Use-case library
78 practical Copilot and Power Platform use cases for awarding organisations. Open a use case to see details and confirm whether it works in practice.
Showing 78 of 78 use cases
Use Computer use where no connector exists
Use an agent to navigate a legacy interface for repetitive work when a suitable API or connector is unavailable.
Where: Copilot Studio / Agent Builder
Consolidate data from multiple files
Bring together tables or structured information from several files and ask AI to create one combined dataset or consistent summary.
Where: Excel / Analyst / Copilot Chat
Build an internal case-management app
Create an internal app to manage records, status, evidence, actions and ownership in one place.
Where: Advanced business tools
Monitor a web page for changes automatically
Check a specified web page on a schedule, compare it with the previous version and alert people when something changes.
Where: Advanced business tools
Run unattended validation checks
Run scheduled or unattended checks against records and flag exceptions for review without requiring a person to start the process.
Where: Advanced enterprise guidance
Run periodic access and lifecycle health checks
Periodically review Copilot licences, Cowork access, agents, connectors and automations to remove stale access, confirm owners and retire work that has ended.
Where: Advanced enterprise guidance
Extract information from documents
Ask Copilot to pull out specified facts, dates, names, actions, values or other fields from one or more documents and present them in a structured list or table.
Where: Copilot Chat / Word
Ask questions about a document
Open, upload or reference a document and ask Copilot questions about what it contains, where something is mentioned or how different sections relate.
Where: Copilot Chat / Word
Complete a template from source material
Open an existing template or structured document, reference one or more source documents and ask Copilot to draft content into the relevant sections.
Where: Copilot in Word
Classify incoming messages or documents
Use AI inside a workflow to label or route incoming content by topic, type or category.
Where: Power Automate / AI Builder / prompts
Consolidate multiple documents into one
Provide several source documents and ask Copilot to bring their information together into one structured draft.
Where: Copilot in Word / Copilot Chat
Have a voice conversation with Copilot
Use voice to ask questions, think out loud, explore ideas or discuss work without typing, where voice is available.
Where: Copilot voice-enabled experiences
Choose between Chat and delegated multi-step work
Use Chat for an interactive question or quick task; consider Cowork or another delegated capability when you have a defined multi-step job with a clear outcome.
Where: Advanced guidance / Copilot
Summarise content
Ask Copilot to shorten a long document, email thread or other content into the key points, actions or themes you need.
Where: Copilot Chat / Microsoft 365 apps
Diagnose a missing Copilot feature
Work out whether a missing feature is caused by licence, rollout, admin policy, permissions, region or billing configuration.
Where: Advanced guidance
Understand what your Copilot access includes
Check which capabilities are included in your current Microsoft 365 setup and which depend on a paid licence, admin enablement or usage-based capacity.
Where: Advanced guidance
Turn information into a plan
Give Copilot an objective plus relevant background and ask it to create a sequence of tasks, milestones, dependencies or next steps.
Where: Copilot Chat / Pages
Create charts and explain what they show
Ask AI to create a suitable chart from a dataset and explain the main patterns, changes or outliers in plain language.
Where: Excel / Analyst
Extract information and file documents automatically
When a document arrives, use AI to extract required fields, write them to a table or system, rename the file and move it to a processed location.
Where: Power Automate / AI Builder / prompts
Build a public FAQ agent
Create an agent that answers common questions from a deliberately limited set of approved public information.
Where: Copilot Studio / Agent Builder
Ask questions and explore ideas
Ask Copilot to explain something, suggest options, brainstorm approaches or help you think through a problem.
Where: Copilot Chat
Automate repetitive data entry unattended
Use unattended automation for repetitive system entry where APIs or modern connectors are unavailable and the process is suitable for automation.
Where: Advanced enterprise guidance
Build an internal support agent
Create an internal agent that answers repeatable staff questions and can hand off to a person or support process when needed.
Where: Copilot Studio / Agent Builder
Draft a response inside a workflow
Use AI to create a draft reply or acknowledgement from incoming information before it is reviewed or sent.
Where: Power Automate / AI Builder / prompts
Continuous document intake
Process submitted documents and route exceptions
Where: Power Automate + AI Builder
Rewrite or improve text
Paste or reference text and ask Copilot to make it clearer, shorter, more formal, friendlier or easier to read.
Where: Copilot Chat / Word / Outlook
Compare documents
Ask Copilot to identify differences, additions, omissions or conflicting information across two or more documents.
Where: Copilot Chat / Word
Build a process-guidance agent
Create an agent that helps users follow a defined process, gathers the right information and prepares the next step.
Where: Copilot Studio / Agent Builder
Monitor external sources for change
Watch selected external sources, detect changes and alert the relevant owners for review.
Where: Advanced enterprise guidance
Extract actions, dates and owners from documents
Use AI to identify actions, deadlines, names or other specified fields in documents and pass them to the next workflow step.
Where: Power Automate / AI Builder / prompts
Draft new content
Ask Copilot to create a first draft of an email, document, FAQ, report, briefing or other piece of content from your instructions.
Where: Copilot Chat / Word / Outlook
Prepare records for downstream processing
Validate, organise and prepare records automatically before they enter a downstream production or operational process.
Where: Advanced enterprise guidance
Summarise a batch of incoming content
Use AI inside a workflow to group themes and summarise a collection of responses, messages or documents.
Where: Power Automate / AI Builder / prompts
Analyse data and find patterns
Give Copilot a table or dataset and ask questions about trends, outliers, changes over time or relationships between fields.
Where: Excel / Analyst / Copilot Chat
Connect to a line-of-business system
Use premium or custom connectors to move data between Microsoft 365 and another business system.
Where: Advanced business tools
Run an approval or checklist workflow
Move a piece of work through a repeatable set of checks, approvals or status changes and notify the right people at each step.
Where: Power Automate / Microsoft 365
Build an agent inventory before setting policy
IT first uses the Agent 365 registry to discover the agents already present across the tenant, then records each agent's owner, publisher, purpose, status, usage, data sources and governance state before deciding what to restrict or retire.
Where: Agent 365 / Microsoft 365 admin centre
Translate content inside a workflow
Use AI to produce a draft translation as part of a repeatable process, with human review where accuracy matters.
Where: Power Automate / AI Builder / prompts
Build a change-impact agent
Create an agent that helps identify which documents, processes or teams may be affected when a source changes.
Where: Copilot Studio / Agent Builder
Build a project note space
Keep sources, notes and draft actions for a qualification update
Where: Copilot Notebooks
Read scanned documents with OCR
Use AI Builder or OCR to turn scans and images into machine-readable text for later workflow steps.
Where: Power Automate / AI Builder / prompts
Convert chat output into a working page
Create an editable action plan from a Copilot answer
Where: Copilot Pages
Trigger a workflow when something changes
Start a workflow automatically when a file arrives, a record changes or another defined event occurs.
Where: Power Automate
Automate repetitive work in a legacy system
Use attended desktop automation or another supported approach to reduce repetitive data entry where no suitable API exists.
Where: Advanced business tools
Review agent access, knowledge sources and permissions
An administrator reviews a shared agent's knowledge sources, connectors, users, owner and effective access before wider publication, and repeats the review when the agent's purpose, owner or source data changes.
Where: Agent 365 / Microsoft 365 admin centre / Entra / Purview
Build a public-information agent
Create an agent grounded only on selected public sources for consistent public answers.
Where: Copilot Studio / Agent Builder
Send scheduled reminders
Run a workflow on a schedule to remind people about dates, reviews, renewals or outstanding work.
Where: Power Automate / Microsoft 365
Create an outline or plan
Give Copilot an objective and ask it to turn the idea into a structured outline, agenda, plan or set of next steps.
Where: Copilot Chat / Word / Pages
Find and triage unmanaged, ownerless and stale agents
IT uses the Agent 365 registry to identify unmanaged agents, agents without owners and low-activity agents, then checks business purpose and data access before deciding whether to assign an owner, block, retain or retire them.
Where: Agent 365 / Microsoft 365 admin centre
Build an operational dashboard
Bring together business data into a dashboard for monitoring volumes, status, performance or trends.
Where: Advanced business tools
Check documents for missing information
Use AI to compare incoming documents with expected fields or sections and flag likely gaps for review.
Where: Power Automate / AI Builder / prompts
Operate a shared agent responsibly
Define owners, sources, testing, publishing, monitoring and review for an agent that other people rely on.
Where: Copilot Studio / Agent Builder
Track actions and remind owners
Store actions in a list or task system and automatically remind owners as due dates approach or pass.
Where: Power Automate / Microsoft 365
Explain formulas and calculations
Ask Copilot to explain what a formula does, suggest a formula for a calculation or help diagnose why a result looks wrong.
Where: Excel / Copilot Chat
Ask AI to explain dashboard trends
Use AI to help interpret changes, patterns or anomalies shown in a dashboard.
Where: Advanced business tools
Delegate a multi-step preparation task
Ask Cowork or another delegated capability to gather approved sources, create several draft outputs and prepare a defined deliverable across multiple steps.
Where: Advanced enterprise guidance
Build a document-checking app
Create an internal tool where users submit documents and receive structured checks or feedback before the next process step.
Where: Advanced business tools
Challenge an idea or plan
Ask Copilot to look for weaknesses, assumptions, missing questions, risks or alternative approaches in a draft idea or plan.
Where: Copilot Chat
Summarise transcripts automatically
When a transcript becomes available, use AI to create a summary, action list or structured record for review.
Where: Power Automate / AI Builder / prompts
Set Cowork spending limits before rollout
IT enables Cowork only for a pilot group, sets user or group-level spending limits and monitors Copilot Credit use before wider adoption.
Where: Microsoft 365 admin / Copilot Cowork cost controls
Summarise a meeting and its actions
Use available meeting content to produce a recap of key points, decisions, actions and open questions.
Where: Teams / Microsoft 365 Copilot
Catch up on what changed
Ask Copilot to help summarise relevant messages, meetings and files so you can understand what changed while you were away or focused elsewhere.
Where: Microsoft 365 Copilot
Measure AI value and ROI
Track time saved, quality, throughput, adoption, review effort and cost for selected AI use cases before scaling.
Where: Advanced business tools
Capture submissions into a list or table
When someone submits a form, automatically create a record in a List, table or another approved data store.
Where: Forms / Power Automate / Lists / SharePoint
Maintain an agent register
IT and governance teams keep a live register of every shared agent, its owner, source material, permissions, connectors, review date and retirement status.
Where: Agent 365 / Microsoft 365 admin centre / governance register
Find previous decisions and context
Ask Copilot to help locate or summarise what was previously decided about a topic, using the work content you are permitted to access.
Where: Microsoft 365 Copilot
Decide when AI transcription and summarisation are appropriate for sensitive meetings
The AO sets a policy for sensitive meetings that distinguishes between permitted, restricted and prohibited uses of Teams transcription, Copilot summaries and meeting agents, based on the data involved, the purpose and the controls available.
Where: Teams admin centre / Purview / governance process
Send automatic messages
When an event occurs, automatically send a confirmation, acknowledgement or notification by email or Teams.
Where: Power Automate / Outlook / Teams
Use Security Copilot for IT/security investigations
An IT/security team uses Security Copilot agents to support investigations across Defender, Entra, Intune or Purview, while monitoring included compute usage.
Where: Defender / Entra / Intune / Purview / Security Copilot
Research a topic
Ask Copilot or Researcher to investigate a topic, combine relevant sources and produce a structured briefing with source links.
Where: Copilot Chat / Researcher
Explore trends in operational data
Combine or inspect operational datasets and ask Copilot to explain changes, peaks, recurring patterns or areas worth investigating.
Where: Excel / Analyst / Copilot Chat
Save, move or rename files automatically
Automatically save incoming files to the right location, rename them using a standard pattern or move them when processing is complete.
Where: Power Automate / OneDrive / SharePoint
Build a focused Notebook for a project
Bring selected files, notes and other relevant sources into one focused workspace so Copilot can help you explore the project without searching across everything.
Where: Copilot Notebooks
Choose the right Copilot surface
Match the task to Chat, an in-app Copilot experience, automation, an agent or delegated multi-step work.
Where: Advanced guidance
Prepare for a meeting
Ask Copilot to bring together relevant calendar, email, chat and file context so you can prepare questions, priorities and background before a meeting.
Where: Microsoft 365 Copilot
Turn an AI answer into a shared working page
Take a useful Copilot response and turn it into an editable collaborative page for a team to refine together.
Where: Copilot Pages
Use Analyst for deeper data analysis
Ask Analyst to explore one or more datasets, test patterns, create charts and produce a reproducible analysis for review.
Where: Microsoft 365 Copilot Analyst
Edit a document in place
Use in-app Copilot to change wording, structure, formatting or content directly inside the file you are already working on.
Where: Word / PowerPoint / Excel where supported