Microsoft 365 edition

The Facilitator agent in Teams can do something new since September. If a factual question in a meeting stays unanswered, the agent now runs a Copilot web search itself. The answer then appears in the meeting chat, without anyone asking for it. Last month, Facilitator only helped with the agenda, timing and notes. Now it also joins in on the content of the conversation. Three conditions apply. You need Microsoft 365 Copilot Premium, the more expensive version of the paid work licence. The feature is not on by default: someone has to switch it on manually for each meeting. And Microsoft has tuned it so it triggers less than once per meeting on average. The same update adds a button that lets participants report suspicious behaviour during or after a call. This fits a wider push around compliance through Purview, the part of Microsoft that helps organisations manage their data and rules. Also from the same roadmap: the feature that let agents from Copilot Studio join a meeting directly was quietly dropped in August. Agree within your team who switches Facilitator on, and say out loud at the start of the call that the agent may join in on the search. The agent listens along using the meeting transcript. If it spots a factual question that nobody answers, it runs a search through Copilot and posts the result as a message in the chat. Microsoft has deliberately set the threshold high, so the agent steps in less than once per meeting on average. That is a choice against noise: an agent that drops something into the chat at every hint of doubt is one nobody reads anymore. Because it has to be switched on per meeting, it is not a setting you fix once and forget. An answer from a web search is not the same as a checked answer, but it still lands in your meeting chat with the authority of 'it was written down'. Someone reading the minutes later won't easily spot that a machine added that line. So agree that whatever the agent suggests counts as a tip, not a decision. Also pay attention to the conversation itself: it is being listened to in order to decide when the agent should look something up. For a meeting about staff, patients or an ongoing case, that is a reason to switch it off.

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