Copilot in Teams chat: catching up and summarising

A busy project channel or a group chat that's been going since eight this morning is exactly the kind of thing Copilot in Teams is built to shortcut. Instead of scrolling to "catch up," you ask, and Copilot reads what's there and answers.

Where to find it

Open the chat or channel conversation. Copilot sits at the top, either as an icon that opens a prompt box or a "Catch up" style suggestion Teams surfaces on a busy conversation. Typing directly into that box, or asking from the wider Microsoft 365 Copilot app with the conversation as context, both work.

What to ask it

"What did I miss?" is the obvious one, and it works well on a chat that's had a burst of activity — Copilot returns a short summary of what was discussed and who said what mattered.

"Summarise this channel since Monday." Useful for a channel that runs continuously; scoping by time keeps the summary tight instead of trying to cover the channel's whole history.

"What did we decide about X?" is the more valuable pattern in practice. Rather than a general summary, ask a specific question and Copilot searches the conversation for the relevant messages and answers directly, often with a reference back to the message it used.

"List the open questions in this thread." Good for a chat that's turned into a loose planning discussion with several unresolved points scattered through it.

"Turn this thread into a plan." Once a discussion has settled on a direction, ask Copilot to turn it into a short action list — who's doing what, and by when, based on what was actually said. It's a useful bridge between "we talked about it" and something you can hand to Planner or a task list, though you should still confirm ownership with the people involved rather than treating the output as a formal assignment.

What it needs

A Microsoft 365 Copilot licence. Copilot only reads what the signed-in user can already see — it doesn't reveal messages from before you were added to a chat, and it respects any information barriers or compliance boundaries already applied to the conversation. There's no separate admin toggle for chat summarisation specifically; it follows the tenant's general Copilot settings.

Where it falls short

Very long-running channels (months of history) summarise less precisely than a scoped question — narrow the ask by date or topic. Messages that are mostly reactions, GIFs, or short back-and-forth banter don't summarise into much of substance, which is expected rather than a bug. And Copilot reads text: a decision made verbally on a call that was never typed up in the chat isn't something it can recover.

This is a different feature from meeting summaries — see Copilot in Teams meetings: recap and action items for that, and Teams: what did I miss? — catching up on a meeting for the equivalent question asked of a live or recent meeting rather than a chat.