Unlocking the secrets to a smarter, snappier Copilot experience

Microsoft Copilot is one of the most widely adopted AI tools in financial services, mainly due to its strong privacy and security protections. However, despite using the same underlying model as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, it’s not always rated as the “best” AI in an increasingly competitive landscape.

What many users don’t realise is that Copilot has several powerful capabilities that are not immediately obvious - features that can significantly change the game in how you use it and the value you get from it.

We explore some of Copilot’s most overlooked capabilities and how to configure them properly.

1. Copilot Instructions

If you’ve ever wanted Copilot to always respond using British English spelling, or even to end each response with a joke, Copilot Instructions is the feature you need to enable. Hidden within Copilot's settings menu, under Personalisation, Copilot Instructions allows you to set preferences that apply to every response that Copilot generates. For example, you could set instructions like:

“Only use British English spelling in your replies. Do not use em dashes. Avoid providing long-form explanations within your responses; get straight to the answer as succinctly as possible, unless they're explicitly requested as part of the prompt. Do not make anything up, do not lie, do not be untruthful, prefer responding with I do not know the answer.”

Once configured, Copilot Instructions elevates your experience by ensuring Copilot responds in a way that aligns with how you work and how you want it to respond.

2. Copilot Drafting and Calendar Instructions

Just like with Copilot Instructions, Drafting and Calendar Instructions allow you to set specific instructions for how Copilot composes emails and interprets your calendar. This feature is currently available only in the “New” Outlook and is accessed via the settings menu in Outlook (not in Copilot’s global settings).

Drafting Instructions allow you to guide Copilot’s writing style and tone in a way that better matches how you normally communicate. A great tip is to ask Copilot to generate these drafting instructions for you based on your previous emails. For example:

“I need you to compose Outlook Copilot Drafting instructions. The instructions should inform Copilot how to write in my specific style using examples of emails that I have previously written, to ensure that Copilot drafts are in line with my typical response style and tone. Provide only the drafting instruction that I can copy and paste into my Outlook settings”

Once set, you’ll find Copilot’s drafts feel far more natural, requiring significantly less editing before sending.

3. Copilot Notebooks

Notebooks is one of Copilot’s hidden gems, but it does have a higher barrier to entry for use than some of the other features of Copilot.

Notebooks essentially replaces your note-taking app, but with an interesting spin on it. It actually functions more like a scrapbook than a notebook. The core difference is that you can reference files, emails and meetings as links to a collection of notes, and then use Copilot to ask questions of all of those things combined.

This becomes especially valuable for tasks like investment research. For example, you might create a notebook for a particular company or security that you are researching. Within that notebook are your personal notes, links to websites, files, emails, and even previous Copilot responses to questions about that company. In that notebook, you can ask Copilot to summarise everything, answer research questions, or even generate a Podcast summary of the contents that you can then listen to on your commute.

4. Copilot Agents (Researcher & Analyst)

While Copilot agents are becoming more visible, they are still hidden away in menus, despite being incredibly important for generating higher-quality outputs. Two key agents stand out in particular:

Researcher

The Researcher agent uses a different AI model than the one you use when you interact with Copilot in the normal way and is designed to perform more like a human researcher. It reviews and re-reviews content in a more structured, methodical way.

Responses can take significantly longer than the regular Copilot, sometimes tens of minutes, but the output is generally several pages long and can be exported directly to Microsoft Word. Researcher is ideal for prompts that require deep analysis.

Analyst

The Analyst agent is great at working with numbers and performing calculations – not because AI models like ChatGPT are inherently good at maths (they’re not; in fact, they are terrible) but because Analyst writes and executes computer code behind the scenes (something AI models are great at) to perform the analysis in a special Microsoft Cloud environment.

This allows a regular computer to perform calculations and the AI to then interpret and provide the results back. This makes the Analyst agent extremely effective for analysing large tables of data (such as historical stock prices), though it is less suited to highly complex spreadsheets involving Macros.

Are there any more hidden Copilot features?

Absolutely. There are many more of these hidden options, tips and tricks within Copilot, and with the pace of change, new functionalities are being added continuously. As a result, new and more effective ways of using Copilot is constantly emerging.

Lanware offers dedicated Copilot training, from introductory sessions through to advanced use cases, enabling financial services firms to get the maximum value from their Microsoft Copilot implementation.