Microsoft prompts Teams AI agents to collaborate with humans

Microsoft has added a “facilitator” agent to Teams to provide AI assistance during meetings by creating agendas, taking notes, and more. It’s one of several Copilot agents coming to Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps that will act like an AI teammate, Microsoft announced on Thursday.

“Microsoft 365 Copilot is moving beyond personal productivity to enable teams to work together with AI — building strategy, reducing miscommunication, and accelerating progress,” said Nicole Herskowitz, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365 and Copilot, in a blog post on Thursday.

The Facilitator agent appears during a Teams meeting to perform a range of tasks that allow participants to focus on their conversation.

For example, it can find an existing agenda from the meeting invite or create its own based on meeting goals set out at the start of discussion. It will also allocate time for each topic to keep the meeting on track, Microsoft said. Participants can then ask the agent to make changes to the timeline, adding or removing topics — useful if you don’t want the AI assistant dictating the entire flow of a discussion.

Once a meeting has started, the Facilitator takes notes that can be edited by all participants, as well as answer questions pertaining to the meeting or more general queries that require information pulled from the web. It can detect when participants mention the need for a new document and offer to create it on their behalf, as well as generating a first draft on the desired topic.

The agent will also capture any tasks mentioned during the meeting and assign them to a coworker, thanks to an integration with a Project Manager agent in the Planner app for Teams. Again, it will be possible to edit and reassign these tasks by interacting with the agent. Tasks can then be managed in the Planner app.

The Facilitator agent is generally available to Microsoft 365 Copilot customers from today, while the task management and document creation skills are available in public preview.

In addition, for M365 Copilot customers, Microsoft is adding agents that will appear in every Teams channel. The Channel agent acts as a “domain expert” for a team, performing a range of tasks: highlighting deadlines, drafting status reports, and assigning tasks.  

The Channel agent can also interact with third-party agents via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard that has emerged recently as a means to connect AI agents across applications, “sharing context and invoking each others’ tools within the same workflow,” said Herskovitz.

Microsoft also announced two agents coming to other M365 apps. A Knowledge agent for SharePoint, in public preview ahead of general availability in early 2026, it automatically generates metadata and arranges files into columns, for example. It can also scan a SharePoint site to detect broken links and inactive pages and suggest how to fill content gaps based on information site visitors are searching for. Users can also query the AI assistant about the contents of files in natural language and ask it to perform functions such as to send an email when invoices reach a certain value, for instance.

Finally, agents in Microsoft’s Viva Engage enterprise social network, also in public preview, will draft responses to community questions and help community managers ensure discussions are accurate, Microsoft said.

The Knowledge agent for SharePoint and agents in Viva Engage require an M365 Copilot license.Microsoft prompts Teams AI agents to collaborate with humans – ComputerworldRead More