Introduction to Copilot Course
This is a course to introduce Copilot: how to get started and use it productively and safely.
Who Should Attend
This course is for people who work in organisations that have adopted or may adopt Copilot as their official AI assistant.
Pre-requisites
None. This is a beginner level course.
Course Length
This is a full day course.
Content
The course starts with a tour of the Copilot user interface and a quick look at some useful features (prompt gallery, dictation, load/attach files). It also covers how to use Copilot safely.
The course then covers the basics: how to sign in to Copilot, navigate the user interface; use features such as conversation history, loading files, prompt gallery, dictate and speak aloud, pages, and search. There is a short exercise to have our first conversation with Copilot.
The course covers some of Copilot’s more advanced capabilities including Notebooks, and the Analyst, Researcher and Visual Creator agents.
- Notebooks contain a set of related documents e.g. financial performance, compliance policies. The content can be Word or PDF documents. Copilot just uses the content only to generate its responses - the responses are “grounded” in the content. It does not search the web or use it’s own training, so its responses are “grounded” in the content uploaded into the notebook. Notebooks are very useful things with lots of great use-cases!
- Copilot’s Analyst agent acts as a data analyst: it will read a dataset, and then answer our questions related to the data; e.g., describe the data, build some charts, provide insights.
- Copilot’s Researcher agent is useful for larger and more challenging tasks. Researcher uses a more powerful reasoning model. It may take a few minutes to respond but comes back with a more considered and comprehensive response.
- Copilot’s Visual Creator agent creates an image or video based on a text description.
Several hands-on exercises provide an opportunity to explore Copilot’s capabilities and practise example prompts to encourage Copilot, and other AI assistants, to provide more accurate, tailored and relevant responses.
Copilot is available integrated into M365 applications such as Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams. The course covers these capabilities in brief.
Note: A particular course will cover only those Copilot capabilities currently available to attendees
Copilot has several different capabilities, for example
- Copilot Chat, a browser-based AI assistant
- work sources. Copilot Chat can search the public web to respond to an prompt. In addition, work sources allow Copilot Chat to use internal content (emails, Word and Excel files on OneDrive and SharePoint)
- notebooks
- Copilot such as agents the Analyst, Researcher and Visual Creator agents.
- Copilot integrated into M365 applications
An organisation may decide to make available some but not all capabilities. An individual course will cover only those capabilities available to most attendees.