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
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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.
