Exercise 1, Task 2: Use Copilot in Teams to summarize meeting notes

In your role as a Financial Analyst for Fabrikam, you joined a meeting with Robin Kline, Fabrikam’s Finance Manager, and other members of the Finance department, including Amari Rivera, Quincy Brooks, Miguel Reyes, and Eric Solomon. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the upcoming year-end financial analysis and reporting requirement. The discussion covered how new data fields and automation might affect financial reporting timelines and formats.

You didn’t have time to take detailed notes, so you turn to Copilot for help. In this exercise, you plan to use Copilot in Teams to summarize the meeting notes. This summary can help you quickly extract key takeaways and action items, which can then be shared with your manager and used to align future financial reporting processes.

[!NOTE] Since this course uses a bring-your-own-subscription (BYOS) model, it doesn’t include a simulated lab or demo environment for Fabrikam. Therefore, there’s no Microsoft 365 tenant to access. To replicate the experience of a real Teams meeting in a simple, accessible format, meeting notes are provided in a text (.txt) file. In a corporate environment, these conversations would typically be stored in Teams, but for this exercise, the text file allows learners to upload and use the content with Copilot Chat without needing access to a live Teams channel. The format preserves sender names, timestamps, and message content so you can practice summarizing and extracting key information just as you would with actual Teams chat messages.

Perform the following steps to complete this task:

  1. Select the following link to download the Fabrikam Finance meeting notes.txt file. Store the file in your OneDrive account for use by Copilot in your tenant.

[!NOTE] You can copy and paste the contents of the downloaded meeting notes file into Notepad or any text editor of your choice.

  1. In your web browser, go to the Microsoft Copilot home page, select the App Launcher (grid icon) in the top-left corner, select More Apps, and then select Teams from the list of available apps.

  2. In Teams for the web, select Copilot in the left navigation pane.

  3. On the Copilot Chat page, ask Copilot to summarize the key decisions, updates, and action items in the Fabrikam Finance meeting notes.txt file. You should attach the file from OneDrive before submitting your prompt.

  4. Review the summary to ensure it includes decisions, next steps, and responsibilities. Ask Copilot to generate a downloadable file for distribution to the meeting participants. After Copilot generates the document, close the preview pane, select the ellipsis (…) next to the document, and then select Download.

  5. After reviewing the next steps in the report summary, ask Copilot to generate a detailed task list for each participant based on the action items in the notes. Have Copilot assign deadlines or priorities to tasks (for example, “high priority for compliance checks”).

  6. Once Copilot generates this task list for each meeting participant, ask it to draft an email to the team and include these tasks in the email. In a real-world scenario, you would then copy and paste the draft into an email in Outlook. For this exercise, review the draft and then proceed to the next step.

  7. Ask Copilot to generate a timeline of key milestones discussed in the meeting.

  8. As a follow-up to the timeline, ask Copilot to draft a calendar invite for the team to reconvene.

  9. Review the results. In our testing, Copilot produced two results. Sometimes it provided several dates to choose from for the team’s next meeting. Other times, Copilot displayed a draft of the invitation’s message and a request for the meeting date, but it didn’t provide any date options. If you experience the latter, then you would need to respond with a prompt that tells Copilot what date to use (you don’t need to do that here).

    In a real-world scenario, you would select the Copilot option to send the meeting request. However, since this exercise deals with a fictitious company, you can proceed to the next step.

  10. Finally, after reviewing the meeting notes, ask Copilot to draft a short policy brief explaining the override approval workflow that was discussed during the meeting. You plan to use the brief as an authoritative guide when handling exceptions, overrides, or compliance-related tasks. Doing so should ensure that all team members follow the same process, reducing ambiguity and risk.