Have you thought how you could be in three meetings at the same time? Or skip two of them but stay up to date what that meeting was about and what is expected of you? Artificial Intelligence is bringing that to Microsoft Teams meetings with Teams Premium feature called Intelligent Recap.
With Intelligent Recap you can choose to reply to meeting Follow, instead of just Yes or No. This will give you access to the recap once meeting has been concluded. This is one feature that will help massively to work both sync and async. Instead of joining the meeting, you can recap what it was about and what tasks were created – and check out notes as well. It it very likely that intelligent recap will require that meeting has been recorded & transcribed to gain full benefits of the feature.
When you open the recap you can see several things there
- Recording with markers such as you were mentioned, something was shared, PowerPoint Live slides and moments of joining / exiting the meeting (in case you joined it only partially)
- When people have been speaking (timeline)
- Topics mentioned
- Automatic note highlights
- Automated tasks
- Manual notes and tasks
- Transcript
Meeting notes are also changing in Microsoft Teams. They will become Collaborative Notes. Those are actually Loop components, that people in the meeting will be able to edit simultaneously or in different times. One welcome addition will be that when you add a task to a person with atMention it will be synchronized to that person’s Microsoft ToDo and Planner. Finally Loop tasks will no longer be separate silos! (this will work at least in meeting notes, but I would assume the functionality will be available in all Loop components).
The Intelligent Recap will be a big changer on meetings – it allows us to catch up quickly on meetings we have missed fully or partially. See tasks that were created (either by AI picking them up or manually adding them) and notes highlights. Even without a Copilot it will bring value to busy people. Instead of reading through the transcript or watching the recording I can get more information with a quick glance to see if I need to dive into it, or is it just something I can skip.
Now, when we add Microsoft Copilot, the AI, we can get even more out of the Recap. We can ask, in natural language, from Copilot details, summaries or information about the meeting.
What was discussed, why and how people ended up in some decisions, what was left hanging and what items were completed / solved and so for. You can get those with just by asking the Copilot. Yes, by asking by writing the question to the Copilot. And I would assume we will be getting speech to text there sooner than later, so we wouldn’t have to even type but we could just tell the Copilot what we want to know about the meeting.
And you can go on, getting more information about the meeting using natural language.
And as with Copilot in all apps, you can check out where it got the information from. You get references to sources – including meeting transcripts.
I took these screenshots from Microsoft Intelligent Recap + Copilot Video in YouTube – check it out!
And yes, this doesn’t happen overnight. People don’t change and adopt this technology in a week. It will require change management and the “dull” adoption project to get people to understand benefits they will get from it. And it starts with simply by starting to record all meetings with transcription. And yes, you need to pay attention that spoken language setting matches the language used. In fact, if you start doing that today you can already benefit from it by finding meetings based on transcriptions.
I admit, I am excited about how AI will be able us to work better, faster and thus be more productive. It will be a great moment when I can ask the AI that “was there anything in the meeting that would need my effort” or “summarize the meeting, decisions and how those decisions were made.” or “what were most important outcomes of the meeting”. It will save me a lot of time – and I can join more meetings than before – this time truly asynchronously and quickly without spending too much time on them or I can find out , effortlessly, if my input is needed and I need to check out the recording in more detail.
At the moment of writing this article there isn’t any information how Copilot will be licensed or will it be included with existing licenses. If I had to guess, I would say it won’t be free because it is known that AI does require computing power and thus money when used. Of course the question will be: how much time it will save you monthly? And how much that time is in money?
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