Copilot Cowork: Build AI Workflows in Microsoft 365

Your Work Runs on Autopilot Now

You’ve got seven meetings this week, two status reports due, an inbox that’s 200 emails deep, and a quarterly deck that somehow needs to exist by Friday. You know what to do for each task – the problem isn’t skill, it’s time.

Copilot Cowork changes the equation. Instead of chatting with AI one prompt at a time, you describe the outcome you want – “prep me for tomorrow’s board meeting” or “build this week’s status report from my Teams threads and Planner” – and Cowork turns that into a multi-step plan that runs across Outlook, Teams, Excel, PowerPoint, and SharePoint. It works in the background, checks in when it needs your input, and delivers finished outputs you can review, tweak, and send.

This course teaches you to build real workflows, not toy demos.

What You’ll Learn

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to:

• Build meeting prep workflows that pull docs, summarize threads, and draft agendas automatically
• Generate weekly status reports from scattered data across Teams, email, and Planner
• Triage your inbox with smart categorization and draft responses ready for review
• Create data-to-deck pipelines that analyze Excel data and output polished PowerPoint slides
• Track projects across Teams, Planner, and SharePoint in one coordinated workflow
• Chain and troubleshoot workflows that handle real-world edge cases

Course Overview

Lesson 1: Welcome to Copilot Cowork

What Cowork actually is, how it differs from regular Copilot chat, and your first working workflow in under five minutes.

Lesson 2: Automated Meeting Prep

Build a workflow that pulls relevant emails, files, and past meeting notes, then produces a briefing doc, a draft agenda, and a prep calendar block.

Lesson 3: Weekly Status Reports on Autopilot

Create a recurring workflow that gathers updates from Teams channels, email threads, and Planner boards, then compiles a polished status report.

Lesson 4: Email Triage and Smart Response Drafting

Design a workflow that categorizes incoming email by urgency, drafts responses for routine messages, and flags items that need your personal attention.

Lesson 5: Data Analysis to Slide Deck Pipeline

Build an end-to-end pipeline that analyzes Excel data, generates insights, and creates a presentation-ready PowerPoint deck.

Lesson 6: Project Tracking Across Teams, Planner, and SharePoint

Set up a workflow that monitors project milestones, flags risks, and produces a consolidated tracker your team can actually use.

Lesson 7: Advanced Workflows and Edge Cases

Chain workflows together, handle failures gracefully, and learn to prompt Cowork for complex, multi-branch operations.

Lesson 8: Capstone – Design Your Own Cowork Workflow

Design, test, and deploy a custom Cowork workflow that solves a real problem in your work.

Who This Course Is For

• Knowledge workers buried in meetings, emails, and status updates
• Project managers tracking work across multiple Microsoft 365 tools
• Team leads who spend hours compiling reports from scattered sources
• Operations professionals looking to automate recurring cross-app workflows
• Anyone with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license who wants Cowork to do real work, not just answer questions

You should be comfortable with Microsoft 365 apps (Outlook, Teams, Excel, PowerPoint). No coding required – Cowork runs entirely through natural language.

Time Investment

8 lessons, about 12-15 minutes each. Budget extra time for hands-on practice building workflows in your own Microsoft 365 environment. You’ll get the most value by building each workflow alongside the lesson.