Tuesday Prompt Day | 6W + E Practical Experiment #3 — From AI Output to Business Decision
In our previous discussion, we explored an important idea: Prompt → Output → Evaluate → Refine → Better Output Today, let's take the next step. What happens when the goal is not simply to get a better answer from Copilot, but to get an answer that helps someone make a better decision? Let's look at a practical enterprise scenario. BASIC PROMPT "Review this project update and tell me if we are on track." It looks simple. But what does "on track" actually mean? On track against what? Who needs the answer? What decision are they trying to make? What evidence should Copilot consider? This is where 6W + E becomes useful. 6W + E PROMPT "Act as an enterprise program advisor. Review the project status information provided below and prepare an assessment for the project steering committee. WHY: The purpose is to determine whether the project is on track and whether leadership intervention is required. WHAT: Assess progress, major risks, dependencies, issues and upcoming milestones. WHO: The audience is senior business and IT leadership. WITH: Use only the information provided in the project status material. Do not invent missing facts. WAY: Present the response using these sections: Overall status Evidence supporting the status Key risks and their business impact Critical dependencies Decisions or actions required from leadership WIN: The output should allow a steering committee member to understand the situation quickly and identify where action is required. EVALUATE: Before finalizing the response, check whether each conclusion is supported by the source material. Clearly distinguish facts, observations and assumptions." Notice what changed. The prompt is not simply longer. The problem has become clearer. IMPROVED OUTPUT Instead of simply saying: "The project appears to be on track, although there are some risks." Copilot can be guided toward something more useful: Overall status: Amber - progress is continuing, but a dependency may affect the next milestone. Evidence: Current delivery remains aligned with the planned milestone. A key dependency is still unresolved. The available information does not confirm whether the dependency will be resolved before the milestone. Business impact: If the dependency remains unresolved, the next milestone may be delayed. Leadership action: Confirm ownership and resolution date for the dependency. Information gap: The source material does not provide a confirmed resolution date. That is a very different outcome. The AI is no longer just summarizing information. It is helping structure the information around a business decision. NOW EVALUATE Before accepting this output, ask: Are the conclusions supported by evidence? Did Copilot confuse an assumption with a fact? Is the business impact clear? Is the recommended action actually supported by the information? Can a decision-maker understand the situation quickly? What information is still missing? This is where EVALUATE becomes more than a final proofreading step. It becomes a quality-control mechanism. REFINE Suppose our evaluation identifies one problem: The response identifies the dependency, but the leadership action is still too generic. We can refine the instruction: "Refine the leadership action. Do not simply recommend monitoring the dependency. Identify the specific decision, owner or escalation required based only on the available information. If the source material does not provide enough information to identify an owner or decision, explicitly state what information is missing." Now we have another cycle: Prompt → Output → Evaluate → Refine → Better Output And this leads to a broader question. Are we really trying to teach people how to write better prompts? Or are we trying to teach people how to work effectively with AI? I believe there is an important difference. Prompt engineering may start with the prompt. But effective AI collaboration continues through evaluation, judgment and refinement. YOUR TURN Think about a Copilot interaction you use in your day-to-day work. Ask yourself: What decision is the output supposed to support? What evidence should Copilot use? What would make the answer genuinely useful? How would you evaluate the first response? What would you refine if the answer was only almost right? Share your experience without including confidential information. I'm especially interested in examples where Copilot produced a technically correct answer but the answer was not useful for the actual business decision. Those examples can teach us more than perfect prompts. This discussion continues the 6W + E practical experiment series. Please see the Resources section for the previous experiments and the original 6W + E framework. The goal of this series is not simply to create better prompts. It is to explore whether 6W + E can become a repeatable method for working with AI in real-world scenarios. What would you evaluate first in your next Copilot response?Tuesday Prompt Day 🚀 | 6W + E Practical Experiment #2
In our previous practical experiment, we took a simple Copilot request and transformed it using the Six W + E framework. Today, let's focus on the part that can make the biggest difference: E = EVALUATE A common assumption is: Prompt → Copilot → Answer But in real-world enterprise work, I believe the process should be: Prompt → Output → Evaluate → Refine → Better Output Let's continue with the same scenario. 🔹 BASIC PROMPT "Create a summary of our cloud migration project." The response may be reasonable. But before accepting it, let's evaluate it. 🔹 EVALUATE Ask yourself: Did Copilot understand the intended audience? Did it focus on the business objective? Did it distinguish facts from assumptions? Did it surface the risks that actually matter? Can the intended audience act on the result? Suppose the answer is: "Mostly good, but the risks are too generic and the executive summary contains too much technical detail." That feedback is valuable. We now know what needs to change. 🔹 REFINE Instead of starting over, we refine the instruction: "Refine the previous response for senior business and IT leadership. Reduce technical implementation details. Prioritize the most significant business risks. For each risk, provide: Risk • Business impact • Current mitigation • Decision or action required Keep the executive summary concise. Do not introduce information that is not supported by the source material. Clearly identify any information that is unavailable." Now the interaction has changed. We are no longer simply asking Copilot for an answer. We are using the first answer to improve the next instruction. 🔹 IMPROVED OUTPUT The objective is not necessarily to make the prompt longer. The objective is to make the next interaction more precise. That distinction matters. A good prompt can produce a useful first response. But a good evaluation process helps us systematically improve the result. This is why I see EVALUATE as an important part of Six W + E. It creates a feedback loop: Think → Prompt → Output → Evaluate → Refine And this raises an interesting question for enterprise AI adoption: Should we teach people only how to write better prompts? Or should we teach them how to evaluate AI output and refine their interaction with AI? I believe the second capability is just as important. 💡 YOUR TURN Take one prompt you use with Copilot. Run it once. Then evaluate the response before rewriting the prompt. Share: What you originally asked What was missing or incorrect in the response What you changed in your prompt Whether the second result was actually better Please avoid sharing confidential or sensitive information. I'm particularly interested in examples where the first Copilot response looked correct but wasn't actually useful for the business problem. Those are often the most interesting examples. 🔗 This discussion continues our Six W + E journey. Start with the original framework discussion and then explore the practical experiment series from there. I'll use the strongest examples from this series to explore how Six W + E can evolve from a prompting framework into a practical method for working with AI.How Generative AI Learns and Creates 🎨🤖
Today, we will learn and understand how Gen AI actually learns to create new things. Generative AI models learn by studying patterns from massive datasets — such as text, images, or audio. They don’t memorize this data. Instead, they identify how words, shapes, or sounds connect — and then use this understanding to create something new. For instance, when you ask Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT to write a paragraph, the AI doesn’t copy it from the web. It uses what it has learned from patterns in language to generate fresh, original text. Similarly, image tools like DALL·E create pictures based on descriptions by learning visual structures and textures. In simple terms, Generative AI learns like an artist who studies thousands of styles — then paints something unique. ✨ Try this: Ask Copilot or ChatGPT to “write a two-line poem about teamwork in space.” Observe how it constructs ideas and language. That’s AI creation in action! 💬 Share what you tried — or what surprised you most — in the comments below!The New Era of Copilot: From Assistant to AI Agent Platform
Microsoft 365 Copilot is shifting from a simple AI assistant into a full agent platform that can understand context, take actions, and be governed at scale. This new direction changes how enterprises design, deploy, and monitor AI in daily work. The headline: Copilot is no longer just “answering prompts”; it is orchestrating tasks across email, documents, meetings, and business systems, with controls and analytics that IT and AI leaders have been asking for. 1. GPT‑5 Chat Inside Copilot Agents One of the most important updates is the move to GPT‑5 Chat for agents created with Copilot’s Agent Builder and Copilot Studio. Key implications: Higher-quality answers: Better reasoning, fewer hallucinations, and more fluent responses in complex business scenarios. More reliable instructions: Agents follow multi-step instructions more consistently, which is critical for workflows like HR onboarding or IT helpdesk. No extra configuration: Where available, tenants automatically benefit from the new model when their agents respond to prompts. For innovators, this means your existing Copilot agents can suddenly handle richer conversations and more nuanced tasks without you rewriting them. 2. Microsoft Agent 365: A Control Plane for AI Agents Another big change is the introduction of Microsoft Agent 365, a unified control plane for enterprise AI agents. What this brings: Centralized governance: One place to manage policies, access, and behaviours for all your agents across the organization. Monitoring and analytics: Visibility into which agents are used, how they perform, and where to improve. Real actions with connectors: Agents can schedule meetings, generate documents, send emails, and update CRM records with full compliance and audit trails. This is crucial if your organization wants to go from “a few pilots” to hundreds of agents safely and consistently. 3. Stronger Governance: Agent ID, Security, and Compliance To support this growth, Microsoft has added new governance and security capabilities. Highlights include: Microsoft Entra Agent ID: A dedicated identity layer for agents so IT can see which agent did what, when, and under which policy. Real-time protection: Integration with security tools for threat detection and protection as agents access resources and perform actions. Enhanced content governance: Features that help prevent oversharing and protect sensitive data in SharePoint and other repositories. For AI and Copilot leaders, this makes it easier to say “yes” to more AI use cases without sacrificing risk management. 4. Smarter Copilot Chat and Conversation History On the user side, Copilot Chat is becoming more context-aware and persistent. Recent improvements include: Better models in Copilot Chat: Higher quality and faster performance for everyday chat across Microsoft 365. Conversation history: Copilot can now use your past chats to provide better follow-up answers and let you pick up where you left off. Scoped content sources: Users can explicitly limit Copilot responses to selected sources (like a specific site or set of files), improving precision and transparency. This makes Copilot feel less like “a new chat every time” and more like an ongoing AI partner that remembers context responsibly. 5. New Agent Experiences in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams Across core apps, Copilot is gaining new “agent-like” behaviours that go beyond simple prompts. Examples: Agent Mode in Word and Excel: Copilot can act like a mini-assistant inside your document or workbook, guided by higher-level goals such as “clean this dataset and prepare a summary” or “improve this proposal for executives.” Meeting planning and summaries in Outlook and Teams: Copilot can help plan meetings, summarize email threads, and recap live or recorded meetings with clearer action items. PowerPoint “Explain” and speaker support: New features help explain complex slides, add speaker notes, and translate content. For innovators, these capabilities are building blocks for domain-specific solutions—like sales decks that update themselves or financial models that explain their own assumptions. 6. What This Means for Generative AI and Copilot Innovators For your Generative AI and Copilot Innovators community, this new wave of Copilot updates opens several strategic opportunities. You can: Design agent-first solutions: Move from “prompt libraries” to full AI agents that can take actions, respect policies, and be measured. Partner deeply with IT: Use new governance and identity controls to align AI innovation with security and compliance. Build reusable patterns: Create templates for HR agents, sales agents, support agents, and analytics agents that others in your org can reuse and adapt. Educate on responsible scaling: Use these updates as a framework for training colleagues on safe, effective deployment of AI at scale. A practical scenario: imagine a “Project Delivery Agent” that reads project documents, updates tasks, drafts status reports, checks risk registers, and prepares meeting agendas—governed centrally, monitored via dashboards, and powered by GPT‑5 Chat. 7. How to Start Exploring These Updates To make the most of these new capabilities: Identify one or two high-value processes (like employee onboarding or customer proposal creation) and prototype an agent around them. Work with IT to configure governance, identities, and data access correctly from day one. Capture lessons learned—prompt patterns, guardrails, and adoption tips—and share them with your community so others can accelerate. These updates transform Copilot from “a powerful assistant” into a foundation for building a whole ecosystem of governed, action-taking AI agents inside your organization.
Top 5 Copilot Prompts Every MCT Should Know 🎓
As trainers, we spend a lot of time preparing content, engaging learners, and managing communication. Copilot + AI can change the game—if you know how to use it smartly. Here are my top 5 prompts and tips: ✅ 1. “Create a training outline for [topic] with objectives and key takeaways.” AI Insight: Copilot uses context to build structured outlines. Add details like audience level (beginner/advanced) for better results. ✅ 2. “Give me 5 scenario-based questions for a workshop on [topic].” Tip: Scenario-based prompts make AI generate practical, real-world examples—great for hands-on learning. ✅ 3. “Turn this document into a 3-slide PowerPoint summary for learners.” AI Insight: Copilot can condense complex content without losing key points. Always review for accuracy before sharing. ✅ 4. “Write an email inviting participants to a session on [topic], highlighting benefits.” Tip: Add tone instructions like ‘professional but friendly’ to make your email sound natural. ✅ 5. “Suggest 3 creative icebreakers for a virtual training on [topic].” AI Insight: Copilot can pull ideas from diverse sources—combine them with your personal touch for maximum engagement. 💡 Pro Tip: The more context you give (audience type, duration, tone), the smarter Copilot gets. Think of it as prompt engineering for trainers. 👉 Your turn: What’s your favorite Copilot prompt for training? Share in comments!