Copilot 101: How to use Copilot to prepare for, run, and recap your meetings

“Meetings have increased in length and frequency over the past 50 years, to the point where executives spend an average of nearly 23 hours a week in them, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s.”

— Harvard Business Review

With a significant portion of our days now dedicated to meetings, it’s no wonder there’s constant debate about whether so many meetings are actually productive. But, love them or loathe them, meetings are here to stay, and will continue to fill our schedules for years to come.

But, we shouldn’t settle for boring or inefficient meetings. If they are a necessary evil, we have to make the most of them. This is where Microsoft Copilot can help. In this article, we’ll explore how Copilot can assist you in preparing for meetings, enhancing the meeting experience itself, and ensuring you use your time wisely in those inevitable post-meeting follow-ups.

Pre-meeting preparation with Copilot

It all starts with pre-meeting preparation. Preparing for a meeting often involves sifting through an avalanche of emails, Teams messages, and documents. It’s not just time-consuming—it’s exhausting. Serving as your own executive assistant, Copilot can pull together the information you need and present it in a concise, easy-to-digest format. The strength of Copilot when it comes to meetings really is its summarisation capabilities.

1. Summarising pre-meeting information

Imagine having all the key points from dozens of emails, Teams chats, and other communications neatly summarised for you in seconds. I say “imagine”, but this is exactly what Copilot is capable of right now. Copilot uses AI to scan through your communications and extract the most relevant details, giving you a clear overview without the need to seek out each message individually or read through entire chains for one small comment. This feature not only saves time, but also ensures you’re well-informed and can contribute meaningfully to the discussion.

2. Generating meeting agendas

Coming up with a meeting agenda can be tricky, especially when there are multiple topics that need to be covered. Copilot can assist by reviewing past messages, previous meeting notes (where applicable), and relevant documents to suggest agenda items that are appropriate and actionable – just make sure you give Copilot a really good prompt to ensure you get the information you want!

This ensures your meetings have a clear purpose and that important topics are addressed. Plus, having a clear agenda can help prevent “meeting drift”, where discussions veer off course and nothing gets resolved.

3. Collaborative planning

Through its chat feature, you can engage with Copilot to refine topics, develop objectives, and even come up with new ideas that might not have been on your radar. It’s like having a creative partner who’s always available to help you plan effective, worthwhile meetings – just make sure you check Copilot’s work for any errors!

Enhancing the Meeting Experience

Once the meeting is underway, it’s easy for all your preparation and planning to go out the window – you get bogged down in details, lose track of key points, or feel overwhelmed with lots of information. Copilot can step in to keep things on track, ensuring your meetings are as productive as possible and nobody loses sight of the task at hand.

For Copilot to work during meetings, make sure you are transcribing the call in Teams. It’s also crucial that you keep a handle on the facts – Copilot is very good at understanding context, but it isn’t perfect and can sometimes mishear you. Make sure you review everything, and if you notice something is wrong, make a note to ensure your colleagues are aware!

1. Real-time summarisation

After only 5 minutes of meeting, Copilot will start providing summaries of the recent talking points. This feature is particularly useful in long or complex meetings where it’s easy to lose track of what’s been said. It’s also very helpful if you’re running a little late!

2. Transcription and documentation

Teams itself can transcribe and record meetings, but Copilot kicks it up a notch. If you’ve ever tried to recall who said what during a meeting, when you were mentioned, or the action points, you’ll appreciate Copilot’s transcription capabilities. It can record the meeting and provide a detailed transcription afterwards, showing you what was said, who said it, and when.

Post-meeting Productivity

After the meeting, the real work begins – following up on decisions, assigning action points, and ensuring that everyone is clear on what needs to happen next. Copilot can help streamline these post-meeting tasks, making it easier to turn discussions into actions.

1. Clear next steps

A few minutes before your meeting ends, Copilot will send participants a prompt to notify everyone that the meeting is almost over. You can open Copilot for a summary of the key points at this stage, and spend the last few minutes discussing and agreeing next steps, including who should take on what task and when it should be done by. Participants can then see this in the recap after the meeting, and can even search for any unresolved issues from the agenda to see if other tasks need handling.

2. Summarising key outcomes

Following your meeting, the transcription can be used to create detailed summaries, ensuring everyone has a clear understanding of the outcomes and next steps. It also makes it easier to follow up on specific points or revisit discussions without having to rely on memory alone, or having spent half the meeting furiously scribbling notes!

Not sure where to start?

Copilot often relies on what we call prompts to complete tasks – essentially, this just means an instruction given to Copilot to make sure it does what you want it to do. The strength of Copilot’s response is only as good as the prompt you put into it.

Not sure where to start? Before your meeting, you can use a detailed prompt to gather intel from all of your Microsoft programs, such as Teams chats, Outlook emails, and past recorded meetings. You can also use Copilot to help you brainstorm some talking points. During and after the meeting, you can recap on specific agenda items, ask Copilot what next steps were assigned to you, and more.

Check out Microsoft’s blog on the topic for some more example prompts, or check out our recent article to learn how to make strong prompts yourself!

In a world where meetings are both a necessity and a time-consuming part of our work lives, Microsoft Copilot offers a solution that makes them more efficient, productive, and even enjoyable. From pre-meeting preparation to real-time summaries and post-meeting follow-up, Copilot helps you get the most out of every meeting, allowing you to focus on what really matters.

So, why not give Microsoft Copilot a try? By integrating it into your 365 environment, you can experience firsthand how this tool can transform your meetings and boost your productivity. After all, in today’s fast-paced business environment, anything that helps us work smarter, not harder, is worth exploring.