AI and Microsoft Teams: A New Era of Collaboration

Earlier this year, Microsoft’s Work Trend Index introduced the concept of the “Frontier Firm”, a new kind of organization where AI is available to every employee and even acts as a collaborator on projects. For many of these organizations, Microsoft Teams has been the hub where work happens; where people meet, plan, and build together. As Frontier Firms increasingly look to AI as both a productivity boost and a collaborator, Teams is evolving to be a platform where groups of people and AI collaborate.

With the latest wave of Copilot innovation, we are giving every channel, meeting, and community an agent that can collaborate with you and your team, acting as a virtual teammate. Throughout a team’s workday, agents will keep everyone updated on project status, run smarter meetings, draft useful content, stay on top of tasks, and provide timely answers to questions. Additionally, with tools like the GitHub app for Teams and the Teams AI Library, developers now have a streamlined way to collaborate on code within Teams and powerful resources to build and deploy agents faster than ever.

Let’s explore how the addition of these agents and new Copilot skills help individuals and groups streamline their work in Teams.

 

Smarter Human-AI Collaboration

An agent for every meeting

Facilitator is agent that automatically participates in a Teams meeting to help make them more productive—not more work. It keeps meetings focused, organized, and action-oriented with a conversational interface that allows meeting participants to easily engage and collaborate with each other and the agent, all in real-time.  Facilitator supports teams with a range of capabilities across the entire meeting lifecycle, including:

• Establishing an agenda: The agent surfaces an agenda from the meeting invite or, if none exists, quickly infers the meeting goals from the opening discussion. You can also chat with it to specify agenda topics you’d like Facilitator to track or change in the original agenda by adding or removing topics.
• Keeping the meeting on track: Agenda topics are displayed on a timeline at the top of the meeting window so everyone can see progress and time remaining. Time allocations are also provided per topic, either through times you’ve provided or times it’s suggested, and you can always ask the agent to adjust topic times. During the meeting, you’ll receive gentle reminders at the halfway point and five minutes before the meeting ends to provide awareness and help keep discussions moving.
• Taking real-time, collaborative notes: Real-time notes are automatically captured throughout the meeting and are editable by everyone, ensuring nothing is lost and follow-ups are clear.
• Providing answers: During the meeting discussion, questions inevitably come up. The agent can respond to questions about the meeting itself or pull in relevant information from the web, visible to everyone.
• Managing tasks: As tasks are mentioned, the agent captures and assigns them. You can also direct it through chat to add, update, or reassign tasks. These tasks can also be managed in Planner, which aggregates tasks from meetings, channels, and other plans for comprehensive tracking and oversight.
• Creating documents: When your meeting discussion suggests the need for a new document, the agent can detect the need, create a task for it, and even offer to create it. Once the agent offers to create the document, it’s as simple as a single click to get the agent started. The first draft is generated in Word or Loop allowing you to refine and share. You can also ask the agent to create a draft document on a topic discussed in the meeting.
• Enhancing in-room experiences: The agent in your meeting also extends to meetings held in Microsoft Teams Rooms, enabling features like chat interactions, real-time AI-generated notes, and agenda timer, shown on the display in the Teams Room and controlled by the in-room console.
• Capturing ad-hoc discussions: not every important conversation is scheduled in advance, and with an agent for any type of meeting, that’s no problem. Whether it’s a quick hallway chat or a spontaneous in-person sync, Facilitator can capture every key point and decision right from your mobile device. With a single tap, the agent can provide real-time notes and action items, just like a formal meeting.

Facilitator is now generally available for users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and subject to available capacity. Task management and document creation skills are available in Public Preview*.

 

An agent for every channel

Teams channels provide an organized space for teams to manage workstreams and communicate with stakeholders. Now, each channel can have a Channel Agent that draws on its conversations and meetings to act as a domain expert for the team. These agents adopt the channel’s name and help with common tasks – for example, flagging important deadlines that are buried in conversations, summarizing progress with succinct status reports, assigning tasks and due dates, and answering questions asked in natural language like “What’s the latest on our budget?” You can even invite these agents into meetings when you need expert insights in the discussion. These agents will start with the capabilities below and expand into new ways to enable AI-powered collaboration. One update users can look forward to is the ability for agents in channels to communicate with select third party agents via MCP-agent orchestration. Channel Agent is launching with a set of skills leveraging MCP and we will continue to invest in more capabilities that enable agents in channels to communicate with other agents.

• Status reporting: The agent can draft a status report for your project on your behalf. It pulls updates from channel conversations, meeting summaries, Planner boards, and announcements, organizing them into sections within the report. You can edit the draft directly in Teams before publishing it to the channel.
• Providing answers: Instead of manually searching for information across posts and threads, simply ask the agent. It checks the channel’s conversations, meetings, and plans, and can also trigger a web search. Then it quickly compiles the insights, summarizes the information, and delivers a clear, actionable reply.
• Planner integration: When a user assigns a task to another user via your channel’s agent, it creates a plan in Planner. Users can then ask the agent questions about the plan and the agent will keep them updated on the status of action items.

Channel Agent is now in Public Preview* for users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

 

An agent for every community

Viva Engage communities can now benefit from agents that efficiently communicate updates and share knowledge, including through the Engage app in Teams. When added to a community, the Community Agent takes on the community’s name and immediately get to work—reviewing past conversations, pulling from selected SharePoint sites and files, and drafting grounded, reference-backed responses to unanswered questions. Designed to help community experts scale their impact, deepen engagement, and keep knowledge flowing without manual overhead, these agents enable members to get answers quickly and streamline knowledge sharing across the organization. These agents launch with a core set of capabilities and will continue to evolve, expanding how they support your community. For more details, see the Viva Engage blog.

• Proactive Support: Even when the community admin or expert is not monitoring the community, the agent within the community continues to work—proactively generating responses as questions come in and citing sources inline. This allows community managers to shift focus to other priorities while ensuring the community stays informed and connected.
• Posting Control: Community admins can choose whether responses are auto posted or require review. When auto-post is disabled, the agent notifies the admins and experts when a response is ready and provides reasoning and references to support the answer. Community admins and experts can edit, approve and post the response, which then appears with a “Verified Answer” badge for community trust.

Agents in Viva Engage communities are now in Public Preview* for users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license

Automation and intelligence that helps you move at the speed of AI

The newly redesigned Workflows experience in Teams makes automation easier and more accessible than ever. With a simple interface, it helps you automate day-to-day tasks, like getting updates from your teammates, automatically routing documents for approvals as they get modified, or adding tasks to Planner from messages without ever having to leave Teams. Additionally, you can now use new AI-powered workflow templates to automate tasks with Copilot or your channel’s agent — no coding required. 

Take the “Help Me Prepare for My Day” template: it scans your recent chats and emails to generate a personalized briefing in Teams every morning, summarizing your day's agenda and pending tasks to help you start your day with clarity and confidence. The “Summarize Key Takeaways” template pulls insights from your Teams conversations to create a digest of decisions, action items, and blockers. Scheduling these workflows allows you to build a workflow once and automatically receive updates. The "Recurring Prompts for your channel's agent" template empowers your team to automate tasks like sending the latest news from the web to your channel every Monday or scheduling a competitive analysis report to be generated every week - keeping everyone aligned with insights delivered directly to your Teams channel.

The new Workflows experience in Teams is currently in Public Preview*. Users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license can access AI workflows.

 

As an evolution of the meeting recap feature, audio recap is a new way to stay on top of your meetings anytime, anywhere. With audio recap, your meeting recap is transformed into an audio format that you can listen to on-the-go. Choose up to eight recent meetings to generate audio recaps and customize the style of delivery to fit your preferences. Whether you’d like a concise, no-nonsense summary (Newscast style) or a more conversational dialogue between two speakers walking through the highlights (Casual style), or something in-between (Executive style) audio recap adapts to the way you like to catch up. All your generated audio recaps are easily accessible from the meeting recap page or the Meet app.

Audio recap in Teams is now available in Public Preview*.  

 

The Copilot experience in Teams is being unified across chats, channels, and meetings for users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, matching the experience in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Beyond the updated interface, Copilot in Teams can analyze chat history, meeting transcripts, and calendar contest to generate smart recaps, rewrite messages, and surface relevant insights. Whether reviewing a thread or following up after a call, Copilot delivers context-aware summaries and suggestions based on your activity and goals.

The new Copilot experience in Teams will be available in Public Preview* on October 1st for users with a Copilot license.

An AI Platform Built for Developers

The GitHub app for Teams and the Teams AI Library offer developers two powerful ways to extend collaboration in Teams—whether by generating code in context or building intelligent agents that work where their teams do.

The GitHub app for Teams is a context-aware AI app that understands a developer’s repository, the team’s goals, and the cadence of their development process. When developers are brainstorming in Teams, GitHub works alongside them—responding to conversations, surfacing relevant code, and helping translate intent into execution. This initial release focuses on the Copilot coding agent, which was built to translate conversations into code and pull requests. This is the first step toward bringing the full power of GitHub into Teams.

• Task delegation: You can assign tasks to the GitHub app just like you would a developer. It opens pull requests, writes code, and requests reviews, helping move work forward without needing constant oversight.
• Understands your team’s context: The app grasps the nuances of your repository, your team’s history, and your development cadence. It responds to conversations, surfaces relevant code, and translates intent into execution.
• Works where you do: Whether you're in GitHub or Teams, the app operates inside the tools your team already uses. No switching tabs or learning new interfaces; just seamless collaboration in the flow of work.

The GitHub app for Teams is currently in Public Preview* and requires a GitHub Copilot license.

 

The Teams AI Library is now generally available for JavaScript and C#, and in Public Preview for Python. It provides a simplified SDK, support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent-to-Agent communication (A2A), and streamlined tools to enable developers to build intelligent agents for Teams – including agents that are integrated with other agents and servers - up to 90% faster.  Whether you're creating an agent to publish to your organization or the Teams store, the updated Teams AI Library makes it easier to bring AI into critical team workflows.

The updated Teams AI Library is in General Availability for JavaScript and C# and in Public Preview* for Python.

Putting intelligent collaboration to work

For leading organizations, AI isn’t just a tool, it’s a teammate.  And now Copilot in Microsoft Teams is redefining how people and AI work together, moving from assistance to active collaboration. Agents across meetings, channels, and communities make group collaboration more dynamic and intelligent.  Features like AI Workflows and Audio Recap can turn everyday interactions into intelligent, context-aware experiences.  Tools like the GitHub app and Teams AI Library equip developers with the resources they need to execute code faster and create agentic experiences in Teams. And the impact is real: according to a recent Forrester Report, organizations using Teams and Copilot are seeing measurable gains in productivity, decision-making, and employee satisfaction. 

If you’re ready to see what agents can do in Teams, try adding an agent to your next meeting, channel, or community. Experience how AI can help your team work smarter in Microsoft Teams today.

 

*Beyond preview access, additional licensing details will be communicated at general availability.