Copilot for Microsoft 365 | Vlad Talks Tech

SharePoint Skills FAQ: Your Webinar Questions Answered

Vlad Catrinescu — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 04:07:27 GMT

The Teams gremlins held my camera hostage for part of my Getting Started with SharePoint Skills webinar, but the questions kept coming, and I ran out of time before I ran out of questions. This SharePoint skills FAQ answers every question from the Q&A panel and the chat, including the ones I answered live, double-checked against Microsoft Learn and Microsoft’s latest updates. If you missed the live session, you can watch the full SharePoint skills webinar recording on my YouTube channel.

Key takeaways

A skill is not a saved prompt. It’s a shared, multi-step workflow that everyone on the site can trigger in plain English, and Copilot in SharePoint doesn’t have saved prompts anyway.
Skills run when someone asks for them in the Copilot in SharePoint chat. They can’t run on a schedule, on a file event, or from Power Automate today.
Personal skills live in your OneDrive and are for you only. To share a skill with your team, create it as a site skill on the team’s SharePoint site.
You protect skill files like any other SharePoint content: break inheritance on the Agent Assets library, and people with View access can still run the skills.
There’s no official application lifecycle management (ALM) for skills yet, so keep a copy of business-critical skills in a central repository and use PnP PowerShell or Microsoft Graph PowerShell for inventory.
A SharePoint agent answers questions about content. Copilot in SharePoint with skills takes action on that content.
Microsoft just announced that Copilot in SharePoint has hit General Availability and also clarified the billing model!

Skills vs Saved Prompts and Other Tools

Why Is a Skill Different From a Saved Prompt?

Microsoft 365 Copilot does let you save prompts in the Copilot Prompt Gallery from Copilot Chat, Teams, and Outlook, but Copilot in SharePoint doesn’t have saved prompts, so on a SharePoint site a skill is the way to package a request people can reuse. There is some overlap in the idea, since both save you from retyping the same instructions. The difference is everything a skill adds on top.

A skill lives on the site, so everyone with View access can run it. Nobody has to find the prompt in a Notepad file or a OneNote page. People just ask in natural language, and Copilot in SharePoint matches the request to the skill through its description. A skill can also chain several steps, load reference files, and call other skills, so it handles long-running tasks a single prompt can’t.

The biggest difference is consistency. A saved prompt behaves differently depending on who runs it, because each person’s memories and customizations shape the answer. A skill documents the process once, so everyone gets the same steps and the same output. Microsoft’s skills documentation says skills let Copilot in SharePoint perform tasks “more consistently than one-off prompts.”

When Should I Use a Skill Instead of a Power Automate Flow, a Copilot Studio Agent, or a SharePoint Agent?

Use a skill when the work stays inside SharePoint and benefits from judgment: reading documents, classifying them, checking them against a rule, and updating lists or libraries based on what it finds. Skills are no-code, multi-step, and use AI to understand intent, but today they can’t connect to external systems or run custom code. That first limit is about to loosen: Copilot in SharePoint is getting support for plugins from your enterprise store, and a plugin can bundle skills and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that connect to other systems. It’s in preview and scheduled to roll out worldwide in December 2026, according to the Microsoft 365 roadmap.

The other three options each fit a different job:

A Power Automate flow is deterministic. It follows the exact same path every time, connects to third-party systems through connectors, and handles formal processes like approvals through Outlook. When the process must never vary, or it has to reach outside Microsoft 365, use a flow.
A SharePoint agent answers questions. It’s grounded in your SharePoint content, but it doesn’t take action on that content.
A Copilot Studio agent is for scenarios beyond SharePoint. Custom engine agents built in Copilot Studio can reach other systems and even trigger actions automatically, without a user asking. They’re also more work to build, deploy, and maintain.

This is exactly the question my October 20 webinar goes deeper on, with scenarios for each option. The registration link is at the end of this post.

Running Skills

Can Skills Run on a Schedule, When a File Is Added, or From Power Automate?

Not today. A skill runs when someone asks for it in the Copilot in SharePoint chat, either with a matching request or by naming the skill. You can’t trigger a skill from a file event, run it on a schedule, or call it from a Power Automate flow.

If what you need is a simple reaction to a file event, SharePoint’s built-in workflows for lists and libraries now cover some of it. In its September 2026 update, Microsoft added workflows that post a Teams message when files are added or metadata changes, and workflows that route approval requests. Those are separate from skills, but they might cover the event-driven part of your scenario.

Is There a Limit to How Many Documents a Skill Can Classify, and Can It Handle 10,000 Files?

I haven’t found a published limit on how many files a skill can process, and I haven’t tested a 10,000-file library myself. I’m checking with the product team and will update this post when I hear back.

What is documented is the usage limit. During the preview, according to the Copilot in SharePoint get-started guide, Copilot in SharePoint applies daily and weekly usage limits to each user. The limits are individual, not shared across your organization, and when you hit one, Copilot features pause until the limit resets automatically. A classification run across thousands of files does a lot of work, so plan for it:

Test the skill on a few selected files first, then on a single folder.
Run large libraries in batches, folder by folder, instead of in one request.
For files that keep arriving, look at autofill columns in SharePoint, which extract metadata as files are uploaded, so you only run the skill once on the backlog.

In the blog post from September 25th, Microsoft has announced the ability to work with Copilot in SharePoint to operate across large content collections, but I do not know yet what large means!

Can a Skill Create Site Pages From a Template and Add Quick Links Web Parts?

Creating pages, yes. Copilot in SharePoint can create pages, and a skill chains Copilot in SharePoint’s built-in capabilities, so page creation can be one of the steps. Whether it can also add and configure a Quick Links web part that points to related pages depends on the page tools available in your tenant.

The quickest way to check is to type --agenttools in the Copilot in SharePoint chat, which lists every action Copilot in SharePoint can run on that site, and look through the page-related tools. The list of tools differs from tenant to tenant, so check yours rather than relying on someone else’s screenshot. Then test the skill on one page before running it across a site.

A skill you create in OneDrive is a personal skill, and personal skills are designed to be yours alone. That’s why you got the message that the skill doesn’t support sharing with everyone who can access the folder. So yes, it comes down to OneDrive instead of SharePoint, though the real distinction is personal versus site scope.

Personal skills are saved as Markdown files in your own OneDrive, under Documents, Copilot, Agent Assets, Skills, and they follow you across every SharePoint site and OneDrive. They’re perfect for your own way of working, like how you want long documents summarized. They rolled out in preview in August 2026 and roll out worldwide in December 2026. Microsoft announced them in its September update, but the Microsoft Learn skills article only covers site skills so far.

To share a skill with your teammates, create it as a site skill instead. Open the Copilot in SharePoint chat on your team’s SharePoint site and create the skill there. It’s saved to that site’s Agent Assets library, and everyone with View access to the site can run it.

How Do I Protect the Skill Files in the Agent Assets Library?

You protect them the same way you protect any other SharePoint content. By default, anyone with Edit permission on the site can create a skill, and anyone with View permission can run one, which means every member of a team site can change the skill files. If you want a tighter model, Microsoft’s documentation points you to breaking permission inheritance on the Agent Assets library and applying more restrictive permissions.

In practice, that means giving members Read on the Agent Assets library and keeping Edit for the owners and the few people who author skills. Members can still run every skill, because running a skill only needs View access. Retention, sensitivity labels, and auditing apply to skill files too, and the library keeps version history, so you can roll a skill back if someone breaks it.

You already spotted the trade-off: once members can’t edit the library, they can’t create skills on that site anymore. The same library holds your SHAREPOINT.md file, so locking it down protects your site context too. The library also holds a Plans folder, so after you change the permissions, sign in as a member and run a skill to confirm everything still works the way you expect.

Governance and Lifecycle Management

Can I Maintain SKILL.md Files With Azure Pipelines in Azure DevOps?

Not officially, and I’ll be honest, this is one of the more disappointing parts of the preview. Skills are managed at the site level, and Microsoft doesn’t offer a supported way to deploy or update them from a pipeline.

In the meantime, a few things help:

Version history. Skills are files in a document library, so every change is versioned and you can restore an earlier version.
Built-in skills that improve your skills. Microsoft ships built-in skills to create, check, and improve skills. In September 2026 they added measured evaluations, where Copilot suggests tests, evaluates the current results, and recommends changes before you share a skill more broadly.
A preview of what’s coming. When you type /skills, the list includes a section for enterprise skills. It was empty in my tenant during the webinar, but it shows where Microsoft is heading for centrally managed skills.
Plugins from your enterprise store. A plugin can bundle skills, and an admin can install it tenant-wide, so once plugin support rolls out you’ll have a governed way to distribute the same skills across sites.

Until then, my recommendation is simple: when a skill becomes business-critical, keep a copy in a central repository you control. That gives you a source of truth even without an official process.

Until Enterprise Skills Arrive, Is PnP PowerShell the Way to Govern Skills?

Yes. Since skills are Markdown files stored in each site’s Agent Assets library, PnP PowerShell works well for building an inventory: loop through your sites, look in the Skills folder of the Agent Assets library, and each subfolder with a SKILL.md file is one skill. Microsoft Graph PowerShell works too. Auditing also applies to skill files, the same as other SharePoint content.

I can’t wait for Microsoft to give us proper governance for skills. Governance for SharePoint skills and agents would make a great future webinar topic too.

SharePoint Agents vs Microsoft 365 Copilot Agents

Every SharePoint site comes with a ready-made agent that answers questions based on that site’s content. People with Edit permission can also create custom agents, which are saved as .agent files in the site’s Site Assets library, scoped to the sites, folders, or files you choose, and tailored with your own instructions.

Custom agents don’t automatically appear in any list, so you share them like any other file. People can open the .agent file, and you can also share a SharePoint agent in Teams group chats and meetings. Site owners also decide what opens when people select the agent icon, either Copilot in SharePoint or a custom agent, and access always follows the site’s permissions.

Keep in mind that SharePoint agents answer questions, while Copilot in SharePoint is the experience that runs skills and takes action. My step-by-step guide to creating SharePoint agents walks through building one.

Is a SharePoint Agent the Same as an Agent Created in Microsoft 365 Copilot?

No. A SharePoint agent lives in its SharePoint site and only uses SharePoint content. An agent you build with Agent Builder in Microsoft 365 Copilot can use knowledge from SharePoint, Teams, Outlook, public websites, and Microsoft 365 Copilot connectors, and you can share it across the organization or submit it to your organization’s catalog.

Where you build it depends on where the content lives and what the agent needs to do:

Build it in SharePoint when the content lives on one site and the audience is that site’s members.
Build it with Agent Builder when the agent needs content from several places, like Teams and Outlook as well as SharePoint. My guide to building Copilot agents with no code in Agent Builder covers the basics.
Build it in Copilot Studio when the agent needs to take actions in other systems or run without a user asking.

Agent Builder agents can do a lot more, but they’re also a bit more work to maintain and deploy.

What This Means for You

Most of these questions come down to the same thing: skills are still a preview feature, and the parts around them, like scheduling, lifecycle management, and governance, haven’t caught up yet. That doesn’t make them less useful today. It means you should be deliberate about where you use them.

If you’re an admin, decide who can edit the Agent Assets library on your important sites before skills spread, and start keeping business-critical skills in a central repository now. If you’re a builder, pick one repetitive task that stays inside SharePoint, build it as a site skill so your whole team can use it, and test it on a small set of files before pointing it at a large library.

Ready to take SharePoint skills further? On October 20, Microsoft MVP Gokan Ozcifci and I are running a free webinar on automating content in SharePoint with Copilot, covering more advanced skills, SharePoint agents, and autofill, and when to reach for each one. Save your seat for the October 20 webinar.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Explained: What It Is and How to Use It

Vlad Catrinescu — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:58:15 GMT

There are over a hundred different Copilot experiences across the Microsoft ecosystem, but the one that changes your daily work the most is Microsoft 365 Copilot. This is the AI assistant that lives directly inside Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams, and the rest of the Microsoft 365 apps you already use, and it is grounded in your own work data. In this post, you will learn what makes Microsoft 365 Copilot different from generic AI tools, where you can use it, and the day-to-day scenarios where it actually saves time.

Key takeaways

Microsoft 365 Copilot is the productivity-focused Copilot offering that has access to the same Microsoft 365 data you do, including emails, files, meetings, chats, calendars, and contacts.
Unlike ChatGPT or Gemini, Microsoft 365 Copilot answers are grounded in your organization’s content through Microsoft Graph, a capability Microsoft calls Work IQ.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is embedded in Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Stream, Loop, Planner, Forms, Whiteboard, and several Microsoft Viva apps.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is the single hub where you can query content across your entire Microsoft 365 environment and run agents your organization has built.
Permissions are security trimmed, so Copilot will never surface data your account does not already have access to.

What is Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot is the productivity-focused Copilot offering, and it is available across almost every Microsoft 365 app. It sits inside the tools you already use every day, so you do not need to leave your workflow to ask it for help. Whether you are drafting an email in Outlook, building a deck in PowerPoint, or running a meeting in Teams, Copilot is one click away.

What makes this Copilot different from a generic chatbot is the data it sees. Microsoft 365 Copilot has access to the same data you do in Microsoft 365, including your emails, files and documents, meetings, chats, calendars, and contacts. And before anyone worries about oversharing, everything is security trimmed. Copilot will never surface data your account does not already have permission to see.

How Microsoft 365 Copilot is different from ChatGPT and Gemini

A generic AI tool like ChatGPT or Gemini is trained on data from across the Internet. That data is a mix of accurate information and noise, and the answer you get back is generic. It is not adapted to you, your team, or your organization’s standards.

Microsoft 365 Copilot works differently. Because it is grounded in your company’s resources, it has access to the projects you have been working on, your documents, your meeting recordings, and your emails. It knows who you work with, your style of writing, and what your company’s standards and requirements look like. The answer it gives back is shaped by your organizational context, not pulled from a generic web crawl.

Microsoft refers to this capability as Work IQ or Microsoft Graph grounding. It is the single biggest reason Microsoft 365 Copilot delivers more useful answers than a public chatbot for work tasks. And you do not lose web access either. If you want, Copilot can still pull information from the Internet on top of your organization’s data.

Where you can use Microsoft 365 Copilot

One of the things I love about Microsoft 365 Copilot is that you do not have to go to a separate website or a separate app to use it. It is embedded directly in your favorite Microsoft 365 apps. You will find Copilot in:

Microsoft 365 apps: Outlook, Excel, Word, OneNote, and PowerPoint
Microsoft 365 services: Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Stream, Loop, Planner, Forms, and Whiteboard
Microsoft Viva apps: Viva Amplify, Viva Engage, Viva Insights, and Viva Glint

On top of that, there is Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, the single hub where you can ask questions about all your Microsoft 365 content in one place and interact with the agents your organization has created. If you have ever wanted one place to query everything across your tenant, Copilot Chat is it.

Catching up on missed meetings with Microsoft 365 Copilot

One of the biggest time sinks in any modern job is catching up on meetings you missed. Watching a 60-minute recording at 1.5x speed still costs you 40 minutes you do not have. Microsoft 365 Copilot fixes this in two ways.

First, every meeting recording in Teams now includes AI-generated notes that recap the discussion. That alone covers most of what you need. Second, when you have specific questions, you can ask Copilot directly. Want the recap condensed into five short bullet points? Ask. Want to know exactly what one specific person said about a budget number? Ask. Copilot will pull the answer from the recording and the transcript.

The same trick works when you join a meeting late. Instead of interrupting the conversation to ask what you missed, you can quietly ask Copilot questions like “Who is in the meeting and what are their roles?” or “What was discussed so far?” Copilot summarizes everything for you, and you can catch up without disrupting the flow.

Transforming content with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Another use case I lean on constantly is content transformation. Imagine you built a polished PowerPoint presentation, and now marketing wants the same content as a blog post. The old workflow was a long copy-paste-rewrite process. With Microsoft 365 Copilot, you open Word, click Copilot at the top, and tell it to write a blog post based on your PowerPoint deck. A few seconds later, you have a draft.

You will probably still want to spend a few minutes adjusting and polishing the output, but the heavy lifting of restructuring slide bullets into flowing paragraphs is done. The same approach works in reverse: turn a Word doc into slides, summarize a long report into talking points, or reformat a meeting transcript into a project brief.

The point is not that Copilot writes perfect prose on the first try. The point is that it removes the blank-page problem and gives you something to react to.

Drafting emails and prepping for your day

Email drafting is another easy win. Tell Copilot what you want to say, and it writes the email for you. Short, professional, in your voice. Done.

But the most powerful Microsoft 365 Copilot scenario, in my experience, is using Copilot Chat to summarize your day. From any device, you can open Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and ask something like, “Summarize my emails and Teams messages and chats from the last 24 hours, and let me know what I need to know in order to be ready for my day.” Copilot delivers a structured summary: an email recap with key points and action items, tasks assigned to you in documents, the most important Teams threads, and anything you need to follow up on.

You can take this further by asking Copilot to help you prepare for your meetings. For each meeting on your calendar, Copilot pulls the purpose, the latest context from chats and emails, what needs to be decided, and even drafts talking points and a client-ready communication. Walking into back-to-back meetings already briefed is a different experience.

What this means for you

Microsoft 365 Copilot is the most concrete productivity shift Microsoft has shipped in years. It is not a side product you have to remember to open. It is woven into every app you already use, and because it is grounded in your work data, the answers are actually relevant to your job.

If you are an IT professional, the practical implication is that your end users are about to ask you a lot of questions about Copilot. Knowing where it lives, what data it can see, and how the security trimming works should be table stakes. If you are an end user, the win is reclaiming time on the parts of work that drain you the most: catching up on meetings, drafting routine emails, and pulling together status updates.

The fastest way to get value out of Microsoft 365 Copilot is to pick one or two use cases that map to your worst time sinks and use Copilot for those every day for a week. Once those are habit, expand from there.

Ready to go deeper on Microsoft 365 Copilot

If you want to understand the full Copilot ecosystem from Power Platform to Dynamics 365 to Security Copilot and GitHub Copilot, the complete course is on Pluralsight. Watch Microsoft Copilot Foundations on Pluralsight for the full deep dive, or explore the full Microsoft 365 Copilot learning path to follow a structured journey through every Copilot you need to know.

Looking for more on Microsoft 365 Copilot? Check out my guide on how Microsoft 365 Copilot helps you catch up fast across email, Teams, and calendar, the broader Microsoft 365 Copilot feature overview for M365 and Power Platform, and the best practices for crafting the best Copilot prompts so you get the most out of every interaction.

Prefer video? Watch the full walkthrough on my YouTube channel: Microsoft 365 Copilot explained

AB-900, AB-100, AB-730, AB-731: Making Sense of Microsoft’s New Copilot Certifications (with Tiago Costa)

Vlad Catrinescu — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 13:33:00 GMT

Microsoft just reorganized its certification lineup into a new AI Business Solutions track and introduced four new Copilot/AI certifications. If you’re wondering what these exams actually cover, who they’re for, and which one makes sense for your role, this video will save you a ton of time.

In this discussion, I’m joined by Tiago Costa (Microsoft MVP & MCT), and we break down what’s new, what surprised us, and what to watch out for as these certifications move from beta to GA.

In this video, we cover:
✅ What changed with Microsoft’s certification structure (MB/PL/MS → AI Business Solutions)
✅ The 4 new certs: AB-900, AB-100, AB-730, AB-731 — who each one is really for
✅ AB-900: wide objective domain, what “fundamentals” actually means, and how to prep
✅ AB-100: why it’s tough, what kind of role it targets, and why you should actually study for it
✅ AB-730 vs AB-731: business user vs transformation leader, and the mindset shift required
✅ What Microsoft Applied Skills are good practice (and why they’re underrated)

If you’re planning your 2026 certification goals around Copilot and AI, this one’s for you.

Want to learn from some of the top professionals around the world? Join me at the Microsoft 365 Conference and get $150 off with the discount code VLAD150!

Watch my 100+ courses on Pluralsight

Watch my playlist on Creating Agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot!

Video Summary

Microsoft reshuffled the certification world, merging MB, PL, and MS into the new AI Business Solutions track — and introduced four fresh AI/M365 Copilot certifications that are already shaking things up.
AB-900 (Copilot Admin Fundamentals) is fair but massive — the objective domain is so wide that even seasoned M365 pros don’t touch everything it covers daily. Great for beginners, but instructors will struggle to teach it in the “recommended” 5.5 hours.
AB-100 (Architect) is no joke — extremely broad, pulling in M365, Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and even Foundry. Tiago called it “very challenging” and recommends serious prep before attempting it.
The business-user certs (AB‑730 & AB‑731) surprised everyone — 730 goes much deeper than expected, requiring you to know exact steps, tab names, and agent-building workflows. And 731 flips your brain into an executive mindset — ethics, governance, responsible AI, and organizational readiness.
Applied Skills are underrated weapons — they’re free, hands-on, and perfect warm‑ups for several certs. Both of us recommend taking the Copilot‑related Applied Skills before jumping into the business-user exams.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Transcript

In the past few months, Microsoft has completely changed the way they organize certifications. By merging the MB, PL, and MS series into one new bucket called AI Business Solutions, we also got four new certifications related to AI and M365 Copilot.

Today, I have the pleasure of being joined by Tiago Costa—old friend, Microsoft MVP, MCT, and you probably have all the titles at Microsoft, to talk about those. Tiago, you’re super popular in the learning community, but for the few people who don’t know you, can you introduce yourself?

Yeah, sure. Basically, I work as an AI and cloud architect, and I also teach. I teach a lot in the classroom. It’s one of my big passions—being in the classroom and passing knowledge to new generations, and even current, even older generations too. The idea is always to pass new knowledge to people. And, you know, like Vlad, I like to do conferences and speaking. So that’s kind of me—focusing a lot on the AI and Azure space.

Okay, that’s amazing. And between us two, we actually took all the AB certifications. Yeah. So first of all, I want to get your opinion. So far, we have four of them. We have an architect-level one, AB‑100. AB‑100. We have a Copilot Administration Fundamentals, which is a 900‑level course. Yes. And we have, for the first time, two of them for business users. Was that on your bingo card this year—that we’re going to get business user certs?

No, definitely not. I was hoping to have some more Copilot fundamentals. I thought, “That’s definitely needed,” and I think that wasn’t a surprise when they launched that one—at least not for us in the industry. But not the architect, and definitely not the business users. That one, I was like, “Wow, that could be a good idea,” because business users can actually do a lot of push for Copilot and AI in companies and really make use of the AI tools.

It’s the key to unlocking significant productivity. It’s not just having the tools—it’s knowing how to use them and the power behind them. So I think it’s a great move. Okay. And you mentioned Copilot Fundamentals, but in a way, I see the 730—the AI Business Professional—as Copilot Fundamentals. And I know you’re yet to take that one. Yes, I have it scheduled. It’s a lot about using Copilot, of course, based on the name, and creating agents. Creating agents, yes. We’re going to have a lot of fun with that one. But let’s start with the one we both took, the AB‑900. Yes.

What did you think about that one for starters? Well, I think it was a very fair certification. We took it in beta, so—It might change by the time… Exactly. For the audience, you need to take our conversation with a grain of salt because things might change when the certification is GA—generally available. But in beta, I think it was a good, fair exam. I’m not going to lie—there were two or three questions that were a bit weird. Oh, that’s always the case. One of them, I thought, “Well, this needs some polishing,” but that’s why it’s a beta. I gave my feedback—“Hey, this should be more like this”—so the exam authors can polish things. And they do. But overall, it was a fair representation of a fundamentals certification.

For people who don’t know what a fundamentals certification is, it’s for people getting started in that technology. It’s not for people with five, six, seven, or eight years in the industry. For those people, fundamentals should be really easy. Should be, yes. Should be, at least. One thing I noticed—and I want your opinion on it—I fully agree with you that the questions matched the objective domain. But the objective domain is so wide. Yes.

I feel like in most enterprises, your average admin doesn’t touch everything from Exchange Online to SharePoint to Purview to SharePoint Advanced Management to Entra ID. There are just so many things. And again, this is a fundamentals exam. You don’t need to know how to do things—you need to know what things are and where they are. You’re not going to get “Write the PowerShell cmdlet.” Definitely not. Fundamentals are usually at the “describe” level: describe what X is, what Y is. Still, as you said, the objective domain is really wide. There’s a lot of stuff.

For example, Purview—I don’t work with Purview daily. I know what it is, I know people who do it 100% of the time. I interact with them, so for me, this certification was fine. But I guess a lot of people taking this fundamentals certification—the exact audience—they might not have experience even at a “describe” level. But I also see this as a challenge and an opportunity. It exposes them to things outside what they normally do. And since it’s “describe,” they don’t need to go deep.

Okay. You’re saying something interesting—that it motivates people to learn other things. At Ignite, I talked to someone who said something that stuck with me: “This is what Microsoft wants an M365 admin to be.” They want admins to know Purview—not configure it, but at least know it exists. So if a business user asks, “How do I protect this content?” they don’t say, “I have no idea.” Exactly. It’s knowing that those features are there. Another question: you’re probably going to teach classes on this. Very probably. Or create my own training—definitely creating my own. You also have Learn with Tiago, with great on‑demand training. Yes. We don’t usually compete—you have the Azure stuff, I have SharePoint—everybody’s happy. But I find it will be tough to balance how to teach this and still keep it in Microsoft’s recommended 5.5 hours.

You and I like to go beyond slides—we like demos. But now we have to show SC‑900, MS‑900, Copilot… it’ll be a challenge. Definitely. I haven’t started planning content yet, but it’s on the list. When I saw the objective domain, I had the same thought: “This will take 12 to 15 hours to teach properly.” But I can’t do that for a fundamentals course. I’ll need to trim things. It’ll be hard for you too—deciding what to demo or skip. Exactly. Problem for 2026: Tiago and Vlad. Exactly. Even SharePoint Advanced Management is one line—but it took me an hour and a half to present it. Exactly. Do I just explain what it is? Do I demo it? What do I choose? Problem for future us. Definitely.

Next up: the architect exam—AB‑100. Yes. This is the one I didn’t take. Looking at the objectives… Microsoft didn’t even add AB‑100 to the certification poster. They forgot. But they have the objective domain available. It’s an exam where, if you think AB‑900 is wide, AB‑100 is even bigger. That’s why I didn’t take it. To be honest with the audience, it’s been a big challenge. I work with that stuff—that’s fine—but there are touches of things I don’t do daily. Especially Dynamics. There are a lot of Dynamics integrations. And Copilot agents in Dynamics that you need to know. So I think this exam is for a very specific audience.

A lot of the things—I look and think, “I have no idea.” Like: “Design connectors for Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales.” I’m lost on two levels. You’re brave for taking it. Yeah, I took it. I have to confess—life got in the way of studying. Zero prep. I just thought, “Let me check the exam.” I still don’t know the score because it’s a beta. You only know weeks later. But I found it very, very challenging. I bet. Yes. Some questions, I thought, “Oh yeah, definitely this one.” Probably half of them. The other half—some you can figure out, but others are totally out of my knowledge because I don’t work with that stuff. So if you want to take AB‑100, my advice is: prep properly. Videos, classroom training, Microsoft Learn—read everything. At the time of recording (December 2025), there’s nothing yet.

Maybe by early 2026, they’ll release something. But prep very well. Maybe I’ll take it in the future. I’m laughing at how much they’ll need to rename. Yes. All of them. AI Foundry—Azure Foundry—now Microsoft Foundry. Dynamics 365 Copilot for Sales—that changed. Now we have Work IQ. There’s nothing about Work IQ because these certs were released before Ignite. Exactly. Agent 365 wasn’t there yet. Now it is. People will get a bunch of updates. That certification needs major updates before GA—wording, product names, and new products like Work IQ.

Final question for AB‑100: In your experience, does a role like this exist in enterprises? Someone who does Power Platform, Dynamics, Foundry—all of it? Or is this role a unicorn? Depends on the company’s maturity and the market. In North America, maturity is higher. In Europe, not so much. We’re recording this in Europe right now. I don’t see many companies here with someone who does all this. Some do—big, mature ones. But most?

No. They’ll have multiple consultants—PL‑2000s, PL‑400s, Power Platform architects. But not someone who does everything. Again, I wonder if Microsoft put this out to push the market. Yes. And I love seeing Microsoft lead, not follow. With the products and plans, this role will be needed. Companies need this. It’s good that Microsoft is pushing it.

Next up: AB‑730, AI Business Professional. You didn’t take this one yet. Not yet. I’m taking both business-user certs next week—Thursday and Friday. You’re going to laugh, but I took this at Ignite, and I found the 730 tougher than the 900. Oh really? Yes. Two reasons: AB‑900 is more of what I do daily. And I studied. This one—“easy business user”—so I thought I didn’t need to study. I should have studied. It’s not wide, but it’s deep and specific. Lots of: what tab do you click, what section, what tier supports what. Things I do on autopilot—I don’t remember the names. So I should have reviewed. So the audience gets this: even Vlad needs to study. 100% of the time. Don’t feel too confident going into exams. Even if it’s your daily job, there are things you don’t do often.

Good advice—because I wasn’t planning to study. Now I think I need to review. This one isn’t that many things. Within an hour, you could build everything hands-on. But you need to pay attention to every click—the name you type—everything. I cannot wait to make training for this one. It will be fun, but very different. Business users in a Microsoft certification class—it’s a different dynamic. Yeah. Business users come with a problem they want solved. You don’t know their company, their constraints, or their policies. It’s challenging. This exam requires: “You need to learn this. You need to remember this.” Not: “How do I solve my problem?” Exactly. But I’m excited to create content.

Now the last one—731. The AI Transformation Leader. Why do the numbers feel random? 731, not 740. It feels like the lottery. This one was very interesting. You’re probably more suited for it than I because it has both M365 Copilot and a lot of Azure. Yes, I already saw that. You need to know M365 Copilot, licensing, Foundry, Document Intelligence, Speech Services, Vision, Search—everything. And licensing differences. You’ll have no problem with that. But the part I also noticed—and I actually studied for this one—there’s a lot of adoption specialist content. And ethics. The Microsoft AI ethics framework. I do adoption in training, but I’m not usually the one saying, “First step: hire a Chief Ethics Officer.” Does it make sense for a transformation leader?

Absolutely. So I agree with the role. But for IT pros taking this exam, you must think like an executive. Learn Microsoft’s approach to ethics and responsible AI. It’s very different from the technical view. These topics are often covered in executive tracks at conferences—not tech tracks. Exactly. Executives don’t care what service does what. They have people for that. They care about governance, privacy, and ethics. High-level concerns. This certification touches fairness, responsibility—you can intentionally or accidentally introduce bias in a model. You need guardrails. This exam talks about that. It’s very good. They need to update wording—Work IQ, Agent 365, Foundry—but those are easy fixes before GA. For IT pros: review Microsoft Learn, understand how Microsoft pitches AI to executives. You need to think like an executive. Exactly.

Now, a question for you: should IT pros take this certification? Great question. Do they need to? No. Should they? I think consultants should. It forces you to understand how executives think, what their concerns are, and how to present to them. IT pros think about implementation. Executives think about governance. So it’s recommended. But I wouldn’t force it—no mandatory KPIs, no bonus requirements. But it’s a useful perspective. I agree. It’s always good to understand leadership thinking. And Microsoft may force this anyway for partner designations. Yes. So it might not be optional later. Exactly. And you’re always more valuable with certifications—especially in consulting. We covered all of them.

One final question: applied skills. Have you taken any yet? Yeah, I think I have two from Copilot, around thirty total. My goal is to have all of them. Catch them all. Yeah, kind of. Even if I don’t work with that stuff, I want to know what’s out there. It helps prove I know the basics. And pushes me to learn new things. I started my career as an IT pro on Unix and Solaris. Then I became a dev. I reinvented myself several times. I worked with cloud before cloud was cool. Now AI. It’s important to keep learning. You might find something you love.

For the Copilot applied skills I’ve done, some without prep—I struggled but passed with 100%. But I had to search for where stuff was. So read the Learn modules—spend 3–5 hours. Find content online—videos, etc. Vlad also has amazing content. I also have some content. Do you recommend applied skills as practice for certifications? Depends. Some align well, some don’t. But for some exams: absolutely yes. For example, for PL‑2000 or M365 Copilot, applied skills. Doing those first is good practice. They’re free. Not proctored. You can do them anytime. Just need internet. Exactly. You press a button, and you get a virtual machine with goals—not steps. Achieve the goals. They’re nice. If you fail, you can take them again after 72 hours. I had one crash on me, so it was marked as failed. It happens. You can take it again. I’ve failed applied skills before, too. Exams are hard even for us. Especially for new certifications when content doesn’t exist. Exactly.

Well, Tiago, thank you so much. I’m not going to say good luck—I’ll say break a leg—on the certifications next week: 731 and 730. It would be awesome to connect after and hear what you think. Hopefully, my tip to study helps. It can’t hurt. Now that you say that, I was planning not to study. I’m questioning myself. Maybe one hour of proper hands‑on and I’ll be good. One last question: if Microsoft listened to you with no questions asked, what are three certifications you want them to create in 2026? Ooh, very good. I’d love to have that power. I’d say: first, a pure dev certification—coding. Even with “vibe coding,” coding is more important than ever. Something around .NET, Python—core languages. Maybe easier to have Python now with AI.

Second: a pure dev certification for SharePoint. How to customize SharePoint—not the other stuff. I’m surprised you said SharePoint. I think it’s a miss. We used to have MS‑600—rest in peace. Rest in peace. But great for video views when they retire certs. True, but I’d rather have the certs. Third: an advanced Azure administration cert. More advanced than AZ‑104. Not an expert-level cert—but a second-level admin cert. That’s interesting. I think a collaboration admin cert—SharePoint, Teams, Planner, Stream, To Do, but not Teams Voice. Only collaboration. That would be awesome. I wonder if we’ll get an associate Copilot administrator cert—like AB‑900, but associate level. That makes sense. I think they might do that. My third: bring back PL‑100—Power Platform App Maker. The gap between PL‑900 and PL‑2000 is too big. And with agents and vibe coding, makers matter. There’s a need for that. Let’s hope. Let’s watch this video in a year and see if Microsoft listened.

Yes. We need to record this again in a few months as well. We don’t know where ESPC is next year—we’ll find out tomorrow. Wherever it is, we’ll record a follow‑up and see if we were right. But right now, the lights are closing behind us, so I think it’s time to finish the video. Tiago, thank you so much. And for everybody watching, if you want to connect with Tiago, you’ll have all his socials in the description below, as well as a link to Learn with Tiago for his awesome courses. And on the screen right now, you’ll see more certification content. Make sure you like the video, subscribe to the channel, and I’ll see you in the next one.

How to Get Accurate Copilot Usage Data in M365 (What Microsoft Doesn’t Show You Yet)

Vlad Catrinescu — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Are your users really using Microsoft 365 Copilot—or are the built-in reports just telling you they aren’t?

In this interview from the @PowerPlatConf, I’m joined by Microsoft MVP Loryan Strant to walk through why the native Copilot analytics (M365 Admin Center, Copilot dashboard, Viva Insights, etc.) don’t show the full picture—and how his open-source Copilot usage dashboard fills the gaps.

You’ll see how his solution:
✅ Pulls real Copilot interaction data via the Graph API (including apps like Forms, Planner, Stream, SharePoint, and more!
✅ Runs nightly, so you can actually see the impact of trainings and pilots
✅ Lets you combine usage data with survey/feedback data for real adoption insights
✅ Respects privacy, while still giving departments, managers, and execs the data they need

You can find all the resources mentioned here.

Want to learn from more pros? Learn from some of the top talent around the world at M365 Community Conference, and get $150 off with discount code VLAD150! Have questions? Check out my Microsoft Community Conference FAQ!

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Video Summary

Out-of-the-box Copilot dashboards aren’t enough – They only show usage in core apps like Word and Excel, missing apps such as Forms, Planner, and SharePoint—so they don’t give the full adoption picture.
Custom solutions give deeper insights – Laurian built an open-source solution using Graph API to track Copilot sessions and interactions across all apps, updated nightly, with filtering by department or role for better insights.
Data tells a bigger story – Usage data alone can be misleading. Combining it with survey feedback on productivity and satisfaction helps organizations understand real value, not just raw numbers.
Privacy and flexibility matter – The solution avoids storing sensitive prompt data while still allowing for customization. It also enables leaderboards and “laggard boards” to identify low users for coaching, not just license removal.
Community-driven innovation – Laurian encourages the community to download V2 from GitHub, customize it, and share improvements. Future versions aim to add richer visuals, trend analysis, and even ROI calculations, like time saved converted into dollar value.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Transcript

We all know that Microsoft has been pushing Copilot heavily in recent years, and many companies have started purchasing it, running pilots, but before rolling it out to the whole company, there’s one big pain point: are my users actually using it? So this is why today I’m joined by Microsoft MVP Loryan Strant. Thank you so much for being here with me.

Thanks for the time and for having me on. And we’re at the Power Platform Community Conference. You just had a session that was all about monitoring Copilot, figuring out if people actually use it. And you told me you can just do everything with dashboards out of the box, right? They’re amazing.

They are, but they’re not enough. There aren’t enough. And I didn’t detect the sarcasm clearly enough there. They do a job, but they don’t do a good enough job. And for me, where they fall is that they don’t list all of the apps where Copilot exists. And if you’re not listing all the apps, then it’s not giving an accurate picture. They focus on the obvious ones like Office—Word, Excel, Teams, PowerPoint, Chat—but they ignore Forms, Planner, Stream, SharePoint, all these things. So if you’re using it in those other apps but not the core Office apps, then the out-of-the-box functionality is going to say that you’re not using it much, which means someone will say, “I’ll take away your license, thanks.” But I’m using it, and I am productive.

And I agree with you, what we have out of the box—and I was just joking—most enterprises are like, “That’s a good starting point, but that’s not enough for me to actually decide if I take your license away.”

Yeah, absolutely.

But you found a better way.

Yeah. And I think it’s important to kind of understand what the options are with the different reporting. So I do this comparison with clients, and I’ve also got an extensive write-up on my site about it. But effectively, we’ve got the native stuff. So you’ve got the M365 Admin Center, but that’s limited because there’s certain reporting there, but also it shows the date of last use, which I don’t care about. I want to know how much. So it has some of it, but a lot of times, the Admin Center only shows the last 28 days. It’s starting sometimes in some areas to go further back. We’ve got the Copilot dashboard—that’s good, it’s got some pretty graphs, you know, the things execs need. And then you’ve got Viva Insights, which has your Copilot adoption and a few other Copilot-esque reports, but all of them only show a subset of the data.

So when we’ve got custom solutions, we can customize the Viva Insights report, but I still have the same limitation that the data is simply not there. Or when we look at Graph API, which is what I’ve done, you would think, obviously, go to the usage reports of Graph API, but no, that’s the same as the M365 Admin Center, so not helpful. Or you know, Copilot interactions is a dedicated endpoint in there that I created. And then there are third-party solutions which are basically using the same as what I’ve created. And I’m really good friends with the people at Tiger and Point, so I actually promote theirs, but I basically built my own because I just like to touch the paint to be sure it’s dry.

So, I just needed to kind of prove that, hey, there’s more there. And I think that for me, it’s you need to have the full picture to actually make proper business decisions, not some of the picture. Because if we said to someone, “Oh, we can show some of the Copilot usage. Is that good enough?” They’ll be like, “No.” So why do we have it? So yeah, I wanted to build something better.

Awesome. And what you’ve built, you told me you actually open-sourced.

Yes, absolutely.

Right. So, can’t wait to see it.

Yes, we can. So this is an example of not the actual solution but a version of one that I’ve built, where the first thing—and what I was saying in the session—is the solution that I’ve built, take it and customize it. One of the things is not to just put Copilot data in there. Add your own data from surveys so that you can start seeing that if Copilot usage is going down, well, you usually think that’s not good. But if you add other data in there like “We are finding it more valuable, it’s making business faster, it’s making my day easier,” that’s going up, then this data about the actual usage is not as important. So you need both of those to tell a true story. So the comparison of the two solutions is, you know, there’s the out-of-the-box ones, and then there’s the custom, which, as we can see, is like a lot more apps. So this is actually in a fellow MVP’s tenant that I kind of—I wouldn’t say I built it in her tenant, I probably finessed it in her tenant because I’d already built it two times over. One was using the audit log, which I don’t recommend to anybody to do because firstly there’s too much data that the solution will get access to, and I don’t like it having that because I have to get every activity you did, find the Copilot ones. I can’t filter and query just the Copilot ones. I have to get everything. So it’s heavier to run, but also, there’s too much data there.

So yeah, this V2 one that I’ve got here is showing all of the apps that I can find. I can go as far back as I can. So when you implement it, I don’t just want it from today; I want to go back and get all the data as well. So that’s what this does. It’s got accurate license counts because the other ones are influenced by other factors, whether you’ve got Viva Insights licenses and things. But when we look at what the actual data is, I can see a lot more apps in there. I can see their history, whether they’re growing. But also, I can filter down by different departments, and I can actually filter by whether I want individual users. Now people would say straight away, like privacy—I don’t want to see Vlad has been doing this—and you know what, I completely respect that. The thing i,s the solution needs the data to be able to look at Vlad’s department, Vlad’s location. So whether or not you choose to allow that data to be shown is up to you, but I still need the data in there because what I would envision is organizations would customize this and have the departmental level view or a manager level view or an exec view.

We pull this kind of information in. We’ve got a lot more because I’m pulling other fields from Entra ID. We can sort and filter by those kinds of things. But also, we can start creating leaderboards. And I think what’s important with the leaderboards is that the version that exists out there for the community to take doesn’t have something that I built in the V1 and will bring back in V3, which is the laggard board—show me your lowest users. Okay. Now, it’s because a lot of people will think, oh, the lowest users, you know, the intent is to take their licenses away. And look, that actually may be a valid thing. I see it more as an opportunity to go, okay, who are the lowest users of Copilot? Let’s buddy them up with somebody in their organization, in their team, in their role who is using it really highly, and let’s see if we can actually transfer some knowledge and skills and help them. So I see more of an opportunity to grow the usage as opposed to, you know, take their license away. I think having lots of data is better than having not enough data.

I do have some questions for you. So you said you’re now using data from the audit log.

Correct. Where do you get the data from?

So there is a Copilot endpoint in the Graph API called Copilot. It only works for licensed users, unfortunately. So I don’t get to see the non-licensed Copilot usage. And in there, there’s a call you make called AI Get AI Enterprise Interaction History. And in that interaction history, there is a lot of data, which again I remove a lot of the data because I don’t want it, but yeah, so that dedicated one allows me to query—I basically pass it this licensed user ID, give me their interactions within this date range.

Okay.

And that’s how the solution runs on a nightly basis, whereas the other ones are generally up to a two-day lag to get data. This runs nightly, so I can see, hey, we ran a training session, and now I can see a spike today. So that’s what I wanted is also more current and relevant.

Well, so you know what causes it. Like, there’s a spike, why?

That’s right.

We need to know when the spike is and why it’s happening.

Exactly. Because it’s all about having, you know, keep hearing the term data-driven insights. Cool. Get the data, connect it to other data, and then we have the insight.

And the other question I had for you, you mentioned that you can only get it for licensed users, correct? And right now, I mean, we just talked about it on how the Copilot button is everywhere, whether you like it or not, licensed or not, you have the BIS chat. Well, M365 Copilot chat is not connected to your work data. That would be web chat, which is what it’s called behind the scenes.

Web chat.

Okay. Because you call it BIS chat, no, not you. And it’s referred to as BIS chat, but BIS chat actually is talking with your business data.

Yeah.

So, it’s when you’re looking at the worker web tab. So if you’re a licensed user, you get Worker Web. If you’re unlicensed, you just get web, which is web chat versus BIS chat. And I didn’t know the technical terms. So I learned something. I learned even more stuff right now.

Okay. So, web chat, if I use web chat in Office, can I see that?

Yes.

So I can show you an example of what the data looks like. Whenever we do a query to see what the interactions are, we actually get two. So the first one is the user prompt. And in this user prompt, we can see a lot of rich information in there around basically the ID. We can also see the session ID and the interaction ID because sessions and interactions are different, and then different usage metrics. We can see where they were prompting it from. So were they in an app or were they in chat, as in the chat interface? If they were prompting it from an app, we can also see where the content was that was located. So whether it was OneDrive or SharePoint. If it’s in Teams, we can see if it’s in a chat channel or a meeting. And as you can see in the screenshot, we can also see the actual prompt itself. Now this is relevant that I’ll get to in a sec. I don’t want to see that prompt—for me, that’s a privacy issue. If someone wants to see it from an audit log perspective for security, go do that. My solution is not for that purpose. But if somebody ever wants to adapt it, they could absolutely just go and modify the workflow, and where I have a select action in the workflow that says these specific things, add it back in so that you get that. So yeah, we can see whether there was an attachment related to it. So a whole bunch of context there. The other one we get is the AI response. So I discard that one entirely because otherwise I end up with you, Vlad, were in a Word document and you asked it a question, and it responded. That’s two interactions.

Okay.

So, but that’s not actually how many times you used it. So, because of that, I actually discard the response entirely.

Okay.

Because then I get the how many times did you use it, not how many times was there an interaction.

And just to take a step back, because you explained this to me yesterday, the difference between a session and an interaction. So I’m going to try to explain i,t and you tell me if I do a good job.

Okay.

So every time you open up, let’s say Word or PowerPoint, and you open up the Copilot on the right side, you open up a new session and then every time you ask Copilot, “Hey, change this paragraph, do this, add a joke in here,” every time you write to it is one interaction.

Yep.

But as long as that Word document is open, we’re still in that same session.

Yes.

If I close the Word document and then reopen it in an hour, that creates a new session.

Yes.

Right.

Capture it perfectly.

Awesome. So, it’s important to know the difference because sometimes you look at the sessions and some people think that’s how many prompts they did.

Yeah. And the other thing as well is everybody works differently, right? So the way that I work with, for example, just using the M365 Copilot chat as opposed to in an app is when I’m asking it about a thing, and then I move on to the next thing, I will create a new conversation window because to me it’s a different context, different things. I don’t want it to be done. Whereas other users might not. They may just keep going with it. So that to me is two sessions, one had a few interactions, one had a lot. The thing is, though, what does sessions versus interactions mean? That’s subjective because what I genuinely expect will happen over time is that we’ll see sessions and interactions. We might see sessions going u,p but interactions going down. And you’re like, well, hang on, which one’s the good metric? I don’t know. And it’s very subjective based on the app itself, but also, what it could actually be is that they’re getting better at prompting. So instead of “I went in and I said create a PowerPoint slide that’s got this information and then add a banner and then put a picture and do this,” and before I know it, I’ve got 10 prompts just to create one slide. Instead, as I get better as a user, I would go in and say “Create a slide that is talking about this, that has a banner, that’s got this, that’s got a picture of a person showing this, that this is this, this” and instead of going 10 prompts, I’ve now got two, maybe three.

So interaction isn’t always a bad thing.

That’s right. And that’s why that slide that I showed before, about having the qualitative data about people saying, “It is saving me time, I am getting value out of it,” is critical to basically offset that so you can tell a clearer picture. Now, we’re going back to the data that’s shown here; there’s a lot of information that’s shown here that I don’t store. What I actually store is a very much cut-down version of it. Now, without getting into the details of the behind-the-scenes stuff, it’s still quite messy, and I store it as JSON blobs in a database table because I pick it up in Power BI and then do things with the JSON blob. But here, though, you can see I’ve got a file location field. I’ve got a Teams location field, but also the app class is, you know, IPM.Skypeyp.teamsmessage.compile.outlook. What does that mean? Outlook. So that’s where, in Power BI, I clean all of this up and then group it by different things, which gives me that was two interactions in one session. I’m not recording the response at all. I’m not recording the prompt. I am purely recording the context, the location of it, and yeah, time, date, and basically just data points. So that’s it.

Awesome. Man, Skype is going to be there forever, I think.

I honestly don’t know why that’s even in there now.

Probably using some of the old APIs from Skype and things like that.

I do have one question for you. So I see OneDrive here for an example, and you said you told me you can see SharePoint as well.

Yes.

Can I see what site exactly it references, or what sites?

You absolutely can. I don’t store that because again, from a privacy perspective, but that’s why the workflow will basically summarize that where it says if it sees hyphen-my.sharepoint.com, SharePoint.com OneDrive, if it sees SharePoint.com without the hyphen-m,y then sorry that yeah so OneDrive or SharePoint and that’s all stored. Now that’s all I’m storing. If someone wanted to modify the workflow and change that and store the specific site URL or those kinds of things, they can actually.

I’m just—I’m wow, I’m mind blown right now. So I’m thinking in theory, if let’s say I saved everything, I could create a map of every user and what SharePoint site they accessed.

Yeah.

So I can also say, “Hey, I want this SharePoint site. Who accessed it with AI?”

Well, that’s the thing.

With Copilot, I could if I wanted to.

You absolutely could. And that is actually part of the reason why I do record whether it’s SharePoint or OneDrive. And also with Teams, whether it’s a chat, channel, or meeting, is to be honest actually not for Copilot’s benefit. It’s actually for a broader adoption benefit because if I see that most people are interacting with files in OneDrive, then that raises a different alarm bell, which is that our people probably aren’t putting files in the right place. Or if they’re interacting with chats and meetings but not much channel, then again, maybe they’re not using the channel functionality in general as opposed to just in Copilot. But I mean, I’ve got other solutions where I pull all that other data out. And what I would love is for people to then connect the dots and again, a clearer picture, more context, you know, so that every company will have unique needs. So that’s the cool thing. You can decide what you build with this.

Absolutely. And the thing i,s what I’m trying to work on is so what I’m showing here, this screenshot, these bits of data, these are actually from the V3 that I’m working on.

Okay.

Where because currently V2 doesn’t have these because there was less data in the API.

Okay.

From that Copilot interaction method. Now it’s there. So now I’m going great, I’ve got more information I can put in. Let’s put it in there. And then I’m also trying with the V3 version, which is actually to put in more data about the sessions and interactions to show that. So I show you an example of what I’m trying to get to. It’s rough. So I show you an example of what I’m trying to get to. It’s rough, but I love it. So this is an example of V3. Now it’s not really telling us much, but the thing is what I’m showing, though, is sessions and interactions together because I intend to show that maybe I can see more sessions, fewer interactions or more interactions, fewer sessions. And I think this is where people have to then look at how the users are doing things and again use that survey data to go, okay, maybe people are finding that—I don’t know—that maybe using Copilot in Excel is actually not good. You know, so it’s a case of not good or maybe they don’t know how to use it, or maybe they need to have the expectation set as to what it can and can’t be done. So that’s why I’m just starting to play with that. I thought I’d put some spider radials in because I had a client go crazy for them. So I thought I’d put that in. Trying to put some averages in there as well. And the other one as well is with the solution. This is where I’m again putting sessions and interactions together and then trying to draw a trend line because, again, now this is off a demo environment of five users. So really hard to—and we tried hard to simulate usage. But yeah, this is showing all those different apps. And what I want to see is, as I said, maybe I can see the trend line for, you know, if I look at like OneNote, right, it’s very slowly going down, but you know, the usage is actually potentially so high. So I’m not a Power BI expert, so this has a lot of work to be done, and that’s why I put it out to the community, because hey, make it better, share it with me, everybody else can benefit from it. But yeah, and also those logos pull from my Microsoft cloud logos repo. I see that SharePoint and Teams have been updated. Outlook is updated.

All updated because—and even that Forms one, I updated the logo on it yesterday, and I hit refresh on my report, and it updated. That is cool. So yeah, anybody who deploys the V3, if, for example, the Whiteboard logo gets the same treatment as the Stream logo, the next day after I’ve updated it, they will get it.

I don’t know how I feel about the ones that didn’t get the new logo. Are they?

I feel like, you know, Microsoft has favorites.

Oh, absolutely. The fact that Forms actually got a new logo, I was surprised about because yeah, they’ve left them behind previously. So yeah, but that’s the thing is I thought that could make it richer. And the thing is, people don’t have to do it in the same layout I’ve got because, as I said, I’m not a Power BI expert. Like I was playing with another layout here where I’m trying to try, you know, the two bottom rows, those are actually the same data but different graph types. Yeah. Because, you know, this is where I encourage people in the community to help out with this because, hey, if you’re a Power BI visuals expert, great. Help me build better visuals because, you know, there’s an MVP buddy of mine in Melbourne, Greg Nash, who, a few times, has criticized my overuse of pie charts. And the thing is, I’m not a BI person. It’s a means to an end for me. So, you know, if there are better charts, let’s use them. Yeah. I’m just doing this because that gives me the data that I want.

You should ask Copilot. Copilot, here’s my data. Give me the charts.

Actually, I use Copilot a lot with Power BI stuff where I say, I’ve got this and this,s and I want to do this, and it will say Go create a measure for this. Here’s the code. There are other things that I’m trying to do beyond V3, where I’m trying to add in some additional functionality. So, I want a standalone report for execs. So, they don’t see all of the other pages. They just see the big ones with the big graphs and the things going up and the satisfaction rating. So, like some of the ones that I showed before, I want a manager level one so they can see their team, how their team is performing. But also,o I want an individual one, like how do I stack up against other people in my team without seeing the details of their names, obviously or other people in my country or other people with the same job title as me. And I think that’s the thing is with all this data, it’s completely up to the person who’s implementing it if they want to provide that. But that’s what I want to do. And yeah, I want to also get more trends and things and data science stuff because I just don’t know. There’s only so much I can do when I’m figuring out what actually means behind the scenes, trying to figure out what the Graph API response is, because there’s a bunch that aren’t in V3 yet, because I don’t know what they mean. Okay. As in the word, for example, when I pretty up the name, one of them is Viva Goals. And I look at that—it’s gone. Exactly. So, how am I getting Viva Goals data? There’s—I’ve seen Copilot Search has appeared, which is now the new search interface. There was another one that was simply Viva Copilot. I think it might be Copilot for Sales, because that was originally Viva Sales. So I’m like, god, this is what goes into this. I’ve figured it out, and I guess none of it is documented. Not really. No, those are not documented. Some of them are, but that’s where I basically bash my head against the wall, try to figure it out and make it so that when you open it up, it says Whiteboard or Engage or yeah or like BIS chat, web chat—it doesn’t say that. It says chat, work chat, web. That’s what I’m doing.

Yeah. So this is exciting.

It’s rewarding but frustrating that I have to do it, but it’s rewarding when it helps. So with Lindsay, my co-presenter that I did this session with today, this flat out resulted in them buying an extra 2,000 licenses over their 10,000. So that’s the thing is for me if anybody from Microsoft—and I said in the session hey if you want to have an issue with the fact that I’m saying potentially, you know, not positive things about the tools and don’t they have lots of value, lots of merit—but this is resulting in actual license purchases then hey and you know what if Microsoft wants to take it and incorporate it I’d be happy, please. So yeah, that is awesome. So I’m super excited. Thanks.

How can somebody get started today?

So, there is the V2 that they can already download, which has been on my GitHub since February, when I first did a series of blog posts, because what I actually have is a dedicated Copilot usage landing page that has four different blog posts of me ranting but explaining things. Which, to be quite frank, I’m sure people will just open it up, Copilot, and Edge and whatever, and just go summarize, cut out Loryan’s rantings. But yeah, it talks about the challenges with the Viva Engage data, the challenges with and the different methods. But fundamentally, there is one that says how to build your own. And there is another one that says how to implement mine with step-by-step instructions. I have had people reach out to me who are not technical at all, who are the adoption lead for a major global airline, like one of the top five, who has had basically very little support in terms of her team’s availability, and she has deployed this herself.

Wow. Because I have provided the files, there is a zip file that is the solution for all the workflows, all the tables, everything. There is a Power BI template, so effectively that blog post you follow the steps to provision and import the solution, run these things in order, then you open up the Power BI file, it’ll say what’s your host address, which you get from the instructions, you put it in and then it sits and refreshes, and you have data. Wow. You hit publish and set a refresh cycle; you’re done. So all you need is really Dataverse capacity and a Power BI Pro license to consume the report from a requirements—and I know that’s probably in the blog—that is in the reading part. So yeah, effectively all people need is a Power Automate Premium license.

You know, you could use an existing service account. I would suggest not using a dedicated one. It’s not exactly a high cost because you don’t want to have throttling from other workflows doing things. Similar to the Power BI Pro license, more so not so much from a throttling perspective, but if you, Vlad, do this and you publish the report, and then you leave the organization, the refresh will fail. So put it under a service account. Yeah, I recommend that people also create a dedicated Power Platform environment to put it in, also from a security perspective and lock it down, put the report into a specific workspace. But that’s it. Yeah, 29 bucks US a month. That’s amazing, and you get this solution.

That is awesome. And for everybody, the link will be in the description below to the series of blog posts on the solution as well. This way, you can quickly get to it. Thank you very much. Thank you. I will need to try it. I’m a bit, you know, my demo environment is me and five users, a bit like you, but I want to play with it. I want to play with the API. I want to see what all the data you can do. Probably, my reports are not going to be as good as yours. Mine are not fantastic. So, you know, don’t beat yourself up. One of the questions I got in the session was around whether I use the prompt data that people have typed in, like basically get some insights as to what they’re prompting, which is an amazing idea.

And sorry, now I’m sitting thinking of building a different solution. You’re giving me ideas on stuff. Well, because I don’t record the prompt data, but I could create a different solution that records just the prompt data in some secure vault and then runs like Azure OpenAI at it and then basically summarizes what people are asking for, where they are doing it, that kind of stuff further. Every meeting summary, you assign it a dollar value, and then you can actually get a dollar amount on your Power BI report for every 30 minutes of meeting that you summarize. You save 20 minutes, add a dollar value to that, and then you can actually calculate how much money Copilot saved you. That’s a brilliant idea. That just came to my head now that you mentioned that. That’s fantastic. No, that’s—and this is why I put it out to the community, because I didn’t want to just do a blog post and go here’s how you do it. I want to say no, here’s mine. Use this as a step up, then go build your own, and please share it back with me so that we can add, and you know, and others can benefit from it. So it was good in today’s session that there were like hundreds of people there, like snap snap snap snap snap, like take it please let’s make this better together. So yeah, that is awesome

I definitely have homework now. I’ll add it to the list, but thank you so much for your time. This has been very, very valuable for everybody watching. You’ll have Loryan’s socials blog everything in the description. Please connect with him,m he always shares a bunch of awesome and useful stuff as well for everybody watching.

Thank you so much for your time. If you’re looking for more news from the Power Platform Community Conference, you’ll have one appear on the screen right now. And if you enjoyed the video, please like it and subscribe to the channel. It means a lot to me. And see you all in the next one.

Clear Your Copilot History Across Microsoft 365 Apps | Quick Tutorial

Vlad Catrinescu — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 12:00:00 GMT

If you’ve been using Microsoft Copilot and want to delete your activity history, you’re not alone. Whether it’s for privacy, cleanup, or peace of mind, knowing how to remove that data is important.

In this video, I’ll show you step-by-step how to clear your Copilot history across Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, Loop, Planner, Whiteboard, and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.

You’ll learn:
✅ Why you might want to delete Copilot history
✅ How to find the privacy settings in your Microsoft account
✅ How to delete Copilot activity history in just a few clicks
✅ Which apps does this apply to across Microsoft 365

This quick tutorial takes less than 5 minutes to follow and will help you keep your Copilot experience private and under control.

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Video Summary

You can delete your Copilot history—it’s not just there forever. Handy if you’re sharing your screen in Teams or doing a training session and don’t want all your trial prompts showing up.
The process takes less than a minute: go to your Microsoft 365 portal → click your name → View Account → Settings & Privacy → Privacy → Copilot activity history → Delete history.
Choose what to wipe: you can specifically target Microsoft 365 Copilot activity, then hit Delete. It usually clears in 30 seconds, but sometimes takes up to 15 minutes.
This covers all the big apps—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, plus Forms, Loop, Planner, Whiteboard, and Copilot Chat itself.
Peace of mind delivered: once deleted, your history’s gone across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, so you can demo, teach, or screen-share without awkward surprises.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Transcript

If you’ve been using Microsoft Copilot and you’re wondering how to delete your activity history, you’re not alone. Whether it’s for privacy, cleanup, or just peace of mind, knowing how to remove that data matters. In this video, I’ll walk you through exactly how to do it across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

You might be thinking, “Why would I need to delete it?” After all, everywhere you look, it says that Copilot is your personal assistant and that others can’t see your conversations—which is true. However, if you share your screen during a Teams meeting or conduct a Copilot training session, your previous prompts and responses could be visible. This includes all your practice runs and test prompts, which might not be something you want to show.

For example, in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, if I were to share my screen, all my recent conversations would be visible. The same goes for Teams—inside Copilot, the history of what I asked during a meeting is stored. If I want to reset that and keep it private, there’s a simple way to do it.

From the Microsoft 365 portal, click on your name and select “View Account.” This will take you to myaccount.microsoft.com. From there, go to Settings & Privacy, then navigate to Privacy > Copilot Activity History, and select Delete History. You’ll be asked which Copilot activity history you want to delete—just check “Microsoft 365 Copilot” and click delete. It may take anywhere from 30 seconds to about 10–15 minutes for the history to be fully cleared.

That’s all you need to do. This method works across all Microsoft 365 apps that store Copilot activity history, including Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Teams, and online apps like Forms, Loop, Planner, Whiteboard, and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.

If you have more questions about Copilot privacy—like deleting history, managing permissions, or understanding what Copilot can see—drop them in the comments. If you found this video helpful, don’t forget to like it and subscribe for more great content. And check out the other videos on your screen for more tips

M365 Conference 2025 Highlights: Copilot, SharePoint & Big Announcements!

Vlad Catrinescu — Fri, 09 May 2025 12:00:00 GMT

Missed the Microsoft 365 Community Conference? We’ve got the keynote recap you need. Join me and MVP Gokan Ozcifci as we break down the biggest updates from the event:

👥1B+ SharePoint users & 2B weekly Power Automate flows

🤖New Copilot Notebooks, Researcher Agents & audio recaps

📄SharePoint gets flexible layouts, AI-powered FAQs & smarter autofill

📆Big leaps in Teams meeting recaps and agent governance in SharePoint Advanced Management

Like, comment, and subscribe for more sessions recorded live from Vegas!

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Video Summary

Impressive User Numbers: The keynote highlighted significant user statistics, including over 1 billion active SharePoint users and 320 million monthly active Teams users. Additionally, there are 2 billion Power Automate flows running through SharePoint weekly.
New Features and Enhancements: The keynote introduced several new features, such as the ability to create sections with Copilot in SharePoint, a new FAQ web part, and the integration of OneDrive data with SharePoint agents.
Teams Updates: Microsoft Teams focuses on becoming more secure, simple, and smart. New features include a combined view for chats and teams, meeting recap updates, and the introduction of facilitator agents for AI notes and translation.
SharePoint Innovations: SharePoint is becoming more flexible with new design capabilities, such as drag-and-drop elements and creating context-aware sections. The platform also introduced a new FAQ web part powered by AI.
Governance and Security: The keynote emphasized the importance of governance and security, with new tools for admins to manage permissions, govern agents, and apply policies across sites using semantic matching.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Transcript

Hello everyone. We are live from the Microsoft 365 community conference in Las Vegas, the biggest Microsoft 365 community event across the globe. I’m joined today by my good friend Gokan Ozcifci. Gokan, how are you doing?

Fantastic! Amazing! Very, very happy to be here this year with you again. So very proud to be with you here on that video about the keynote. I know I missed you on the last two, so I’m so happy you’re back. And both of us, not even 30 minutes ago, came out of the keynote of the Microsoft 365 conference, where we had some of the biggest names in Microsoft 365 show us what’s new and what’s next.

Let me get started with the numbers. I marked them down because if not, I will forget. I know you all love to get an update on the numbers. The first one is quite impressive. We have over 1 billion active users in SharePoint, and Jeff was really proud of that number. He did preface it on what that 1 billion includes because the cool thing is SharePoint powers a lot of M365, but now it also powers SharePoint embedded custom apps and OneDrive personal, which runs on SharePoint in the back as well. So, for all of you who have been saying SharePoint is dying, I have bad news for you. SharePoint is alive, well, and over 1 billion people use it, which is an amazing number.

It is. It feels like 1 billion users. Another even bigger number—I didn’t think we were going to get bigger than 1 billion—but there are 2 billion Power Automate flows that go through SharePoint every single week. Not every month, every single week. That’s an impressive number. I was surprised when I heard that. That’s impressive.

Now let’s switch over to millions. I feel like we have to get back a bit to reality. Talking about Teams a bit, we have 320 million monthly active users in Teams, which is a huge number. But you know what surprises me, Gokan? In the last earnings report, Microsoft said it had 430 million paid Office 365 and Microsoft 365 users. So that means there are 100 million people licensed for Teams that are not using it every month. So much growth opportunity.

It is. And finally, let’s talk about something brand new: Agents. As you all know, Microsoft has been all about agents lately. Microsoft has 1 million agents that are grounded on SharePoint. That includes SharePoint agents and Copilot Studio agents grounded in SharePoint. Those were the highlights for the numbers. Now that they’re out of my head, we can talk about new stuff. So, Gokan, what happened at the keynotes?

Yeah, I have some notes on my phone. Basically, Jeff Teper, super energetic, came in running as usual to the stage, and then he just explained to us about the four pillars he wanted to explain. The first one was about M365 Copilot and agents, then Teams, then SharePoint, and finally Power Platform, which is basically Copilot Studio. He started his keynote by thanking us, thanking the community, thanking the partners, and emphasizing that we leave our family home and bring that excitement here in Las Vegas for their tools and products. SharePoint is going to become 25 years old next year, right? He said there would be a big anniversary for next year. So if you plan to come, if you’ve never been here, next year is the spot to be here.

There you go. Well, I prefer Las Vegas, but if it’s Orlando, it’s Orlando. If it’s San Francisco, San Francisco. I’m happy with anywhere in the US. Just be at the conference. They started the keynote with the Frontier program first. Vlad, do you want to mention something about the program?

Sure. The Frontier program includes all of the latest innovations that Microsoft is bringing, such as the researcher agent, for example. They even shared some statistics around companies that they consider at the frontier and how successful they are compared to organizations that have not embraced the latest technology. It was quite eye-opening to see those work trend indexes and the statistics from that, and how it can impact the company in the end.

Talking about the researcher agent, I know you really like that one.

I really love the researcher agent. They even made a few demos around that. In a few clicks and a few seconds, they were able to create a whole marketing plan for the release of a new shoe. I really loved it. When we talk about shoes, you know, you were phenomenal with your shoes. They could really do that in a couple of seconds. That demo was really impressive. I know because of my background back in time with Valo when I worked for the marketing team, that plan could take us weeks to do, and now it takes a couple of seconds.

But not only that, they also talked about notebooks, like Copilot notebooks. That was impressive to me as well. She just created a notebook in Copilot and then just gave a name, and from that name, Copilot could just render a list of documents that she could use.

Right. Let’s recap what notebooks are for people, because I’m not sure I like the name notebooks. People who paid more than I have decided that. For those of you who have used ChatGPT projects in ChatGPT, it’s exactly the same functionality. Basically, you’re able to create a notebook, a project, have a starter prompt to kind of already tell your AI tool, whether ChatGPT or Copilot, what that notebook is about, how it should answer, all the basic things you should have in a prompt, what the goal is, how it should answer, and everything. You can even ground it in specific documents. I know that’s the part you mentioned. They just entered the name for that notebook, and it found the documents for you.

She just selected those documents,s and then she could just work on that and even create some data, publish them as a durable asset into Copilot pages.

You know what I really thought for a second? This looks like Viva Topics. The fact that she created a knowledge base, put some articles, had some data, I was like, “Oh my gosh, Viva Topics, I still love you. You left us too soon.” But that’s another story, right?

That’s another story. Something else in notebooks, we also had the audio recap.

Yeah. So now, for those of you who have something that Gemini had for a while, I forgot what the name is in Gemini, the name of the feature. I’m sure we’ll put it in the lower third below when I remember a bit later. But basically, you’re able to give it a piece of content, and then you can have the AI summarize it for you in the form of a podcast. So many people don’t learn when they just read stuff, but when they see two people having a conversation about that stuff, then they can relate to it.

Absolutely. Now, you know what I wonder? I tried to use the Google stuff, okay? The voices they gave me were like, you know, and I’m sorry for the stereotype, everybody, but it was like the California podcaster voice. It was like, “Oh my god, you won’t believe what they just did.” It was just so exciting, like an influencer podcast that I was not able to take seriously. That’s okay for a consumer tool, but I really wonder if, for an enterprise tool like Copilot, I can dial up or down the excitement level? Can I have it more professionally sounding, or can I have it all in influencer mode? It remains to be seen, I guess.

Yeah, probably. I don’t know. Do you like the influencer mode?

It was okay. I was not that shocked, but it’s okay. I get your point. That’s okay. Finally, they finished that first part, the first pillar, by showing the create option in Copilot, where they just created an image. They just added that image by adding text and adjusting the color—really important stuff for that image. It’s able to connect to your brand center in SharePoint. That’s the part I love the most. I want to continue on that. The good thing is that you can connect with your organization’s colors. That’s what the image showed us on the demo. I’m sneaking at your notes right now. But yes, you can have custom fonts. For Blackbox Tech, I use Cascadia Code, which is not a default font, but now I can have my AI image generator use that custom font. It’s amazing. Researcher notebooks, create, search, all those things we have seen. That’s the summary of everything new, the first thing that we have seen.

Then we moved to Microsoft Teams, where Jeff Teper started the second part by the 3S: secure, simple, and smart. I love that they use a 3S model. I don’t really agree with all that they’ve been showing me because Teams is getting slower and slower and slower. I get a lot of bugs, unfortunately, but hey, that’s another discussion. That’s why they want to aim to do that. They started the keynote with new core UX changes and announcements, like the fact that now Teams and chats are all in one pane. That’s how they started. I’m curious about everybody watching this. Please let me know in the comments: Do you prefer to have your chats and Teams separated? That’s how I prefer it, to be honest. Or do you like the new combined view? I’m curious to get that post from the community. So let me know in the comments below which one you prefer. I’m betting 99% will say separate, like you and like myself.

Well, I think it’s the people who come from a Slack background that don’t have Teams, only channels in a way. They prefer the combined, but you know…

You’re saying you prefer Slack more than Teams?

No, no, no. Let’s say no. Okay, then the most important part for me and the thing I really loved was the recap meeting updates they announced. Being able to ask for a meeting recap, and then you even get the shared screen as a response. That was pretty amazing, right? I’ve been doing that demo forever, showing up late at a meeting, and you would only get the recap, which, don’t get me wrong, was already amazing. But now you get that screenshot of the shared screen. Wow. And not only that, but even a whiteboard. They had somebody in front of a whiteboard write text by hand, so it was even able to detect that part. That was truly amazing. That’s something I wish we had a year ago, but I guess I’m happy we have it now. It’s just mind-blowing that we have it. It’s a game changer.

Then the keynote, well, the second part of the keynote, finished by introducing again the agents, like the facilitator agents for AI notes, the interpreter agent for translation. We had a real demo where the other lady in the meeting talked Spanish, if I’m not wrong, and then it translated automatically to English. Then, a planner premium P3 project manager agent. That was something new for me, but you told me why.

Yeah, I told you why. The unfortunate reason is that the project manager agent is not new, but it’s tough to get. Why? Because you need to have an M365 Copilot license, and then you need to have a planner P3 premium license. So it’s not the planner included, it’s not the P1 at $10 per user per month, it’s like $60 per user per month in addition to your M365 Copilot license. That’s why you don’t have it, because you need to start paying, Gokan. Come on.

I’ll ask my manager. I’m a Microsoft shareholder, so come on. I’ll ask my manager. Okay, so that was it for the Teams part. I guess we covered all that they said. Then, the most important of all, SharePoint. SharePoint, right? Jeff Teper started a bit nostalgic because I think he is aware that 25 years is a lot. He just showed the old wheel, the first wheel, I guess, created by Microsoft, and then he just showed the updated version of that wheel. I was like, I’m getting old. If I say that, I don’t imagine what Jeff Teper would say. Are you saying Jeff is old? Okay, next question.

Then they started with the flexible sections. I do a lot of site design for my customers, and I love the fact that we can now just drag and drop elements almost anywhere. You know what I love about that is the flexibility and beautiful design of WordPress, with the content management capabilities and enterprise readiness of SharePoint. SharePoint was always an amazing tool, but it was tough to make it pretty. When we worked at Valo, I know we were making SharePoint pretty in a way. Now you’re able to have that flexibility of WordPress and that kind of Wix drag and drop, wherever you want or Elementor, but in an enterprise tool. It’s amazing.

I remember when we talked like a month or two ago, when I said I have a dream to have one single web part which we could call the SharePoint universal web part, which is also something from Valo, right? Then I could talk to that web part and say, “Hey, I’d like to have a section which is divided into, on the left side, you just add a divider with a few texts and on the right side, the hero web part.” But that’s again something me asking way too much, I guess. Then we also saw the ability to add a section with Copilot, right?

Yes, that was also pretty cool because it’s grounded in the context. It’s able to understand the site, the rest of the page, so when you add a new section, you just tell it what you expect. It’s so much better at giving you something closer to what you expect. They also said that it was context-aware, meaning that it will check for your design, check for double, so pretty solid.

Then we went for the brand new, very new announcement, the FAQ web part based on AI. You explain what the FAQ web part is, and then I’ll tell you why I love it.

Okay, so FAQs, we all love them. Every information knowledge manager loves to have FAQs. Basically, now you have a web part where you can just upload a document and tell your web part, “Hey, could you just create an FAQ based on that document?” Then, in three steps, you just select your chapters, the questions and answers, and then you just publish that all based on Copilot.

You know what I loved about it is that too many AI tools; you just tell it, “I want an FAQ,” and then in one step, it gives you everything. With the FAQ web part, you mentioned it briefly, but I want to really emphasize that the first thing it will return to you is the categories. It’s not going to give you the questions and answers right away. Let’s agree on the categories, order them the way you want, and after that, generate questions. This way, you’re not overloaded as a user with, “Oh, it gave me this big thing. I don’t like the categories. I don’t like the questions.” You hate it. But if you go one step at a time, you manage to kind of say, “Hey, I don’t like these two things here,” rather than those ten things in the final result. Your result will be so much better, faster.

Love what’s next. And what’s next? The last part was OneDrive. OneDrive, remember that? I was like, “Wow, this is what we need,” because what we have seen is when you create an agent in SharePoint, now you get the chance to also upload data from your OneDrive as a source and also save this as a personal OneDrive. I was like, “Wow, this is something that we need.” That’s amazing. Imagine you create an agent; it’s not good for everybody, but you can have your agent in OneDrive.

There’s something that we’re not sure about, and we’re doing this 30 minutes after the keynote, so we’d rather not tell you a fake thing. We can place the image just here. But, in the UI, it said you can choose stuff from SharePoint or OneDrive. Now we’re not sure if you can mix and match them or not. Once you select OneDrive, is it OneDrive only, or is it still SharePoint and OneDrive? We’ll find that out. I guess we should do an updated SharePoint agents video soon, once that’s in production.

Then we had a very brief update about the new forms experience, but it was literally 10 seconds, right? It was very fast. Then we went into autofill, something that you and I really love because we are content AI lovers. We’ve been using autofill, and they also announced the new feature that whenever you have a document library and you add some data, it will suggest those brand new columns and fill in data into them. It’s not only using a prompt to extract that information, but it’s also telling you the columns that you need. It’s amazing.

Then the last pillar was all about Power Platform-ish, Copilot Studio-ish, where we just saw how you could edit basically an agent with Copilot Studio and then save that in Teams live. Something they said, which they didn’t click on it when they were building the SharePoint agent, they said you can now edit it in Copilot Studio. The button is there today, but it opens a pop-up that says “coming soon.” They didn’t click on it. They said it’s available, but I’ll believe it when I see it because it’s been there for a couple of months.

Then the keynote was done. Jeff Teper had done an amazing job. Thank you again, Jeff, for all that you’re doing for the community, for the product, and for our lives. Then we had a brief 50-minute break, and then we started the second keynote, which was all about security. Honestly, half of it was not even for me because it was not M365. It was really about Windows 365, Defender, things like that. But we still had some amazing features coming through SAM, which is your baby, right? Should I just list what we have seen, and you go for it, or do you just want to jump in because I already see you excited to talk about SAM?

Time is here, you know. I’ll try and cover everything, and you tell me if I miss anything. First thing new in SAM, we have a brand new report to check the permissions of a specific user. Let’s say that I want to see what Gokan has access to inside my tenant because I don’t trust that guy. I can go type in Gokan, I can type in a security group, and it will show me a list of all the places Gokan has access to. Maybe I look at them, and there are some of them I’m not sure if Gokan should have access to them, but I don’t know every site inside my tenant. So I can start an access review only on those sites. That was one of them.

After that, let’s talk agents. The biggest problem with agent adoption is governance. Admins want to be able to govern them, but we didn’t have the tools. This changes today, at least in the slides. At least in the slides. Two new SharePoint agent reports. The first one is all the agents that you have. You’re going to see the agents that you have per site, how many people have access to them, all of that. Another one in SharePoint, you’re able to see which sites are most accessed by SharePoint agents. They didn’t really go into the reports. They showed us they’re there, but we haven’t seen the results from those reports. Continuing with SAM, a feature that I actually have in my tenant now, I can talk about it is semantic matching. As admins, we don’t know the content on our sites, but let’s say I have a site with financial data. I can select it, and then I can tell SharePoint to find me all the other sites that have this type of data. It will go through all the sites in my tenant and find all of them that also have financial data. Then I can say apply the same policies because maybe I want to block downloads on all the sites with financial data. I can do that to all the sites. Something really interesting, I’m not sure if you knew that, Gokan, but it does not use Purview sensitive information types. It uses a semantic index. So it actually doesn’t need sensitivity labels or DLP for that to work. It just uses AI.

I think that’s it for SAM. Then we went to the M365 admin center, which also covers your Copilot Studio agents, your agent builder agents. What we have there are a bunch of new reports. First of all, we’re able to see all our agents, whether they are used or not. We’re also able to block who can create agents. For specific agents, we can say, “You know what, this is an HR agent. I don’t want Gokan to have access to it.” I’m sorry, so I can limit it to certain people.

They are doing a lot of work. I’ll say they’re doing a lot. Did I remember everything?

Everything was done, so I’m just taking it over because you’re too excited when it’s about SAM. They are just investing a lot in agents, and we can see it. Copilot and now its agents, and all the infrastructure is getting ready for agents. I know you have given that feedback like, “Hey Microsoft, please love us admins and give us some governance tools.” You’re getting them slowly but surely.

I know Adam made fun of me on LinkedIn for that comment, but you have to find the comment for you to understand. I think that’s about it. We covered all the highlights from the keynote. Of course, like Gokan said, the security keynote also had a whole other bunch of content about Windows 365, Defender, how to use AI security to secure AI, and things like that, like how to find jailbreaking prompts or things like that. There’s a lot of stuff there, but I feel like for M365 admins and the audience as well, while some of them found it really interesting, a lot of them were like, “This is amazing, but I don’t have the permissions to do it, so I’m not the one doing it.”

This is it, Gokan. Before we’re done, if you had to choose one feature or at least a set of features, what would it be?

Well, for Teams it would be the…

No, no, no. One. You’ve got to pick one.

Autofill for SharePoint.

Then autofill for SharePoint. Okay. Then, of course, my heart is on SAM, especially now that Microsoft is doing stuff for IT pros. Having those SAM features to govern agents is amazing. Second is Copilot notebooks.

You said only one. I could only choose one.

No, I could only choose one. You choose only one. It’s my channel, so I can just sort of get… But no, I said the first one is SAM and agents. That’s my favorite one on this.

Thank you so much, everyone. For those of you who missed the conference, I really hope that this takes some of that FOMO away because now you’ve seen everything that Microsoft announced. If you found this valuable, Gokan and I are going to record a bunch of other content at the conference. Make sure you follow Vlad Talk Tech on YouTube and subscribe to the channel to get the latest news.

Demo: Working with Copilot Pages in Microsoft 365

Vlad Catrinescu — Wed, 07 May 2025 12:00:00 GMT

See how Microsoft 365 Copilot Pages transforms your workflow—whether you’re drafting blog content, generating images, organizing tasks, or pulling in data from your OneDrive. In this demo, I walk through using Copilot Pages to collaborate with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, generate structured content one paragraph at a time, reuse work data, and even bring in visuals and checklists—without switching context.

This is just a small clip from my Microsoft 365 Copilot content on Pluralsight! Watch How Pages gives you a permanent, organized space to manage your AI-generated content and edits.

Watch my 100+ courses on Pluralsight

Video Summary

Creating Images with Copilot: I asked Copilot to generate images for my blog post on Power Automate. It provided three options, and I could easily add my favorite directly to the page without downloading.
Checklist Creation: Copilot helped me create a checklist to get the blog post live, including tasks like drafting, reviewing, and publishing. It formatted the checklist as a table automatically.
Tagging Collaborators: I tagged my colleagues, Vlad, Vanessa, and Alex, on the page. Since the page is currently private, their names appear in red until I share it with them.
Navigating Pages: You can open and close pages while chatting with Copilot, or view all your pages from the Microsoft 365 home. This makes it easy to access and manage your content.
Using Microsoft Loop: Copilot Pages integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Loop, allowing you to rewrite and modify content while maintaining the full Loop experience.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Transcript

So here I have opened Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, and I have a blog post to write this morning. Let me use Copilot. In the prompt, I said I need to work on a blog post about Power Automate for an audience of IT professionals who are new to the Power Platform. It needs to be about 800 words in length, and I want you to help me create it one paragraph at a time. Let’s start with only the introduction for now. Whenever I work with Copilot to create long text, I like to let it work one paragraph at a time. This way, it’s easier for me to ask for changes. I don’t have to ask for changes about the whole blog post; I can focus on one paragraph at a time.

Now you see it gave me the introduction here. Let’s read it real quick. At first glance, it looks good. Usually, what I would have to do now is copy it into a Word document and switch context all the time. But at the bottom of it, and I’m a bit zoomed in now so you see better, this is what it will look like in a more normal resolution. I have “Edit with Pages.” Once I click on it, it will create a brand new page here and automatically copy the result of the prompt into the page. As you can see, it really copies everything. Let me clean it up a bit here. Let’s delete the first part, the second part over here, and this. Let me fix the title as well. There we go. Now I have it: “Blog Introduction to Power Automate.”

Our Copilot page is Microsoft Loop, so you can use it exactly as you would Microsoft Loop, which is a bit different than using Word because we do not have a ribbon. However, if I want to add a heading or anything like that, I can just do the slash and then add a table, checklist, divider, headings, collapsible headings, quotes—everything is here in the slash. Let’s continue our blog post. Now I want to ask Copilot, “Great, what would the rest of the outline look like? What would your headings be?” Copilot is writing them at the bottom. Let’s see what it did. It’s “What is Power Automate,” “Getting Started with Power Automate,” “Key Features and Capabilities,” and so on. I can always just copy-paste if I want to. Nothing stops me from doing it. Let’s make this an H1. Here I can select it and make it an H1.

Now let me ask it, “Create the ‘What is Power Automate’ paragraph.” It only took a few seconds, and it created it. But I feel like it’s missing something. Let me ask Copilot, “Can you tell me some statistics on the usage of Power Automate? I want to show it’s very popular.” You don’t have to copy H1 into pages. You can keep chatting with Copilot on the left side here. We have our Copilot chat, and then only copy the parts that you need inside Copilot Pages, which is pretty amazing. There we go. Now it gave me the statistics. But I didn’t want them to be separate. I want Copilot to incorporate those into the “What is Power Automate” paragraph. There we go. It took a few seconds, and it did it. Now it looks pretty good. I’m not going to read it all. That’s not the topic of this course. Let’s click on “Edit in Pages.” There we go. It added it underneath. There’s still a little bit of cleanup to do here, so I’ll clean up the stuff before and after my paragraph. This is how Copilot Pages gives me that permanent storage where I can save the results of Copilot prompts.

Right now, I haven’t been using a lot of work data. I’ve been focusing on web data. Remember, you don’t even need an M365 Copilot license for this. Even if you only have the web tab or you don’t have a license, as long as you have access to Copilot Chat, you have access to Pages. Now let’s try and leverage some work data in here. I will tell Copilot, “Great, next I want you to talk about the three types of flows we have in Power Automate. I already have some information on this in my OneDrive, so use those files as a source.” Then, because I want to make sure it leverages the right ones, I can always click on the slash here. I know my first one is “Introducing Business Process Flows.” Then I also have one that is “Creating Cloud Flows with Power Automate.” Finally, I have one about “Robotic Process Automation.” There we go. I’m telling Copilot to create content, but base it on those three documents in my OneDrive for Business. Don’t go to the web; just base it on those documents. Let’s see what it did. It did a great job. It did the paragraph. Great. Let’s go here, click on “Edit in Pages,” clean it up, and we have our content saved into our page.

So far, we have done text-based stuff. Now I won’t keep going on with my blog post. Let’s move on to other types of content. What else would I need for this blog post? I probably need some images in there because I need to have a cover image. Let me ask Copilot, “Can you create an image for this introduction to Power Automate blog post?” Copilot will take a few seconds here, and then usually it will give me four different images about the topic. Let’s see how good it is. Usually, when it has text inside, there are some mistakes, but I just want to show you the images. There we go. It gave us three options. Let’s say the first one here is the one that I like the most. Usually, I would have to download it and everything, but with Pages, I can just click the “Add to Pages” button. I’ll just go to another image. Again, there is the “Add to Pages” button, and then it adds it to the page as well. It’s not only text; it’s also images.

I can also ask Copilot, “Great, now can you please create a checklist for me to get this blog post live? Here are some items on it,” and format it as a table. I just added a few tasks like creating a draft, reviewing the draft, and publishing the blog post. Let me add this to the top. This way, we have everything in here. As you can see, Copilot Pages was able to see that this is a table and automatically applied the table format to it. That is pretty cool. Now, instead of just having it like that, I want to tag everybody. Let me tag Vlad, Vanessa, and Alex. But you probably already noticed something. Vanessa and Alex show up in red. That’s because this page is only accessible to me. I haven’t shared it with anybody yet. We’ll cover that in just a minute.

Before we go to that, I have my page, and my blog post is ready. I’ll need to share it with Vanessa and Alex soon. But for now, you’re probably asking yourself, “How do you get back to this page in the future?” First of all, if you don’t want to see the page as you’re working with Copilot, you always have the “Open Page” and “Close Page” buttons at the top. While you’re in the conversation, you can always open and close it, which is pretty amazing. Or you can view all your pages here, which will bring you back to the Microsoft 365 home and the pages on the left. You will always be able to get to it from your Microsoft 365 home. You have pages, and right now I only have one of them. As you can see, it’s the same thing. The other way to get to it is from Microsoft Loop. Once you go to Loop, which you can either access from your app launcher here, or maybe you know the URL by heart, you can go to your recent components and pages. You see, I have my blog intro to Power Automate, and from here, I can modify my Loop component.

Something cool is that once you’re in Loop, you can also rewrite stuff with Copilot. You can change things using Copilot. The Copilot page doesn’t take anything away from Loop. You still have that full Loop experience, including Copilot in Microsoft Loop, which is pretty amazing. This is it for this first demo on how to use Copilot Pages alone as I work on content. Now let’s learn how we can use Copilot Pages to work with others.

How Microsoft 365 Copilot Helps You Catch Up Fast (Email, Teams & Calendar Demo)

Vlad Catrinescu — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 12:00:00 GMT

Want to see Microsoft 365 Copilot in action? In this clip from my Pluralsight course “Microsoft 365 Copilot Foundations,” I show you how to use Copilot to catch up on everything across Outlook, Teams, and your calendar—fast.

✅ Find unanswered emails
✅ Summarize Teams chats and meetings
✅ Get ready for your day with one smart prompt

Copilot does more than just search—it understands what matters and brings it all to you. Watch the demo to see how it can transform your workflow. Want the full course? Check it out here

You can also check out my 100+ courses on Pluralsight

Video Summary

Email Catch-Up with Copilot: Vlad starts his day by checking emails in Outlook. Copilot helps identify important emails that need a response, such as project deliverables and discount discussions, and provides direct links to those emails.
Using Copilot Across Microsoft 365: Copilot isn’t limited to Outlook; it can also be accessed via Microsoft Teams and the Microsoft 365 portal. Vlad demonstrates how Copilot can summarize activities from the past 24 hours across Teams chats, channel conversations, emails, and meetings.
Meeting Preparation: Copilot can scan Vlad’s calendar and provide details on upcoming meetings, including agendas and related emails. This helps Vlad prepare efficiently by highlighting key points and concerns.
Summarizing Chats: Copilot can generate AI-driven notes and action items from Teams chats, summarizing key arguments and agreements. Vlad shows how Copilot can format these summaries by member and highlight important decisions and tasks.
Customizable Prompts: Vlad emphasizes the importance of specifying the format and detail level when asking Copilot for information. Whether bullet points or detailed summaries, Copilot can tailor its responses to meet specific needs.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Video Transcript

Now that we’ve learned how to interact with Microsoft 365 Copilot, let’s see it in action. First, let’s look at how we can use Copilot to catch up. Whenever I start my day, the first thing I do is open up Outlook and check my emails. It looks like I’ve missed quite a few of them, but as you know, not all emails are important. Luckily, I have Copilot to help me out. I go to Copilot at the top right, click on chat, and ask Copilot if there are any emails from this week that I was supposed to answer but didn’t. Copilot will look through all my emails from this week and tell me not only the unread ones but also any emails that were waiting for my response.

Copilot takes a few seconds, and here we have deliverables for Project Alpha. Vanessa and Alex have been discussing the final deliverables for Project Alpha and are waiting for my feedback on the risk assessment section and compliance details. That’s something I need to look at. Another cool feature of Copilot is that you don’t need to find the email after each result. You will have a reference here; you see, this is number one. I can click on it, and it will open up that email directly, so I don’t need to browse through all the different emails. Copilot will bring me exactly to where I need to be.

Let’s take a look at the second one: a discount for Carved Rock Fitness. Vanessa and Taylor from Finance have been discussing whether to offer a discount to Carved Rock Fitness. Taylor is hesitant about offering the discount, while Vanessa thinks a small incentive could help solidify the deal. They’re looking for my input on this matter. Again, I can open it, and it’s perfect.

This is catching up in Outlook, but as we know, in Microsoft 365, a lot of things also happen in Microsoft Teams, in our calendar, and a little bit everywhere. This is where we use Microsoft 365 Copilot chat, which you can access either directly from your Microsoft 365 portal, where you’ll have Copilot pinned at the top left inside your Microsoft 365 apps, or directly inside Microsoft Teams. Whichever one you access will bring you to the same spot.

Great, let me go here and close this. Let me ask Copilot to let me know what happened in the last 24 hours so I can prepare for my day. If I want to take it to the next level, maybe I want to split the information between Outlook and Teams. I can ask Copilot to give me the information as bullet points grouped by Teams chats, Teams channel conversations, emails, and meetings. I’m adding the expectation and telling Copilot even more of what I want to make sure it gives me back the information in the right format. Let’s give it a second. You see, it did it in bullet points exactly the way I asked, and it’s grouped by Teams chats, Teams channel conversations, emails, and meetings.

With only one single prompt, Copilot was able to summarize everything that happened in the past 24 hours, everything that I missed. Now I can quickly go to all the important things. I can even ask Copilot if there are any meetings that I should prepare for in the next few days. Copilot will look at my calendar because it has access to it, and you see, I have one meeting scheduled for tomorrow that I should prepare for. It’s a manager one-on-one with Vanessa Lee. I can directly see the people mentioned inside my company. The meeting will last for 30 minutes, and the agenda includes reviewing project timelines, discussing reasons for recent delays in project deadlines, and identifying solutions. I don’t like discussing recent delays, but Copilot tells me there’s a related email from Vanessa regarding deliverables for Project Alpha, expressing concern about not receiving a response from me yet.

So, not only does Copilot tell me, “Yes, you have a meeting tomorrow,” but it also processes that Vanessa wants to talk about delays and that she sent me an email asking why I’m late on something. From a productivity and time-saving point of view, I don’t need to figure out what is delayed or what Vanessa wants to talk about; Copilot already gave me that information. If I want, I can click on this reference and go directly to that email.

Now, let’s do a quick final example about catching up. Has it ever happened to you that you go to Microsoft Teams, see an unread chat, and then realize there are so many things to catch up on? Let’s be honest, do you really want to read the whole thing, or do you just want to get the highlights? Copilot offers you two different ways to do it. First, you have the AI-generated notes enabled by a Microsoft 365 Copilot agent called Facilitator, which summarizes the notes for me as well as the action items, which are the most important part. I can also just ask questions from this chat.

Let me ask Copilot what the highlights of this chat in the past day are. Please create a bullet list of what arguments each member made, grouped by name. At the end, tell me if an agreement was reached and if there are any action items. As you can see, it says, “Here are the highlights of the chat in the past day, grouped by name.” I see everything that Vanessa said, all the highlights for Taylor, and the most important part: was an agreement reached? Yes, a hybrid marketing approach combining traditional and influencer methods was agreed upon. Action items: Vanessa and Taylor set up a meeting with leadership to get budget approval and prepare case studies.

Now, I was able to ask Copilot to summarize this chat for me, format it the way I wanted, and even tell me what agreement was reached and the action items. This was a bit long, but of course, I could have asked Copilot to only show me the top three arguments per name. So remember, if you want something shorter, tell Copilot you want something shorter. If you want it as a bullet point, tell Copilot you want it as a bullet point.

Proactively Tackle Obstacles in Your Workday With Microsoft 365 Copilot!

Vlad Catrinescu — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 12:00:00 GMT

Improve your current Productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot! Whether it’s scheduling across time zones, turning a presentation into a document, or really any productivity challenge – Microsoft 365 Copilot is there to help make YOU more productive!

Those are just some of the shorts from the Summer of Copilot, check out the rest here!

Video Summary

Effortless Form Creation: Copilot can quickly create onboarding feedback forms, ensuring employees provide valuable insights without including personal information.
Simplifying Technical Jargon: Copilot helps transform complex technical documents into easy-to-understand content for audiences new to the topic.
Efficient Data Analysis: Copilot can swiftly highlight specific data in large Excel files, making it easier to find crucial information before meetings.
Error Detection in Automated Processes: Copilot assists in monitoring Power Automate flows, identifying errors to prevent disruptions in business operations.
Personalized Communication: Copilot can craft customized emails for clients based on previous interactions, enhancing personalization at scale.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Watch my 90+ courses on Pluralsight.

Video Transcript

People often complain that Teams is a fire hose of information. We have notifications, mentions, and just too many distractions, which means that sometimes we miss the important ones. Luckily for us, Copilot can help. All right, let’s set our destination to never miss a task. Let’s take off. Have you ever come back to your desk and found 99+ unread messages in the group chat? Well, with C-pilot, you don’t need to read the full thing. Simply open up C-pilot in the group chat and ask Copilot to summarize what was discussed in the past day, make a bullet point for each decision, and create a separate section with bullet points for items that are assigned to you. It’s that easy. Now you’ll be able to arrive at your destination.

Back in the old days, we needed big machines like the windmills behind me to transform products. Even today, we spend way too much energy transforming our content, whether it’s from Word documents to PowerPoints or PowerPoints to emails. But it doesn’t have to be that hard. All right, let’s set our destination to no more double work. Let’s take off. Let’s say you recently did an internal presentation for your company, but now marketing wants it as a blog post. Just open up Copilot in Word and ask Copilot to create a thousand-word blog post based on the presentation document. The tone should be informative, and the audience is users that are new to Copilot and Outlook, for my example. And that’s it. Now you’ll be able to arrive at your destination.

If you’re in the same office and time zone, scheduling meetings can be super easy. But if you work for a multinational organization and need to schedule across continents and multiple time zones, it can get quite tough. Luckily, Microsoft 365 Copilot is here to help. All right, let’s set our destination to better connect across time zones. Let’s take off. With Copilot, scheduling meetings across time zones becomes a breeze. Simply open up Copilot and ask it to identify an available time for a meeting with your colleague tomorrow that aligns with their working hours and does not conflict with either your or their existing meetings. That’s it. Copilot will analyze everything and let you know what is the best time for your meeting. Now you’ll be able to arrive at your destination.

Have you ever received an email and, after reading it, felt more like you’re playing Clue? Writing emails that are concise, polite, and clear is a skill that will be necessary throughout your career. But if that’s not your forte, don’t worry, Copilot has got your back. All right, let’s set our destination to improved email skills. Let’s take off. Tensions can get high in the workplace, especially when not everything goes to plan, and sometimes we write emails that do not have the best tone or the right words. Luckily, Email Coach by Copilot can make sure that your emails use the right tone, have a good reader sentiment, and are clear. Now you’ll be able to arrive at your destination.

Sometimes every minute counts, but when you have so many meetings on your schedule, you might look back on your week and wonder, where did my time go? This is why properly planning your week is essential. Okay, let’s set our destination to better time management. Let’s take off. If you want to better understand where you spend your time, simply open up Copilot and ask Copilot to organize your meetings into five categories with percentages so you can understand how you’re planning to spend your time this week. Copilot will look through all of your meetings and then give you the information you need to better manage your time. Now you’ll be able to arrive at your destination.

Did you ever receive an email that starts with something like this? It doesn’t feel so nice, does it? Personalizing your content to your audience is very important and makes them feel valued. Luckily for us, Copilot can help us do it at scale. All right, let’s set our destination for better personalization at scale. Let’s take off. Do you have an upcoming promotion and want to email all your clients about it? Why not let Microsoft 365 Copilot write customized emails for you? Simply ask Copilot to send an email to your client to tell them about the new promotion in your reference file and make it personalized based on your last conversation with the client. That’s it. Copilot will do the rest. Now you’ll be able to arrive at your destination.

Whether it’s traveling to another country or joining a new company, one of the things they have in common is so many forms to fill out. And let’s be honest, most of them are badly designed or, even worse, on paper. But designing beautiful digital forms isn’t always easy. Luckily, we have Copilot. All right, let’s set our destination to better forms. Let’s take off. Let’s say you need to create an onboarding feedback form but don’t know where to start. You can simply ask Copilot to create the form to get feedback on how satisfied employees are with the onboarding process, remind employees not to include personally identifiable information, and voila, your form is done in less than a few seconds. Now you’ll be able to arrive at your destination.

If your day job is to be a pilot, you’re probably looking at all those buttons and you’re comfortable because you know what each one of them does by heart. But for those of us that don’t do this for a living, it can be quite scary. Back to our day-to-day life, too often technical people create documentation that is too difficult for their intended audience. All right, let’s set our destination to better documentation. Let’s take off. If you have content such as a document full of technical jargon but want to simplify it for your audience, you can simply ask Copilot, “How could I simplify this text for an audience that’s new to the topic?” That’s it. Let Copilot do the rest. Now you’ll be able to arrive at your destination.

Businesses today have large amounts of data, but the challenge is how do we find the right piece at the right time? Ah, there it was. Luckily, Copilot can help. All right, let’s set our destination for faster data analysis. Let’s take off. Imagine that right before a meeting, you asked for data and they sent you this big Excel document, but you only need to find specific information. Simply ask Copilot to highlight the data where the claim amount is higher than 7500 in my case. And that’s it. Copilot will do the hard work for you. Now you’ll be able to arrive at your destination.

Well, we wish every system was perfect. The truth is, errors happen. The important part is to catch them before it’s too late. As you start automating business processes in your organization, your company can save a ton of money. But if one of those automated processes fails, your company can come to a complete stop. All right, let’s set our destination to spotting errors faster. Let’s take off. If you’re in charge of monitoring Power Automate flows for your organization, you can discover errors that your flows had by simply asking Microsoft 365 Copilot, “Show me the top five flows by number of runs together with the error type.” It’s that easy. Now you’ll be able to arrive at your destination.

Want to learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot? View ALL my Microsoft 365 Copilot courses here.

Microsoft Copilot Demos and Use Cases Across M365 and Power Platform

Vlad Catrinescu — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 12:00:00 GMT

Are you looking for real #MicrosoftCopilot demos and use cases? I wrapped the Summer of Copilot – Inflight Services series into 1 episode so you can see use cases and demos for all your favorite M365 and Power Platform in 5 minutes!

Watch every Summer of Copilot Short!

Video Highlights

Meeting Recap Requests: Users frequently ask for summaries of meetings they missed, including attendee roles and concerns, formatted into tables.
Filtering Chats: Users need help filtering through long chat histories to identify pending decisions and important information.
Status Meeting Summaries: Users request lists of discussed options with pros and cons when their bosses miss status meetings.
Presentation Assistance: Users seek help organizing PowerPoint presentations and generating ideas for content, such as video topics for IT professionals.
Data Analysis in Excel: Users often need assistance with analyzing large Excel files, creating charts, and identifying key data points like top vehicle models with the most claims.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Watch my 90+ courses o n Pluralsight

Copilot for Microsoft 365 | Vlad Talks Tech

SharePoint Skills FAQ: Your Webinar Questions Answered

Skills vs Saved Prompts and Other Tools

Why Is a Skill Different From a Saved Prompt?

When Should I Use a Skill Instead of a Power Automate Flow, a Copilot Studio Agent, or a SharePoint Agent?

Running Skills

Can Skills Run on a Schedule, When a File Is Added, or From Power Automate?

Is There a Limit to How Many Documents a Skill Can Classify, and Can It Handle 10,000 Files?

Can a Skill Create Site Pages From a Template and Add Quick Links Web Parts?

Sharing and Protecting Skills

Why Can’t I Share a Skill I Created in a Shared OneDrive Folder?

How Do I Protect the Skill Files in the Agent Assets Library?

Governance and Lifecycle Management

Can I Maintain SKILL.md Files With Azure Pipelines in Azure DevOps?

Until Enterprise Skills Arrive, Is PnP PowerShell the Way to Govern Skills?

SharePoint Agents vs Microsoft 365 Copilot Agents

What’s the Difference Between the Default SharePoint Agent and a Custom Agent, and Can You Share Them?

Is a SharePoint Agent the Same as an Agent Created in Microsoft 365 Copilot?

What This Means for You

Microsoft 365 Copilot Explained: What It Is and How to Use It

What is Microsoft 365 Copilot

How Microsoft 365 Copilot is different from ChatGPT and Gemini

Where you can use Microsoft 365 Copilot

Catching up on missed meetings with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Transforming content with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Drafting emails and prepping for your day

What this means for you

Ready to go deeper on Microsoft 365 Copilot

AB-900, AB-100, AB-730, AB-731: Making Sense of Microsoft’s New Copilot Certifications (with Tiago Costa)

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Transcript

How to Get Accurate Copilot Usage Data in M365 (What Microsoft Doesn’t Show You Yet)

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Clear Your Copilot History Across Microsoft 365 Apps | Quick Tutorial

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M365 Conference 2025 Highlights: Copilot, SharePoint & Big Announcements!

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Demo: Working with Copilot Pages in Microsoft 365

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How Microsoft 365 Copilot Helps You Catch Up Fast (Email, Teams & Calendar Demo)

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Proactively Tackle Obstacles in Your Workday With Microsoft 365 Copilot!

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Microsoft Copilot Demos and Use Cases Across M365 and Power Platform

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