Copilot in Teams meetings

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People keep telling me Copilot in Teams “writes notes for them”.

That’s not what it does. That’s what an action item list does.

What Copilot does is let you ask a meeting questions. Live, while it’s happening. Or three days later when someone CCs you in and asks for an opinion.

Most SMBs I work with have it switched on and have no idea. Staff have a Copilot license, the meeting has a transcript ticking along, and the Copilot pane sits there unused while everyone scrambles to take their own notes.

Notice what’s missing? The bit where someone actually uses it.

What is Copilot in Teams meetings, really?

It’s a question box that knows what was just said.

You open the Copilot pane during a call, type a question — what have we decided?, what did Sarah commit to?, am I even needed on this one? — and it answers from the live transcript.

After the meeting, that same pane becomes the intelligent recap: chapters, AI-generated notes, suggested follow-ups, and timestamps that jump you straight to the moment someone said the thing that matters.

That’s the whole product. Live Q&A on the meeting, plus a navigable recap after. There’s a broader catalogue of AI features in Teams, but this is the one that earns the license on day one.

Step-by-Step: Turning it on properly

Two things have to be true for any of this to work: a Copilot license on the user, and transcription enabled for the meeting. Without a transcript, the Copilot pane has nothing to read.

Here’s the order I run it.

Enable transcription in the meeting policy

In the Teams admin centre, go to Meetings → Meeting policies, open the policy that applies to your Copilot users, and switch Allow transcription to On. The default global policy is off in some tenants. Check.

Turn Copilot on in the same policy

Same screen, scroll down. Set Copilot to On with or without transcription for genuine flexibility, or On only with transcription if you want a paper trail every time. My recommendation? The second one, especially for any regulated client.

Set the room expectation

Drop one line into the meeting invite: This meeting uses Microsoft Copilot. A transcript will be generated. Teams shows attendees a banner anyway when transcription starts, but writing it once removes the awkward moment.

Show people the pane

Open a meeting. Click the Copilot icon in the toolbar. Ask it something live. Then do it again from the recap tab after the meeting ends. Two clicks. That’s the training.

Why this actually changes behaviour

The win isn’t the summary. The win is what people stop doing.

Here’s the real one. They stop typing notes mid-meeting. They stop joining meetings they didn’t need to be in, because the recap takes two minutes afterwards. They stop emailing what did we agree? — they ask Copilot, and it answers with a timestamp.

Can I just ask what I missed? Yes. That’s the whole point.

Copilot doesn’t replace the meeting. It replaces the scramble around the meeting.

For regulated clients, the privacy notes for intelligent recap are worth ten minutes — they’re the answer when a client asks “but is this safe?”

Copilot in Teams meetings isn’t there to take notes for you. It’s there to make notes optional.

If you’re not showing your SMB clients this in their next review, someone else will.

Absorb — You Can’t Use What You Don’t Know

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The other day, a business owner told me he’d “heard” that AI could now write emails. He said it like it was news. That capability has been sitting on his desktop for well over two years. He wasn’t behind because he lacked tools. He was behind because he didn’t know what was already available to him, inside software he was paying for every month.

This is the quiet problem with AI right now. The technology is moving faster than most people’s awareness of it. The models shipping today can do things that would have sounded like science fiction six months ago. But if your mental picture of AI was formed from a dinner-party conversation eighteen months back, you’re trying to build on a map that no longer matches the territory.

You can’t use what you don’t know exists.

Second-hand AI is a losing game

Most people I talk to get their AI news the same way they get most news — accidentally. A friend mentions something at a barbecue. Their teenager shows them a clip. The barber has an opinion between the scissors and the mirror. By the time a capability filters through that chain, it has been misunderstood, exaggerated, or it has already been replaced by something newer.

That gap between what AI can actually do today and what you think it can do is not a small thing. It’s the entire opportunity. The people who will get real leverage out of AI in the next twelve months are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the fanciest titles. They’re the ones with the clearest, most current picture of what’s possible right now.

The good news is that closing the gap doesn’t require a course, a certification, or a consultant. It requires a habit. And the habit hides inside something you’re probably already doing too much of — scrolling.

Use your feed to feed your mind

The same social platforms that eat your attention can be quietly retrained to deliver a daily education. Two tactics I recommend to anyone who asks.

Schedule it. Open YouTube and search “AI + [your industry].” Subscribe to the top three channels that come up. Then put a twenty-minute block in your calendar called AI Absorb Time. Treat it like a meeting you cannot cancel, because that’s exactly what it is — a standing appointment with the thing that is going to reshape your work. Twenty minutes a day is a hundred minutes a week. Inside a month, you’ll know more about what’s actually shipping than ninety percent of the people in your industry.

Hack the algorithm. Find the strongest AI videos in your niche and drop “FYP” in the comments. It stands for For You Page. Engaging with those videos tells the recommendation engine what you want more of. Do it for a week and your feed quietly rewires itself into an online university, delivered free, on your phone, in the margins of your day. You are paying for social media with your attention anyway. You might as well buy something useful with it.

The habit is the edge

AI literacy is not a one-time event. It’s a drip. The people who stay current are not smarter than everyone else — they’re just in the flow. They’ve built a small, boring habit of absorbing what’s new, and it compounds quietly in the background of their week.

Before you automate anything, build anything, or spend anything, do this first. Know what’s actually possible this week. That is where every real AI decision starts.

Need to Know podcast–Episode 365

In this episode, we dig into Cowork Skills and why they represent a genuine shift from “AI as a novelty” to “AI as part of how work actually gets done.” Not more prompts. Not more tools. But fewer decisions, less friction, and more consistency across the business.
If you’ve ever thought “Copilot is interesting, but it’s not really embedded yet”, this episode is for you.

Brought to you by www.ciaopspatron.com

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Launched: Microsoft 365 Copilot Adoption Hub Redesign

Copilot prompt libraries for your tenant

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Most Copilot rollouts I see have a strange shape. The licences are bought. The admin centre is half-configured. And nobody is using it.

Six months in, a few power users are saving an hour a week. Everyone else opens Copilot, stares at a blank box, and closes the tab.

That’s not a Copilot problem. That’s a prompting problem.

And the worst part? Microsoft has already shipped the fix. Most tenants haven’t turned it on.

What is a tenant prompt library, really?

A prompt library is a list of known-good prompts pinned inside the Copilot experience itself. Your users see them when they open Copilot — in chat, in Word, in Excel, in Outlook, wherever you’ve published them.

Two layers matter for SMBs and MSPs.

The first is the Microsoft Copilot Prompt Gallery — the public set Microsoft maintains. Useful. Generic.

The second is promoted prompts — your own prompts, pushed to your own users from the Microsoft 365 admin centre. This is the layer almost nobody uses, and it’s the one that actually changes behaviour.

Think of it as the difference between handing someone a generic cookbook and putting a Post-it on their fridge that says “this is how we make pasta”.

Step-by-Step: publishing a tenant prompt library

Portal walkthrough, no PowerShell.

Open the admin centre

Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin centre as a Global or Copilot admin. Expand Copilot in the left nav, then Settings, then Promoted prompts.

Write the prompt your users actually need

Don’t reach for a clever one. Reach for the boring one your help desk keeps explaining. “Summarise this week’s emails from my customers and group by client.” “Draft a weekly status update for my manager based on my meetings and Teams chats.” Plain English, written the way a non-technical user would actually type it.

Pin it to the right app

You can target the prompt to Microsoft 365 Copilot chat, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, or OneNote. Pin one prompt per app where it’s actually useful. Five great prompts beats fifty mediocre ones.

Set the audience

Use a group, not “everyone”. Roll it to a pilot. Sales gets the sales prompts. Finance gets the finance prompts. The prompt is the training material.

Publish and watch adoption move

Promoted prompts surface at the top of the Copilot prompt UI for the assigned users within a few hours. Microsoft’s Copilot Prompt Gallery documents the surfaces they show up on.

Title: Weekly client summary
App:   Microsoft 365 Copilot chat
Prompt:
Summarise emails and Teams messages from
my customers this week. Group by client.
Highlight any unanswered questions.

Notice what’s missing? No mention of how Copilot does the work. No file picker. No talk of Work IQ. The user just asks once and gets the outcome. That’s the brief.

Why this actually changes behaviour

Most adoption programmes hand out PDFs nobody reads. Promoted prompts put the training inside the product, at the moment of use.

“I don’t know what to ask Copilot for.”

That sentence kills more rollouts than any licensing or governance issue. A prompt library answers it.

Three things shift the day you publish one:

  • New users see a starting point on day one instead of a blinking cursor.

  • Power users stop reinventing the same prompt twelve different ways.

  • You finally have a measurable, governable surface to iterate on.

That last one matters for MSPs. You can review the prompt library quarterly with your client, the same way you review a security baseline. Copilot doesn’t get tired. Use that.

For the deeper guidance on what makes a prompt land, Microsoft’s own write effective prompts page is worth lifting language from when you draft yours.

One closing thought

If you’re rolling out Copilot to a client and you haven’t published a single promoted prompt, you’re charging them for a tool and shipping them a blank page.

Promoted prompts aren’t there to teach people how to use Copilot. They’re there to remove the moment of not knowing what to ask completely.

Director or Doer? The AI Question Nobody’s Asking

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Most of the AI conversations I have these days start the same way. Someone leans in and quietly asks, “Do you think AI is going to take my job?” I understand the worry — it’s everywhere, and it’s loud. But I think it’s the wrong question. The one worth asking is sharper and far more uncomfortable. Are you using AI, or is AI using you? That single reframing changes the whole game. And the window to land on the right side of it is narrowing faster than most people realise.

The Doer Trap

I see the Doer pattern everywhere. Someone types a rushed prompt, reads whatever comes back, tidies up a comma or two, and ships it. The email goes out. The deck gets shared. The summary lands in a meeting. The person feels productive because something got done — but they didn’t really direct any of it. The tool picked the angle, the structure, the tone, even the conclusion. They just drove the delivery truck.

The thing that makes this dangerous is that it feels like progress. Output is going up. Calendars are clearing. But the thinking is going down. The muscles that matter — judgement, taste, point of view — quietly shrink while everyone is busy celebrating how much faster the work moves. If AI is setting the pace, choosing the framing, and deciding what “good” looks like, you are no longer in charge of your own work. You are assisting it.

The Director Shift

The people I watch pulling away from the pack work very differently. They treat AI the way a good manager treats a capable team. They brief it properly. They tell it the audience, the constraint, the outcome they want, and what to leave out. They read the output the way an editor reads a draft — with scepticism, not relief. They push back. They ask it to try a sharper angle, to argue the opposite, to shorten by half. They know what great looks like before they ask for it, and they recognise when the answer is merely adequate.

Being the Director is harder. It takes domain knowledge, taste, and the patience to iterate. But the work that comes out the other side is genuinely yours. The ideas are yours, the standards are yours, the reasoning is yours. AI is doing the heavy lifting on the mechanics while you do the heavy lifting on the thinking. That’s the right shape of the partnership.

The Window Is Closing

Here’s what I think people underestimate. The gap between Directors and Doers is compounding. Every week spent actively learning how to brief, evaluate, and steer these tools is a week of skill you’re banking. Every week spent passively accepting output is a week of skill you’re quietly losing. Six months from now, a year from now, that gap will be visible from across the room — in the quality of decisions, the confidence of arguments, the crispness of output.

The people who dig in now, who actually invest the hours to learn this properly, aren’t just getting better at AI. They’re becoming more valuable than they were before AI existed. Their judgement is sharper. Their output is broader. Their leverage is higher. The people waiting for it to settle down are going to wake up behind, and it will take a lot more than a weekend of prompting tutorials to catch up.

So I’d stop asking whether AI is coming for your job. Ask instead who’s running whose day. Because that answer — today, this week, this month — is the one that decides where you end up.

Driver & firmware update management via Intune

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Walk into most MSP-managed Windows fleets and the update story stops at quality and feature rings.

Drivers? “Windows Update grabs those.” Firmware? “The OEM utility does that.”

That’s not a strategy. That’s three different cooks in the same kitchen, and you’re praying none of them serves up a bad BIOS on a Friday afternoon.

Here’s the real win. Intune has had a dedicated approval surface for driver and firmware updates for a while now. And almost nobody’s switched it on.

What is a driver update policy, really?

It’s a separate Intune profile that sits alongside your existing update rings. It shows you every driver and firmware update Windows Update has queued for your managed devices, and lets you decide — one at a time — whether to ship it.

Approve, pause, defer, hold back the one dodgy NIC driver while the rest go through. All in the portal.

Critically, it’s the same pipeline Windows Autopatch uses for drivers. Five-laptop accounting firm on Business Premium or 500-seat shop on M365 E3 — same surface. You need Intune Plan 1 and a Windows licence that includes the Autopatch entitlement (Business Premium and M365 E3/E5 both have it), devices must be Entra joined or Entra hybrid joined, and telemetry must be set to Required or higher. That’s the lot.

Step-by-Step: switching it on
Check your existing rings aren’t blocking drivers

This is the bit that catches people. If your existing Update Ring or Settings Catalog policy blocks drivers, the whole feature does nothing. In your update ring, set Windows driver to Allow. In the Settings Catalog, set Exclude WU Drivers in Quality Update to Allow Windows Update drivers.

Both default to Allow, but I’ve found plenty of older tenants where someone clicked Block years ago and forgot.

Open the right blade

Sign in to the Microsoft Intune admin centre → Devices → By platform → Windows → Manage updates → Windows 10 and later updates → Driver updates tab → Create profile.

Pick an approval mode

You get two:

  • Automatically approve all recommended driver updates — anything the OEM tags “recommended” gets approved on its own, with a deferral you set between 0 and 30 days.

  • Manually approve and deploy driver updates — every driver lands as Needs review and waits for you.
Approval method:   Automatically approve all recommended driver updates
Make updates       7
available after:

Notice what’s missing? There’s no per-vendor split and no per-device override. One policy, one device — stack two driver policies on the same machine and you’ll fight yourself.

Assign and stage

Pilot group of around 10% — your own laptops, IT, one tolerant power user. Watch it for a fortnight. Then 25%. Then the rest. The per-driver pause button is your friend the first time something breaks.

Why this actually changes behaviour

Most clients have never had a driver controlled by anyone other than Windows Update itself. The first time a Lenovo BIOS update bricks a laptop at 4pm on a Friday, that’s the conversation you do not want to be having with the owner.

With a policy on, you see the update before it hits anyone. You pause it. The rest of the fleet still ships. The client doesn’t even know it happened — and that’s the point.

“But surely Windows Update already knows what’s safe?”

Windows Update knows what applies. It doesn’t know your fleet. You do.

One last wrinkle. The policy doesn’t honour the OEM’s Computer Hardware ID targeting — so managed devices can pick up a newer “recommended” driver even when the OEM reserved a CHID-matched build for that exact model. My recommendation? Use manual approval on hardware you don’t have a spare of in a drawer to test against.

Driver update policies aren’t there to give you more buttons to click. They’re there to take the OEM utility, the random Windows Update behaviour, and the 4pm Friday surprise off the table completely.

If you’re not running one on every managed tenant, you’re outsourcing your hardware change control to luck.

CIA Brief 20260523

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Security & Threat Intelligence

Microsoft 365 Apps & Productivity

Microsoft 365 Copilot

After hours

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Editorial

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Watch out for the next CIA Brief next week

One Offer, One Deadline — Why Your MSP Marketing Keeps Stalling

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I keep seeing the same pattern on MSP websites, in newsletters, and in the sales decks owners email me for a quick review. The front page lists managed services, cyber security, backup, cloud migrations, Copilot workshops, vCIO packages, compliance assessments, and an introductory audit. Everything is on the menu. Nothing is on the clock. Then the owner wonders why prospects keep saying, “Looks great, let me think about it,” and then vanish for six months. The marketing isn’t broken because it’s ugly. It’s broken because it gives people permission to do nothing.

The buffet problem

When you put eight services in front of a prospect, you aren’t being helpful. You’re asking them to become the expert on their own problem before they can even choose who to talk to. Most business owners can’t tell you the difference between endpoint detection and managed detection, and they don’t want to. They want someone to look at their situation and say, “This one. Start here.” Every extra option you add increases the cognitive load and drops the response rate.

And yet I see owners fight this. “But we do all those things,” they tell me. Sure — but not in the same sentence, not on the same page, and not to the same prospect on day one. I’ve watched MSPs double their reply numbers by stripping a landing page down to one service, one price range, and one outcome. Same traffic. Same list. One decision instead of eight.

No deadline, no movement

The second half of the problem is the absence of a clock. If the offer is available forever, it will be taken up never. I’ve sat with MSP owners staring at a pipeline full of “warm” prospects who had a proposal three months ago and still haven’t come back. Why would they? Nothing changes if they wait. The price is the same next month. The bonus onboarding session is still there. Your calendar still has room. You’ve quietly trained them that delaying costs them nothing — while your cash flow is the one paying for their indecision.

A deadline isn’t a gimmick. It’s respect, for their time and yours. “We’re taking on three new managed services clients this quarter and we close intake on 31 May” is a sentence that forces a real conversation. Either this is the right time or it isn’t. Both answers are useful to you. “Let me think about it” is not.

Pick one door

Choose one offer. Not your whole catalogue — the single service that matches the kind of client you most want more of. For a lot of MSPs right now that’s a Copilot readiness or adoption engagement, because it opens a door the rest of your stack can walk through later. Attach a real deadline tied to something tangible: an intake window, a limited number of slots, a price that genuinely moves on a date. Say it plainly on the page, in the email, and on the call. Then stop adding extras. Every time you say, “and we can also do…,” you undo the work.

The uncomfortable part is you’ll feel like you’re leaving money on the table by not mentioning everything else. You aren’t. You’re creating a first yes, and everything else becomes a conversation you earn once the client is already working with you.

The close

Marketing isn’t a menu, it’s a door. One door, clearly marked, with a sign that says when it closes. That’s how you stop feeding prospects options and start feeding your business.