Microsoft Teams Premium vs. Copilot for Microsoft 365: A Comprehensive Guide for the Optimal Teams Experience

Copilot for Microsoft 365 has been released for general availability to Enterprise and SMB, and companies everywhere are beginning to test the AI capabilities. As many earlier Microsoft enthusiasts jumped right in with Teams Premium last year to enhance their experiences with Teams, many people are now wondering, what’s the difference between Teams Premium and Copilot for Microsoft 365, and which is best for my users?

For the Teams enthusiasts out there, the goal of this article is to focus ONLY on the functionality relating to Microsoft Teams between Teams Premium and Copilot for Microsoft 365.

This infographic covers the high-level features included within each license:

The price points are very different between the two plans, with Microsoft Teams Premium coming in at $7/user/month and Copilot for Microsoft 365 at $30/user/month.

I’m going to start with the overlap between the plans, and personally speaking my favorite feature of both.

Intelligent Recap – Included in both Teams Premium & Copilot for Microsoft 365

The primary reason I was excited about Teams Premium upon its announcement was the Intelligent Recap feature. As someone tasked with organizing numerous meetings and ensuring efficient follow-up through gathering information and organizing action items, this feature has proven invaluable to me.

Intelligent Recap is included in BOTH Teams Premium and Copilot for Microsoft 365, and as it’s hands down the best feature provided by Teams Premium and Copilot (as of today), it’s worth exploring for anyone that spends significant time in Microsoft Teams meetings.

For someone that DOES NOT have Teams Premium or Copilot for Microsoft 365, after you record a Teams Meeting, and go to that meeting within the Calendar tab of Teams, expand that meeting and click Recap, it looks like this:

I did turn on transcription and recording, so within the Recap tab, I am able to go back into the recording to view/download the transcription and recording. The transcription is linked to the recording, so if I want to jump to the part of the video recording to a specific part of the conversation, simply click and it takes you there. Out of the box, pretty basic functionality.

However, when a user has Teams Premium or Copilot for Microsoft 365, this is greatly enhanced. See below what is available for a user that has both Teams Premium AND Copilot for Microsoft 365:

When a Microsoft Teams meeting is conducted that has both recording and transcription enabled (either manually set or automatically via a meeting template), Teams will generate a recap of the meeting incredibly valuable information shortly after the completion of the meeting. Below of what is provided within the Recap for each license type:

Recap Features included with BOTH Teams Premium AND Copilot for M365 (outlined above in Green):

AI Meeting Notes – Expandable summaries of key topics covered within a meeting. Each note is clickable, and will update the playback to jump to exactly when in the meeting a topic was discussed, providing quick navigation if you need to relisten to a particular portion of the meeting

Follow-up Tasks – clear and concise action items with the person responsible for the task. All notes and tasks can be easily copied and sent by the Meeting Organizer to all attendees for the notes and action items from the meeting

Speaker Tracking & Time Stamping – Teams will track exactly when each person speaks, with clickable ?

Tracking @ Mentions – For the licensed user, Teams will track @ mentions to provide specific notes for when someone is mentioned. This is very helpful if you missed part of a conversation, or were not able to join that meeting but needed to quickly gather pertinent information

Chapters – Intelligent Recap divides a meeting by chapters, so users can quickly navigate to a chapter that they’re looking for

Topics – This flags key topics that were covered throughout a meeting, and the time stamps where they were discussed

All of these are generated automatically by the Intelligent Recap within a few minutes of the end of a meeting and have saved me many hours and captured valuable data. Where I previously would find myself frantically taking notes throughout a meeting to capture all valuable information, I now remain engaged in the meeting, knowing that my notes will be available after the meeting concludes.

One key factor is that this is provided “after the conclusion of the meeting”, and this is where there are some additional points that go in favor of Copilot for Microsoft 365 within Teams Meetings.

Additional Teams Meeting Features ONLY with Copilot for Microsoft (Outlined above in Blue):

Real-time Meeting Prompting – This is incredibly helpful, as there’s often pieces of a call that I would love to capture that have an impact on the later parts of the meeting. With Copilot, users can get real-time information from Copilot on what has transpired already within a meeting through a number of suggested prompts such as:

• Recap meeting so far
• List action items
• Suggest follow-up questions
• What questions are unresolved?
• List different perspectives by topic
• List main ideas we discussed

Generate Meeting Notes (during meeting) - Copilot has two methods for usage during a meeting:

• With Transcription Turned On – Meeting organizers can set this for the meeting, and when whenever a licensed Copilot User selects the Copilot button and enables transcription during the meeting, Copilot starts running for all licensed users. Copilot will be available BOTH during AND after the meeting in this scenario.
• With Transcription Turned Off – ??Meeting organizers can set this for the meeting, and when whenever a licensed Copilot User selects the Copilot button, it starts running for all licensed users. This option relies on a temporary transcription that gets deleted when the meeting ends, so Copilot will only provide the value during the meeting, and once the meeting ends, that data is wiped. Additional information can be found here .

Below is an example of what Copilot provides DURING the meeting:

Having the ability to leverage Copilot during a meeting to see what you might have missed, summarize what was said, or simply gather info on the tone of a call can be pretty useful during a meeting.

Post meeting prompting – As shown in the Recap screenshot earlier in the Blue outline, Copilot can go beyond the Meeting Notes and Action Items that Teams Premium can provide, and users can interact with Copilot to gather additional information from the meeting. You can ask Copilot to summarize information in different ways, such as ask for a breakdown of the attendees and their roles, ask for the timeframes discussed in the call, or ask for specific action items called out for a certain individual. The interact nature of Copilot increases its value, but the user does need to know how to correctly prompt the solution to get the right responses.

This is where the overlap between Teams Premium & Copilot for Microsoft 365 ends, so with my goal of focusing on the Microsoft Teams experience, here are the key areas where those two solutions differ, starting with all the features only available in Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Features Exclusive to Copilot for Microsoft 365 within Teams

M365 Chat

Available as a widget within Teams M365 Chat allows you to interact with Copilot to synthesize data from multiple sources to give you a summary of things you need to catch up on, including your files, messages, meetings, emails, and people. Here’s a quick look at what it provides:

Chat Prompting & Summarizing

Within Teams Chat, users can use Copilot to help rewrite messages in a variety of ways. You can use it to make messages more concise, longer, or change the tone to make it more professional or casual. Below is a look at what happens when a user chooses to leverage Copilot to help write messages:

I will say that Copilot has not yet found my tone within the message generation, but it is helpful with rewriting some messages depending on what I input. As with any of the AI tools, you need to know what to input in order to get valuable content in return. One thing to note, within Teams, it’s not pulling data from the conversation above, nor is it referencing file data within OneDrive or SharePoint to craft responses, it’s simply using the LLM to help with writing the messages.

That concludes the features that Copilot for Microsoft 365 specific to Microsoft Teams, but that is not the end of the capabilities. Copilot for Microsoft 365 has capabilities within Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, OneNote, Loop, and Power Automate that should all be evaluated properly when determining what is the right plan for you.

Now lets move to all of the additional Teams functionality provided only to Teams Premium users.

Features Exclusive to Teams Premium

Meeting Themes & Custom Backgrounds

At first I thought this might be gimmicky, but having used it for many months, I constantly get comments from clients on how much they like the custom branding we have applied to our Teams meetings. Once the Theme is set up, your meeting organizers with a Teams Premium license will have their meetings displayed with custom lobby backgrounds, logos displayed, and even custom colors of the various feature buttons. Additionally, you can use policy to ensure all licensed users get an org-defined background for your meeting that you choose.

Below is an example of a meeting lobby without branding, and then one with branding when I schedule a meeting.

Now one with the our custom theme applied:

It just adds a little differentiation to our meetings, which our team really likes, myself included.

Meeting Templates ?

This feature I’m a big fan of, as there’s several different types of meetings that we organize (Client Meetings, Demos, Team Meetings, Company-Wide Meetings, etc.) and there are different settings for each type that provide value for that type of meeting.

With templates, our organization can configure the settings for a template, and apply those to all meetings. For example, for client Demos we want to have the “Watermarks for meetings” setup on that type of meeting, to ensure our intellectual property is protected, so we have a template called “Demos” that I apply whenever I schedule a demo meeting, and all those settings are applied.

Or perhaps we’re having a series of internal meetings on standard operating procedures, and would want to ensure that those are recorded and transcribed to reference later. Meeting templates give both the users and the administrative team additional control on what meeting settings they would like to standardize on for users or groups.

Protected meetings

There are many applications for safeguarding what happens in a meeting, and within Premium there are three primary ways to protect meetings

• Sensitivity labels – Organizers have additional features to control the lobby, chat, chat copy, presentation, and recording functions past what can be done with a non-premium license
• Watermarking – This I really love, as PEI has Intellectual Property that we provide demo’s for clients. By using Watermarking, my email address is displayed over the meeting content, which protects us from any screen capturing that someone may attempt. Below is what it looks like when Watermarking is enabled

• End-to-end encryption – With the right sensitivity label applied, an organizer can now provide increased security through encryption for meetings that would require it.

Town Halls & Webinars

For anyone that has previously used Microsoft Teams Live Events, Town Halls & Webinars are the expansion of the webinar capabilities for Teams, where the goal is to provide live presentation to many attendees.

With the Town Hall Events and Webinars, Microsoft has added some nice touches to more effectively run a one-to-many experience, with some enhancements outlined below:

• Set up a green room for webinar presenters
• Manage attendees’ view
• Send reminder emails to registrants
• Create a webinar wait list
• Manually approve registrants (huge win if you’re looking to eliminate competitors joining your webinars)
• Limit the day and time when people can register
• Use Real-Time Messaging Protocol-In (RTMP) for Webinars

Virtual Appointments ?

For clients that do remote support, whether that’s tele-medicine, financial advisors appointments, or even tech support, the Virtual Appointments enhancements with Teams Premium are truly great.

Below are the highlights for what Teams Premium provides above and beyond with all Teams users receive for Virtual Appointments:

• Send SMS Notifications (this is huge, as a high percentage of virtual appointments are accessed on mobile)
• Chat with attendees in the lobby waiting
• View & Manage scheduled appointments in the queue
• View & Manage on-demand appointments in the queue
• Send post-appointment follow-ups

These enhancements greatly improve the scheduling, rescheduling, and overall management of virtual appointments. Efficiency is often key here for maximizing the total number of appointments an individual can make, and the Virtual Appointment management allows for providing a great customer experience.

Live translation for captions

For international conversations, Teams Premium provides AI-powered real-time translations from 40 spoken languages, allowing users to hold meetings spoken in different languages. If the meeting organizer has Teams Premium, all meeting attendees can enjoy live translation captions.

Summary

This concludes the feature breakdowns specific for Microsoft Teams for Teams Premium & Copilot for Microsoft 365. For companies that are only looking to maximize their efficiency in Teams Meetings, Teams Premium should not be overlooked, especially at the price point of $7/u/m versus $30/u/m with Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Additionally, there is significantly more work that should be completed prior to rolling out Copilot for Microsoft 365 across the organization to ensure data security and accuracy of data being produced by Copilot. The risk of deploying Teams Premium to users is far lower than Copilot for Microsoft 365, and if you’re an organization with heavy Teams usage, the question should not be if we’re rolling out Teams Premium at all, but rather who should be getting it.

Below are some roles that significantly benefit from Teams Premium:

• Project Managers
• Salespeople
• Executive Admins
• Webinar organizers
• Technical Trainers
• Appointment setters for high volumes of meetings

Hopefully this information is helpful, and there's great opportunity for all organizations to leverage Microsoft's new AI capabilities.

If you are evaluating how your organization can take advantage of these capabilities, shoot us a note at [email protected] and we'll setup time for a licensing strategy session.

Martin Feehan