Fear and misinformation surround new artificial intelligence (AI) apps, yet AI can help workers automate mundane tasks and protect focus time so you can put more hours towards the work you love to do. Worktank executive producer, audio engineer and creative John McDonald spent a week with Copilot for Microsoft 365 to see how AI simplifies everyday tasks to help reduce churn in his work week.
Your Boundary Creator.
Like me, you’re probably skeptical about how AI can reduce the churn of everyday tasks like emails, chat, and meetings. I started my weeklong Copilot for Microsoft 365 deep dive with openness and curiosity, yet was unconvinced AI would live up to the promise of giving me back time to do the work I love like editing, audio post-production, and developing video creative. And the good news: it works.
I learned AI isn’t tech you activate like a Roomba. You need to first shift how you work and make space for AI tools like Copilot to help get you started. As an example, I typically dive headfirst into email every morning – and with Copilot , you need to take a step back from your routine and let it do its job of scanning emails and surfacing priorities for you. Now, my morning begins with a fresh perspective – clearly delineating what I need to focus on today and what I can hold for later.
I quickly found Copilot to establish new and firm boundaries for how I need to work.
How Copilot Works
Copilot is integrated into the productivity tools you use every day like Microsoft Teams. It worked best for me when I let Copilot manage activities in the background so I can focus blocks of time managing recording sessions, creative work and pressing deadlines.
Copilot pulls content from two sources: my company and the Web. What’s brilliant about Copilot within our eco-system? The results are fast, spookily accurate, exact, and well summarized. Before Copilot, it wasn’t unusual for me to be interrupted several times in a week by coworkers asking about the location of a presentation or doc – and now they can get there faster via Copilot without having to ask me.
My Top 5.
By the end of the week, Copilot helped me improve some bad time management habits like frequently jumping between work, email, chat, and meetings. However, the reality is it will take time to change my well-worn habits.I need to be patient with my own growth as I begin to trust how AI can help tame my day to day crunch.
Here are the Top 5 ways Microsoft Copilot helped me get ahead the most.
1. Preview the day and week ahead.
As an executive producer, I often oversee several projects that are led by individual producers. Even if I’m unable to attend every meeting, I need to know every project status and any areas of concern. With Copilot, I reviewed a morning summary via Microsoft Teams that included a rollup of emails, meetings in the day ahead, and a POV on what’s most pressing and what can wait. Just by starting here, I oriented myself to a new way of working that will stick.
2. Summarize a stack of emails and chats.
As I’m often running hours long recording sessions, email threads grow tenfold before I get to them. After a meeting or a session, I started with Copilot to scrub the most vital details while I was offline. By prompting the interface with “Summarize emails since 9 am”, Copilot quickly generated an accurate bulleted list of key info, even leading with what it considered most important and relevant for my day. Copilot also let me copy the list over to OneNote which lets me track action items.
3. Tame my calendar.
My first go with Copilot on Monday morning was to ask for it to preview the week ahead. Copilot quickly listed bullets of key meetings and gave me the option to copy to my OneNote journal for me to track. It allowed for follow-up questions like “is any meeting urgent?” and confirmed there were no meetings marked as urgent yet prompted a reminder for me to review agendas and confirm with the organizers if my presence is required.
It’s a little cheeky, but at the start of the day I asked Copilot “what meetings can I skip this week?” Copilot suggested potentially skipping recurring meetings attended by folks on my team – and it even served up the actual invitation in its response so I can quickly open and make any changes.
4. Find actions by name.
For producers and clients I work with most regularly, things get lost in email and calendars quickly – and rather than search through specific emails, invitations, or files, Copilot let me prompt with a “/” and a name. So, “/Evan Sadler” returned not only activity and actions related to my colleague Evan, but it also instantly served relevant documents, presentations, and references like “Evan Sadler in chat.” If I had a specific question like “what was the last email Evan Sadler sent me?” Copilot replied with the date, time, subject line and even a summary of the email.
5. Maintain a Copilot Dashboard.
Copilot is brilliantly nested within Microsoft Teams, yet as I progressed through the week, I tended to turn to the Copilot dashboard and just left it open for easy access. I learned quickly that AI doesn’t come with a user manual, just prompts – and prompts are all you really need to know to get started. On the Copilot for Microsoft 365 dashboard there are six primary categories: What’s New? which gives me the latest info from a specific person organized by email, chat and files; Catch on meetings provides access to meeting notes, transcripts and actions; Track your tasks prompting what needs to be on my radar; and How to, a supercharged tutorial on anything I need help on like writing a proposal or a workback schedule.
AI Starts with You.
If you’re old enough to remember the promise of Ask Jeeves! you’ll start to understand the potential of AI and apps like Copilot for Microsoft 365. Yet Copilot delivers in ways you never dreamed about. It’s fast, exact, and super relevant to everything I do at work. Copilot is just that. It keeps me organized, focused, on track and helps me not get bogged down in the details.
We’re excited to kick off a series on how Worktank integrates AI in our production and broadcast solutions including tutorials on how we use AI with post-production and more pro tips on how Copilot for Microsoft 365 will help with post-event reporting and analysis. If you’re interested in learning how the video production pros at Worktank can help you level up your virtual broadcasts, meetings, and hybrid events, contact us online or give us a call at 877-975-8265.
