Microsoft has made some major changes to its solution portfolio in recent years. Perhaps two of the most significant updates to the Microsoft ecosystem for business leaders, are the introduction of Microsoft Premium, and the intuitive generative AI Copilot service.

Built in collaboration with the innovators at OpenAI, Microsoft Copilot aims to fundamentally transform the way we use technology to collaborate with colleagues and complete tasks. Microsoft Premium, on the other hand, offers an add-on solution for your collaboration platform, providing access to more intelligent, personalized, and secure communication tools.

So, how do the two solutions work together? Here’s everything you need to know about the power of Copilot combined with Microsoft Teams Premium.

Understanding Microsoft Copilot: Generative AI for the Workplace

Microsoft Copilot is one of the most exciting solutions to emerge in the world of unified communications and collaboration in recent years. The technology acts as a “personal assistant” for employees, designed to improve productivity, automate repetitive tasks, and enhance communication on a fundamental level.

Copilot takes advantage of Microsoft’s multi-billion-dollar investment in the OpenAI company, best-known for its ChatGPT tools. Leveraging the latest developments in generative AI, Microsoft built Copilot as a personal assistant users can interact with easily, using natural language inputs.

Copilot sits within the existing Microsoft ecosystem, seamlessly integrating with various applications, from the Office 365 productivity tools, to Microsoft Teams, and even Microsoft Dynamics. Though it’s still in the initial stages of development, Copilot promises to offer an assistant for:

  • Productivity in office applications: Copilot can work inside of applications like Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, Excel, Microsoft BI, and more, offering guidance, suggestions, and natural language content generation tools.
  • Enhanced meetings: Copilot in Microsoft Teams can summarize key discussion points from meetings, automatically generate action points, and conduct sentiment analysis.
  • Better communications: In both Teams and Outlook, Copilot can provide suggestions to enhance the sentiment, clarity, and tone of messages.
  • Organization: Copilot can integrate with OneNote to assist users in drafting plans, generative ideas, organizing information, creating lists, and more.
  • Stronger collaboration: In Microsoft Loop, Copilot can facilitate stronger team collaboration and alignment, by summarizing content and curating crucial documents.

What is Microsoft Teams Premium?

Introduced as an add-on license for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 subscribers, Teams Premium offers users access to more advanced experiences within the Teams landscape. Available at a price of $7 per user per month, the solution adds new functionality to Teams, to make conversations between employees more intelligent, personalized, and secure.

Jamie Wheeldon – Chief Architect for Symity

The relatively low price point of Teams Premium when compared to the recently announced Copilot costs, combined with the more focused scope of the AI features, make it the perfect place for organisations to get started with AI without the added security and compliance considerations that will likely need consideration when adopting Copilot.

With Teams Premium, companies don’t just get access to more intuitive AI-powered tools, they can also leverage advanced scheduling features for meetings, custom backgrounds and together mode scenes, watermarks for data protection, and more meeting options.

Teams Premium also comes with automated meeting protection options, powered by sensitivity labels, advanced virtual appointment setting tools, and state-of-the-art reports and analytics. What’s more, it empowers companies to host more advanced, high-quality webinars.

With Teams Premium, you can create registration workflows for your webinars, customize communications with registrants and attendees, and even present more effectively using behind-the-scenes tools to distribute your content.

Intelligent Re-Cap Microsoft Teams Premium

One of the core components that sets Microsoft Teams Premium apart from other subscription plans, is direct access to a range of AI solutions. With Teams Premium, companies can immediately access Microsoft’s latest AI innovations to transform the quality and outcomes of meetings.

Intelligent re-cap in Teams Premium gives business leaders the opportunity to boost productivity, by creating automated meeting summaries. The AI-generated notes service allows users to focus on the discussion taking place, rather than recording important data.

This could build on the abilities of Copilot, planned for future Teams users, which help individuals to navigate meeting recordings and summaries more effectively. The AI-driven tools add timeline markers to content, to help users detect when their name was mentioned, when people joined or left, and which people were speaking at any given time.

Microsoft’s AI tools in Teams Premium can even automatically translate meeting captions into different languages. This empowers companies to unify employees and improve clarity between staff members working in various geographies.

Jamie Wheeldon – Chief Architect for Symity

A common question we get a lot from customers when talking about Copilot and the Teams Premium AI features is ‘What’s the value of Copilot in Teams above and beyond the AI features in Teams Premium?’

The key to answering this is realising that the AI powered features in Teams Premium, such as intelligent re-cap and Meeting Translation are not interactive and have a single, point-in-time use-case. Whereas Copilot in Teams can be used interactively, in real-time and via the Copilot prompt, will respond to a wide range of requests which makes it potentially much more transformative.

As Copilot for Teams is going to be licensed under the wider M365 Copilot product, the Teams functionality will also naturally integrate with other M365 collaboration workloads.

Currently, Microsoft is working on adding more functionality into the Teams experience using Copilot innovations. The company recently announced the development of Copilot for Teams phone, which will make Teams the first UCaaS solution to include generative AI in phone calls.

With the service, companies can make and receive calls from a Teams app, and get real-time summarizations, as well as insights that highlight key points and actions. Microsoft is also expanding Copilot functionality in Teams chat, helping users to rapidly synthesize key information from chat threads. You can use the tool to get caught up on conversations faster, summarize information, and manage different chat threads efficiently in the collaborative environment.

Together, Teams Premium and Copilot provide businesses with an end-to-end solution for optimizing meetings, webinars, and team conversations, with the power of generative AI.

Looking Ahead with Copilot in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft offers business leaders a number of ways to access the power of Copilot within their communication and collaboration workflows. Even without a Teams Premium license, companies will be able to add the functionality of Copilot to their existing technologies.

However, Teams Premium does offer companies an easy way to start experimenting with AI capabilities within the Teams ecosystem today. Purchasing a Premium license means you can immediately access meeting summarization, transcription, and translation tools to upgrade the outcomes of your meetings and workplace conversations.

Working with a certified Microsoft solutions provider, companies can also take the functionality of both Copilot and Teams to the next level. Partners working with Microsoft can help business leaders unlock the potential of large language models and generative AI in their apps, collaboration tools, and even the contact center landscape.



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