Carbon dioxide is a sufficient and important carbon resource, which has been widely used as a C1 building block in synthetic chemistry. Carbonylations with CO are important processes in industry. However, due to the toxicity of CO, its storage and transport are problematic. Attentions are gradually focused on using other safe reagents to be the CO surrogates in carbonylation reactions. This review focuses on the summary of recent developments in using CO₂ as a CO surrogate in homogeneous catalysis. Reductive processes by using H₂, Si‐H, alcohols, etc and redox‐neutral processes are separately summarized.