In my opinion, one of the clear best features of Microsoft Copilot 365 is the integration with Microsoft Teams Meetings. The ability to ask for meeting notes, unanswered questions, and more is fantastic. But it needs to be (minimally) configured, so this is what you need to check.
Blog post updated April 2025 with updates for more recent changes in Microsoft Teams.
Some of these settings are per user, and some are admin controlled. The admin controlled settings can override the end user settings.
Firstly from the users perspective. With a Copilot license enabled a user can turn on Copilot in their meetings and have the AI based information either only available during the meeting or available during and after the meeting. If no attendee of the meeting turns on Copilot then during and after the meeting their is no AI parsing of the meeting contents. Of course you could do a standard text based transcript and drop that into any AI and get something similar and to that end, administrators might want to disable transcript and recording where meetings are sensitive to avoid them going to Copilot or another AI.
Remember Copilot does not use your meeting content to train its models – dropping a transcript into another AI absolutely could.
The admin settings for Copilot in a Teams Meeting are found in the Meetings/Meeting Policies area of Teams Admin Center. There is more than one policy, so you need to modify the policy that impacts your users. By default everyone is on the Global policy, but that may not be the case in your tenant.
At the bottom of the Recording and Transcription section of the Meeting Policy that you are changing there is a Copilot entry with four options:
The four options are “On with saved transcript required” (the default value) or “On with transcript saved by default” as well as “On” and “Off”. These allow for “persistent” or “non-persistent” transcripts as well as turning on or off Copilot in all meetings for anyone with the policy assigned to them.
Some of these names in the admin center are not clear (at least to me)! None of these options block Copilot – to block the use of Copilot either do not assign the user a license or turn off the Copilot option in the Teams Meeting Policy settings.
Policy: On with saved transcript required
If you select “On with saved transcript required” (the default value) then a meeting can have Copilot started and with that a transcription will start. The transcription will remain as part of the meeting beyond the end of the meeting until the meeting organizer deletes the meeting or the transcript retention policy kicks in. The transcription is also stored in the organizers Exchange Online mailbox (or online mailbox shard if using Exchange Server). The transcription can be shared with meeting attendees, though internal attendees can access it without it being shared directly to them – external attendees do not have access to the transcript.
With “On with saved transcript required” you cannot disable the transcription and make a “meeting only” transcription.
With Copilot enabled and running in the meeting, the transcript is used as the source for the AI’s “understanding” of what the meeting content is about. After the meeting, as the transcript remains, Copilot can be used to still ask questions about the meeting.
If Copilot is not started in the meeting then there is nothing to ground the AI into, and so it is not possible to ask questions from Copilot about the meeting. If a recording and or transcript is turned on, even by another internal user in the meeting, then Copilot will have something to work against and so it is not always the case that Copilot needs to be enabled in the meeting for it to work – but it is always the case that the meeting needs to be transcribed before Copilot can work. This is either a standard transcription or video recording in the meeting or by turning on Copilot and having it enable the transcription (or just the temporary transcription as discussed in this blog post).
As mentioned above, for the transcript to exist and Copilot to reason over it, Copilot needs to be started ideally as the meeting starts, but this is not automatic. If Copilot is not started, the transcript is not started, and later on if Copilot is started, the earlier content is not available for “meeting notes”, “unanswered questions” and other prompts to Copilot that might be made.
Starting Copilot when “On with saved transcript required” is enabled looks like this:
Then once the transcript starts, you are prompted to let everyone know it is running:
You can now (or at least after 5 minutes of transcription has passed) ask Copilot questions about the meeting.
This setting in the client requires that both Copilot settings are enabled as mentioned above and also that the admin Meeting Policy allows transcription. Copilot requires transcription to be on, and will offer to turn it as as you see above – but if it cannot be turned on then Copilot will use a temporary transcription that is not available to users nor available after the meeting. To that end Microsoft are changing the default value for transcription in the meeting policy to be “On” and not “Off”. This will be new tenants July 2025 onwards and any older unchanged tenant. If you have changed or customized the meeting policies then this will not change. So if transcription is “Off” you can only use Copilot against current meetings as they happen and not against already ended (and transcribed) meetings.
Policy: On with transcript saved by default
This is the similar of the above setting. With “on with transcript saved by default” the default is a saved transcript the same as above – so Copilot can be enabled and used during and after the meeting, but unlike the above setting, this setting can be changed in the meeting options. The meeting options allow the meeting organizer to make a selected meeting a “meeting only Copilot” or enforce Copilot to be “off” and not possible to have it enabled in the meeting. The previous option does not give the meeting organizer any choices and if Copilot is enabled it will always be available during and after the meeting.
In this setting you are giving the meeting organizer, via meeting options, the ability to set if Copilot is available during and after the meeting, during the meeting only, or not available.
Policy: On
The other admin option for everyone under a given Meeting Policy is the Copilot option of “On”. This enables a temporary transcription, which you cannot access as the transcription is enabled in the background and it is discarded once the meeting is ended. Therefore, any questions to ask of Copilot 365 requires them to be done during the meeting and before the organizer ends the meeting for all.
When this option is set by your administrator, you cannot create a transcript for Teams for Copilot. You can enable Copilot, ask all the questions etc., but only during the meeting and there is no transcription to share externally after the meeting. Indeed, there is nothing to share or archive and therefore nothing to perform compliance searches etc. against either.
When the “On” option is enabled, there is no prompt about transcription in the Teams Meeting, but instead a message at the top of the Copilot pane in Teams that Copilot can only work during the meeting:
If you are the meeting organizer, don’t end the meeting for all attendees until you have collected the meeting information that you need from Microsoft Copilot 365. Before the meeting though you can change the meeting options so that although your Copilot option is “on” and so will use a temporary transcription if Copilot is enabled in the meeting or to disable Copilot completely (per meeting)
Policy: Off
When administrators set the Copilot option to “Off” the default setting for a meeting or event is off, but the meeting organizer can change this on a per-meeting basis. As above, they can change each meeting (before the meeting starts) to “Only during the meeting” or “During and after the meeting”.
Changing meeting options
If you are the meeting organizer you can use the Meeting Options to change the state of Copilot per meeting. If your admin policy setting is “On with saved transcript required” then you cannot change your per meeting settings for Copilot – if Copilot is enabled in this case it will always be a meeting that Copilot can be used during and after (see above).
Meeting Options needs to be changed before you join the meeting (if you join and change this setting, you need to leave and join again for it to take effect).
Meeting Options is available in Outlook New by opening the meeting and clicking the link in the Teams call/numbers/code message in the event to go to “Meeting Options”. This will open in a separate browser session.
Photo by Tara Winstead: https://www.pexels.com/photo/robot-pointing-on-a-wall-8386440/
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