1. Never miss out on catching up with the team
We understand meeting fatigue and how hard it can be to catch up with the overflow of information and actions. But the good news is that with Copilot, if you missed a Teams meeting, turned up late, got distracted part way through by urgent emails, or zoned out, all is not lost. It’s Copilot to the rescue.
While you were physically or mentally absent (and as long as someone enabled ‘transcribe’ and it was an internal meeting), Copilot summarised the key points of the discussion, including who said what. It noted where people agreed or disagreed – and who they were, suggested actions and owners, and generally acted like the most efficient, intelligent PA ever.
While few of us want to read a word-by-word transcript of a missed meeting, the ability to scan an accurate real-time summary of the whole thing (or just what happened while you were running late or popped away to top up your coffee) is gold.
You can even jump into the Copilot ‘compose’ box on the right of your meeting window to ask Copilot to pull out points of disagreement, pick holes in someone else’s argument, create pros and cons tables, list action items with names against them, call out questions which were raised during the meeting but not answered, generate meeting notes, and more.
You can do this at any time during the meeting – or leave it until the end and ask Copilot to make sure you have covered everything on the agenda before you wind up, so you don’t need to revisit any missing topics with yet another meeting.
2. Whiteboard wizard
Excitingly, Copilot can also automatically convert your Teams meeting content into a visual within Microsoft Whiteboard in real-time. In addition, it can suggest ideas to add to your Whiteboard as the conversation happens.
You can even ask Copilot to set up a shared workspace for you in Teams, name it and allocate editing permissions. And you don’t need to click a single button to make it all happen; just ask Copilot in natural language to ‘make it so.’ And it will.
3. Igniting a new way to collaborate
While as a Microsoft partner, we’ve had the advantage of using Copilot for Teams since December 2022 through the Early Access program, most businesses won’t have access until February 2023. But it is most definitely worth waiting for.
At this year’s Microsoft conference - Inspire, Microsoft announced the next wave of Copilot in Teams with Copilot in Teams Phone and Copilot in Teams Chat, bringing the same functionality from Teams meetings to unscheduled Teams chats and calls. Copilot in Teams Phone will enable you to make and receive calls from your Teams app on any device and generate real-time summaries, insights, notes, and discussion highlights (like tasks, names, numbers, dates, and next steps). So, you can imagine how this will transform sales calls and follow-ups. After the call, you can ask Copilot to use the summary to draft a project plan on the spot – not two weeks later – so you can strike while the sales iron is hot. (OK, that’s not collaboration, but it’s so cool we feel we had to mention it).
In his keynote speech at Ignite, Nadella said: "With Copilots, we're able to complete tasks much faster, and that's having a real cascading effect on work and workflow everywhere. People who use Copilot are spending less time searching for information; they're holding more effective meetings." And we agree.
