A practical guide to AI in Microsoft Teams in 2025

The buzz around AI is pretty much impossible to ignore, especially now that tools like Microsoft Copilot are showing up directly inside Microsoft Teams. If your team is like most, you’re probably already using it to get quick meeting recaps or summarize a chat thread you missed. It feels like a neat little productivity trick.

But here’s the thing: those features, while handy, are just scratching the surface. They help you, as an individual, work a bit faster. The real value comes from building specialized, autonomous agents that can handle entire business functions, like fielding internal IT support questions or answering HR inquiries, all on their own.

This guide will walk you through the whole spectrum of AI in Microsoft Teams, from the native capabilities of Copilot to the untapped potential of creating custom AI agents that connect to your company’s unique knowledge, wherever it happens to live.

What is AI in Microsoft Teams?

First off, "AI in Microsoft Teams" isn’t one single thing. It’s an entire ecosystem of tools working at different levels to make your work life a little easier. Think of it as a spectrum, from simple background tricks to a fully autonomous IT support bot living inside a Teams channel.

Here’s a simple breakdown of the different layers of AI you’ll find:

• Standard AI features: These are the quiet, built-in features you probably use without even realizing it. Things like background blur in video calls, real-time noise suppression, and those suggested replies that pop up in chat. They’re all designed to make the basic experience of using Teams better.

• Integrated AI assistants: This is where tools like Microsoft Copilot come in. It’s a powerful, general-purpose assistant that’s woven into the fabric of the Microsoft 365 suite. It’s great for helping you create content, summarize conversations, and find information that exists within Microsoft’s world.

• Third-party AI apps: The Teams app store has a bunch of specialized AI tools you can add, often focused on a single task. You’ve probably seen meeting assistants like Read.ai or Otter.ai join a call. While useful for transcription, they often operate as separate services and can sometimes cause security headaches when external users add them to confidential meetings.

• Custom AI agents: This is where it gets really interesting. These are purpose-built bots you create to handle specific, repeatable business processes. Imagine an AI agent that can answer any question your team has by instantly searching through your company’s Confluence, Google Docs, and past support tickets. This is the step from personal productivity to genuine business automation.

Native AI in Microsoft Teams: Understanding Microsoft Copilot

For most companies just starting to explore AI, Microsoft Copilot is the natural first step. It’s powerful, deeply integrated, and designed to give you and your team a productivity boost right out of the box.

What Copilot does well for AI in Microsoft Teams

Copilot’s strength is its home-field advantage in the Microsoft ecosystem. It’s not just an add-on; it’s part of the furniture.

• It just works: Because it’s a Microsoft product, Copilot moves effortlessly between Teams, Outlook, Word, and all the other apps you use daily. There’s no clunky setup; it’s just there.

• A focus on productivity: It’s a workhorse for common office tasks. It can generate meeting summaries and transcripts in real-time, recap long chat conversations, and help you draft messages and documents. It’s like having a personal assistant dedicated to saving you from boring admin work.

• Great at finding Microsoft stuff: Copilot is excellent at piecing together information from your organization’s Microsoft 365 files. If the answer you need is buried in a SharePoint site, a OneDrive folder, or an old email thread, Copilot can probably dig it up.

This video demonstrates why the meeting recap feature is a favorite among Copilot users in Microsoft Teams.

Where general-purpose AI in Microsoft Teams has its limits

While Copilot is a fantastic generalist, its one-size-fits-all nature comes with some real limitations, especially for businesses with specific needs.

• The knowledge silo: Copilot’s biggest blind spot is that it mostly lives and breathes Microsoft data. But what about the rest of your company’s brain? Most businesses rely on a mix of tools. Your IT processes might live in Confluence, your marketing briefs in Google Docs, and your customer support history in Zendesk. Copilot can’t see any of that, which means it can’t answer a huge chunk of your employees’ actual questions.

• Not much control: As a general-purpose assistant, you can’t really tell it how to work. You can’t define a specific, multi-step process for an IT support request, like "first, check the knowledge base; if nothing is found, check past tickets; if it’s still unresolved, create a Jira ticket with these specific fields." It’s a bit of a black box, which isn’t great for structured processes that need to be done the same way every time.

• The per-seat cost: Rolling out Copilot to everyone can get expensive, fast. At around $30 per user per month, the cost adds up. This model works for people who will use it all day, but it’s a tough sell for employees who only need AI for one specific thing, like asking an occasional IT or HR question.

Going beyond productivity with AI in Microsoft Teams: Building specialized agents

The big leap forward with AI in Microsoft Teams isn’t about making individuals a little more productive; it’s about automating entire business processes. This is where specialized agents come into play. Instead of one general assistant, you can deploy a team of expert bots for departments like IT, HR, and Operations that handle repetitive, structured tasks.

This is exactly what platforms like eesel AI are designed for. eesel lets you build and launch these kinds of specialized AI agents directly within your Microsoft Teams integration, without needing a team of developers or waiting months for it to go live.

Unify all your company knowledge with AI in Microsoft Teams, not just Microsoft files

An AI agent is only as smart as the information it can access. This is the biggest difference between a general tool and a specialized one. An eesel AI agent acts as a central brain for your company, connecting to over 100 different knowledge sources.

Imagine an employee goes into an IT support channel in Teams and asks, "How do I request a new software license?"

• Microsoft Copilot, stuck in the M365 world, would probably come up empty if that process is documented somewhere else.

• The eesel AI agent, connected to your company’s Confluence or Google Docs, would instantly find the official process, provide the link, and answer the question correctly. That’s one less ticket for your IT team to deal with.

This ability to pull knowledge from everywhere ensures your employees get the right answer from a single place, every time.

Gain total control over your AI in Microsoft Teams workflow and actions

Unlike the "black box" feel of general AI tools, eesel AI gives you a fully customizable workflow engine. You’re in the driver’s seat, telling your AI exactly how to behave.

You can set the AI’s persona and tone of voice so it fits your company culture. More importantly, you can define the specific actions it can take.

For example, you could set up your IT support agent to automate triage. If a question contains the word "VPN," the agent can automatically tag the conversation. If it can’t find an answer in the knowledge base, it can use a custom action to create a new ticket in Jira Service Management and assign it to the network team. This kind of detailed control turns your AI from a simple Q&A bot into a real workflow machine.

Deploy your AI in Microsoft Teams with confidence using a risk-free simulation

One of the biggest worries businesses have about AI is uncertainty. How do you know if it will work correctly before you let it loose on your employees?

eesel AI helps with this through a powerful simulation mode. Before going live, you can test your AI agent on thousands of your company’s past support conversations. The dashboard shows you exactly how the AI would have responded to each question, giving you an accurate forecast of its performance, how many issues it would solve, and the time it will save your team. This takes away the guesswork, so you can deploy it with confidence.

Comparing AI in Microsoft Teams solutions

To figure out the best path for your organization, it helps to see everything side-by-side. The table below breaks down the key differences between the native assistant, common third-party bots, and a specialized agent platform like eesel AI.

It’s also important to talk about security. As some sysadmins have pointed out, external users can sometimes bring unauthorized AI recording bots into meetings, creating major compliance and security risks, especially when sensitive information is being discussed. Using an internally managed and deployed solution like eesel AI gives your administrators full control, ensuring that your data stays secure and compliant without you having to worry about rogue bots.

Feature	Microsoft Copilot	3rd-Party Meeting Bots (e.g., Read.ai)	eesel AI
Primary Use Case	Personal productivity, M35 content creation & summary.	Meeting recording, transcription, and summarization.	Autonomous internal support (IT, HR), unifying company-wide knowledge.
Knowledge Sources	Microsoft 365 (SharePoint, Outlook, etc.).	The meeting itself.	100+ integrations (Confluence, Google Docs, Zendesk, etc.).
Customization	Limited to prompts and basic settings.	Limited to bot name and summary formats.	Full control over prompts, persona, actions, and workflows.
Deployment	Enabled by admin via license.	User-level sign-up, joins meetings as a participant.	Self-serve setup in minutes, with risk-free simulation mode.
Pricing Model	Per user / month (e.g., $30/user/mo).	Per user / month, often with a free tier.	Based on usage (AI interactions), not per-seat. More predictable.

Choosing the right AI in Microsoft Teams for your team

So, what’s the takeaway here? The right AI strategy for Microsoft Teams really comes down to what you’re trying to do.

If your goal is to give individual employees a productivity boost for tasks within the Microsoft world, then Microsoft Copilot is a powerful and well-integrated choice. It’s built for that job and does it well.

But if your goal is to automate entire business processes, reduce the number of repetitive internal support questions, and create a single source of truth for your team, you need a specialized platform. An AI that can connect to all your knowledge, follow your exact rules, and prove its worth before you even turn it on is no longer just a nice idea, it’s becoming a necessity.

Get started with smarter AI in Microsoft Teams

Ready to move beyond simple summaries and build a truly helpful support agent for your team? With eesel AI, you can connect all your knowledge sources and launch a powerful AI assistant in Microsoft Teams in just a few minutes, not months. See for yourself how easy it is to automate support and give your team the instant answers they need.

Start your eesel AI free trial today.

Or, if you’d like a guided tour, you can always book a demo with our team.