Using AI to Generate Meeting Minutes in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft's current support page says Copilot summarises key discussion points, including who spoke and what they said, suggests action items, and answers questions in real time during or after a meeting.

After the meeting, Copilot is reachable from the meeting chat and from the Recap tab. Microsoft's recap walkthrough is four steps: open the meeting chat, select the Recap tab, select Copilot, select View prompts, then select Recap the meeting. The same page carries a plain instruction: be sure to verify your results, because AI-generated content could be incorrect.

Two boundaries are worth knowing before you promise anything to a team. Microsoft states that Copilot will not work in meetings hosted outside the participant's organisation. And intelligent recap is described as part of Teams Premium, an add-on licence, and is also available as part of the Microsoft Copilot licence.

So the output is a draft with named speakers and suggested actions — not an approved minute.

Sources: ^[1,2]

Microsoft is precise about this and it is the single most misread point. Transcription is not required to turn Copilot on in a meeting. But to prompt Copilot about the meeting, or to see Copilot's conversation history after the meeting ends, live transcription has to be turned on during the meeting. To ask questions about what was said once the meeting is over, a transcript must be available.

On the admin side, transcription is both a per-organiser and a per-user policy setting. For a meeting to include a transcript, the organiser must have the setting on, and the person who starts the recording or transcript must have it on too. One missing toggle on either account is enough to end up with no transcript.

Transcripts are stored together with meeting recordings in OneDrive and SharePoint, and participants can view the transcript afterwards with timestamps and speaker attribution. Live captions are a different thing: Teams does not save them.

Recurring meetings have a trap. Microsoft warns that previous Copilot conversation history in a recurring meeting is no longer available once a later meeting in the series is transcribed, and that if a transcript is no longer available, Copilot becomes unavailable and the earlier history is removed. Export what you need when you need it.

Sources: ^[1,3]

The organiser decides how and whether participants can use Copilot, and Microsoft notes the organiser holds that control even without a Copilot licence of their own. The setting is Allow Copilot and Facilitator, found in the meeting scheduler under Online meeting options > Copilot and other AI. Which values are offered depends on the organisation's policy, sensitivity label and template settings.

During and after the meeting. Transcription is required. Copilot starts as soon as someone begins transcribing, and stopping transcription also stops Copilot. Selecting Copilot in the meeting controls prompts to start transcription.

Only during the meeting. Copilot starts when it is selected in the meeting controls and works from speech-to-text data. After the meeting ends, speech-to-text data that was not transcribed, along with the interactions with Copilot, is no longer available. If someone does start transcribing, Copilot becomes available during and after the meeting for the transcribed portions.

Off. Copilot is disabled for the meeting — and Microsoft states that recording and transcription are disabled as well, to prevent Copilot from accessing sensitive information. The Teams admin documentation repeats the same rule from the other direction: when organisers turn off Copilot in Teams meetings and events, recording and transcription are also turned off.

If minutes matter for a given meeting, "During and after the meeting" plus transcription is the only combination that reliably leaves you something to check the draft against.

Sources: ^[1,3]

Microsoft's requirements documentation lists the account-level prerequisites: users must have a Microsoft 365 licence assigned to them, they must have Microsoft Entra ID accounts, and Copilot supports only primary mailboxes hosted on Exchange Online — not archive, group, shared or delegate mailboxes. Copilot in Teams itself is available on Windows, Mac, web, Android and iOS.

The same page states the rule this whole guide turns on: to enable Copilot in Teams to reference meeting content after the meeting ends, enable transcription or meeting recording.

Administrators control transcription in the Teams admin center under Meetings > Meeting policies, where the Transcription toggle is on by default for new policies, or through PowerShell with the `-AllowTranscription` parameter in `Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy`. If a specific user cannot start a transcript, Microsoft provides a Teams transcripts diagnostic tool in the Microsoft 365 admin center to check whether that account meets the requirements.

Two licence-gated extras are easy to assume and expensive to assume wrongly: intelligent recap sits with Teams Premium or the Microsoft Copilot licence, and live translated transcription requires the organiser to hold a Teams Premium licence.

Sources: ^[1,3,4]

Prices move, so treat this as a capture rather than a quote. On Microsoft's own Microsoft 365 Copilot business pricing page, viewed on 1 September 2026 with the Plans with Teams and Yearly options selected, the listed prices were:

• Microsoft 365 Business Premium with Copilot — $32.00 user/month, paid yearly.
• Microsoft 365 Business Standard with Copilot — $23.50 user/month, paid yearly.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot Business, sold as an add-on to an existing Microsoft 365 plan — shown at $18.00 user/month paid yearly, reduced from $21.00.

All three are described on the page as annual subscriptions that auto-renew, and the figures are the US page's US-dollar list prices. Open your own region's page before budgeting, and re-check before you buy.

Sources: ^[5]

A recap is a draft. Turning it into minutes is a short, boring routine that someone has to own.

1. Open the Recap tab, run the recap prompt, and read the draft against the transcript rather than from memory.
2. Correct names, figures, dates, decisions and action owners. Microsoft's own note on the recap page is to verify results because AI-generated content could be incorrect.
3. Move it into a document. If a Copilot response runs past 1,300 characters, Teams offers Open in Word; if the response is a table, it offers Open in Excel.
4. Expect the export to be blocked when it should be. If the meeting carries a sensitivity label that prevents exporting content, or the organiser turned on the option to stop copying and forwarding of meeting chat, live captions and transcripts, those exports are unavailable by design.
5. Record who approved the minute and who received it.

The draft saves the typing. The named reviewer is what makes it a record.

Sources: ^[1,2]

Two gaps in the Teams path are structural rather than fixable by settings. Copilot does not work in meetings hosted outside your own organisation, and none of it applies to a conversation that never becomes a Teams call — a client visit, a site walk, a table of eight people in one room.

Memora's public staff guide covers that case with a browser recorder: sign in, tap the microphone, pause and resume as needed, tap End Meeting and keep the page open until the upload finishes, then open Meetings to review the audio, transcript, summary, action items and decisions. The guide also asks you to choose EN for English meetings or BM for Bahasa Melayu meetings, and to place the device or microphone near the centre of the table.

The review step is the same either way. For the in-room version of this workflow, see How AI Can Assist with Physical Meeting Minutes.

Sources: ^[1,6]