Transforming meetings: How we’re using the new Microsoft 365 Copilot-powered Facilitator feature at Microsoft

Our employees are using the new Microsoft 365 Copilot-powered Facilitator feature in Microsoft Teams, and it’s helping them do a lot more in meetings.

Currently available to some of our employees as part of a ringed-deployment, Facilitator does the stuff none of us want to do in meetings, including taking and sharing notes in real-time, managing the meeting clock and reminding colleagues to wrap up, tracking your goals for the meeting, including highlighting when key points and decisions are made, and answering questions without interrupting the flow of the meeting.

Facilitator keeps up with your conversation and creates AI-generated notes for everyone within a single workspace. The notes are shown in the full meeting in the meeting notes windowpane, which frees meeting attendees from having to take their own notes and allows attendees to make updates and correct meeting notes in the same meeting notes windowpane. This allows them to stay present, focused, and more productive in meetings.

It’s important to note that Facilitator updates your meeting notes as your conversations unfold, and your group’s collective viewpoints change. It uses the AI Notes feature to keep track of the topics, action items, and tasks shared in the conversation (please note that there is a delay in adding new and updated information as the meeting progresses).

The effective result is you no longer need to comb through your notes to see what the outcome was, Facilitator captures it for you.

“It’s one of those rare features that comes along and immediately increases our productivity,” says Chanda Jensen, a senior product manager on the deployment team in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “Facilitator takes notes for everyone, which allows me to sit back, listen, and be more engaged.”

We have deployed Facilitator to some employees internally here at Microsoft and will soon deploy it to the full company. You can learn more about Facilitator’s public preview here.

Delivering immediate value

Running late to a meeting?

You can ask Copilot what you missed, or you can review Facilitator’s live AI Notes for a quick review and update.

“So many times when we come into a meeting, we’re a little bit late because we’re jumping from meeting to meeting,” says Sara Bush, a principal product manager and leader of the Microsoft Teams deployment team here in Microsoft Digital. “Now we can use Facilitator to catch up without disrupting anyone.”

Need to catch up on the Group Chat?

You can @Facilitator in the group chat to summary.

Trying to remember a point without writing it down and taking your focus off the meeting?

Facilitator has got you covered.  

You can ask a question in your meeting’s group chat, and Facilitator’s answer will be shared with all the meeting participants, or you can open your private Copilot view, and ask a question where you are the only one who sees the response in your private windowpane.

After the meeting is over, Facilitator notes are shared in the post meeting group chat in a Loop Component and via the meet’s Teams Activity icon. If people were assigned work in the meeting, you can go to either location to see what each person was asked to do.

Facilitator has become our employees’ advocate in the room that always keeps track of things for them.

“Facilitator is there to be your champion, to be your collaborator,” says Lesley Montgomery, a principal product manager on the deployment team in Microsoft Digital. “It’s the part of AI that has the tools and humans working together.”

Internal feedback leads to a better product

While they love the new capabilities, our employees wanted to make sure they can still talk securely in meetings.

“We had to show that we were using their meeting data appropriately and that Copilot and Facilitator are secure on our tenant,” Jensen says. “They wanted to know that private chats with Copilot could stay private when needed, and they can.”

Recognizing that there are times when sensitive matters need to be discussed, our team worked with the product engineering team to ensure that controls are available to allow meeting organizers and attendees to turn off Copilot and features like Facilitator when they want privacy in a meeting.

The team continues to receive and adjust to feedback it receives from employees.

“We’re continuously innovating and improving,” Jensen says. “Our users are always asking for more innovative ways to use Teams.”

Endless possibilities

The effects of deploying Facilitator are being felt throughout the company as the benefits of employees having higher-caliber meetings are passed upward through the organization in a compounding way.

“It’s amazing the response we’re getting from employees,” says Eileen Zhou, a principal product manager on the deployment team in Microsoft Digital. “They feel great about having more real, genuine time to focus on brainstorming, on being creative, on having time to come up with higher-value solutions that can move the company forward.”

A great way Facilitator helps groups stay on task is by monitoring the meeting time with or without an agenda.

You can tell Facilitator to keep track of time for certain agenda items to keep meetings running efficiently. Facilitator can also send post-meeting tasks directly to the assigned owner(s) that include action items and requested deliverables. Those are just a few of the ways we’re using Facilitator to help employees save time and be more productive.

“The possibilities are endless,” Bush says. “It’s already changing how we work, and we’ve barely scratched the surface as to what our employees are going to be able to do with this.”

Facilitator is one of many new AI-infused capabilities that we’ve gradually been folding into Teams, including Copilot analyze content shared onscreen during meetings. It can answer questions based on the shared content, such as slides, documents, spreadsheets, and websites. It also suggests follow-up questions to keep the conversation going and combines screenshare with transcript and chat data to provide comprehensive answers.

Copilot works well with Facilitator as it focuses on content analysis and follow-up questions, while Facilitator manages real-time meeting dynamics, including notetaking, time management, and goal tracking.

“Copilot works like a personal assistant for users, while Facilitator helps out the whole group,” Jensen says.  

These new features build on the personal AI assistant capabilities we added to Copilot in Teams last year, including the Intelligent Recap feature. These features capture what was said and decided at the end of a meeting, create lists of action items for attendees, answer questions in real time, and provide a transcript and notes. Learn more about what it was like for us to deploy the Intelligent Recap feature here.

We’ve expanded Copilot’s personal AI assistant capabilities a step further—instead of helping one employee at a time, Facilitator serves all the people who attend a meeting together, collaboratively.

“It really can help you stay on task as a group,” Montgomery says. “Traditionally, when people take notes, they take them from their perspective – with Facilitator, that’s no longer an issue as Facilitator doesn’t bring any partialities.”

Deployment journey

We deployed early versions of Facilitator to some of our engineering teams in the summer of 2024, and as they provided feedback, the product group made improvements to the feature. In the fall, we deployed the improved version to 18,000 employees in our Microsoft Elite program.

The Elite program is made up of employees who volunteer to test new products and experiences at Microsoft. They help us in Microsoft Digital serve as the company’s Customer Zero, which refers to how we gather and send employee feedback to the product group. That feedback is then used to make improvements to the experience before shipping it to customers.

We plan to fully roll out Facilitator to all employees and vendors with a target date of April 30^th, 2025.