Copilot in Teams meetings requires the Microsoft 365 Copilot paid add-on. Without it, the Copilot panel does not appear in meetings. Transcription can still be enabled for all users regardless of Copilot licence — but Copilot cannot query the transcript without the paid add-on. Verify under Settings → Subscriptions or contact your Microsoft admin or check your organisation's licence portal.
Copilot Cowork is now generally available and billed on usage (Copilot Credits, $0.01/credit pay-as-you-go), and the Work IQ APIs reached GA. The $30 Copilot add-on that unlocks in-meeting Copilot is unchanged — but if your org builds custom agents that ground in M365 data via Work IQ, that usage is metered in Copilot Credits. See the licensing/comparison guide for the full cost picture.
July 2026 additions: Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 is rolling out in Microsoft 365 Copilot, including Copilot Cowork and PowerPoint, for agentic multi-step work, and Claude Opus 5 followed on 24 July 2026 across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Chat, Cowork, and Copilot Studio. Relevant here because Cowork sits alongside meeting-adjacent flows (recap generation, follow-up drafting, agent-driven action items). Deep citations now link Copilot's answers to the specific portion of the source Word or PowerPoint file (Rolling Out; Meetings, Web, and PDF support coming). Sales Agent and Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot are now generally available, working inside Outlook and Teams and grounded in Dynamics 365 data. Copilot Cowork's plugin catalogue expanded to include Enosix, Harvey, LSEG, Miro, monday.com, Moody's, Morningstar, S&P Global Energy, and TeamsMaestro (Databricks via sideloading), plus Fabric and Dynamics 365 apps. Agent Mode in PowerPoint can now reference a Teams meeting or chat directly when creating a presentation (GA, Roadmap IDs 555885, 555884, 555883). The Facilitator agent is expanding to Teams Rooms for in-person meetings on Android (Roadmap 560700) and Windows (Roadmap 560318), and can now automatically detect open questions during a meeting and offer answers via web search (In Development, Roadmap 558341). Planner integration into Microsoft Cowork is in development (Roadmap 567315), letting Cowork view, create, and update plans and execute Planner tasks across M365.
Mid-July 2026: Copilot can now find meetings by topic or keyword, drawing on the meeting body, chat, and transcript (GA, Roadmap 559110, 15 July 2026). Worth adding to user guidance for meeting-heavy teams. In development: multilingual recap with a translation button, letting users change the recap language after it is generated (Roadmap 567458; the roadmap lists GA for August 2026). One cancellation: Microsoft announced on 16 July 2026 that it will not move forward with Copilot analysis of content shared on-screen during recorded meetings (Roadmap 325873). The feature had an August 2026 GA target; transcript and chat remain the grounding for meeting recaps, and it should be removed from any rollout plan that counted on it.
Early August 2026: a meeting recaps app in Teams rolled out in July. Pin it to the sidebar for filters, thirty days of recaps, and an audio recap, which is the first place recaps live outside the meeting they came from. Copilot responses now surface rich images inline, pulled from files and meetings instead of returning text only (GA). Voice tethering is GA (Roadmap 553223): when an interpreter voices for a D/HH signer, captions and transcripts attribute the words to the signer rather than the interpreter, which fixes an attribution problem that made transcripts misleading. Rolling out: IT admins can customise part of the recording and transcription notification message shown to users in calls (Roadmap 567302), so align that wording with whatever notice your legal team already approved. Two retention-shaped items are in development. Intelligent recap without retaining a transcript can be set from meeting options before the meeting, or turned on during it by the organiser and eligible participants (Roadmap 558286). A tenant-wide AI-generated meeting archive lets Copilot and Facilitator keep key insights beyond transcript retention periods, so Copilot can still answer questions about past meetings after the transcripts expire (Roadmap 558933). That second one is a retention decision before it is a Copilot feature: it deliberately keeps meeting content alive past the point your retention policy deletes the transcript. Take it to whoever owns that policy before you enable it.
End of August 2026: attendees in PowerPoint Live meetings can select slide text and get a Copilot explanation in a side pane, processed within the meeting environment (Roadmap 557256, generally available per the 25 August release notes).
Mid-August 2026: Microsoft published a Teams blog roundup of Copilot meeting capabilities across three phases, and it is worth reading for what it does not carry. Before a meeting, Copilot Chat schedules it and checks availability, reschedules 1:1 meetings and personal events a user has marked flexible, and drafts an agenda from meeting details and recent work. During, Facilitator answers questions, tracks agenda progress and turns conversation into shared tasks, and Interpreter does real-time speech-to-speech translation. After, the recap carries AI notes, suggested action items and personalised highlights. Nothing in the post carries a preview or general availability milestone, a roadmap ID or an admin control, so there is nothing in it for tenant policy to point at, and the 400 percent three-year return it quotes is a Microsoft-commissioned Forrester projection rather than an observed result.
Early September 2026: the multilingual recap flagged as in development above has arrived: Copilot in Teams adds a translation button that changes a meeting recap's language after the recap has been generated, rolling out during August per Microsoft's roundup. The Queues app picked up two Copilot features for recorded call-queue calls, both moving from in development to rolling out: intelligent call recaps, AI-generated summary notes, key discussion points, and follow-up actions, available from the Recap tab on the call record (Roadmap 569017), and a Copilot Chat sidecar after a call that summarises key details and answers questions about the call, without manually searching the transcript or listening back to the recording (Roadmap 568933). And for government clouds: Copilot Chat is coming to chats, channels, calls, and meetings in Teams for GCC, GCC High, and DoD (Roadmap 569214, in development). Target GA per the roadmap: October CY2026.
Mid-September 2026: a grounding source worth adding to the Facilitator agent's governance review. Meeting Shared Files will let users add files and links to a Teams meeting, shared automatically with all participants, and meeting AI such as the Facilitator agent grounds its answers on those files (Roadmap 570427, in development). Target GA per the roadmap: October CY2026, worldwide multi-tenant.
Late September 2026: one meeting feature confirmed, one mobile entry to watch. Express voice enrolment in Teams is now confirmed by a public roadmap entry: users enrol a voice profile by speaking during a meeting after opting in under Teams settings, and the profile enables voice isolation, speaker recognition, identification in meeting rooms and transcripts, and Microsoft 365 Copilot meeting recaps and insights. Admins can switch the feature off; the roadmap lists GA June 2026 (Roadmap 537269). In development, Teams on mobile will offer an Ask Copilot option in the search bar and on the results page, turning a query into a Copilot conversation with follow-up questions in context (Roadmap 571299). Target GA per the roadmap: November 2026.
End of September 2026: Copilot Cowork is listed as taking a described outcome, gathering context from mail, meetings, chats, files and business data, working across tools and systems, and returning a completed result, for Android, Windows, iOS, Mac and the web. On meetings themselves, Copilot finds meetings from topics or keywords using relevant data such as the meeting body, chat and transcription, with search over transcript text covering meetings from the last two months. And in development, the face counterpart to the express voice enrolment above: Teams users would create a face profile using their camera during eligible meetings after opting in, so supported Teams Rooms can recognise who is in the room and improve downstream experiences such as Copilot and recap. Admins can enable or disable it for the organisation (Roadmap 570846). Target GA per the roadmap: November 2026.
| Feature | Requires transcript | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Catch me up (during) | Yes | Transcript must be running before you join. Cannot catch up on content before transcript started. |
| Questions during meeting | Yes | Copilot reads the live transcript in real time. |
| Post-meeting intelligent recap | Yes — or recording | Transcript preferred. Recording alone generates a basic recap, not full chapter/action extraction. |
| Action items extraction | Yes | Extracted from spoken commitments in the transcript. |
| Key decisions list | Yes | Requires full transcript — not available if transcript was stopped mid-meeting. |
| Follow-up email draft | Yes | Based on the recap. Requires transcript for accurate content. |
| @ reference in Chat (after) | Yes | Meetings without a transcript cannot be referenced in Copilot Chat. |
| Meeting notes (auto) | Yes | Automatic meeting notes in Teams require transcript to be enabled by organiser. |
| Before-meeting prep in Chat | No | Uses your email, calendar, and previous meeting transcripts for context. |
More (…) → Start transcription. All participants are notified. Anyone with a Copilot licence can start transcription.Edit → Meeting options → turn on Record automatically and Transcription. Starts the moment the meeting opens.General → Automatically start transcription. Applies to meetings you organise. Does not affect meetings organised by others.Meetings → Meeting policies → enable Transcription and Copilot for the relevant policy. Contact your Microsoft admin or check your organisation's licence portal to verify your org's setting.@Previous-session-May-2 What open items were not resolved in our last meeting?"@Sophie Martin What have we been working on together recently?"@Project-brief.pdf Summarise the three key decisions I need to make in today's session."