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

“Now it’s like creating a book where the pages are always changing,” says Yannis Paniaras, a principal designer in the Microsoft Digital Studio. “At the critical junction in the UX, where humans interact with Copilot, the AI transforms into the conductor of the user experience. This shift is enabling our designers to move away from defining fixed flows to embracing a non-deterministic design style orchestrated by the AI.”

Microsoft Digital Studio is our team of designers and researchers in Microsoft Digital. The Microsoft Digital Studio team is committed to using their expertise in design, research, content strategy, accessibility, and product planning to create experiences that empower Microsoft employees to achieve more in their lives.

Paniaras has observed that designing an AI-enabled product is very different from designing a traditional desktop or mobile app. In conversations with designers, program managers, and developers, he frequently encounters questions about how various product-making disciplines should coordinate their work in this new context.

“We have Copilot, powered by a large language model (LLM), and we use Fluent AI design language for experiences that rely on lean graphical user interfaces with dynamic prompts and dynamically generated, contextual cards,” Paniaras says. “These provide just-in-time user interface elements that map to the generative flow. Consequently, designers are shifting their focus from standard UI towards the vocabulary of prompts, dynamically designed adaptive cards, and on finding consistency withing the UX context. These elements are becoming the new building blocks of AI-based UX design.”

The Microsoft Digital Studio team’s designers still work in Figma, the popular design and prototyping tool, but their designs need to remain open-ended and sometimes more abstract, rather than a set of fixed linear designs.

“The design becomes a set of probabilities,” Paniaras says. “While this poses a challenge for designers, it also encourages us to collaborate more closely with everyone else.”

Laura Bergstrom, a principal UX manager for the Unified Employee Experience team, adds that content designers and designers on her team developed guidance for engineers to scale Copilot responses creating consistent, reliable responses with the right tone of voice at the right time.

“With all the power of generative AI, user experience and design are still responsible for the quality of the experience and the outcome, so we’re finding ways to scale working with engineering and data science,” Bergstrom says.

Spurring collaboration with AI

Using AI to quickly align plans and goals is causing a shift in the way the entire product-making crew works together. “All the different disciplines are working together to get things in place,” Paniaras says.

He tells a story of a designer who worked concurrently with PMs and engineers to design prompts, comparing it with the previous way of doing things.

“It used to be different: you had research, based on that you would have ideas, prototype certain things, build them, then engineers would test them,” Paniaras says. “It was more linear.”

Modern engineering with AI requires a shift to a more collaborative culture on product teams, where there aren’t clear lines of ownership and people can work flexibly together. It’s similar to the shift that engineering went through from the waterfall approach to agile, when instead of owning specific pieces, engineers swarmed over one part of the product for a sprint, then swarmed on another part in the next sprint.

Transitional UI interfaces

Victor Albahadly, a senior UX designer on the Microsoft Digital Studio team, says AI has potential to transform the way he does his core job, which is to test to find out where the designs he and his team build breakdown and fail to meet the needs of the people who will use them.

“I need to figure out what the user wants,” Albahadly says. “When we build an application, I need to know where they are coming from, what they want to do, and where the experience that we’re building for them will break down.”

The challenge is that he has to sample the experiences users have with his designs and extrapolate what he learns to the rest of the design. And importantly, he does this at scale—not for just one person, but for all the people who use the application.

“I need to test how the experience will work for many people,” he says. “That’s an intense process.”

AI has the potential to change that because it will be able to see everything—something a human will never be able to do on their own.

“With AI’s help, someday in the near future, I’ll be able to test the entire application,” Albahadly says. “There will be a lot of power in that.”

AI can help designers get this kind of scale at every step in the process, which not only makes the results far more accurate, but also much faster.

Transforming user testing with AI

The future of ideation

Albahadly also envisions AI enhancing parts of the design process. Today, ideation is done by talking to experts and customers, holding brainstorming sessions, and doing workshops. In the future, he suggests he could do similar ideation with his teammates and AI.

“In your app, say there’s a huge drop-off of traffic coming from Japan,” he says. “Now we need to do a workshop to find out why this is happening. The AI could point to specific stuff like a language barrier or culture barrier, or a time issue like a holiday. Instead of taking a week to ideate, it could become a step in the process the same day.”

In addition to changes in design processes, generative AI is changing the user experience.

“We’ve had a linear way of pumping out experiences—an OS, products on top of it, and apps,” Bergstrom says. “Now there are different copilots, different extensibility, ways of doing things on surfaces. This all has to make sense to a user end-to-end.”

It requires a lot of design thinking to produce that experience.

Data quality is also crucial to producing an experience that makes sense. “Generative AI is a wildcard, which requires data to be more pristine,” Bergstrom says.

For example, the LLM for Microsoft 365 can go through all your emails and SharePoint sites. If you type in “benefits,” it should identify the authoritative source and display that information—not go through your email to find every benefits-related message you’ve ever gotten.

Transforming work with AI

What about the potential of AI to do routine, repetitive work and give people the time to do higher value work? Bergstrom sees a wide range of opportunities.

“We can use generative AI to help employees with everyday tasks, from finding the best place to park to managing the immigration process to identifying the best selections for employee benefits,” Bergstrom says. “And for large enterprises, we can use generative AI to help manage facilities by identifying cost-to-benefit ratios, building usage, and for finding the best locations to have offices.”

Both Bergstrom and Albahadly see an opportunity for AI to help employees write their performance reviews. Bergstrom notes that it could help managers combine review feedback from multiple sources and tie it to OKRs.

And Albahadly says that for employees, AI can help with writing their own performance reviews.

“That’s been a challenge for most Microsoft employees, because at the end of the year, you have to sit and remember everything you worked on,” he says.

Because AI will be exposed to your meetings, your calendar, your projects, it will be easy for it to co-write your review with you.

“In the future, it will be less writing and more selecting stuff, and AI will generate a whole year for you,” Albahadly says.

With all this transformation happening, some people worry about the future of work.

Paniaras is optimistic.

“Everything around us, including our roles, work, processes, and definitions of values, has been created by us humans” he says. “Whenever any of these dimensions change, we inevitably end up redefining them or filling the void. But you need to have that thinking attitude, and the recognition that everything around us is a result of our own making.”

Bergstrom agrees.

“Durable problems don’t change,” she says. “But now we have infinitesimally more ways to solve for those problems with an intelligent assistant that can anticipate needs and predicts possibilities—we’re just trying to figure out how to harness all the capability in our designs.”

Try out Microsoft 365 Copilot to learn what you can do with AI.

Watch John Maeda’s LinkedIn Learning class—UX for AI: Design Practices for AI Developers—to learn more about how collaboration works with AI.

Here are some tips for getting started with generative AI at your company:

1. Embrace AI as a collaborator:
   • Consider AI as a creative partner. It can augment your design process by suggesting patterns, layouts, and interactions.
   • Collaborate with AI tools to generate design variations, explore possibilities, and iterate faster.
2. Understand AI’s capabilities and limitations:
   • Familiarize yourself with the types of AI algorithms commonly used in design, such as neural networks, generative adversarial networks (GANs), and reinforcement learning.
   • Recognize that AI has limitations—it can’t replace human intuition, empathy, or domain expertise. Use it as a tool to enhance your creativity.
3. Design for adaptability and personalization:
   • AI-driven UX should be adaptable and personalized. Create interfaces that adjust dynamically based on user behavior, context, and preferences.
   • Use AI to tailor experiences for individual users, providing relevant content and recommendations.
4. Collect and curate data:
   • AI models require data to learn and improve. Collect relevant user data (with privacy considerations) to train AI algorithms.
   • Curate high-quality datasets that represent diverse user scenarios and behaviors.
5. Iterate and refine AI models:
   • Start with simple AI models and gradually increase complexity. Iterate based on user feedback and real-world usage.
   • Regularly evaluate and fine-tune AI models to ensure they align with user needs and business goals.
6. Ethical considerations:
   • Be mindful of biases in AI algorithms. Ensure fairness, transparency, and inclusivity.
   • Understand the ethical implications of AI-driven decisions and design accordingly.
7. Learn from existing AI-driven products:
   • Study successful AI-powered products and services. Analyze how they integrate AI seamlessly into the user experience.
   • Learn from industry leaders and adapt their best practices to your own projects.

Remember, AI is a powerful tool, but it’s most effective when combined with human creativity and empathy. By embracing AI and understanding its role, UX designers can create innovative, personalized, and adaptive experiences for users.

Find out what you can do with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

• Take this UX for AI: Design Practices for AI Developers class with Microsoft’s John Maeda.
• Explore these five communications-based tips for prompting Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Unpack deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot internally at Microsoft.
• Discover embracing emerging technology at Microsoft with new AI certifications.

• 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.

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