Copilot for Teams Meetings: Honest Review, Limitations, and Alternatives (2026)
Comparisons and guides
4/17/26
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10 min
Microsoft Copilot in Teams generates meeting summaries, identifies action items, and lets users ask questions about what was just said. On paper, it’s the ideal assistant for teams that are constantly hopping on calls. In practice, feedback from the field is much more mixed, especially in French-speaking SMBs. Copilot surpassed 16 million paid licenses by the end of 2025 (source: Microsoft financial results, Q2 FY2026). But according to Recon Analytics (January 2026), its market share among paid AI tools fell from 18.8% to 11.5% in six months. And 44% of users who abandoned Copilot cite distrust in its answers as the main reason. This article sorts out what Copilot does well and what it doesn’t. With a particular focus on the needs of SMBs managing long-term projects.
What Copilot does well in Teams meetings
Copilot activates during or after a Teams meeting and relies on the transcript to generate a structured summary. It provides a recap of the points discussed, identifies action items with attribution to participants, and allows questions to be asked in real time.
According to a Forrester study commissioned by Microsoft (March 2025), summarizing via Copilot is 3.8 times faster than manual writing. Catching up on a missed meeting would be 4 times faster. A consultant reports saving 2 hours per week thanks to automatic summaries (source: experience feedback published by Claranet, January 2025).
Since November 2025, transcription is no longer required to use Copilot during a meeting. The tool works in temporary mode. However, to keep the summary afterward, transcription must be enabled manually.
Copilot's real strength is its native position in the Microsoft ecosystem. If your company lives in Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint, there's nothing to install, no third-party bot to invite, and no additional account to create.
The practical limitations of Copilot for meetings
Documented hallucinations
This is the most frequent criticism in user feedback. An emblematic case reported by the Wall Street Journal and relayed by MacGeneration: Copilot invented a fictitious participant in a summary and attributed to them remarks that had never been made. Copilot's accuracy NPS score remains negative, at -19.8 according to Recon Analytics (January 2026).
Functional French, but not optimal
French is one of the 8 officially supported languages. But Microsoft acknowledges that the best results are obtained in English. French-English mixing, common in SMBs working internationally, is not handled natively. The language must be selected manually for each meeting. For meetings longer than 2 hours, Microsoft recommends segmenting the sessions to maintain accuracy.
A closed ecosystem
Copilot works exclusively in Teams. If your team also uses Google Meet or Zoom for client meetings, Copilot only covers part of your exchanges. The extracted action items do not sync to Planner, To-Do, or Jira. You have to copy and paste manually. This is exactly the kind of friction that project managers in SMBs describe when they talk about information "scattered across too many tools" (a pain point expressed during several field interviews). See how to centralize project information without multiplying tools.
No inter-meeting memory
This is the major blind spot. In meetings, Copilot reasons only over the current transcript. It does not cross-reference previous meetings of the same project. Worse: for recurring meetings, Microsoft documentation specifies that the history of Copilot conversations is no longer available once a later meeting in the series has been transcribed. It is a loss of context by design.
For an SMB managing a 12-month project with dozens of meetings, the impossibility of asking "what had we decided on this point three months ago?" is a structural flaw. It is also one of the criteria that really matter when choosing an AI meeting assistant.
How much does Copilot cost, and who is it for?
Since December 2025, Microsoft has revised its pricing with a new SKU for SMBs (source: Microsoft.com, Computerworld). The Copilot Business price (up to 300 users) has dropped to about 19 euros/user/month with annual billing, compared with 27 euros before. The Enterprise price remains around 27 euros/user/month.
But Copilot is an add-on. You first need a qualifying Microsoft 365 license (Business Basic, Standard, or E3/E5). The actual cost per user is between 25 and 80 euros/month depending on the plan chosen. For an SMB of 20 people, this represents between 5,000 and 7,200 euros per year.
A trial conducted by the UK government on 20,000 Copilot licenses showed an average gain of 26 minutes per day, but with results described as "nuanced" and a real usage rate of only 1.14 actions per user per day (source: Silicon.fr, 2025).
FAQ: Microsoft Copilot and Teams meetings
Do you need a specific license to use Copilot in Teams?
Can Copilot work without enabling transcription?
Does Copilot work well in French?
Can Copilot summarize multiple meetings for the same project?
Are Copilot summaries reliable?
Does Copilot work for Zoom or Google Meet meetings?
Copilot is a good summary assistant for one-off Teams meetings, in a 100% Microsoft environment. But for SMBs that manage projects over several months, with meetings on different platforms and a need to find decisions made six months ago, its limitations become structural. Tools like 5Days are designed precisely for this depth: querying the full history of a project, not just the last meeting.
