Microsoft Copilot Training

A licence is not training. We spend three and a half hours, or a full day, with your team on the parts of their week Copilot can actually take off them, in plain English, built around the work they really do.

Two Copilots, and it matters which one you have

This causes more confusion than anything else, and it explains most disappointing first attempts.

• Copilot Chat is the chat window. You can ask it questions, paste text in, have it rewritten, and have it search the web. What it cannot do is see your inbox, your calendar or your files on its own.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot, the licensed version, is built into Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It does everything Chat does, and it can also read your own mailbox, calendar and the files you already have access to.

If someone has asked Copilot to summarise their inbox and been told it cannot, they almost certainly had Chat rather than the licensed version. Nothing was broken. They were using the wrong door. We sort that out in the first ten minutes.

What we cover

• The four-part prompt. Most disappointing answers come from one-line requests. We show the difference live on your own work, and the fourth line is the one everybody skips.
• The morning brief instead of the inbox scroll. Everything since 5pm yesterday, grouped into needs a reply today, for information, and can wait.
• Meeting prep in three prompts. What was agreed last time, what has changed, then a one-page briefing note under 400 words, with the sources it used so you can check them.
• One set of notes, every channel. From a single document: an intranet post, social captions written for their own platforms, and a two-line email to the team.
• Minutes and actions written while you were still talking. With transcription agreed and switched on, a Teams recap gives you the summary, the decisions and who agreed to what.

What your team can do by the end

• Tell Copilot Chat from Microsoft 365 Copilot, and know which one they have
• Write the four-part prompt that gets a usable draft first time
• Turn the morning inbox into a two-minute scan, grouped by what needs a reply today
• Prepare for a meeting in three prompts and leave it with the actions already written
• Turn one document into the intranet post, the captions and the team email
• Know what must never be typed into a chat window, and who to ask when they are unsure

An NHS communications team, on Bournemouth seafront

We spent a morning in the Branksome Dene Room teaching eleven people from an NHS hospital communications team how to get Copilot doing the parts of their job they do not enjoy. Not a team that went looking for AI. AI had arrived on their desks.

In June 2026 NHS England announced that more than 500,000 staff would get Microsoft 365 Copilot by October. That followed a trial across 90 NHS organisations involving more than 30,000 people, which found an average saving of 43 minutes per person per day.

The line that came back most afterwards was not about a feature. It was this: have a conversation with it, do not take the first answer and walk away. The full write-up is on the blog, including the four-part prompt and the guardrails we set before any of the tricks.

The rules before the tricks

We do the guardrails early, because a team that knows where the line is uses the tool with far more confidence than a team quietly worrying they are about to do something wrong.

Fine: drafting, rewriting and summarising non-sensitive documents, reading long policies, turning agreed meeting transcripts into actions, and working on files you already have permission to open. Not fine: patient-identifiable or staff-identifiable information, anything clinical, anything involving safeguarding, legal or incident reports, pasting work material into a personal AI account, or sending anything out without a person reading it first.

For NHS teams we are clear about two things. Your own organisation's information governance policy beats anything said in a training room, and NHS England publishes information governance guidance and a template DPIA for Copilot, reviewed with the ICO and the National Data Guardian, which is the document your IG team will be working from.

Where this sits

• Using Claude instead, or as well? Claude training for teams is the same session for a different tool.
• Want the policy and the automations too? That is AI training and rollout.
• Prefer a public session first? The workshops run across Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset and Berkshire.
• Not sure which? The training finder asks four questions and tells you.