"Meetings have increased in length and frequency over the past 50 years, to the point where executives spend an average of nearly 23 hours a week in them, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s.”
— Harvard Business Review
Meetings are where decisions get made, but they’re also where the most time is lost. In the past 50 years, the time executives spend in meetings has doubled. With a lot of businesses now operating on a hybrid or remote basis, the majority of these meetings take place online. With Microsoft Copilot for Teams you can stay organised, show up prepared, and ultimately, reclaim a considerable amount of the time you spend preparing for, attending and catching up on meetings.
Whether you’re leading a call or just catching up, Copilot acts as your executive assistant, researcher, note-taker and follow-up coordinator. This Knowledge Base page is your central hub for mastering Copilot in Teams – a strategic guide to using AI to have more effective meetings. Each section includes practical advice, example prompts, quick video tips and links to other resources.
The majority of this Knowledge Base focuses on meetings within Teams, but there is a section for other Copilot for Teams capabilities lower down the page, focusing on quick-start, copy and paste prompts to help you work smarter.
Copilot is more than just a note-taker – it’s a dynamic partner that helps you have more productive meetings. Acting as your research assistant, Copilot gathers insights from emails, chats, files and the web to help you prepare. As an agenda builder, Copilot helps structure meeting plans so discussions stay focused and purposeful. During conversations, it serves as a real-time guide, summarising key points and clarifying complex jargon on the spot. After decisions have been made, Copilot becomes your follow-up coordinator, transforming agreements into actionable tasks to ensure progress. Finally, as a minute keeper, it tracks outcomes and progress across recurring meetings, making continuity effortless.
This Knowledge Base will dig deeper into these capabilities, guiding you through how to use them effectively to save hours of time.
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. When it comes to effective meetings, the devil is often in the details. The more preparation or research you have done beforehand, the likelier it is you will have a successful meeting.
But with the sheer amount of meetings each week, who can find the time? Unless you’re assigned a specific task or asked to present, it’s more common than not to go into a meeting with minimal prep and work it out on the fly. This is where Copilot comes in. Preparation signals professionalism and builds trust. It also makes asking questions during the meeting and following up after much easier. Copilot makes the research and preparation stage effortless.
We’ll take you through a couple tasks in the videos below, but if you’re tight on time or already know the ropes, check out the quick prompts to get started immediately.
Copilot can scan your Microsoft 365 environment to surface relevant details, and search the web for extra information. These two capabilities can help you find out:
We'll show you how to do these things in the quick video below, but if you're short on time, you can use the following prompts as starting points to gather some pre-meeting information.
In Copilot Chat for Work: "Summarise recent emails and documents related to [Company Name] for my meeting with [Contact Name] tomorrow regarding [Topic]."
In Copilot Chat for Web: "I am meeting [Contact Name] from [Company Name] tomorrow to see if we can help them with [Project]. Please do some research on the company and any recent, relevant news surrounding them.
(Optional: Include their website URL for better accuracy)
No more blank pages before your meeting. Copilot can help you draft agendas based on:
Meetings can move fast, but Copilot can help you keep pace. If you’re transcribing your meeting with Copilot, you can use Copilot chat in Teams (almost) live to ask questions, do some analysis or clarify jargon.
Your Copilot chat will be a few moments behind the transcript at any given time, but it shouldn’t take more than a couple minutes in most cases until you can start sending Copilot some prompts about the meeting, and you can prepare your questions in advance in the chat window. Don’t fret – only you can see the Copilot chat window and the responses you receive.
This can be used to summarise your discussion points near the end of the meeting to help you wrap up and determine next steps, help you qualify leads during a meeting by asking Copilot to analyse the conversation under a certain sales framework e.g. MEDDIC, and can help you clarify jargon or summarise points on the fly.
We don’t have any video tips for these guides at the moment, as it’s difficult to record these on the go, but we’ve included some tips on what it’s capable of, some notes about compliance and some quick prompts that you may want to try in your next meeting.
You can ask Copilot to:
Clarifications & Insight
It's important to have the correct layers of security in place before using Copilot in your meetings, or recording meetings in general. Remember:
Compliance Tip: Always confirm recording permissions before enabling Copilot, and tell those in attendance that the meeting is being recorded (Teams will notify them as well, but it's polite to ask).
How many times after a meeting have you just moved on to the next task as if the last 90 minutes never happened? There’s a lot of tasks on the list, and you need to move on before you get sucked in for what feels like forever, reviewing the meeting, sorting out next steps and planning for next week. Copilot can help you follow-up, catch up and plan for the next meeting in no time at all.
If you’re transcribing the meeting with Copilot, it’ll automatically summarise it, give you a handy recap, detail next steps and even highlight who spoke and when. From there, you can delve even deeper into the summary with Copilot chat and perform more advanced tasks like sentiment analysis or just help you plan for next week.
Our video tips below will go into all of this in detail and teach you some useful prompts and processes to try after your next meeting.
Whilst you do need to set this up before the meeting, the pay off comes at the end. Copilot automatically creates structured summaries of:
Copilot meeting summaries are also perfect for anyone who missed the meeting to quickly catch-up without having to sit through hours of meeting catch-up when they come back from annual leave for example.
Using Copilot chat within your meeting recap can be incredibly useful for many tasks, such as:
Whilst the real value of Copilot for Teams comes from its meeting toolkit, it's still a great tool to use in other elements of Teams. We've compiled a list below of where else you can use Copilot to help you stay on top of things.
Summarise Chats and Channels
Create Content and Documents
Teams Mode for Group AI Collaboration
Integration Across Microsoft 365
Meetings aren't going away, but the wasted time can. Copilot for Teams gives you the power to prepare smarter, participate with confidence and follow up effortlessly. Every hour you save is an hour you can reinvest in strategy, creativity and growth.
Don't let meetings drain your productivity. Start using Copilot today and turn every conversation into meaningful progress.
If you've not had Copilot before, you may be entitled to a free 30-day trial and a 15% discount when you buy Copilot for your team.
Ready to explore your options? Book your free consultation today.