Microsoft Copilot Examples: 9 Ways Companies are Using AI Today
Microsoft 365 Copilot eliminates pain points throughout business processes, helping your team avoid tedious tasks like digging through emails, re-writing content, conducting time-consuming research, and constantly switching between tools.
Optimizing Copilot is about finding ways to automate and shift processes that lead to real productivity gains, automate repetitive tasks, simplify complex workflows, and increase collaboration across your organization.
9 Tangible Microsoft Copilot Examples: How Companies Are Already Using It
But where does theory end and practicality begin? While it's nice to hear what Copilot can do for you, seeing it in action will show you its true value. In this blog, we’ll share nine creative and practical ways we use Microsoft 365 Copilot, from Bing Chat and Loop integration to prompt sharing and technical translation, to work smarter throughout the day.
It starts with the tools you already use, surfacing answers, streamlining tasks, and bringing the power of AI into your workday. Let's take a look:
1. Tap into Bing Chat and Context Awareness Right Inside Your Apps
Microsoft 365 Copilot isn't limited to just Word or Excel. In the Microsoft Edge browser, Bing Chat gives you access to Copilot with the free and paid versions. You can ask Copilot questions like “Summarize this page for me,” and get quick, AI-powered answers without switching context.
You can enhance this further when you sign in with your work account. The Copilot sidebar in Edge unlocks a “Work” tab that understands your Microsoft 365 environment, letting you ask context-aware questions and get summaries from within apps like your CRM. For example, if you are looking at a lead or opportunity page, you can ask Copilot to summarize key points. It reads the content on the page and returns a clear breakdown in seconds, helping you work faster and more accurately.
This contextual intelligence saves time and keeps you focused on your most important tasks.
2. Manage and Reuse Prompts Like a Pro
Prompting is becoming the new keyboard shortcut. Whether you’re asking simple questions or generating detailed client-ready deliverables, the way you phrase a prompt can make all the difference, and being able to save and reuse those prompts turns a one-time win into an ongoing time-saver.
For example, you might ask Copilot something quick, like “What is the licensing cost for Microsoft 365 Copilot?” and get an accurate answer in seconds. But where this scales is with more complex, tailored prompts, like preparing for a client meeting. Let’s say you're a Microsoft partner meeting with a pen manufacturer. You can prompt Copilot to generate a table of upcoming Business Central features relevant to their industry, with release timelines. Once you've got a solid output, you can flag and save that prompt for future use.
The next time you meet with a services company, you can pull up that saved prompt, tweak the industry specifics, and instantly generate a new, tailored response. It’s a fast, efficient way to build a library of smart, reusable prompts that adapt to your workflow.
Once you’ve mastered crafting effective prompts, the next step is scaling that value to increase collaboration across your team.
3. Share Prompts Across Teams for Consistency and Speed
Building a prompt library can be time-consuming, especially when creating something technical or tailored to a specific scenario. But once you’ve got a prompt that works, there’s no reason to keep it to yourself. Microsoft 365 Copilot lets you share your best prompts with colleagues so everyone can work from the same starting point.
When a user goes into your prompt library, they can access the prompt gallery and will find a new option: Team Prompts. These are shared prompts you can distribute to specific Microsoft Teams. Maybe you're in pre-sales and have a technical prompt that surfaces the latest deployment syntax, or maybe it’s a user-friendly prompt that summarizes Microsoft licensing. You can share these with the right team members to use them for their needs.
Once you share the prompt, it will appear in that team’s shared library. Then anyone on the team can run it using their access and permissions. Even better, you can easily remove prompts from team galleries if you share them by mistake or they lose relevance.
This kind of prompt sharing builds consistency in messaging, speeds up repetitive tasks, and makes your organization’s knowledge more scalable.
But what happens when you’re swimming in documents and don’t know where to start?
4. Use SharePoint Agents to Mine Your Content
If you've ever stared at a cluttered SharePoint site wondering where to find that one key resource, you're not alone. That’s where SharePoint agents come in, AI-powered assistants that can search, reason, and summarize content across entire folders of files, just for you.
Let’s say you’re working in your team’s SharePoint and are preparing for a client meeting. You can activate a custom Copilot agent trained on the documents in that folder. Ask it, “How can I use these resources?” and it will understand your role and suggest the most relevant files for your engagement. Here are some other examples of how SharePoint agents work:
- Looking into security protocols: An agent can instantly locate and summarize those details.
- Comparing related documents: Copilot can analyze documents side-by-side, evaluate them, assess readiness, and compare and contrast them.
- Intelligent navigation: Spend less time searching and more time working with Copilot's built-in prompts (for example, "Create a new post"). This may help you uncover features you didn't know about before.
Managing overflowing inboxes? Copilot can lend a hand there too.
5. Clean Up Your Inbox with Smart Email Rules
We've all spent time trapped in a never-ending email thread that keeps popping up in our inbox. Instead of manually sorting or deleting every message, Copilot can automate this process.
Here’s how it works: Open the email thread, activate Copilot in Outlook, and give it a prompt like “Create a rule to move all emails with this subject line to junk.” Copilot will automatically surface the Rules and Alerts panel, pre-fill the rule name, and the subject line conditions, and suggest common actions like moving the emails to a folder, junking them, or deleting them entirely.
In just a few clicks, you can finalize the action (like deleting all emails in the thread), check “Run this rule now,” and instantly watch your inbox get cleaned up, no need to dig through Outlook’s menus or Google how-to articles.
Need IT help? Try an agent before you submit a ticket.
6. Reduce IT Bottlenecks with a Help Desk Agent
Our internal IT team has found relief thanks to a custom help desk agent powered by Copilot. When the support queue fills up, this agent empowers employees to self-serve by answering common IT questions.
For example, you’ve been promoted and must update your email signature. Instead of emailing IT, you can prompt the help desk agent with “How do I change my email signature?”, and it will return the exact steps from internal documentation.
Still stuck? Just ask, “How do I submit a support ticket?” and Copilot will walk you through the process to get personalized help. In another example, let's say you need to reset your password. The agent will clarify whether you’re trying to change your email login or MFA credentials, and then direct you to the right internal guide.
This help desk agent lightens the load on IT while giving users a quicker way to get what they need. It eliminates waiting for someone on the IT team to respond to a ticket if you can solve it with a few clicks.
You can also translate technical speak for non-technical audiences with the help of Copilot.
7. Use Copilot for Technical Translation
Have you ever needed to explain a complex IT concept to a non-technical audience? Copilot can help you bridge that gap quickly and effectively.
Say you’re preparing to talk about Conditional Access in Entra ID. Copilot can provide a detailed explanation with links and supporting details. But while informative, that response might still feel too technical for your audience. So, you take it further, ask Copilot, “How does Conditional Access work with multi-factor authentication?”, and it connects the dots across your conversation.
Still too jargon-heavy? Just prompt Copilot to summarize this for a specific audience. It will then rewrite the content with clearer, simpler language that retains the key concepts without assuming deep technical knowledge.
Even better, you can prompt Copilot to “Frame this to show the business value,” and it will add that lens to help convey why the topic matters. It’s a great tool for preparing for client conversations or leadership briefings, and all responses come with source links so you can verify or explore further as needed.
With Copilot you can also work together seamlessly with Loop.
8. Use Loop and Copilot for Real-Time Collaboration
Loop is Microsoft's dynamic collaboration app. Imagine OneNote meets Teams with supercharged productivity. Here’s how you can use it with Copilot to streamline planning, content creation, and research, all in one place.
Let’s say you're managing a workspace dedicated to licensing and are creating a new informational document for Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing. You've added Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files and invited collaborators. You can prompt Copilot to create it with something like “Create a brochure for M365 Copilot licensing.” It instantly generates structured, brochure-style content right in the workspace.
Loop and Copilot can help your team with project plans without toggling between apps. Ask Copilot “What does Microsoft say about Copilot licenses?” right in the Loop sidebar. Copilot searches the workspace content and external resources, returning helpful insights you can paste directly into your plan.
You can also interact with Copilot inline on the page, highlight text, and prompt it to explain or expand. Whether you're building event materials, asset content, or researching licensing details, Copilot meets you where you work.
And here’s a bonus: not everyone on the team needs a Copilot license. The whole group can benefit from its collaborative features as long as one person has the right license.
Bring it all together by letting your insights drive action, automatically.
9. Take Action with Copilot’s Newest Capabilities
A brand-new capability has landed: Copilot Actions. Previously, Copilot helped generate and summarize content, but now, it can do things for you. Actions are available through three tabs: Create, Discover, and Manage, and they’re a game-changer for personal productivity.
In the Create tab, you’ll find prebuilt automations like “Help me prepare for my day.” When you click on the prompt, you can choose to get daily summaries via Teams or Email. Copilot does this by building a Power Automate flow for you.
Want more? Head to the Discover tab, which offers categorized suggestions like Catch Up, Gather and Prepare. These aren’t just helpful, they’re smart. One example is the “Review Teams messages where I’ve been mentioned” action. It identifies chats where you were @mentioned, helps you catch up, and ensures you never miss a beat or a deliverable. You can set it to run daily and choose a delivery method that works for you.
Finally, all your running or completed automations live in the Manage tab. It’s a centralized hub where you can tweak, rerun, or remove any action.
Copilot is no longer just a co-pilot, it’s your smart assistant in motion.
What’s Next for Copilot? The Future Looks Bright
Copilot is already transforming the way we work, integrating seamlessly with Microsoft applications to boost productivity, streamline collaboration, and automate actions that reduce your manual work tasks.
However, there is always room for more! New features arrive almost daily. From enhanced Copilot support in OneNote, perfect for staying organized on the go, to live voice translation in Teams meetings that makes global collaboration more natural than ever, the pace of innovation is remarkable. Soon, you’ll even be able to use Copilot during Teams calls without turning on transcription or recording, giving you the best productivity and privacy.
These capabilities are just the beginning. Whether you're automating tasks, generating content, uncovering insights, or simply staying on top of your day, Copilot continues to evolve as a highly intelligent partner. The more you explore what Copilot can do, the more you will uncover ways to work smarter and more efficiently.
Ready to Explore the Tangible Ways You Can Use Copilot and AI Now and in the Future?
Talk to the Stoneridge team today to get started with Copilot! Whether you're just starting or want to expand your Copilot capabilities, our experts can answer questions, share best practices, and guide you through the next steps.
Co-Authors: Tracy Ottenstroer and Tyler St. Pierre
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