Microsoft Teams Introduces AI-Powered Follow-Up Questions Feature

Wrapping Up a Microsoft Teams Meeting Will Be Harder Than Ever Thanks to This New AI Tool

Most meetings can be emails. At the very least, most meetings can be a whole lot shorter. Seemingly rejecting that concept is Microsoft, with its new AI feature for Microsoft Teams that suggests follow-up questions to "keep the conversation going." Microsoft's Copilot Will Prompt Follow-Up Questions During Teams Meetings Much like Google's Gemini, Microsoft's Copilot is an "everyday AI companion," according to Microsoft Support, intended to simplify tasks so that you can focus on meaningful work over menial work. While efficiency is the goal, Microsoft's latest Copilot update for Teams, its virtual meeting app for Windows and Mac, may actually encourage longer meetings. Announced via Microsoft 365 Roadmap, the Copilot sidebar will soon suggest follow-up questions automatically during a Teams meeting: "When Copilot in Teams Meetings responds to a prompt, it will also suggest follow ups to keep the conversation going. These questions will generally be based on the response it gave prior, and could be related to honing in on a particular topic, asking for more details, or asking what a particular person said during the meeting." According to Microsoft Support, Suggest follow-up questions already exists as a Copilot prompt in Teams. However, the AI assistant will soon produce them automatically after any response. So, if you ask Copilot to clarify a team member's perspective or list action items, it will both respond to your request and supply thoughtful follow-ups. The Copilot update is still in development and is set to roll out in March 2025. The Role of AI in Meetings If virtual assistants butting into your meetings sounds familiar, it's because Microsoft Teams isn't the only app touting its AI-powered sidebar. Launched in October 2024, Zoom's AI Companion 2.0 offers in-meeting tools to help you understand what's being discussed. Like Zoom's companion, Microsoft's Copilot produces a transcription of the meeting, and can even help catch you up if you're running late. Ideally, AI meeting tools can ground you in a meeting and clarify next steps. At best, they ensure meetings aren't actually a waste of time. However, they could also encourage more multitasking. After all, if your AI companion is giving you the follow-up questions to ask, you don't actually have to be present to synthesize the information for yourself. To me, these tools risk enabling absent-mindedness. We're likely to end up in the same place in which we started: did this meeting really need to happen, or could this have been an email? With meeting transcriptions, the line between a meeting and an email is increasingly faint. That said, not all meetings are created equal. Hopefully, Microsoft's latest Copilot update actually extends meetings in a meaningful way. If a follow-up question encourages colleagues to get the clarity they really need from one another, then maybe that beats an email after all.

Microsoft Teams wants to use Copilot to keep your meetings going, whether you like it or not

Extra questions could be on meeting topics, clarification or other areas Wrapping up your Microsoft Teams meetings on time may soon be a thing of the past thanks to a new Copilot feature. Microsoft's AI tool will now be able to suggest follow ups to, "keep the conversation going", when responding to a prompt, whether you like it or not, the company has revealed. This could mean your video conferencing calls drag on a little longer than expected - or you and your colleagues are able to stumble on some previously unknown insights. News of the update was revealed in a post on the Microsoft 365 roadmap, where it was simply entitled "Copilot in Meetings will suggest follow up questions to ask it". The post noted that the feature will consist of Copilot in Teams Meetings suggesting follow ups when it answers a prompt from a user. Microsoft says these follow-up questions will "generally" be based on the response Copilot has given in the past, meaning they could focus on a particular topic, asking for more details, or clarifying what a particular person has said during the meeting. The feature is still listed as being in development for the time being, but Microsoft has listed an expected rollout start date of March 2025, meaning users won't have too long to wait. When released, the feature will be available to users on Windows and Mac, on desktop, across the world. The news is the latest in a raft of additions and improvements to Microsoft Teams in recent months as the service looks to stay useful for users across the world. Most recently, Microsoft Teams revealed it will be introducing transcription for multi-lingual meetings, supporting more languages than ever, even when it comes to meeting recaps. The news will also see an improved version of document summaries, generated and supplied by Copilot, to help users stay on track with their chats.