Copilot in Outlook: Meeting Preparation Is About to Get Smarter

Currently, the “Prepare for meetings with Copilot” feature requires at least three participants. Starting mid-October, this is changing. Copilot will soon support all meetings, including 1:1s. The rollout will begin in mid-October and is expected to complete by November 2025 according to the message center. With this update, you’ll also see new real-time insights in the Outlook meeting event form, summarizing relevant context, tasks, documents, and other resources. Plus, you’ll be able to chat with Copilot to confirm action items or better understand meeting goals. The more context Copilot has, the better it works. Meeting series with related emails, shared documents, Teams chats, and previous Copilot transcriptions deliver the richest experience. If your organization limits Copilot to in-meeting use only and deletes content afterward, you’ll miss out on much of this value. Here is a relevant " how to " guide for users.

Microsoft facilitator

Microsoft has been talking about agents for some time, and in the end of 2024 they made some updates to what we called "Copilot in teams meetings" by releasing the application (or agent) called Facilitator. The Facilitator requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license in addition to a Teams license. 

So what is new, or what is the difference between "Copilot in teams meetings" and the new Facilitator? They both require transcription turned on, and they both create great summaries. But the Facilitator takes the feature to the next level by generating real-time AI notes and suggesting tasks on the fly in the meeting, as opposed to the previous experience of post meeting summaries. Not only does the Facilitator work in meetings, the app can be added to chats and group-chats as well, making it really easy to stay up to date in any conversation.

The Facilitator was rolled out in the November - December 2024 timeframe and has been implemented as an app organizations can control access to. It can be controlled through policies in the Teams Admin Center (Default policies will allow all apps).

The App is available on Desktop and mobile, but mobile users can at the moment only view AI-content, not enable them by starting the app.