Copilot for Teams Extracts Real Value from Meeting Transcripts

Too Many Meetings – Perhaps an Opportunity for Copilot for Teams

We live in a world of perpetual meetings. At least, it seems like that at times. Microsoft has invested substantial effort to make team meetings more useful (and bearable) through innovations like avatars and the Meet app. To help people manage their calendars more intelligently, since 2015, enterprise Office 365 SKUs include analytics information about meeting habits (now in Viva Insights – Figure 1) based on calendar events. Humans are creatures of habit, so whether anyone uses analytics to moderate how they participate in meetings is quite another matter.

Generating Meeting Content from Transcripts

This brings me to Copilot for Teams (part of Copilot for Microsoft 365) and its ability to generate meeting notes for Teams meetings and allow people to ask questions about what happened during a meeting. This aspect of Copilot for Microsoft 365 is one of its most compelling features.

Copilot uses the meeting transcript to generate notes and summaries. The transcript captures spoken contributions to meetings, including speaker attributions, in the form of short snippets. The transcript later becomes the basis for the captions for the meeting recording.

Copilot needs about five minutes of transcript capture before it can make sense of what’s happening in a meeting. After this point, participants can query Copilot to prompt for information about topics, action items, and contributions based on what’s happened in the meeting so far. This is all very nice, but if you’re paying attention to the meeting, you’ll probably be able to figure out how to move the meeting forward or end discussion about a topic. On the other hand, people who nod off (as I have) in a meeting or pay more attention to email or chat while others are talking will appreciate the ability to catch up.

True magic happens once the meeting is over. I really like the AI notes generated from the transcript. The overall accuracy of the notes is reasonably high, but it’s important to check the notes before accepting that AI-generated text is a full and faithful account of meeting proceedings. Some errors are simple (like referring to Michel de Rooij as Michelle – Figure 2). Other errors are more fundamental when the AI misunderstands what was said.

What’s really good is using Copilot for Teams to interrogate the meeting notes. Microsoft’s documentation suggests some questions to ask, like what was the mood of a call. I asked Copilot to summarize the mood of a recent call about the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook (Figure 2), and was told:

The mood of the meeting was mostly friendly and cooperative, with some jokes and banter among the participants. There were no signs of conflict or tension, and everyone seemed to respect each other’s opinions and contributions. The only exception was when Tony made a sarcastic remark about Paul’s airplane being stuck in the snow, which Paul did not appreciate. 1 However, this did not seem to affect the overall tone of the meeting, which was positive and productive.

I’m not sure that I was being sarcastic when I asked Paul about his airplane being grounded by 7 inches of snow in a Kentucky municipal airport, but there you are. Like other aspects of Copilot for Microsoft 365, extracting full value from meeting notes with Copilot can only occur when users receive education about how to interact with the AI.

The intelligent recap feature available in Teams Premium includes some of the capabilities used by Copilot for Teams like AI-generated notes. The big difference between the two is that intelligent recap only includes a static transcript that can’t be interrogated after the event.

Using Copilot Without a Meeting Transcript

Originally, meetings had to be recorded and transcribed for Copilot to work. This is a suitable arrangement for most meetings, but sometimes people don’t want to record sensitive meetings. A Teams meeting option is available to allow Copilot to work without recording a meeting. Essentially, instead of capturing a permanent transcript that’s stored for eDiscovery purposes, Teams uses Microsoft Audio Services to create a temporary transcript that Copilot can use during the meeting. Once the meeting concludes, Teams discards the transcript.

Chasing Value from Copilot

Hype surrounds Copilot for Microsoft 365. Despite the removal of previous limitations, investment in a Copilot deployment still involves a $30/user/month investment with a year-long commitment. In other words, a ten-user test will cost $3,600 for Copilot licenses. Figuring out to extract value for that investment is important unless you like throwing money away. Extracting information from Teams meeting transcripts can be extraordinarily valuable for some people (I wish I had had this capability available when I worked as a Vice President in HP). Whether it’s sufficient to justify the investment in Copilot is a question that only you can answer.

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Insight like this doesn’t come easily. You’ve got to know the technology and understand how to look behind the scenes. Benefit from the knowledge and experience of the Office 365 for IT Pros team by subscribing to the best eBook covering Office 365 and the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem.