How to remove Fireflies AI from Microsoft Teams

Read the three-minute claim narrowly. It is about transcript and notes creation. Fireflies does not say what happens to audio captured during those minutes, and it does not say nothing was captured. If that distinction matters for the meeting, the reliable move is to keep the bot out, which is what the rest of this page is about.

This is the part that is specific to Teams and that Fireflies’ own article skips entirely. Teams assigns every participant a role, and Microsoft’s roles table lists Remove participants as available to the organizer, co-organizers, and presenters. Attendees do not have it.

So if you open the participant list and there is no remove option next to Fireflies, you are an attendee. Ask the organizer or a presenter to do it, or ask the organizer to promote you. In meetings where the organizer has set everyone else to attendee, which is common for large or external calls, that is the only route.

Turn it off. In Fireflies, open Settings, then Recording & Privacy, and toggle off Auto-record meetings.

Or narrow when it joins. Open Settings, then Meeting Settings, and change Auto-join calendar meetings. Fireflies documents four options: all meetings with a web-conference link, only meetings that I own, only meetings with teammates, and only when I invite fred@fireflies.ai. The same dropdown is reachable from the Upcoming panel on the dashboard under Calendar meeting settings. The last option is usually what people wanted in the first place.

For workspace admins. Fireflies documents an Integrations Permissions page under Settings, then Team, which lets an admin see which team members are connected to each integration and, in Fireflies’ words, remotely disconnect or remove integration access when needed. That is the control for a colleague’s bot inside your own Fireflies workspace. It does nothing about a bot from another company.

Nothing in a Fireflies account can cancel a bot that somebody else’s account invited. For that, the controls live in Teams, and there are two of them with different reach.

Block the app in the admin center. Microsoft documents the path: sign in to the Teams admin center, go to Teams apps, then Manage apps, select the app, and choose Block. The org-wide app settings on the same page can disallow all third-party apps. Microsoft also states that guests in your tenant follow your org-wide app policies, so a blocked app is blocked for them too.

Here is the limit. That block governs your tenant’s app catalog. A Fireflies bot invited by someone at another company does not install anything in your tenant; it joins through the meeting link as a participant. Neither Microsoft nor Fireflies publishes a statement that an app block stops that. We looked for one and did not find it, so treat the admin-center block as necessary for your own people and not sufficient for outsiders.

Use the lobby. This is the control that reaches external bots. Microsoft documents that if you set the meeting policy Who can bypass the lobby to anything except Everyone, anonymous joiners wait in the lobby, where an organizer or presenter decides whether to admit them. The org-wide toggle Anonymous users can join a meeting, under Meetings, then Meeting settings, then Participants, decides whether anonymous users can join at all; Microsoft notes it is phasing that org-wide toggle out in favor of a per-organizer policy with the same name. Our reading of Fireflies’ own auto-join guide draws the same line: joining a meeting is not the same as capturing it, and a bot that is held in the lobby is not recording.

The trade-off is real. A lobby that holds bots also holds human guests, and somebody has to admit them. For most organizations that is an acceptable cost, and it is the only documented control that works regardless of which vendor the bot came from.

Fireflies publishes a revoke-access article for Google Calendar, and it says the complete removal is deleting the Fireflies account: Settings, then Account, then Delete my account. We could not find a Microsoft-specific equivalent. Until Fireflies documents one, the options with a source behind them are the Auto-record toggle above, the admin Integrations Permissions page, and account deletion. If you also want your Teams admin to remove Fireflies’ consent from your Microsoft 365 tenant, that is done in Entra under enterprise applications, which Microsoft documents separately and which is outside what this page verified.

Every step above exists because a cloud notetaker needs the meeting audio on its servers, and a bot in the participant list is how it gets there. Capture on the participant’s own machine and there is no participant to remove, no role question, and no lobby to configure.

Minutes is that version: it records device-side and transcribes locally with whisper.cpp, writing markdown to your own disk. Nothing joins the call and no audio is uploaded. To be exact about our own limits, conversation content leaves your machine when you send it somewhere: a summarizer you configured, or an AI agent you connect and ask to read your meetings. Out of the box neither is happening, and the full list is on our security page. The direct comparison is at Fireflies and Minutes.

Device-side capture does not change one thing: tell people you are recording. The bot’s single virtue was announcing itself. The legal detail is in recording consent law by state.