Copilot record summaries

What it does

Copilot writes a short AI summary of a lead, opportunity or account and shows it in an insight banner at the top of the record, with a fuller version behind a "See full summary" link on a research page. The same summary can be asked for in the Copilot side pane, and opportunities also get it as a form widget.

Key facts

Out of the box the summary insight banner covers opportunities, leads and accounts. Custom tables can get a banner too, but that's configured through the model-driven app record summary settings, not the Sales Copilot page.
Summary fields are configured per table under App Settings > General Settings > Copilot > Opportunities / Leads / Accounts, on the Summary tab. You must pick at least four fields and no more than 15. Save is disabled outside that range.
The Recent changes tab is a separate list with its own field set — minimum four, maximum 10 — and it is generated from audit history rather than from the live record.
Fields can come from the current table or from related tables. Adding a related-table field to Recent changes prompts you to turn audit history on for that table.
Customize related info controls which sections appear: Enriched key info (all three tables), Competitor insights (opportunities and leads), Product insights and Quote insights (opportunities only), and Opportunities, Leads and Cases (accounts only). All are selected by default. The Cases section needs Dynamics 365 Customer Service in the environment.
Summary field configuration is organisation-wide. There is no per-team or per-role variation.
The opportunity summary widget is on by default in the opportunity form via the Show opportunity summary as a widget in the form option. On a custom form you add it yourself: a 1-column section, then the Record summary display component.
For leads processed by the Sales Qualification Agent, Copilot always shows the agent's summary and ignores whatever lead summary fields you configured.
With Microsoft 365 Copilot enabled, the Sales agent generates the banner for accounts and opportunities instead — unless an admin has configured summary fields for those tables, in which case the banner respects that configuration. Other agents, such as the Sales Opportunity Agent, take precedence over both.
Sellers can't see recent changes without the View Audit History and View Audit Summary privileges set to Organization level on their security role, on the Miscellaneous Privileges tab.
Lead enrichment — matching contacts by email address, and LinkedIn profile suggestions where there's a Sales Navigator licence — is only available when the Sales Qualification Agent is switched off. Lead-to-contact matching is on email address only and can't be customised.

When to use / skip

Summaries are the feature clients actually notice, and the default field set is almost never the right one. If you're doing anything with Copilot in Sales, do this. It's an hour of configuration that changes whether sellers describe Copilot as useful or as "it just reads the form back to me".

Skip the deeper work — related-table fields, the widget on custom forms, recent changes — where the client's data quality is poor. A summary built on fields nobody fills in is worse than no summary, because it looks authoritative and is empty. In that case configure the four or five fields the org genuinely maintains and leave it there until the data improves.

Configuration decisions

Which 4–15 fields per table go into the summary. Get the sales leadership to agree one list, because it's an org-wide setting and the argument only happens once.
Whether to pull fields from related tables, weighed against turning on auditing for those tables when they also feed recent changes.
Which related-info sections to keep. Competitor, product and quote insights only pay off if those records are actually populated; switch off the ones that will render empty.
Whether the opportunity summary widget stays on the form, and whether it goes on custom opportunity forms as well as the out-of-the-box one.
Which security roles get organisation-level audit history privileges, since recent changes are invisible without them.
Whether the Sales Qualification Agent will own lead summaries — if it will, don't spend time configuring lead summary fields at all.

Gotchas

The 4-to-15 range is enforced silently by a disabled Save button. People add 20 fields, can't save, and don't spot why.
Turning on the Sales Qualification Agent overrides lead summary field configuration completely. Consultants who configured leads first and enabled the agent later usually assume the config was lost.
Same trap one level up: switching on the Sales agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot moves account and opportunity banner generation to that agent, and Microsoft's migration guidance says summary fields must be reconfigured on the agent side.
Recent changes come from audit history, so anything that happened before auditing was enabled simply doesn't exist. Expect "why is it empty" for the first week after go-live.
Removing a related-table summary field later doesn't turn audit history back off for that table. You inherit the auditing volume unless someone remembers to clean up.
The account summary's Cases section quietly does nothing without Customer Service in the environment, and there's no warning on the settings page.

Consultant notes

Demo the banner with a real, well-populated record and a badly populated one side by side. It makes the data quality argument for you and shifts the conversation from AI to CRM hygiene.
Run the field selection as a short workshop with two or three sellers, not with the project sponsor. Sellers know which five fields they actually check.
Check the audit privileges before UAT. Recent changes not appearing for a test user is nearly always the privilege, not the feature.
If the client is heading for Microsoft 365 Copilot, tell them up front that account and opportunity summary configuration will need revisiting when the Sales agent is switched on. Better said now than discovered later.
Set expectations that the summary is generated from a fixed attribute set plus your configured fields — it isn't reading the whole record or the timeline, and sellers will assume it is.

Worth another look if Microsoft changes the 15-field cap or moves summary configuration onto the Sales agent for good.