AI for Operations with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio

AI for Operations with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio is a 20-hour, instructor-led course designed for non-technical HR and Finance operations teams. The course develops practical skills for using Microsoft 365 Copilot across Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, with an emphasis on effective prompting and common operational tasks.

Participants progress from everyday Copilot use and prompt engineering to building no-code agents with Copilot Studio and automating workflows using Power Automate, SharePoint, approvals, and Microsoft 365 services. Hands-on activities cover HR and Finance scenarios such as policy queries, onboarding, invoice checks, reconciliations, and status enquiries. The course also addresses agent reliability, data protection, responsible AI use, governance, and the rollout of AI-enabled operational workflows.

• Understand how Microsoft 365 Copilot works, where it obtains information, and where human verification is required.
• Apply Microsoft 365 Copilot across Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Copilot Chat for common operational tasks.
• Develop reliable prompts using clear goals, context, sources, formats, examples, and refinement techniques.
• Apply reusable prompt patterns to HR and Finance activities such as summarisation, comparison, drafting, classification, and explanation.
• Build and publish no-code agents in Copilot Studio using approved organisational knowledge sources.
• Configure agent instructions, grounding, conversation topics, escalation paths, and response boundaries to improve reliability.
• Connect agents to actions and workflows using Power Automate, SharePoint, Excel, Outlook, Teams, and approvals.
• Automate repeatable HR and Finance operational processes and measure improvements in time, rework, and errors.
• Apply appropriate data protection, privacy, fairness, accuracy, security, and human-review controls to AI use cases.
• Demonstrate an operational solution combining an agent and automated workflow and develop a supporting business case and rollout plan.

No prior AI or technical knowledge is required. Day-to-day familiarity with Microsoft 365 is sufficient. For the practical exercises, participants require access to Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, an appropriate Power Platform training environment, and the required permissions and sanitised training data provided by the organisation.