What it does

The personal Copilot pane inside a meeting or event: each licensed participant asks their own private prompts against what's being said — who said what, where people disagree, what the follow-ups are. Whether it can run, and whether anything survives the meeting, is decided by the -Copilot setting in the meeting policy working together with the transcription policy.

Key facts

• Each participant with a Copilot licence can use it in meetings and events of up to 1,000 attendees. Prompts and responses are private to the person asking. Learn now labels the add-on the "Microsoft Copilot licence".
• In events optimised for large audiences, only organisers, co-organisers and presenters get Copilot. Attendees don't.
• Organisers see three meeting options: During and after the meeting (needs a transcript), Only during the meeting (temporary speech-to-text, nothing saved), and Off.
• Setting the meeting option to Off also turns off recording and transcription for that meeting. Not just Copilot.
• The admin control is -Copilot on Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy, or Meetings > Meeting policies > Recording & transcription > Copilot in the Teams admin center. Values: Enabled (On), EnabledWithTranscript (On with saved transcript required), EnabledWithTranscriptDefaultOn (On with transcript saved by default), Disabled (Off).
• EnabledWithTranscript is the default. It forces "During and after the meeting" and organisers can't change it — so out of the box, Copilot needs someone to start a transcript.
• Enabled defaults organisers to "Only during the meeting" but lets them pick the other two. EnabledWithTranscriptDefaultOn defaults to during-and-after but leaves it changeable. Disabled defaults to Off but organisers can still turn it back on per meeting.
• -AllowTranscription on the same policy interacts with it: with transcription Off and the meeting set to during-and-after, licensed users get nothing unless another participant who's allowed to transcribe starts one.
• With "Only during the meeting", once one licensed user opens Copilot it runs for all licensed users in that meeting.
• Purview retention can still keep Copilot prompts and responses even with recording and transcription off (Commercial cloud only, not GCC/DoD).
• Meeting knowledge files (the AI-generated artefact behind intelligent recap) have their own policy control, -KnowledgeGenerationMeetingTypes: AllMeetings (including untranscribed ones), TranscribedMeetings or None. It only takes effect when both AllowIntelligentRecap and AllowMeetingKnowledgeGeneration are $True; if either is $False nothing is generated, whatever this says.
• Not available in end-to-end encrypted meetings or in GCC High. The policy can also be set in custom meeting templates.

When to use / skip

If the client has bought Copilot, this is the bit people actually notice. The real work isn't switching it on — it's deciding the transcript position, because the default (EnabledWithTranscript) quietly makes Copilot dependent on someone pressing "Start transcription". Users who've been told "you have Copilot now" join a meeting, see nothing useful, and log a ticket. Either train people to transcribe, or move them to a policy value that offers "Only during the meeting".

"Only during the meeting" is the answer for works councils, HR, legal and anyone who flinches at a stored transcript. Users still get live Q&A and catch-up while the meeting runs, and nothing goes into OneDrive afterwards. The trade-off is blunt: no post-meeting Copilot, no intelligent recap from that session. Just make sure the people asking for it understand that Purview may still be holding the prompts.

Skip a blanket Disabled unless there's a reason. It doesn't actually stop organisers turning Copilot back on per meeting, so it's a default rather than a block. To stop Copilot for a population, don't license them — or use templates with locked options.

Configuration decisions

• Default policy value for the org: keep EnabledWithTranscript (transcript-led, best post-meeting value) or move to Enabled/EnabledWithTranscriptDefaultOn to give organisers the transcript-free option.
• Separate policies for sensitive populations (HR, legal, exec, unionised staff) that default to "Only during the meeting".
• Transcription policy alignment: if -AllowTranscription is off for a group, they can only ever use the during-meeting mode in their own meetings.
• Whether to bake the Copilot option into custom meeting templates (and lock it) for regulated meeting types such as board or disciplinary meetings.
• Purview retention for Copilot interactions — agree it with compliance before rollout, not after.
• End-to-end encryption: decide which meeting types genuinely need E2EE, because they lose Copilot entirely.
• Communications to users explaining the three meeting options and what each one stores.

Gotchas

• The Learn default is EnabledWithTranscript and it's enforced. Don't assume Enabled is the default because the Teams admin center label just says "On" — check the table.
• Turning Copilot Off for a meeting kills recording and transcription too. Organisers do this "for privacy" and then wonder why the recording button is greyed out.
• Policy is evaluated against the organiser, not the participant. An external or cross-department organiser's policy decides what your licensed users can do in their meeting.
• In during-and-after mode, Copilot only covers the transcribed portion. Start the transcript 20 minutes in and the first 20 minutes don't exist as far as Copilot is concerned.
• "Only during the meeting" isn't "nothing retained". Prompts and responses can still be caught by Purview retention.
• Large-audience events: attendees get no Copilot, whatever their licence.
• KnowledgeGenerationMeetingTypes looks like the whole switch and isn't. Set it to AllMeetings while AllowMeetingKnowledgeGeneration is still $False and you'll spend an afternoon wondering why no knowledge files appear. Check all three together.

Consultant notes

• Pull Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy | Select Identity, Copilot, AllowTranscription at discovery. You'll usually find Global on the default and a scatter of custom policies nobody remembers creating.
• For a Copilot pilot, put pilot users on a dedicated meeting policy so you can change the Copilot value without touching everyone else.
• Write the three organiser options into the user guide with screenshots. It's the single most common "Copilot isn't working" cause.
• If the client also wants better transcripts for product names and acronyms, the tenant-level custom dictionary (Microsoft 365 admin center, AI administrator role) helps meetings organised by licensed users.
• Remember the policy is organiser-side. When a client says "Copilot works in some meetings but not others", look at who organised them before anything else.

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Recheck the policy value table on Learn each quarter — the defaults and the licence naming both move faster than the client's user guide