Learn Copilot, nine lessons.

Ground every prompt in something specific

Copilot's advantage over a general chatbot is that it can see your work: your files, your mail, your meetings. A prompt that does not point at any of that is throwing away the only thing that makes it worth the licence.

What good looks like: a draft with references back to the source files, so you can click through and check anything that looks off.

Regenerate instead of rewriting your prompt

Copilot Chat has a Regenerate action with Try Again and Switch Model. When an answer is nearly right, the instinct is to retype the whole request. Usually you just need another pass, or a different model behind the same prompt.

Switch Model matters more than it sounds. Different models are genuinely better at different jobs, and the same prompt can produce a noticeably better answer simply by being handled by a model suited to it.

You can now pick Claude inside Copilot Chat

As of July 2026, Anthropic's Claude is available as a model option in Copilot Chat, for complex analysis, document understanding and structured content generation.

This quietly ends the "which one should we buy" argument for a lot of businesses. If your work lives in Microsoft 365 and you occasionally need harder reasoning over a long document, you can now reach for that without leaving the place your work already is.

Copilot Notebooks: a place to put the context

Notebooks give you a shared space to gather the material for a piece of work, then work from it repeatedly rather than re-attaching the same files every time. Since July you can add Outlook emails as references, which matters because in most businesses the actual decisions are sitting in a mail thread rather than in a document.

What good looks like: the contradiction found, because the email thread and the contract are finally being read together instead of separately.

Copilot Cowork: ask for the finished thing

Cowork became generally available worldwide in June 2026. It is agentic: you define the task, it plans, executes and returns a completed deliverable rather than a draft or a recommendation.

The change in how you phrase things is the whole skill. Stop asking for the next step and start describing the finished state, including what "done" means.

Vision: show it, do not describe it

Vision arrived in July 2026. You can show Copilot what is on your screen, or point your phone camera at something, and ask about it in a voice conversation. It uses that visual context to explain what you are looking at and suggest next steps.

The obvious business use is the one nobody predicted: error messages, unfamiliar software, and equipment. Describing a dialog box accurately is harder than showing it.

Copilot in SharePoint is already on

From 16 June 2026, Copilot in SharePoint began rolling out on by default for everyone with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, with new capabilities for creating content, automating work and getting answers out of what is stored there.

Worth saying plainly: this is not something you switch on when you are ready. If you are licensed, it is on. Which makes lesson 9 urgent rather than optional.

Meetings, where most teams get their first real win

Meeting recap is the feature that converts sceptics, because the value is obvious and immediate: what was decided, who owns what, and what got missed. It is also the safest place to start, since a summary of a meeting you attended is easy to sanity-check.

What good looks like: a short, boring, useful list. The instruction not to summarise the discussion is what makes it usable.

The lesson that decides whether the other eight work

Copilot reads what your permissions let it read. That single sentence explains almost every Copilot rollout that has gone badly.

If your SharePoint and Teams sharing has drifted over the years, and in most businesses we take over it has, then Copilot does not create an oversharing problem. It surfaces the one you already had, instantly, to everyone with a licence. Someone asks an innocent question and gets an answer sourced from a document they were never meant to see.

We insist on fixing sharing before a rollout, and it is the least popular advice we give, because it is unglamorous and it delays the exciting part. It is also the difference between a rollout that lands and one that gets paused after a fortnight.

The short version: review who has access to what, tighten the defaults, deal with the sites that have grown broad access by accident, and only then hand out licences broadly.