Imagine having an AI assistant that seamlessly integrates with your Teams workflow, pulling from your notes, existing documents, and databases to enhance collaboration. That’s the power of Copilot for Microsoft Teams, and it’s poised to revolutionize your work.
What is Copilot for Microsoft Teams?
As anyone who’s worked with Teams knows, preparing for meetings can be time-consuming. It’s easy to spend hours digging through chats to find information, following the thread of complex conversations, and getting up to speed on meetings. Now, Copilot has changed all that. With just a few clever prompts, it can search your Team chats, find and analyze Teams meeting transcripts, and serve up a summary that keeps your whole team in the loop.
But that’s not all. Copilot also creates actionable insights from your meetings. It captures critical discussion points, summarizes who said what, and suggests action items—all in real time. Whether it’s a brainstorming session or a project update, Copilot keeps everyone aligned and informed. It seamlessly integrates with other M365 tools, ensuring consistency and enhancing collaboration across your organization. So, when you use Copilot in Teams, you streamline your meetings, gain valuable insights, and keep track of decision-making conversations. It’s like having an AI partner who assists and empowers your entire team.
Ten key features of Copilot for Microsoft Teams
At its core, Copilot for Microsoft Teams brings intelligence to how we meet and purpose to how we collaborate outside our meetings. It brings a powerful suite of capabilities to your desktop, including:
#1—Effortless Meeting Summaries
During Teams meetings, Copilot captures key discussion points, summarizes who said what, and suggests action items—all in real time.
#2—Transcription and Chat Integration
Copilot now provides insights from both meeting transcripts and chat messages. When you open Copilot during a meeting, you’ll see a comprehensive view of what was covered—spoken or written.
#3—Intelligent Call Recap
Starting in June, Copilot will offer AI-powered call recaps for VoIP and PSTN calls. This will allow users to get insights and recaps without manual note-taking.
#4—Hybrid Meeting Enhancements
Hybrid meetings—where some participants are in the room and others remote—can be tricky. IntelliFrame, powered by Cloud AI, helps remote attendees see in-room participants. It can capture and identify everyone’s videos in your Teams meeting, making hybrid collaboration smoother.
#5—Easy Installation and Accessibility
To start, create setup policies in the Teams admin center to install and pin Copilot for your users. Pinning the app ensures easy access. Copilot Pro subscribers can use it across web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook, and it supports multiple languages.
#6—Collaboration Made Easy
Brainstorm with Copilot as your AI partner. Discuss ideas, refine content, and explore different angles—all within Teams itself.
#7—Real-Time Language Translation
Copilot can translate meeting discussions and chat messages into multiple languages, facilitating global collaboration.
#8—Customizable Meeting Insights
Customize Copilot’s behavior by adjusting settings for meeting summaries, transcription accuracy, and chat integration.
#9—Integration with Microsoft 365 Services
Copilot integrates with other Microsoft 365 services, such as OneDrive, SharePoint, and Planner, enhancing your overall productivity.
#10—Security and Compliance
Copilot follows Microsoft’s security and compliance standards and GDPR data handling regulations. These are Copilot for Microsoft Teams’ standard features. However, the real benefits of this program come from Copilot’s ability to customize your Teams interface and experience. Let’s explore the surprising ways you can change the Teams interface just for you.
How to customize Copilot for Teams
Are you the kind of person who wants just the highlights or who needs to archive every detail of an interaction? Either way, Copilot’s got you covered. Now, you can program Microsoft Teams to behave in a customized way every time a meeting starts. You can transcribe, store, summarize, and more using a “set it and forget it” customizable platform. Specifically, you can adjust: Transcription Accuracy: Adjust the level of detail in meeting transcriptions. You can choose between verbatim (word-for-word) or summarized (key points) transcription modes, so you’re never bothered with more information than you need. Action Item Suggestions: Specify how Copilot suggests action items. You can set it to automatically identify and highlight action points or let it provide more general summaries. Chat Integration Preferences: Customize how Copilot handles chat messages. You can prioritize chat content, filter out noise, or focus on specific participants’ contributions. Never worry that a valuable client’s directions will get lost. Teams can always make sure they surface. Of course, all this customization is terrific. However, the real power of Copilot for Microsoft Teams comes from how it interfaces with other programs on your M365 platform. Let’s explore some real-world scenarios where this interoperability will help you.
How Copilot for Microsoft Teams works across M365
When working in Copilot for Teams, you still have the full functionality of the other tools within M365. That means anything you generate in Microsoft Teams can be transported easily out of the program—to an Excel spreadsheet or a Word document, for instance, and vice versa. Here’s how that looks as it plays out in the system:
Collaborate on Word Documents
While chatting with a colleague in Teams, you can pull in a Microsoft Word document directly. Copilot assists you in editing, formatting, and refining the content—all without leaving Teams.
Create PowerPoint Presentations
Start a chat in Teams, invoke Copilot, and ask it to generate a new PowerPoint presentation. Copilot tailors the slides based on your prompts, ensuring consistency and saving you time.
Access Excel Data
Need data from an Excel spreadsheet? Share the link or paste the numbers into Teams chat. Copilot for PowerPoint generates bright art, labels, tables, and graphs for your presentation.
Customize Chat Messages
In Teams chat, prompt Copilot to adjust your message. For example, it can add a call to action or even make your text sound like a pirate—saving you time and adding a fun touch. While you’re doing all this, you can work in a “walled garden” that Microsoft protects for you. Your data and documents are only searchable and available to your organization, and Microsoft’s data protections are hard-wired into the system. Let’s discuss what that means for your company.
The Data, Privacy, and Security Protocols that Come Standard in Copilot for Microsoft Teams
Because Copilot for Teams is part of the M365 Cloud, you have the security of knowing that your documents are protected. While these protections are no substitute for having a full suite of Responsible IT Architecture for your company, they’re a great start.
Compliance Commitments
Copilot complies with existing privacy, security, and compliance standards for Microsoft 365 commercial customers, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the European Union (EU) Data Boundary.
No Training from User Data
Prompts, responses, and data accessed through Microsoft Graph are not used to train foundation large language models (LLMs), including those used by Copilot. Your proprietary organizational data remains confidential.
User Interaction History
Copilot does not save user interaction history, including prompts and responses. No one at Microsoft has direct access to this data.
Data Residency Commitments
Copilot adheres to data residency requirements, ensuring data is stored and processed within specified geographic boundaries.
Web Content Usage
Copilot does not use web content in its responses, but it maintains a secure environment.
Ownership of Content
The content generated by Copilot belongs to the user, ensuring control and ownership. Now that you’ve seen the data protections Microsoft offers, what else needs to be done? Plenty, as it turns out. Your data security is only as good as the groundwork you lay for it. With the high-powered capabilities of Copilot for Microsoft Teams, you’ll need to create a framework that helps protect your systems against data poisoning, hallucinations, and data breaches. Here’s what you need to consider.
Prepare your company for Copilot for Microsoft Teams in six steps
It’s not enough to call your MSP or your CIO and ask to purchase a Copilot license. Preparation needs to begin months in advance. We recommend creating a committee of your IT leadership, IT-managed service providers, and, if possible, a CISSP-certified cybersecurity consultant, such as a vCISO. This group can work together and walk your organization through these key steps.
Step One—Develop Strong Data Governance Policies
Establish robust data governance policies, including data classifications, access controls, and permissible uses for the files in your systems. Ideally, every department in your company should decide what files are current and “searchable” by your AI systems. This will prevent inaccurate information from creeping into your AI searches. Fortunately, Copilot has a mechanism for this in its conditional access protocol, which activates every time you save a file. To safeguard organizational information, consistently apply these policies when you save any documents generated through information in Copilot for Microsoft Teams.
Step Two—Write Communication Compliance Policies
Configure communication compliance policies to detect Copilot interactions. Monitor sensitive information, keywords, and content safety classifiers to maintain compliance.
Step Three—Set User Authentication and Permissions
Ensure eligible users sign in with their work or school accounts (Entra ID). Copilot automatically adds commercial data protection, preventing saved prompts and responses and restricting access to unknown actors.
Step Four—Conduct Regular Security Audits
Conduct periodic security audits to assess Copilot usage, permissions, and policy adherence. You’ll need to do this as part of your pre-installation assessment. Once Copilot is installed in your system, regular cybersecurity assessment and monitoring will be crucial to the health of your system.
Step Five—Educate Users with Updated AI-Ready Training
Your employees will need cybersecurity training so they understand how to safely sign in, save files, and adhere to the company’s cybersecurity policies around AI. If you don’t already have regular cybersecurity training programs for your employees, now is a great time to start.
Step Six—Monitor Data Residency
With the enhanced capabilities of AI search on your Copilot-enabled systems, where and how your data is stored is critical. Microsoft has new recommendations you’ll need to incorporate into your IT infrastructure. Ensure data is stored and processed within specified geographic boundaries. Remember, proactive planning and ongoing vigilance are essential to maximizing Copilot’s benefits while safeguarding your organization’s data.
Are You Ready to Try Copilot for Microsoft Teams? We Can Help!
As a national managed service provider, we are signing up our clients for Copilot Betas and helping them with the prep work to secure their systems for AI. We’d love to help you do that, too. Contact us now for a free consultation.
