Can Copilot help summarize employee feedback and review data?

Hi ClaireB​ !

this is a great use case and one I've worked through with teams, so let me give you the honest picture.

Short answer: yes, Copilot can do this, but for performance and feedback data specifically there's one thing you have to get right first, it's permissions.

Copilot only ever sees what the signed-in person already has access to. It never breaks permissions. That sounds reassuring, and it is, but it cuts both ways. If those 1:1 notes, peer feedback, and goal files are sitting in SharePoint with loose permissions, Copilot can surface sensitive content to people who technically have access but were never meant to read it. With HR data, that's the real risk to manage before you roll anything out. So step one is making sure each manager can only reach their own team's data.

On the "automatic" part of your question: Copilot won't reliably go and gather months of scattered notes on its own unless they're well organised. The way it actually works well is when you point it at the right place. So if a manager keeps a team in a specific SharePoint folder or document, they can prompt Copilot in something like: "Summarise the key themes from the peer feedback and 1:1 notes in [this folder] for [employee], grouped into strengths, areas to develop, and progress against goals." The more structured the source, the better the summary.

On whether you need to build something custom: start simple. Copilot in SharePoint, Teams, and Word handles a lot of this with no build at all. If you want something more repeatable, where managers click a button and get a consistent review summary, that's where Copilot Studio comes in. You can build a lightweight agent grounded only on the right HR site, which also helps you control exactly what it can and can't touch.

Two last things from experience:
First, always keep a human in the loop. Copilot can miss nuance or over-weight a single loud piece of feedback, so treat its summary as a first draft for the manager, never the final word on someone's performance.
Second, before you scale this up, loop in whoever owns data governance and HR compliance, because performance data carries extra sensitivity.

Happy to share a simple prompt set if that would help. Good luck with it😀