meeting options and looks for the Copilot and other AI control — there are three values to pick from:

• During and after the meeting — Copilot starts with transcription and is available afterwards.
• Only during the meeting — Copilot runs live without saving a transcript; nothing is available once the meeting ends.
• Off — Copilot, recording and transcription are all disabled.

If you join a meeting and the Copilot icon is greyed out, this setting is almost always the reason. Ask the organiser. Don’t ask IT yet — nine times out of ten they didn’t switch it off, the organiser did. (Microsoft’s official Copilot in Teams reference lists the same three states under a slightly different label.)

How to turn on Copilot in a Teams meeting (step-by-step)

Five steps. Do them in this order for any meeting you are organising.

1. Schedule the meeting in Teams or Outlook. When you create the meeting, open Meeting options and set Allow Copilot and Facilitator to During and after the meeting.
2. Open the meeting at the start time. Join from Teams desktop on Windows or Mac. Live Copilot works best on the desktop app.
3. Turn on live transcription. In the meeting toolbar, click More (the three-dot menu) → Record and transcribe → Start transcription. Pick the spoken language. Once transcription starts, Copilot is available.
4. Click the Copilot icon in the meeting toolbar. A side panel opens on the right.
5. Send your first prompt. Type a question into the compose box at the bottom of the Copilot pane, or click View prompts for suggestions. A useful first prompt is “Recap the meeting so far and list action items.”

If you are not the organiser, you don’t need to do steps 1 and 3 — the organiser does. Join the meeting, wait for the Copilot icon to become clickable, and start at step 4.

Extremely easy once you have done it twice. The friction is almost always in step 1 — meeting options — and step 3 — transcription.

How to use Copilot during a Teams meeting

Three workflows that earn their keep during a live meeting.

Catching up if you joined late

If you join more than five minutes after the meeting started and Copilot is active, Teams sends you a small notification offering to catch you up. Click Open Copilot. A summary of what you missed appears in the side panel. The meeting keeps running in the main window — there is no interruption.

Do try it the next time you are late to a recurring Monday meeting. It is the moment most people stop being sceptical about Copilot.

Asking questions during the meeting

Open the Copilot side panel during the call. Anything you type into it is private to you. Other participants cannot see your prompts or the answers. Useful prompts:

• Recap the last 10 minutes.
• Where do people disagree on this?
• What is the strongest argument so far for option A?
• Create a table of the ideas discussed with their pros and cons.

The answers reference the live transcript, so they are grounded in what was actually said. If you want to keep an answer for later, copy it out before the meeting ends — depending on the organiser’s settings, the conversation may not be available afterwards.

Generating live action items

Try this pattern. About fifteen minutes before the scheduled end of the meeting, prompt Copilot: List the action items so far, with the named owner and a due date if mentioned. Read the list aloud to confirm ownership before the meeting closes.

This one small habit kills the most common post-meeting failure: everyone agrees in the room, no one writes down who is doing what, and a week later three people think it was someone else’s job. Managers can be quite demanding, and rightly so — they want the action items in writing before lunch. Now you have them before the call even ends.

How to use Copilot after a meeting — recap, summary, minutes

After the meeting ends, Copilot stays available from two places: the meeting chat and the Recap tab.

Open the meeting from your Teams calendar or chat list. Click into the meeting chat. Select Open Copilot in the top-right corner of the chat. You can ask anything about the meeting — but only if a transcript was generated. Without a transcript, Copilot only sees the chat messages, not what was said out loud.

The Recap tab gives you the same conversation history with Copilot, plus a structured view: AI-generated notes, suggested follow-up tasks, a speaker timeline, and the ability to jump to the moment in the recording where a topic was discussed. The Recap tab’s extras are part of Teams Premium or the Microsoft 365 Copilot licence.

Notes, summary or minutes — they are different things. Searchers often use these terms interchangeably. Copilot treats each as a different output, and you will save yourself a lot of frustration if you pick the right one for the job in the begining:

• Meeting notes — informal bullet points. What the team agreed to remember. Prompt: Give me a 6-bullet summary of what was decided.
• Meeting summary — narrative paragraph. A few sentences explaining what happened. Prompt: Summarise this meeting in 4 short paragraphs covering goal, discussion, decisions, and next steps.
• Meeting minutes — formal record with sections. What gets attached to a project file or filed for compliance. Prompt: Generate formal meeting minutes with the following sections: attendees, agenda, key discussion points, decisions made, action items with named owners and due dates, date and time of next meeting.

That third prompt is the one to save. It produces a draft minutes document that needs about three minutes of human cleanup before it is ready to share. For finance, HR, audit and board contexts where a written record matters — and your boss will want it on A4, in a tidy format — this is where Copilot in Teams earns back its licence cost.

If Copilot’s answer runs over 1,300 characters, an Open in Word button appears. Click it to push the answer into a Word document for editing. If the answer is a table, Open in Excel appears instead. These are the cleanest ways to get a Copilot output out of Teams and into something your colleagues can edit. Once it lands in Excel, the same patterns from our Copilot in Excel walkthrough apply for cleaning up the table and turning it into a summary.

How to use Copilot in Teams chats and channels (the bit competitors leave out)

Copilot is not only for meetings. It also works inside Teams chats and channel conversations — useful for catching up on long threads you have ignored for a day.

In a one-to-one or group chat. Open the chat. Click Open Copilot from the top-right of the chat pane. Then prompt it. For example: Summarise the last 30 messages, or List the questions I haven’t answered yet, or What did Sarah ask me to do? Copilot reads the chat history and answers in a private side panel. Other participants cannot see your prompts.

In a channel. Open the channel. Use the same Open Copilot button at the top-right of the channel view. Prompts that work well: Catch me up on this channel for the last week, or List the open decisions in this channel, or Summarise the discussion on the launch plan post. If a post has long replies, you can open Copilot directly on that post and prompt it on the thread alone.

This is the workflow that pays off when you come back from leave. Open three or four busy channels, run a Catch me up since [date] prompt on each one, and you are back in the loop in five minutes. The same pattern works for Monday-morning catch-ups on chats that ran over the weekend. How good is that?

12 useful Copilot prompts for Teams meetings (with examples)

Below are twelve prompts that come up again and again in the classroom. Copy them. Adapt the bracketed bits. Keep the list in a Teams chat with yourself for quick reference.

Recap and catch-up

1. Recap the meeting so far in 5 bullet points.
2. Summarise the last 15 minutes for someone who just joined.

Action items and decisions

3. List every action item discussed, with the named owner and a due date if mentioned.
4. List the decisions made in this meeting. For each, note who agreed and who did not.
5. What was left unresolved that we need to follow up on?

Drafting follow-ups

6. Draft a follow-up email to all participants with the key decisions, action items and the date of the next meeting. Keep it under 200 words.
7. Generate formal meeting minutes with sections for attendees, agenda, decisions, action items, and next meeting.

Sharpening the conversation

8. Where do people disagree in this meeting?
9. What is the strongest argument for option [X] so far? What is the strongest argument against?
10. What questions could I ask to move this conversation forward?

Preparation and post-mortem

11. Before the next meeting on this topic, what are the three biggest open questions from today?
12. Compare today’s discussion with the meeting we had two weeks ago on the same project — what changed?

The twelfth one only works if both meetings had transcripts and you are an attendee on both. When it works, it is the closest thing to a project memory you can run from inside Teams. If you want to build prompts like this into a re-usable agent that runs in your tenant, the agentic AI automations course walks through how to wire Copilot Studio into Teams without writing code.

Common problems and fixes

Five problems show up over and over. Here is what causes each and how to clear it.

The Copilot icon is greyed out in the meeting toolbar

Almost always a meeting-options setting. Ask the organiser to open the meeting in their calendar, go to Meeting options → Copilot and other AI, and set Allow Copilot and Facilitator to During and after the meeting (or at minimum Only during the meeting). If it is already set correctly and the icon is still greyed out, the licence may not be assigned to you. Check with your IT admin.

“No transcript available — Copilot can only see the chat”

Transcription was off during the meeting. Nothing to fix after the fact. For next time, start transcription at the beginning from the More menu → Record and transcribe → Start transcription. If you want this to happen automatically for every meeting, the organiser can set it in the meeting template.

Copilot is missing words or names that were definitely said

Usually an accent or language-switching issue. The speech-to-text engine is strongest on standard English. Strong accents, Singlish, and mid-sentence switches to Mandarin or Malay reduce accuracy. Two fixes. Pick the dominant language when the language prompt appears at the start of transcription. Then re-prompt Copilot with the missing name spelled out, for example “List the action items, including ones assigned to Aiman or Zhi Wei.”

My licence is active but Copilot still won’t appear

Three things to check. Your admin may have switched Copilot off at tenant level — ask them. The meeting may be hosted by an external organisation — Copilot is org-internal only. Or the Teams client may not have refreshed since your licence was assigned. Sign out of Teams, restart the app, and sign back in.

Live Copilot works on my desktop but the icon is missing on my phone

The mobile Teams app supports Copilot in the meeting Recap tab and in chats, but live in-meeting Copilot is still being rolled out and the desktop app gets new features first. For now, use the mobile app for catch-up after a meeting, and stick to the desktop app for live meeting use.

Time to put it to work

Copilot in Teams is one of the few AI tools where the value shows up on day one. Run it through one real meeting and you will know whether it earns its place in your week.

Start small. Pick a recurring team meeting in your diary this week. Ask the organiser to allow Copilot. Turn on transcription. Run the “List action items with owners and due dates” prompt about fifteen minutes before the scheduled end. Then read the list out loud before everyone leaves the call.

I hope you’ll find this guide useful, and that you’ll try the action-items prompt at your very next meeting. If you want a structured way to learn this for your whole team, the Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Copilot in Microsoft 365 Office course covers Copilot across all the Office apps in one workshop, with WSQ funding and SkillsFuture credits available for Singapore companies. The digital transformation with AI tools course is the wider companion for teams thinking about AI more broadly. Do give it a try.