Imagine having a personal assistant that helps you navigate your daily tasks effortlessly. Microsoft 365 Copilot offers just that, allowing you to work smarter, not harder. And the best part? You don’t need to be a prompt engineer to use it.

Here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we found 10 scenarios for using Copilot every day in an experience we’re calling Monday morning with Copilot. Many of the scenarios are one-click actions, making them beginner-friendly. They’ve been thoroughly researched and tested by our Copilot Readiness team.

“We did over a month’s work of surveying different groups to find out what their daily top Copilot scenarios are,” says Cadie Kneip, a readiness business program manager on the Readiness team in Microsoft Digital. “Our extended team whittled them down to ten, from over 100. They had to be things you could use every single day.”

Originally our Readiness team did an intensive training called the Copilot Power Hour. “It was like drinking from a firehose,” says David VanGilder, also a readiness business program manager in Microsoft Digital.

We winnowed the good ideas we got from that exercise down to 10 scenarios that we thought would be a good way for teams like yours to get started using Copilot. “We made sure to focus on those that are for everybody,” VanGilder says. “It’s not for power users.”

Once our 10 scenarios were defined and learning assets made available to Microsoft employees, Microsoft Digital partnered with the MAGIC Skilling Team in our Customer Success Engineering organization that creates impactful and educational customer-facing learning content for Microsoft customers.

“We were able to integrate the scenarios into a robust skilling model that provides an easy-to-follow path for customers to onboard and extend their knowledge of Copilot,” says Tricia Gill, a principal program manager on the MAGIC team. “This is enabling us to help customers realize value even faster.”

The partnership between the two teams has been key, says John Martin, a director of skilling on the MAGIC team. “We love to see how our efforts as Customer Zero translate beyond Microsoft,” Martin says.

Catch up on long email threads with Copilot in Outlook

This is one of many tips that don’t need a prompt—you just open a thread and select the Summarize button. Copilot then provides a summary at the top of your email.

You could use this when your boss adds you to an email thread that has been going on for a long time and asks you to solve a problem that’s buried somewhere in all those many emails back and forth. Copilot can save you the 30 minutes it might take to wade through the entire thread.

“It has annotations of where it found things,” VanGilder says. “If you click the number, it’ll take you to the source, so you can get the full story.”

Recap Teams meetings with Copilot in Teams

You can use this tip to recap an entire meeting, or if you join late, you can recap only the part you missed.

For example, when you return from vacation, instead of spending days catching up by watching the recordings of several meetings, you can quickly read a text summary of each meeting.

“With Copilot, the prompt ‘Recap the meeting so far’ gets you caught up when you’re five minutes late, and you don’t have to disrupt the meeting by asking,” VanGilder says.

Summarize your week with Copilot

Say you’re working on two or three major projects and several minor projects. It can be a lot to keep track of.

With this prompt, Copilot shows you the past week of chats and emails, and you can easily see them in a table that includes whether you’ve responded.

“What’s really lovely about this one is that people already know how to do the first half of this prompt,” VanGilder says. “But the second part, to put it the results in a table—that creates a nice display of results. I was able to get caught up on all my projects quickly.”

Generate meeting notes with Copilot in Teams

Copilot can list key topics and action items from a meeting. If you’re the meeting host, this can be very helpful, as you’re probably used to spending the meeting with your nose buried in OneNote. With Copilot taking your notes, you can be an active participant in your meetings.

“There’s more than one way to use this functionality,” VanGilder says. “Instead of clicking ‘Generate meeting notes,’ I can type in the prompt and add ‘and put the results in the form of an email I can send to participants.’ I do quickly proofread it because it’s not called Pilot, it’s Copilot, so you do need to check its work!”

Draft email with Copilot in Outlook

Of course, many of us are experts in sending and receiving emails for work. But sometimes you have an email that’s especially challenging.

For example, it could be that there’s some friction about the subject, and you want some help in being diplomatic. Or maybe the recipient doesn’t want or need a lot of technical details, and you’d like some help making it understandable to a general audience.

“This is one that will help you look good,” Kneip says.

Get ready for your day with Copilot

In movies and TV shows, when a busy executive walks into their office, an assistant is standing there to say, “Good morning, So-and-so called about the XYZ project, and you have a meeting at 9 o’clock with the Such-and-such team.”

This tip turns Copilot into that assistant for you. It summarizes a lot of things from the preceding day—emails, Teams messages, and meetings. It also gives you a table of your upcoming meetings for the day.

You don’t have to use the part of the prompt that requests an “inspirational tone” and “a touch of fun,” but it shows the power of Copilot prompts. “It’s a good example that shows how users can tailor the prompts,” Kneip says.

Discover what was said with Copilot

This tip is for when you remember that someone messages you, but you can’t find their message, or you want to know what a key stakeholder said about a project.

“This prompt uses the Context IQ, and that’s really the magic of Copilot,” VanGilder says, referring to the forward slash (“/”) you type when entering the prompt. “You can use it to search for documents, meetings, or people.”

Boost your brainstorms with Copilot

This tip also uses the smart search feature of Context IQ. You might not use it daily, but it can save you a lot of time.

The Microsoft Digital readiness team used this to come up with Camp Copilot, a three-week training program. “The prompt we gave was, ‘I want to do a fun, interactive, summer training session for employees. Can you come up with a few ideas?’” Kneip says.

One Copilot user came up with an innovative use that’s similar. They used Copilot to write an email responding to a customer complaint, using the company guidelines for such responses. After refining Copilot’s draft email into the final version, they said the Copilot draft was 70-80% complete.

Create presentations from your ideas and files with Copilot in PowerPoint

You probably won’t use this tip every day, but it’s helpful because it removes the struggle of staring at a blank page.

“People will collect information from customers, put it into a Word document, and then use Copilot to convert it into a PowerPoint presentation,” VanGilder says. “It has a lot of use in training and selling.”

Uncover relevant files with Copilot

If you’ve ever needed to find a file but couldn’t remember exactly what it was named or where it was located—and who hasn’t?—then this tip’s for you. Copilot can search for a specific project or topic.

The prompt was suggested by an attorney at Microsoft, who asked if Copilot could help find files. VanGilder’s response was, “Give it a try and let me know what happens.” And it worked!

“This one’s an exciting prompt that people are absolutely in love with, to quickly find what you’re looking for,” VanGilder says.

We hope these top 10 scenarios help you and your organization get more out of Copilot. When people see how easy these tips are—many of them need just a click or two—they’ll be able to save time and mental effort.

Check out our full Monday morning with Copilot exerpience.

To learn more about Microsoft Copilot and tools for product management, join us here at Copilot for Work.

• Driving Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption with an assist from Microsoft Viva.
• Driving Copilot for Microsoft 365 adoption with our Copilot Champs Community.
• Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot in four chapters.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.
• Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Unlock your productivity: Here are our Top 10 tips for using Microsoft 365 Copilot every day appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

When our internal communicators needed to get the word out about Microsoft 365 Copilot, they turned to Microsoft Viva Amplify, our new product that would allow them to do so quickly, across many internal channels at once.

Viva Amplify, with its “write once, publish everywhere” approach, allows our internal communicators to reach employees easily in Microsoft Viva Engage and other distribution channels. It also gives them the ability to monitor the effectiveness of their outreach, so they know how well they’re reaching people in each channel they use. (Read our story on deploying Amplify internally at Microsoft here.)

“People are excited about the ability to create a publication in one place and send it to many channels at once with very limited rework needed,” says Sam Crewdson, a principal program manager in Microsoft Digital, the company’s internal IT organization. “That they also get rich, consolidated analytics across all of those channels; it really is a powerful one-two punch.”

The Viva Amplify product team recently added Viva Engage as a distribution channel internally at Microsoft, something communicators from across the company were waiting for (it will soon be added to Amplify for external customers as well).

“Many were like, ‘This is cool, but I really want Viva Engage,’” says Sarah Lundy, a senior content program manager on the IT communications team in Microsoft Digital. “I think some were waiting for that key channel because Viva Engage is so key to our communication efforts at Microsoft.”

Communicating with Viva Amplify to Viva Engage

Victoria Martinez and Melissa Cafiero, both senior content program managers in Microsoft Digital, use Viva Engage and Viva Amplify to communicate about Microsoft 365 Copilot, which rolled out across the company earlier this calendar year. They started small last year, with a private preview of Copilot for a limited number of employees. They created a Viva Engage community to share news and updates among this limited group.

Viva Engage was added to Viva Amplify in June. If it had been available when the Copilot private preview began, the communications team estimates they would have been able to do even more. For example, they could have easily replicated email content and customized it for Viva Engage, their top internal communications channel.

“Now that Viva Amplify supports Viva Engage, we’re using it all the time for posting Copilot promotional materials, sending helpful tips and links to live trainings,” Martinez says.

This feature has been well received by communicators across the company.

“Viva Engage users were happy to add Amplify to their toolbox,” Crewdson says. “It’s been very successful.”

Communicating about Copilot with Viva Amplify

If you want to harness the power of Viva Amplify to communicate internally about Copilot, you can take advantage of Martinez and Cafiero’s hard work. They created a pre-built campaign that’s available in Viva Amplify, called the Copilot Deployment Kit. To access it, select the banner in Viva Amplify labeled “Get started quickly with even more pre-built campaigns.”

“Viva Amplify is a key tool for companies looking to land Copilot and get value for the licenses they’ve bought for their employees,” Lundy says. “You can run social campaigns, send launch communications, publish SharePoint training materials—all through Viva Amplify.”

Besides Viva Engage, Viva Amplify has many powerful features that enable communicators to reach more users effectively. With Viva Amplify, communicators can build a single communication to start with, then send it to multiple channels: email, SharePoint, blog posts, Teams, and, of course, Engage.

“We can do it all in Amplify, which makes it really easy and seamless,” Cafiero says. “Also, it promotes consistency and cohesiveness in communications.”

You can customize your communications for each channel by adjusting voice and tone.

“Each channel’s a little different,” Cafiero says. “A blog might be more formal. You can be shorter and snappier on Engage because it’s a social channel.”

Another powerful feature of Viva Amplify is centralized data.

“If a communicator wanted to measure success before Viva Amplify, they would have to go to many different places, including third-party tools,” Crewdson says. “Now you can get consolidated analytics across all those endpoints in a single place, represented in a consistent way.”

The time-saving benefits of Viva Amplify in both creating and tracking communications are significant. Martinez and Cafiero estimate they’ve experienced a savings of 25% in drafting communications, and 50–75% in tracking metrics.

Viva Amplify also enables sharing responsibilities. Multiple people can contribute to a communication and review it, and the people who author the communication don’t have to be the ones to publish it. This feature was helpful to Lundy when a long-scheduled trip conflicted with a release date.

“I was able to leave my coworker with everything ready to go,” Lundy says. “I could prep it all for her and she could publish when she got the word that it was time.”

The future of communicating with Viva Amplify and Viva Engage

Lundy sees Viva Engage as the future of how people will consume information at work. It’s a more social way of communicating, with two-way dialog and opportunities to engage informally and directly with leadership. 

There’s already been an increase in adoption of Viva Amplify since adding Viva Engage, including more people who aren’t professional communicators by job title. For example, program managers are also using it.

“We’re starting to see a hockey-stick shaped uptick in adoption and there’s lots of good stuff to come,” Crewdson says. “The next six to twelve months are going to be really exciting. We’re going to bring the power of Copilot to Viva Amplify. It will help you create concise, effective content. But more, this fall we’re going to release AI capabilities around design ideas. So not only will it help you write great copy, but it’s going to look great too.”

Viva Amplify will also provide even more help with analysis.

“In the future, there’s so much opportunity to provide deeper insights,” Lundy says. “It can tell us, ‘When you send a shorter communication at 7:00 AM, it performs better than longer emails.’”

The value of these tactical improvements is that Viva Amplify will be able to support communicators in their expanded roles.

“We’re not just sending an email about the latest re-org,” Lundy says. “There are elements of change management, leadership messaging, and crisis management. Viva Amplify is beginning to support communicators by allowing them to focus on the big-picture strategy: how their leader is positioned, how employees adopt the right changes at the company. It has the power to free up communicators for the strategic role they often play.”

Here are some suggestions for getting started with Viva Amplify at your company:

• Try out the Viva Engage distribution channel in Viva Amplify. (It will be released to customers this fall.)
• Try out Viva Amplify templates. Author a publication and then save it as a template for consistent branding, look, and feel across your publications.
• Try the new pre-built campaigns in Viva Amplify. The Microsoft Digital team has released one for Microsoft 365 Copilot and one for general AI adoption.

Get started with Viva Amplify.

• Explore our guide for deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Check out our Copilot Deployment Kit.
• Learn more about Microsoft Viva Engage.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.
• Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Transforming internal communications at Microsoft with Viva Amplify and Viva Engage appeared first on Inside Track Blog.