Facilitator Agent in M365 Copilot: Quick Start Guide

At a glance

What it is
A live meeting agent in Teams. Takes notes,
answers questions, and tracks the agenda.

Key difference from Copilot in Teams
Standard Teams Copilot: post-meeting summaries.
Facilitator: live, collaborative, in-meeting.

Who sees the notes
All meeting participants — not just the person
who started Facilitator. Notes update in real time.

Feature	What it does	Status
Collaborative notes	Real-time notes visible and editable by all participants	GA
AI Q&A	Answer questions in chat using meeting content + web	GA
Agenda timeline	Displays agenda timeline indicators and midway/wrap-up notifications during the meeting	GA
Teams Rooms	Notes, Q&A, and timers in physical meeting rooms	GA
Mobile capture	Captures ad-hoc discussion and action items on iOS and Android	GA
Task tracking	Captures follow-up tasks during the meeting and syncs them to Planner on your accept	Public preview
Document drafting	Assign a drafting task to Facilitator itself; it produces a Word document from the discussion. Loop file generation is being retired (see below)	Public preview

What's new — and one thing to plan around. Microsoft is migrating Facilitator to a new back-end for document creation. Two changes come with it: Word document generation is being enhanced, and Loop file generation is no longer supported as of 31 July 2026. AI-generated meeting notes are unaffected: they are still a Loop page, and that is not what is being retired. What goes away is asking Facilitator to produce a Loop document as a deliverable. If any of your meeting routines end in "Facilitator, draft this as a Loop file", move them to Word. On the compliance side, eDiscovery for tasks captured in Teams meetings began rolling out January 2026 and Data Lifecycle Management support for those tasks landed across the first half of 2026, so confirm both are live in your tenant before treating meeting tasks as records — and remember task capture itself is still preview. Separately, Copilot Cowork is generally available and billed on usage (Copilot Credits, $0.01/credit pay-as-you-go) and the Work IQ APIs reached GA. Facilitator itself is a pre-built Copilot agent covered by the Copilot licence and is not separately metered — but custom agents that ground in M365 data via Work IQ are. See the licensing/comparison guide for the full cost picture.

Facilitator vs standard Copilot in Teams — the difference

Capability	Facilitator	Standard Copilot in Teams
Timing	Live — runs during the meeting	Post-meeting — after the meeting ends
Notes	Collaborative real-time notes — all participants edit	Meeting recap — generated after, one person sees it
Q&A	Answer questions mid-meeting in chat	Ask questions about the transcript after
Transcript required?	No — Facilitator works without saving a transcript	Yes — standard recap requires transcript enabled
Tasks	Captured live and synced to Planner during the meeting (public preview)	Action items extracted from transcript post-meeting

How to start Facilitator in a meeting

Join a scheduled Teams meeting

Facilitator only works in scheduled meetings (calendar invites) and on Teams Rooms devices. It cannot be added to channel meetings, instant meetings, Teams calls, 1:1 or group chats, or meetings with external participants in federated tenants. If your team runs its reviews as channel meetings, schedule a normal Teams meeting and post the link in the channel.

Open Facilitator from the meeting toolbar

In the meeting window, click the Copilot button in the toolbar (or select it from the three-dot menu). Select Start Facilitator. You must have an M365 Copilot licence to start it — unlicensed participants cannot initiate.

Add an agenda (optional but recommended)

In the Facilitator panel, add your agenda items before or at the start of the meeting. Facilitator uses the agenda to track timing and send midway and wrap-up reminders automatically.

Notes update in real time

Facilitator generates collaborative notes as the conversation proceeds. All participants see the same notes panel. Anyone can edit, highlight, or add to the notes during the meeting — not just the person who started Facilitator.

Ask questions mid-meeting

Type questions in the Teams meeting chat using @Facilitator. It answers from the meeting conversation so far and the web. Useful for "What did we decide on X earlier?" or "Can you look up [fact] quickly?"

Review after the meeting

Notes are saved as a Loop component attached to the meeting. Access them via Teams calendar, the meeting chat, or Loop. All participants retain access — no separate sharing needed.

Accept the tasks it captured (public preview)

Facilitator collects follow-up tasks as the meeting runs. They sit under Follow-up tasks in the Notes panel and go nowhere until someone selects Accept to sync — then they land in Planner. You can also create one directly: @mention Facilitator in the meeting chat, describe the task, add an optional due date, and @mention the person it belongs to. Query it the same way for a specific task or everything raised in that meeting.

Assign the drafting to Facilitator itself (public preview)

For a document, assign the task to Facilitator rather than a person. It drafts a Word document from what was actually discussed. Word is now the output to plan on: Loop file generation is no longer supported as of 31 July 2026. Treat the output as a first draft with a named human owner — it writes from meeting audio, so anything decided off-call or assumed in the room will not be in it.

Admin setup required first. Facilitator must be allowed by your IT admin in the Teams admin centre: Teams apps → Manage apps → search "Facilitator" → Allow. Loop experiences must also be enabled in Teams settings. If you do not see Facilitator in your meeting toolbar, contact your M365 admin.

The off switch for tasks. Task capture needs no admin action to turn on, which surprises people. To turn it off, an admin sets Set-PlannerConfiguration -AllowRosterCreation $false. Also note where notes land: the AI-generated notes save as a .loop file in a Meetings folder in the OneDrive of whoever started Facilitator — which can be a presenter, not the organiser — and sensitivity labels are not inherited automatically.

What Facilitator supports — and what it does not

Scenario	Supported?
Scheduled Teams meetings (calendar invite)	Yes
Channel meetings	No — cannot be added. Schedule a normal meeting and post the link in the channel.
Teams Rooms (physical meeting rooms)	Yes
Task assignment to Planner	Public preview — needs Teams Public preview enrolment
Word document drafting from meeting	Public preview — needs Teams Public preview enrolment
Loop file drafting from meeting	Retired — not supported as of 31 July 2026. AI meeting notes are still a Loop page; that is unchanged.
1:1 calls	No
Teams calls	No
Group chats	No
External / guest meetings (federated)	Limited and tenant-dependent — often unavailable with external guests. Verify with your M365 admin.
Instant (unscheduled) meetings	No
Webinars and town halls	No
Non-licensed attendees prompting Facilitator	No — view only
Multiple languages in one meeting	No — single language only

Known limitations and considerations

Facilitator does not appear in the meeting toolbar. Your IT admin has not yet allowed Facilitator in the Teams admin centre, or Loop experiences are disabled at tenant level. Raise a request with your M365 admin — the fix takes under five minutes once they know to look for it.

Notes are incomplete or miss parts of the discussion. Facilitator relies on audio quality. Participants who are muted, speaking over each other, or on poor connections will be captured less accurately. Encourage participants to speak one at a time and unmute when contributing.

The single-language constraint causes gaps in multilingual meetings. Facilitator only processes one language per meeting. If participants switch between languages, notes will be incomplete for the other language. For multilingual meetings, use the Interpreter agent for real-time translation, and a post-meeting transcript for notes.

Notes are not visible to a participant. Notes are stored as a Loop component — participants need Loop to be enabled in their account. If a participant cannot see the notes panel, they may have Loop disabled at admin or user level.

Verify compliance before using Facilitator as the official meeting record. Facilitator notes are stored as Loop components. Whether these are covered by your organisation's Microsoft Purview configuration for eDiscovery depends on tenant setup. Check with your compliance team before treating Facilitator notes as the authoritative record — especially in regulated industries or for legally sensitive meetings.

Sources: Microsoft Learn — Set up Facilitator in Microsoft Teams · Microsoft Support — Facilitator in Microsoft Teams meetings · Microsoft Learn — Facilitator in Teams Rooms · Message Center MC1155927 (updated 17 December 2025) · Roadmap ID 500701
Preview status, the channel-meeting exclusion and the 31 July 2026 Loop file retirement re-verified against Microsoft Learn (page dated 16 July 2026, updated 21 July 2026) and Microsoft Support on 10 August 2026.