Copilot Actions y Co-Work: proyectos multi‑paso en M365 (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Microsoft Copilot has a pretty good handle on answering questions or acting on basic instructions. So now, Microsoft is shifting focus. They're trying to make Copilot better at taking action, which can include designing and executing multi-step plans. I'm Nick, and today I want to introduce you to Copilot Actions and give you a preview of Copilot Co-Work. Similar to Clawed Co-Work and Open Claw, Copilot Co-Work represents a significant shift in what Copilot can do. And since Copilot is integrated into your Microsoft 365 account, it can securely leverage information from your meetings, your messages, and your documents. Now, before we get started, we have to kind of run through a checklist, because these features are not available for all Copilot users. You will need a Microsoft 365 Business or Enterprise subscription, the account that's managed by a company, school, or similar organization. These features could work their way to personal accounts later, but for now, they're only for Business and Enterprise. Next, you will also need the upgraded Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription. This is an add-on that enables the full set of Copilot features. For new subscribers, Microsoft 365 with Copilot can be set up all as one subscription. And finally, we're just doing a quick preview of Co-Work. As I'm recording this, it's only available for people enrolled in Frontier, Microsoft's early access program. At the end of this video, I'll loop back around with instructions for administrators to enable Frontier. Or of course, by the time you're watching this, Co-Work may have already completed the preview phase, so you may already have it. Now, to understand Co-Work, I think it helps to start with Copilot Actions, which are incredibly useful on their own. So let's go to Microsoft 365 Copilot on the web, where I am signed in with a business account. I'll select the chat option on the left. And since I have the full Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription, I see the toggle switch at the top for Work and Web. I want to switch to the Work mode, which lets me work with documents, messages, and meetings from my Work account. And I'll tell Copilot to schedule a meeting with me and... And at this point, I want to refer directly to one of my co-workers. I can type the forward slash, then start typing in that person's name. It found that person in my company's directory, so I'll choose her and finish the prompt. I want it to find a time when we're both available and schedule the meeting. And in this configuration, Copilot has the ability to find information about your co-workers and actually schedule the meeting. This is a fairly new capability, and all I need to do is click the Send button to confirm or choose one of the other suggested times and confirm. Great. Let's go a little deeper. I'll start a new chat, and I'll tell Copilot to find information about an event from last year and send new emails to my team to start planning this year's event. It shows me an email draft, but I want it to actually send this message. So I'll tell Copilot to send it. And like the meeting we just saw, it does not send the email directly, but it does show the message, and I can simply click Send, or I can make changes, then send it. Now, depending on when you're watching this, sending the email may require Frontier, but I expect that to clear early access soon. When we send emails or schedule meetings like this from the chat, we can call these Copilot Actions. And these actions are a big part of what makes Copilot Co-Work possible. So let's check out Copilot Co-Work. Just remember, this is in early access, so some steps could change in the near future. Now, Co-Work is an agent that can be used inside the Copilot chat. So from the Copilot website, choose All Agents from the navigation panel, then search for Co-Work. During the early access period, it will only show up here if you have Frontier enabled. So I'll choose Co-Work, then add it. And now Co-Work appears as an agent in the navigation panel on the left. Now, I'm sure you've probably heard of people refer to Copilot as your personal assistant. And if you have a personal assistant, you can ask them to handle individual tasks, like, hey, go grab this file for me. But if you have a good assistant, you can give them a complex assignment and trust them to do the research, contact whoever they need to contact, and find the resources they need. And this is how I want you to think of Copilot Co-Work. To start, we need to make sure that the Co-Work agent is selected. Then describe your goal and give Copilot an assignment. So here's my assignment. I want it to help me plan that Volunteer Day event. I want it to find anybody who contributed last year, make a list of responsibilities, and make assignments for each person. I want it to identify a date and time in August that works for the event, and scheduling the meetings we need to plan the event. Then communicate with the team to let them know what we're working on and create planning documents, spreadsheets, presentations for the kickoff meeting, and any other necessary documents. In this prompt, you could describe specific actions that you want it to take, but you don't always have to do that. So I'll send this prompt. And from here, Co-Work can design a plan. Copilot has a lot of work to do, so this will take several minutes. But you don't have to sit there and wait. You can even start a new chat and work on other things in Copilot and come back to this project later. Now that a few minutes have passed, I'll go back to the Co-Work agent. And I see a line for my Volunteer Day event. Each task has a status listed next to it, and if you point at the list, you can filter it to show tasks that need your input, tasks that are in progress, or tasks that are holding until their next scheduled action. I'll select our task and see how it's going. Now you may have to answer some questions, or in this case, it's ready to schedule some meetings. Before it will take direct action like this, you will have to approve these. Of course, you can make changes if you want, but this meeting looks good to me, so I'll click Create. Depending on your project, you may need to approve several meetings or several email messages like this. So just work through those. And don't hesitate to ask for feedback. I'm going to let a little more time pass, and then I'll check in again. And when this task is finally complete, we get a summary. I can see the meetings that were scheduled and saved in my Outlook calendar. On the right, we can see the Output folder, which contains all of the documents that are created. You can download all of the files together. You can download each file individually. Or you can just click on a file to preview it. I'm going to click on the Output folder. You can download each file individually. Or you can just click on a file to preview it right here. And it actually creates a folder on your OneDrive to store these files. So you can open or share them from your OneDrive later. And if it missed something, or if anything changes, or if you have new requirements over time, you can always come back to this co-work task and ask for changes or ask for something new. And now that we've built out one scenario, let me give you a quick look at a few other things that I've been using co-work for. One thing that I set up is a weekly brief. This is a common thing that early adopters have been using co-work for. Every Monday morning, it reviews all of my meetings, messages, and new files, and gives me a detailed report letting me know what I should be focusing on for the week ahead. I also asked it to include a weather forecast and to let me know if there are any local events that will affect traffic for the week. Based only on my prompt, co-work set up a scheduled action. And because I asked for my briefing as a Word document, I see the first one is here in the output folder. And let's look at one more task. Since I produce a lot of training videos, sometimes I need documents and email messages that look real, but just contain demo content. So I ask co-work to generate several documents and email conversations. Of course, you can just as easily ask it to generate real documents with real information from your organization, depending on what you need. Of course, those are just a few things that I've tried. I have no doubt that you'll come up with far more sophisticated tasks. And finally, now that we've seen how this works, let's loop back around to Frontier. If you are the administrator for your team, or if you want to send this video to your administrator, this is how they can enroll in Early Access. From the Microsoft 365 Copilot website, if you are signed in as an administrator, you can go to the Apps category in the navigation panel and choose Admin Center. In Admin Center, open the Copilot category on the left and choose Settings. Switch to the View All tab, then find the line for Copilot Frontier. And from here, you can grant Frontier access to your entire organization or just to specific people. Remember, only your team's administrator can enroll you in Frontier. Or, of course, you can wait until co-work is out of Early Access. Chat assistants like Copilot have come a long way from answering questions and doing online research. Co-work enables complex, multi-step projects with planning and independent decision-making. It builds on Copilot Actions and integrates with the Microsoft Office applications that you use every day, all protected by the security of Microsoft 365 for your organization. For more videos like this and to keep learning, be sure to subscribe to this channel.