Microsoft 365 Copilot: what it is, and what it is not
Microsoft Copilot provides AI assistance across Copilot Chat and Microsoft 365 applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. Available features, access to organisational information and priority access depend on the user’s Microsoft 365 subscription, Copilot licence, administrator settings and platform.
What Copilot is
- An AI assistant that supports writing, analysis, communication and collaboration.
- A tool that can use your instructions, selected files and, where licensed and permitted, organisational content.
- A starting point for work that should be reviewed, refined and validated.
What Copilot is not
- A guaranteed source of truth.
- A replacement for professional judgement, subject-matter expertise or approval processes.
- A reason to bypass data protection, confidentiality or information-governance requirements.
Important: Features vary by licence, app, platform, tenant configuration, permissions and rollout stage. If an option is not visible, check with your Microsoft 365 administrator.
Summarise this guide in five practical actions I can apply today, then suggest the best place to start based on my role.
Principles that will not change
Regardless of future Copilot updates:
- Users remain responsible for outcomes.
- AI-generated content requires human review.
- Copilot respects existing permissions.
- Data governance remains essential.
- Better prompts generally produce better results.
- Security and compliance remain organisational responsibilities.
The CRIT prompt model
CRIT is a prompting framework developed by Geoff Woods, author of The AI-Driven Leader, to turn AI from a question-and-answer tool into a more effective thought partner. The Interview step is the key difference: it encourages Copilot to ask clarifying questions when important information is missing, rather than guessing.
Context
Provide the background, audience, purpose, constraints and relevant source material.
Role
Tell Copilot which perspective or expertise to adopt, such as marketing manager, project lead or critical reviewer.
Interview
Encourage Copilot to ask clarifying questions when important information is missing, unclear or contradictory. Behaviour may vary by Copilot experience, application and context.
Task
State the outcome required, including format, tone, length, structure and any checks Copilot should perform.
Build your own CRIT prompt
We’ve pre-filled the example from the guide. Edit each part, then copy the finished prompt into Copilot.
Your prompt
Why CRIT works: Context reduces ambiguity, Role sets the perspective, Interview invites a clarification step, and Task defines the deliverable. For a simple, well-defined task Copilot can usually proceed straight away. For higher-impact or ambiguous work, the Interview step helps surface missing information before a draft is produced.
Two instructions worth keeping
Add these to any prompt when accuracy matters.
Prioritise accuracy over agreement. Challenge assumptions, identify missing context and highlight uncertainty. Separate fact from opinion. Do not invent missing information. Cite or identify the source for important claims where possible.
Use only the attached document as your source. If the document does not contain the answer, say so rather than filling the gap from general knowledge.
There are many prompting models, including RACE, RISEN, CO-STAR and CREATE. We have found CRIT and the Copilot Refinement Loop the most useful.
The Copilot Refinement Loop
Don’t treat Copilot’s first response as the finished product. The best results often come from an ongoing conversation where you review, challenge and refine the output. CRIT helps you build a better prompt; the Refinement Loop helps you improve what happens next.
Draft an email to customers explaining our new service.
Repeat review, challenge and refine until it is right.
Copilot tips and best practices
Use Copilot as an iterative working partner. Give it a clear task, review the result and then refine it.
- Be specific about the result you need, the audience and the required format.
- Provide relevant context and point Copilot to the right source material.
- Ask follow-up questions and refine the first draft.
- Request alternatives, risks, counterarguments or missing information.
- Verify names, numbers, dates, quotations, legal points and other consequential claims.
- Treat generated content as a draft until a person has reviewed it.
- Do not paste sensitive information into locations or experiences that your organisation has not approved.
General-purpose prompts
Summarise this document in five points. Separate decisions, risks and actions.
Draft a one-page project proposal from these notes for a senior management audience.
Rewrite this text for clarity. Keep the meaning, remove repetition and use plain English.
Review this plan critically. Identify assumptions, gaps, dependencies and alternative options.
Turn these notes into a table with owner, action, deadline and status columns.
Copilot experiences and availability
The term Copilot covers several related experiences. Here is a practical distinction. Confirm current availability before making a purchasing or deployment decision.
| Experience | Practical description |
|---|---|
| Copilot Chat | Secure AI chat for research, drafting and working with supplied content. |
| Copilot Pages | A persistent, editable and collaborative content canvas. |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot | A broader Copilot experience across Microsoft 365 applications and organisational content. |
| Word, Excel and PowerPoint Agents | Can help create, draft or generate content based on natural-language instructions where supported by the relevant Copilot experience. |
| Custom agents | Task-specific or knowledge-specific Copilot experiences. |
Microsoft Copilot capabilities, licensing, interfaces and commercial models evolve regularly. Examples reflect capabilities available at the time of publication. Availability depends on Microsoft’s licensing model, tenant configuration, regional availability and organisational settings.
Copilot in Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Teams
Pick an app to see what Copilot is good for there, then copy a prompt straight into it.
Writing, reviewing and structuring
Use Copilot in Word to create a first draft, restructure content, summarise a document and improve clarity. Always verify substantive claims and ensure the finished document follows your organisation’s standards.
Create a two-page customer brief with an executive summary, business challenge, proposed approach, benefits and next steps.
Rewrite this section for a non-technical executive audience. Keep all important facts.
Identify unclear claims, repetition, unsupported statements and missing evidence in this document.
Convert this report into a concise FAQ for customers.
Convert the following list into a table with category, requirement, evidence and owner.
Analysis, formulas and insights
Copilot in Excel can help explore structured data, explain formulas and create summaries. For best results, use clear headers, consistent data types and well-structured ranges or tables. Check calculations and source data before relying on conclusions.
Identify the main month-on-month changes in this table and explain the likely drivers shown in the data.
List the ten largest variances and show the fields contributing to each variance.
Create and explain a formula that calculates year-on-year percentage growth.
Summarise revenue by service category and customer segment.
Create an appropriate chart comparing quarterly revenue by service line, and explain why that chart type fits.
Data check: Ask Copilot what data is missing, duplicated, inconsistent or potentially outdated before requesting conclusions.
Email and preparation
Use Copilot in Outlook to summarise threads, draft replies, improve tone and prepare for conversations. Availability can differ between Outlook experiences and licences.
Summarise this thread. List the latest position, unresolved questions and actions assigned to me.
Draft a concise reply that confirms the agreed actions, asks for the missing information and proposes the next step.
Make this email warmer and more direct without changing the commitment.
Using the relevant email thread, create a short meeting brief with background, decisions needed and open questions.
Review this draft for ambiguity, unnecessary jargon and statements that could be misinterpreted.
Presentations and storytelling
Use Copilot to build an outline, create a first draft from source material, improve slide structure and prepare speaker notes. Review facts, branding, visuals and slide density before presenting.
Create an eight-slide executive presentation from this report. Include context, three insights, risks, recommendations and next steps.
Reorganise this deck into a clear problem, evidence, recommendation and action storyline.
Reduce the text on this slide while preserving the key message and supporting evidence.
Create concise speaker notes for each slide, including the main message and likely questions.
Suggest a suitable visual for this slide and explain what information the visual should communicate.
Meetings and collaboration
Copilot in Teams can support meeting preparation, recap and discussion follow-up when the required meeting data, permissions and settings are available. A meeting invitation does not by itself prove attendance, and a recap may not capture every contribution.
Summarise the discussion so far. Separate decisions, questions and actions.
List the decisions made, actions, owners and stated deadlines from this meeting.
What viewpoints, risks or dependencies were not addressed in this meeting?
Draft a follow-up message confirming the decisions and actions. Flag anything that remains unclear.
Create a meeting brief from the available context with objectives, background, open issues and decisions required.
Copilot Chat, Pages and agents
Beyond the individual apps, three experiences extend what Copilot can do. Broader reasoning across organisational emails, meetings, chats and files depends on the user’s Copilot licence and available experience.
Copilot Chat
A conversational workspace for research, drafting and reasoning. It can work with web information, uploaded or selected files and content available in supported applications.
Copilot Pages
A persistent, editable canvas beside Copilot Chat to develop, refine and share content with colleagues. Supported Pages content can be converted into Word or PowerPoint.
Agents
Extend Copilot for particular tasks and may connect to organisational knowledge or processes, depending on account type, licensing and administrator settings.
Compare these three options using cost, implementation effort, risk and expected business value. State any missing evidence.
Turn this discussion into a structured working page with objectives, decisions, actions and open questions.
Research this topic using authoritative sources. Distinguish verified facts from analysis and provide citations.
Use the appropriate available agent to create a first draft, then tell me which sources and assumptions were used.
Draft a two-page proposal with an introduction, problem statement, solution, timeline and next steps.
Availability of Copilot Chat, Pages, agents and Microsoft 365 Copilot depends on Microsoft’s licensing model, tenant configuration, regional availability and organisational settings. Review and refine agent-created content in the relevant application before sharing.
Copilot Cowork: delegating multi-step work
Copilot Cowork is an agentic capability in Microsoft Copilot for multi-step work across Microsoft 365. Instead of only suggesting what to do, it can help plan and carry out a sequence of actions where supported, showing progress and seeking approval before sensitive actions such as sending, posting or scheduling.
How Cowork differs from Copilot Chat
Copilot Chat
- Best for focused questions, summaries, drafts and analysis within a conversation.
- Usually produces information or content for you to act on.
- Useful when the task is quick and bounded.
Copilot Cowork
- Best for coordinated, multi-step work across applications, files and services.
- Can help with actions such as drafting documents, preparing communications for approval and proposing meetings, where supported.
- Useful when the outcome requires several connected steps or recurring work.
Practical business use cases
Prepare a briefing for tomorrow’s customer meeting using the relevant emails, files and previous meeting notes. Create a one-page brief and draft an agenda for my approval.
Using the approved campaign brief, create a customer email, a short Teams update and a campaign checklist. Save the files and show me everything before anything is sent or posted.
Research this topic using authoritative sources, compare the findings with our available internal material and produce an executive report with citations, risks and recommendations.
Every Friday, prepare a weekly status summary from the available project information and present the draft for review.
Create a project folder, organise the supplied files by workstream and prepare an index that explains what each file contains.
Identify the messages that require action, draft responses for review and propose suitable meeting times where a meeting is requested.
Important control: Cowork operates with the user’s existing permissions. Review generated files and approve communications, calendar changes, payments or other consequential actions before execution. Avoid using Cowork as the final decision-maker for legal, medical, financial, employment or other high-impact matters.
Understanding agent costs and consumption
Agentic AI systems such as Copilot Cowork can consume resources based on the complexity of the task. Factors that may influence consumption:
- Number of steps in a workflow
- Volume of data processed
- Number of systems accessed
- Frequency of execution
- Use of reasoning-intensive tasks
- Use of document generation or analysis
Example workflows by relative consumption
Customer meeting summary
- Read meeting notes
- Produce summary
- Create action list
Fast execution · Lower consumption · Suitable for daily use
Marketing campaign assistant
- Review multiple documents
- Compare previous campaigns
- Create draft campaign plan
- Suggest messaging
Moderate consumption · Useful for recurring planning tasks
New customer onboarding workflow
- Gather information from multiple systems
- Create documentation
- Generate tasks
- Route information to teams
Higher consumption · Greater business value · Requires governance and monitoring
Cost planning: These examples describe relative consumption only; actual consumption varies with the task and how it is run. Start with a controlled pilot, review usage by task type and set sensible limits using the usage and cost reporting available to your organisation. Confirm current Microsoft and partner commercial terms before making decisions.
Securing Copilot and agents
Copilot is permission-aware, not risk-free. It does not grant new access, but it can make information that a user already has permission to access easier to find, combine and summarise. Existing oversharing, stale permissions, ownerless sites or poorly labelled information can therefore become more visible and more consequential.
If a user searched manually across every SharePoint site, OneDrive folder, email, meeting and connected source available to that account, could they find information that should not be accessible?
If yes, Copilot may surface the same information more efficiently. The control priority is to correct access and governance, not to assume Copilot will hide it. Ask this before deployment.
Key areas to review
Open each area to see the risk and the recommended control direction.
01Identity and access
02SharePoint and OneDrive oversharing
03Sensitivity and data loss prevention
04Data quality and lifecycle
05Agents, plugins and connectors
06Prompt injection and malicious content
07Agentic actions
08Audit, retention and investigation
09Third-party and web use
10Human verification
What Microsoft protects, and what your organisation must manage
How ready is your organisation?
Tick each item from the guide’s readiness checklist that is already in place. Your answers stay in this browser and aren’t sent anywhere.
Copilot generally reveals the state of the organisation’s existing identity, permission and information-governance controls. Secure deployment starts with data and access readiness, continues with policy and technical guardrails, and depends on informed human oversight.Core principle
Security, privacy and governance
Copilot operates within Microsoft 365 controls and the access available to the signed-in user, so permission hygiene is essential. Combine Copilot adoption with data classification, least-privilege access, retention, sensitivity labels, acceptable-use rules and human review.
Good practice for users
- Use approved work accounts, applications and data sources.
- Check recipients before sending generated content.
- Do not assume a confident answer is correct or complete.
- Validate sensitive, contractual, regulatory, financial, safety or security-related outputs with a qualified person.
- Report inaccurate, unsafe or inappropriate results through approved channels.
Good practice for organisations
- Review oversharing and permissions before and during deployment.
- Define where AI may and may not be used.
- Apply appropriate identity, device, information-protection and retention controls.
- Train users in prompting, verification, confidentiality and escalation.
- Monitor adoption and value without using AI output as an unsupported measure of individual performance.
Ten prompts every business user should know
These adaptable prompts cover common communication, analysis and planning tasks.
Summarise today’s most important information from the selected sources. Separate urgent items, decisions and actions.
Draft a response using the context provided. Do not invent commitments or facts that are not in the source.
Explain this spreadsheet in plain English. Highlight trends, anomalies and data-quality limitations.
Review this proposal critically. Identify risks, assumptions, missing evidence and questions a customer may ask.
Create a customer presentation from this report. Use a clear storyline and keep each slide focused on one message.
Prepare me for this meeting using the available context. Include objectives, background, likely questions and decisions required.
Summarise the actions from this conversation. Include owner and deadline only where explicitly stated.
Turn these notes into a project plan with phases, deliverables, dependencies, risks and owners.
Rewrite this for senior management. Lead with the decision required and the business impact.
What am I missing? Challenge the current approach and present credible alternative viewpoints.
A simple verification checklist
Run through this before you share anything Copilot has produced.
Understanding AI hallucinations
Copilot can occasionally generate information that appears convincing but is incorrect, incomplete or unsupported by source data. Users should:
- Verify important information
- Check cited sources
- Review generated content before sharing
- Apply professional judgement
Microsoft 365 Copilot questions we hear most
Does Microsoft 365 Copilot give users access to information they could not see before?
No. Copilot respects the signed-in user’s existing Microsoft 365 permissions and does not grant new access. However, it can make information a user already has permission to see easier to find, combine and summarise, so existing oversharing or stale permissions become more visible.
Is my data used to train Copilot’s AI models?
For organisational Copilot use, prompts, responses and Microsoft Graph data are not used to train foundation models. Organisations still need to set their own policies for acceptable use, sensitive prompts, retention and investigation.
What is the CRIT prompt model?
CRIT stands for Context, Role, Interview and Task. It was developed by Geoff Woods, author of The AI-Driven Leader. The Interview step asks Copilot to raise clarifying questions when important information is missing, rather than guessing.
How is Copilot Cowork different from Copilot Chat?
Copilot Chat is best for focused questions, summaries, drafts and analysis within a conversation. Copilot Cowork is designed for coordinated, multi-step work across applications, files and services, showing progress and seeking approval before sensitive actions such as sending, posting or scheduling.
Where should a business start with Microsoft 365 Copilot?
Start with one frequent, low-risk workflow such as summarising a document, preparing a meeting brief or drafting a routine email. Save the prompt that works, verify the output and refine the process. Scale only when quality, governance and human ownership are clear.
Sources and further guidance
This guide was drafted from the existing IT.ie Copilot cheat sheet and updated using Microsoft support material available at the time of preparation. Microsoft changes Copilot experiences regularly, so check feature availability in your own tenant.
This guide was created by IT.ie and is not a Microsoft publication. Microsoft, Microsoft 365, Copilot, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. Reviewed October 2026.
Keep the full guide to hand
Download the complete 29-page Microsoft 365 Copilot Guide as a PDF to share with your team, print for a workshop or keep beside you while you work.
Questions about Copilot? Talk to IT.ie
Whether you are planning a rollout, tightening security and governance, or want help getting more from the prompts in this guide, our Microsoft 365 specialists in Ireland are happy to help.
Talk to us
Tell us about your team and what you want Copilot to help with.
Choose your Copilot Champions
Pick the curious, influential people who will use Copilot every day and help others adopt it. A focused group of champions gets far more from Copilot than spreading it thinly.
Put it to work
Use Copilot on real emails, meetings, documents and spreadsheets, with practical prompts like the ones in this guide.
Decide what’s next
We review what worked with you, so you can decide where Copilot belongs in your business.
Get in touch
Send us your question and one of our team will get right back to you.