Prompt Like a Pro: Prepare for your week with Microsoft Copilot in Teams

Will Copilot be able to automatically schedule tasks for me on my calendar? Similar to other platforms like Motion? 

We also tried some “organize” type prompts for information retrieval to help us quickly prioritize our schedules based on all the communications (chats, meetings, channels, group chats) within Microsoft Teams.  What we found is that Copilot still didn’t save us time from sifting through all the information. Most of the time, Copilot pulled up zero results, or the results were inaccurate or irrelevant. This led us to try building our own AI Assistant for Microsoft Teams, specifically to perform faster, more accurate information retrieval tasks. You can see how our AI Assistant compares to Copilot using the same natural language prompts in this video [link removed by admin]. 

My original prompt yielded the correct number of meetings for the week 23. I then asked copilot to exclude lunch from the totals. The second response had the same number of meetings in each category:23 but the percentage was based on a total number of meetings of 32. Lunch wasn't excluded and 9 phantom meetings were added.

Selecting the suggested prompt tell me more about project specific meetings returned info on 5 meetings though both previous results list 6 meetings as project specific and one of the returned meetings was actually an external meeting. The summary lists 3 external engagements but asking for more info on them returned an error both times I tried to get more info. Asking for more info on operational meetings returned the same apology and generic explanation of the meeting category.

I think there is potential for benefit if copilot can provide accurate info. I tested the suggested prompts for about an hour. None of the results were helpful either because the response was an apology with generic info or it wasn't accurate.

Thanks Luca_Valadares I did try following up with something like that but it seemed to just redo the same prompt with a different set of 10 items. It didn't combine the results of both responses.

Thanks Luca_Valadares for the reply.  I had actually modified your original prompt to be "What do I have coming up NEXT week?” to ensure I was getting a full week view.  There were clearly 5 "Focus" entries in my calendar for the next week.  We've seen the problem with Copilot miscounting items before in other prompts.  As example, try this simple prompt - "How many emails did I receive yesterday counted by sender."

agreca as noted in this blog's disclaimer, since this prompt is not a pre-built prompt, there is a higher variance in the response you receive from Copilot. Sometimes it will give you only 10 meetings like you mentioned. In this case, continue your conversation with Copilot! I recommend using a follow-up prompt asking Copilot to display or organize all your meetings that week and see if that helps.

PGraham thank you for your comment! In this case, when you feed this prompt to Copilot it may only give you meeting information from that point in the week. For example, in your scenario, there are only 2 more instances of the focus meeting this week: Thursday and Friday. That is because you submit the prompt on a Thursday, so Copilot will only show you how many of a certain meeting are left before the end of that week. For optimal results with this prompt, I recommend asking again on Monday. Hope that helps!

This is great and all but it's currently very limited (assuming it's token limits) making it so that, at most, it will return 10 meetings or messages. This isn't very helpful for someone who has 30 meetings in a week.

Proof Of vision 

Great suggestion - but would be interested if others are experiencing the same challenge.  When using the "organize" prompt, Copilot struggles to accurately count the meetings for the week and the percentage counts are widely off.  For example, I have 1 hour focus meetings schedule each day of the week.  Copilot correctly categorized them but only counted 2 of them - "Focus (2 meetings, 9.1%): These are blocks of time you have set aside to focus on specific tasks without interruptions.".