Does Microsoft Teams Have an AI Assistant? What Teams AI Costs and What It Covers

Yes. Microsoft Teams has AI built in, branded as intelligent recap, but it does not come with a standard Teams license. Microsoft requires either a Teams Premium license at $10 per user per month paid yearly, or a Microsoft 365 Copilot license at $18 per user per month annually for Business. Audio recap requires Copilot specifically.

That is the answer most buyers are actually looking for, because the question behind "does Teams have an AI assistant" is almost always "do we have to pay again." You do. Below is what each license unlocks, the two admin policy settings that quietly cripple the feature if they are off, what it costs at real headcounts, and the part of the job none of these licenses do.

Does Microsoft Teams have an AI assistant?

Teams has AI meeting features rather than a single assistant you talk to. The feature set is called intelligent recap, and after a meeting it gives users AI meeting notes, AI recommended tasks, a speaker timeline showing who spoke and when, personalized markers for when your name was mentioned, and meeting chapters that break a long call into jumpable topics. It covers scheduled meetings, meet now, events, and both PSTN and VoIP calls.

Microsoft states the licensing requirement plainly in its admin documentation: "You must assign a Teams Premium license or Microsoft 365 Copilot license to your users. For audio recap, you must assign a Microsoft 365 Copilot license." There is no free tier of this. A company paying for Microsoft 365 Business Standard and using Teams every day has no intelligent recap until somebody buys an add-on.

One more constraint worth knowing before you buy for a large group: for Teams events, intelligent recap is available only to organizers, co-organizers and presenters. Attendees do not get it. If your use case is giving 200 people a recap of an all-hands, this is not the feature that does it.

Teams Premium vs Microsoft 365 Copilot: what each license unlocks

These get confused constantly, and the confusion is expensive because Copilot costs roughly twice what Premium does. Teams Premium is a meetings add-on. Copilot is a Microsoft 365 wide assistant that happens to also cover meetings.

Capability	Standard Teams license	Teams Premium	Microsoft 365 Copilot
US price	Included in Microsoft 365	$10 per user per month, paid yearly	$18 per user per month annual (Business), $30 enterprise
AI meeting notes and recommended tasks	No	Yes	Yes
Speaker timeline, topics, chapters	No	Yes	Yes
Audio recap of up to eight meetings	No	No	Yes
Works in Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint	No	No	Yes
Watermarking, end-to-end encryption, meeting branding	No	Yes	No
Real-time translated captions	No	Yes	No

Read that table twice if you are about to buy. Premium and Copilot overlap on recap and diverge everywhere else. If what you want is meeting security controls and branding, Copilot is the wrong purchase at twice the price. If what you want is AI inside Excel and Outlook, Premium will not give you a single thing there.

The two policy settings that quietly break Teams recap

This is the part that generates support tickets three weeks after a rollout. The license is necessary but not sufficient. Intelligent recap also depends on admin policy.

Transcription must be turned on, separately, for meetings and events, for group VoIP calls, and for one-to-one and PSTN calls. Without transcription there is nothing for the AI to read. Then recording: Microsoft is direct about the consequence of leaving it off, saying that if recording is turned off, users "experience recap without the recording, speakers, topics, and chapters." You keep the notes and the recommended tasks, and you lose most of what made the demo impressive.

That trade-off matters more than it sounds, because plenty of offices turn recording off on purpose. Client-facing teams in all-party consent states, HR teams handling sensitive conversations, and anyone with a legal hold policy often block recording deliberately. Those offices buy Teams Premium and get a stripped version of it, which is worth knowing before the purchase order goes out, not after.

Video recap has its own conditions on top: the meeting has to be at least 10 minutes long, and it is not available for meetings that were transcribed but not recorded. Audio recap, the Copilot-only feature, summarizes up to eight meetings into one podcast-style episode and stores it for 60 days in the user's OneDrive under Recordings, then AudioRecaps.

How much does an AI assistant for Microsoft Teams cost?

Per seat, which is the number that surprises people. Teams Premium at $10 per user per month and Copilot Business at $18 both scale linearly with headcount, and both are annual commitments.

Office size	Teams Premium per year	Copilot Business per year
10 people	$1,200	$2,160
25 people	$3,000	$5,400
50 people	$6,000	$10,800

A useful cost control most buyers miss: you do not have to license everyone. Intelligent recap is assigned per user, so licensing the eight people who actually run client meetings costs $960 a year rather than $6,000. Microsoft sells per seat, but nothing forces you to buy every seat. Our full breakdown of what these tools run across the category is in the AI meeting assistant cost guide.

How do I add an AI assistant to Microsoft Teams?

For Microsoft's own AI, it is an admin job in this order:

1. Buy and assign Teams Premium or Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
2. Turn on the transcription policy for meetings and events, and separately for calls if you want call recap.
3. Decide your recording policy, knowing that off means no speakers, topics or chapters.
4. Tell users the Recap tab is where it lives, in the Teams calendar and in the meeting chat.

For a third-party assistant, the path is different and usually faster. An admin consents once to delegated Microsoft Graph permissions, then each person signs in with their normal Microsoft account. No per-seat license purchase, no policy change, and it works whether or not recording is allowed, because a transcript is enough.

What Teams AI still will not do

Every license above stops at the same place: the summary. Intelligent recap gives you AI recommended tasks, and recommended is the operative word. Nothing assigns them to a person, nothing puts a date on them, and nothing checks on Thursday whether the thing promised on Monday happened.

In practice, that is where meeting output dies. The notes are excellent, the action items are listed, and the document is never opened again. The office manager who used to walk over and ask about it is doing something else, so six commitments quietly become zero. If you want the recap to actually turn into finished work, you need something that owns the follow-through, which is what our AI assistant for Microsoft Teams does: every action item gets a named owner and a due date, the recap email is drafted for approval, and the open items get chased in Teams chat until they close or get killed on purpose.

The other quiet gap is meetings that are really a different process wearing a meeting's clothes. First-round hiring calls are the clearest example. They are structured, repetitive and scored against the same criteria every time, so recapping them is solving the wrong half of the problem, and it is usually cheaper to screen the first round on a call that runs itself than to have a coordinator sit through twelve of them and read twelve recaps afterward.

Which one should you buy?

• You want meeting summaries and nothing else: Teams Premium, licensed only to the people who run meetings.
• You want AI across Word, Excel and Outlook too: Microsoft 365 Copilot. Do not buy Premium as a cheaper substitute, it covers different ground.
• You need watermarking, end-to-end encryption or meeting branding: Teams Premium, and Copilot will not help.
• Your office blocks recording: neither add-on delivers its full value. A transcript-based assistant is the better fit.
• Your problem is that nothing gets done after the meeting: no Microsoft license solves this. You need something that assigns and chases.
• Half your company lives in Slack: Microsoft's AI stops at the Microsoft boundary. Look at the AI note taker roundup for tools that cross it.

Frequently asked questions

Is Copilot included in Microsoft Teams?

No. Microsoft 365 Copilot is a separate paid license at $18 per user per month annually for Business and $30 for enterprise plans, and it must be added on top of a qualifying Microsoft 365 license. Teams includes no Copilot functionality by default, which is why intelligent recap is unavailable to standard Teams users.

Does Teams Premium include Copilot?

No, they are separate licenses at separate prices. They overlap on intelligent recap, which either one unlocks, but Premium does not give you Copilot in Word, Excel or Outlook, and it does not unlock audio recap. Copilot in turn does not give you Premium's watermarking, meeting branding or real-time translated captions.

Can I get Teams meeting summaries without Teams Premium?

Not from Microsoft. A Copilot license unlocks the same recap, and third-party AI notetakers produce summaries from the meeting transcript without either add-on. Those tools connect through Microsoft Graph rather than through a per-seat Microsoft license, so the cost structure is different and usually lower for a small office.

How do I remove the AI assistant from Teams?

For Microsoft's own AI, unassign the Teams Premium or Copilot license in the Microsoft 365 admin center, or turn off the transcription policy to stop recap being generated. For a third-party assistant, revoke the app's consent in the admin center under enterprise applications, which cuts access immediately for every user in the tenant.

Does the AI notetaker in Teams need someone to record the meeting?

Recap works with transcription alone, but in a reduced form. Microsoft's documentation says that with recording turned off, users get recap without the recording, speakers, topics and chapters. You keep AI notes and recommended tasks. Video recap requires recording and a meeting of at least 10 minutes.

Is there an AI assistant for Teams that also schedules the meeting?

Intelligent recap runs after the fact and does not book anything. Scheduling assistants read your Outlook availability, propose times in the guest's time zone and send the invite with the Teams link attached once you approve. The category is compared honestly, including the free native Microsoft option, in our AI scheduling assistant roundup.

Licensing requirements and feature limitations quoted from Microsoft Learn documentation on intelligent recap for Teams calls, meetings and events. Prices verified at microsoft.com in July 2026 and subject to change.