Use Microsoft Copilot in Teams to Turn Meetings into Communications

What This Does

Copilot in Teams automatically summarizes meetings, extracts action items, and answers questions about what was discussed. You can turn a leadership meeting into a follow-up communication in minutes instead of reviewing a 90-minute recording.

Before You Start

• Your organization uses Microsoft Teams with Copilot enabled (Microsoft 365 Copilot license required)
• The meeting must be recorded or transcribed (Copilot works from the transcript)
• Meeting transcription must be turned on in Teams settings
• Time needed: 5-10 minutes after a meeting
• Cost: Included in Microsoft 365 Copilot ($30/user/mo)

Steps

1. Enable Meeting Transcription

Before your next meeting, ensure transcription is on. During a Teams meeting, click the three-dot menu (...) at the top of the meeting controls, then select Start transcription. You can also set this to start automatically in your Teams settings under Settings → Meetings → Transcription.

What you should see: A small "Transcription" indicator appears in the meeting window, and participants see a notification that transcription is active.

Troubleshooting: If "Start transcription" is grayed out, your IT admin hasn't enabled it for your organization. Contact your Teams administrator.

2. Access Copilot After the Meeting

After a meeting ends, open the meeting in Teams (find it in Chat → the meeting thread). Look for the Copilot tab at the top of the meeting chat, alongside Transcript and Recording tabs.

What you should see: A Copilot chat interface showing the meeting details with a text box to ask questions.

3. Ask Copilot to Summarize for Communications

Type requests in the Copilot chat to get exactly what you need:

• "Summarize the key decisions made in this meeting"
• "List all action items and who owns each one"
• "What were the 5 most important topics discussed?"
• "Draft a 150-word follow-up email summarizing what was decided"

What you should see: Copilot responds with structured summaries, decision lists, and action items pulled directly from the transcript.

4. Draft Your Follow-Up Communication

Once you have the summary, ask Copilot to format it for your specific communication need:

Copy the output into Outlook, edit as needed, and send.

Real Example

Scenario: You attended a 90-minute leadership planning session to prep for the Q4 all-hands. The SVP discussed 12 different topics and 15 action items were mentioned. You need to send a meeting summary to the 8 attendees and draft the key messages for the all-hands agenda.

What you type in Copilot:

1. "What are all the action items from this meeting, grouped by owner?"
2. "What 5 topics received the most discussion time?"
3. "Draft a post-meeting summary email with decisions and action items for distribution to attendees"
4. "Based on this meeting, what should be the 4 key messages for our Q4 all-hands?"

What you get: Four distinct outputs in 5 minutes that would have taken 45–60 minutes of note review and drafting to produce manually.

Tips

• Always start transcription at the beginning of important meetings. Copilot only works with what's in the transcript.
• Ask for "decision log" summaries specifically when your organization needs traceable meeting records for compliance.
• Use Copilot to generate draft summaries, then review and edit. It occasionally misidentifies action item owners or conflates similar discussion points.

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