Frequently asked questions about agents in Microsoft Teams

The Facilitator agent works within Teams meetings for more effective collaboration.

In Microsoft Teams meetings, Facilitator generates real-time AI notes during your meetings, answers questions in chat, keeps track of the meeting agenda, and summarizes key decisions and open questions from meeting discussions, allowing everyone to co-author and collaborate seamlessly.

Channel Agent in Teams channels gives every project an extra teammate – connecting your projects across a channel and meetings. This agent is available in public preview.

Users can create a unique agent in a channel where the agent will adopt the name and icon of the channel. The agent’s knowledge base can be expanded by adding it to meetings related to the project. The agent will draft and share AI-status reports for the project, schedule meetings, manage tasks for a team, and answer any question the user may ask it.

In a channel, go to Add Agents and bots in the upper right-hand corner. Once opened, a banner will appear with a call to action to add an agent to the channel. If the channel already has Channel Agent, then this banner won't appear.

When Channel Agent is in the channel or meeting, users can access the agent by @mentioning the agent by its name.

In a meeting where the agent is added, directly access the agent through the People, agents, and bots roster in the upper right-hand corner.

In group chats or meetings chats users can add Channel Agent using the add participant menu in the chat surface or by right clicking on the agent’s icon through the side panel in the channel the agent was created in. To more information on how to add Channel Agent to meetings or chats, see How to add Channel Agent to Teams conversations.

Facilitator can be added to a meeting during scheduling by using the Facilitator toggle in the meeting invite, using the Turn on option for Facilitator in the meeting invite, or using the Meeting options pane. 

During the meeting, Facilitator can also be added by selecting More actions  ​​​​​​​ in the meeting controls, then selecting Turn on Facilitator from the menu.

After a Teams meeting, go to the meeting chat where Facilitator was active and select Recap at the top of the meeting chat. Then, select Notes to view AI-generated notes from the meeting.

Both Facilitator and Channel Agent were evaluated through extensive manual and automatic testing using Microsoft internal data. Additional evaluation was performed with adversarial datasets with offensive and malicious chat content. Facilitator and Channel Agent are regularly evaluated through user feedback (thumbs-up and thumbs-down feedback function).

For Facilitator in Teams meetings:

• The notes generated are attributed to a participant, not Facilitator.

• External participants can’t access meeting notes.

• Facilitator isn't available in instant meetings, Teams calls, or channel meetings.

• Facilitator notes in meetings only use the meeting transcript as a grounding source. Meeting chat content isn't included in grounding data.

• When tracking the agenda, Facilitator marks topics with checkmarks at intervals during the meeting, not immediately after the discussion has started.

• Only one Channel Agent can be supported in a channel. One Channel Agent cannot be added to multiple channels – only the one it is created in.

• Private channels don't currently support Channel Agent.

• In a shared channel, the user needs to be a part of the host team and channel to create a Channel Agent.

• Channel Agent doesn't officially support non-US English languages.

• Channel Agent in channels or other Teams conversations with external users aren't functional. Channel Agent in meetings and chats with external users won't answer questions about the channel.

• Channel Agent isn't supported in tenants that use Customer Key.

• Processing data from previews can happen outside of the EU Data Boundaries.

Facilitator can't be customized. Admins can choose if Facilitator is allowed in their org by managing the Facilitator app in the Microsoft Teams admin center. To learn more about admin management, see Set up Facilitator in Microsoft Teams.

Customize Channel Agent through agent settings by adding sources to its knowledge base and configuring its status report skill.

When you add additional knowledge sources to the agent’s knowledge base, you give the agent permission to collect information to be used for its skills.

Status report changes can be made to identify the status report approvers, and the time, frequency, and date in which the status reports are generated.

To learn more about admin management of Channel Agent, see Set up Channel Agent for Microsoft Teams.

Facilitator will best respond when Teams meeting participants do the following:

• Speak or chat in supported languages.

• Ensure that a recent, substantive volume of content is available. Facilitator may provide error messages if these requirements are not met.

• Complete activities in the chat. For example, if an action item was assigned in the chat and has now been completed, send a message in the chat acknowledging its completion. Facilitator only knows about the progress that is available in the Teams chat or meeting transcript.

• For meetings that include Teams rooms, turn on voice recognition to ensure speakers in the room are correctly identified in the notes and action items. Without it, contributions from individuals in the room will be attributed to the room, not the speakers.

• Speak or chat in English.

• In meetings, review and approve the summaries the agent collects. Channel Agent only knows about information in the meeting transcript.

• Ensure that a substantive volume of content is available.

Facilitator in Teams supports the following languages: English, Spanish, Japanese, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Korean, Dutch, Swedish, Polish, Norwegian, Turkish, Danish, Finnish, Arabic, Thai, Hebrew, Czech, Hungarian, Ukranian, Russian, Catalan, Welsh, Indonesian, Green, Slovak, Vietnamese, Slovenian, Croatian, Romanian, Lithuanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Latvian, Estonian.

Facilitator and Channel Agent are built upon and comply with Microsoft’s comprehensive approach to security, compliance, and privacy. For more information, see the following:

• If you’re using Microsoft 365 Copilot in your organization (with your work or school account), see Data, Privacy, and Security for Microsoft 365 Copilot to learn about the standards Facilitator and Channel Agent were built upon for work and school users.

• If you're using Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps at home as part of Copilot Pro (with your personal Microsoft account), see Copilot Pro: Microsoft 365 apps and your privacy to learn about the standards Facilitator and Channel Agent were built upon for at-home users.

For Facilitator-specific technical details and updates, see Set up Facilitator in Microsoft Teams.

For Channel Agent-specific technical details and updates, see Set up Channel Agent for Microsoft Teams.

All agents in Teams do not share data with third parties.

You can appoint other people to review the AI-generated status reports before they're shared in the channel where Channel Agent was created in.

No agents in Teams use your data to train the model.

Teams Generative AI features strive to provide accurate and informative responses, based on the data available. However, answers may not always be accurate as they are generated based on patterns and probabilities in language data. Use your own judgment and double-check the facts before making decisions or taking action based on the responses. 

While these features have mitigations in place to avoid sharing offensive content in results and take steps to prevent displaying potentially harmful topics, you may still see unexpected results. We’re constantly working to improve our technology to proactively address issues in line with our Responsible AI Principles.

If you find a generated response that is incorrect or if you encounter harmful or inappropriate content, please provide that feedback by selecting thumbs down in the summary and providing additional comments in the feedback form. This feedback helps us to improve and minimize this content in the future.

Currently, Facilitator and Channel Agent use the first string in the attendee’s display name. We're aware of cases where this logic fails, such as reversed display names (LastName, FirstName), or first names with multiple words. We're working on changes to ensure correct usage of names. Please share feedback to allow us to improve further.