Join me exploring Microsoft Copilot through each letter of the alphabet. (Well, we’ve got to start somewhere!)

This time, F is for Facilitator. And I want to talk about meetings.

(Don’t worry, I haven’t jumped ahead to my M blog.)

Are you the person always taking notes in them? Keeping one eye on the clock and the other on the agenda, while simultaneously trying to actually contribute something useful? Project managers will know exactly what I mean. 

Or maybe you’ve just suffered through a lot of ill-managed ones; lots of talk, not everyone contributes, nobody’s quite sure what was decided, and you leave wondering what the point of the last hour was. 

Enter Facilitator.

What is Facilitator?

Facilitator is a Microsoft 365 Copilot-powered agent built into Microsoft Teams. Think of it as a virtual chairperson sitting in your meeting. They don’t multitask or zone out, they keep your agenda on track, and they absolutely never forget to write something down.

NOTE: Facilitator is not the same as Copilot you might already be using in a Teams meeting. Plain old Copilot in a meeting is private to you. Only you can interact with it and see its responses. For example you could ask it; “I just zoned out while Claire was talking, what did I miss?” and nobody else would see this, only you (and Copilot). No offence intended, Claire.

Facilitator operates in the group. Everything it posts; like notes, summaries, and nudges, all go into the meeting chat for everyone to see in real time. It’s less personal assistant, more shared team resource.

You’ll need a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence to turn Facilitator on, but once it’s running, all your meeting participants can see what it’s up to. 

What does it actually do?

Quite a lot, as it turns out. Here’s what I found when I used it at our All Hands meeting in February.

Tracks your agenda

The first thing Facilitator does when a meeting starts is go looking for an agenda. Once you give it the agenda, it’ll post it back into the chat so everyone can see it — broken down by topic and time allocation.

Then as the meeting goes along, you’ll get a progress tracker at the top of the meeting window to show you how you’re doing against the time allocated for agenda items. 

This is one of my favourite things. Completed topics are highlighted, and the current one has a live countdown timer ticking away. It’s a visual way to keep everyone accountable to the amount of time spent discussing topics. 

Checks in at the halfway point

Without any prompting, at around the midpoint of the meeting, Facilitator popped up a summary into chat. What’s been covered, what the key points were, and what’s still to come. During our All Hands this looked like a proper, well-structured update — genuinely useful for anyone who’d joined late or had their attention drift for a moment.

Gives you a nudge when time is running short

When you’re getting close to the end, Facilitator flags it — along with a tidy summary of where you’ve got to.

It tells you when you’ve overrun (kindly)

At five minutes past our scheduled end time, Facilitator posted a very polite time check into the chat, flagged a topic that hadn’t been fully resolved, and offered a button to schedule a follow-up meeting on the spot.

That “topic for follow-up” feature is gold. It spots the threads that got left dangling and makes sure they don’t just disappear into the ether after everyone logs off.

Wraps everything up at the end

When the meeting’s done, Facilitator posts a full summary into the chat — decisions made, actions captured, the whole lot — stored in a shared Loop component that everyone can access afterwards.

I’d love it to be better at trying to add assignees for these actions – that would be next-level, but it’s a pretty good place to start!

The bit I didn’t expect: letting go

I used to be the note-taker. Most meetings, furiously typing while simultaneously trying to keep up with and, perchance, contribute to the conversation. It’s an exhausting juggling act; if you know, you know. (There’s definitely a big tangent I could explore here about women doing the lion’s share of the meeting admin ‘juggle’ but that’s possibly for a different type of blog…) 

What surprised me about using Copilot and Facilitator in meetings is how easy I found it to just… stop doing that. After using it a few times I found that I could trust it with picking out the important topics and follow-ups, so now I just sit back and let it take all the notes for me. 

But it’s more than just not having to type things — it’s freed up proper mental space during meetings. Not worrying about capturing everything means I can actually dig into topics. I ask more questions. I follow threads I’d have previously let go because I was too busy scribbling. 

There’s less ‘meeting admin’ background noise in my head — no sneaky glances at the agenda bar to check where we are, no panic about whether I got the wording of that decision right. 

Turns out, being present in a meeting is a lot easier when you’re not also trying to document it at the same time. Who knew.

The bit I do want to say though

Facilitator is a brilliant tool. But it is still just a tool. It won’t make all your meetings suddenly brilliant if you don’t have the right approach to meetings in the first place. 

If you go into a meeting without a clear agenda, without a defined outcome, without the right people in the room — Facilitator cannot fix that for you. You’ll still come out the other end with a beautifully formatted summary of a meeting that went absolutely nowhere.

A good meeting needs good structure before Facilitator even gets involved. Think of it like a GPS: it will absolutely help you get where you’re going more smoothly, but it does need you to know where you’re going in the first place.

You’ve also got to factor in what happens after the meeting, so if you want everyone to engage with those actions in Loop, you’ll need to get them engaged in Loop as a tool too!

TLDR; use Facilitator. It’s great. But don’t use it as an excuse to skip the meeting prep.

Have you tried Facilitator yet, or are you still the designated note-taker in your team? Let me know in the comments.

Next time, let’s see what G is for…