Make Copilot Your First Brain in 2026: 5 Prompts to Learn
Your day probably looks like this: inbox chaos, back-to-back meetings, and somewhere between the two, you're supposed to actually run your business. Most founders treat Microsoft 365 Copilot like a curiosity—something to experiment with when they have time. Which means never. But if you want to learn one single hack in Microsoft 365 to make your life easier in 2026, it's this: use Copilot first, not after you've already burned 20 minutes wrestling with a task.
Here are five prompts that deliver immediate time savings when you make them your default move—no fluff, just copy-paste-and-go:
- "Summarize this email thread from the last week, highlighting key points and action items." Select any bloated email chain in Outlook, drop this prompt in Copilot, and get a clean summary with citations. No more scrolling through 47 messages to find out if anyone actually answered the question.
- "From this meeting transcript, list the action items with owners and propose next steps." After your Teams meeting, throw this at Copilot. It extracts tasks, assigns them (based on who said what), and flags open questions. Your follow-up email practically writes itself.
- "Rewrite this email to make it clearer, more concise, and professional." Drafted something that rambles? Highlight it in Outlook or Word, use this prompt, and Copilot tightens it up. You can even specify tone—"more formal" or "shorter"—without losing your point. Beyond basic editing, Copilot can analyze email tonality and help you deliver more empathetic and supportive responses. This sentiment analysis also contributes to protecting and improving your brand's reputation—especially important when one poorly-worded email can tank a client relationship.
- "Outline a project plan for [brief idea], including goals, deliverables, timeline, and next steps." Paste your half-baked project idea into Word or Loop, run this prompt, and get a structured plan with phases, risks, and tasks. It's not perfect, but it's 80% of the way there in 30 seconds.
- "Brief me on tomorrow's client meeting." With eWay-CRM's integration with Microsoft Copilot, you can train a chatbot to discuss your clients, opportunities, or projects directly from your CRM data. Need a quick briefing before a client meeting? Ask Copilot while you're driving, and it pulls the latest context—past deals, open issues, upcoming tasks—straight from eWay-CRM.
The shift: Stop doing the tedious work first and calling Copilot when you're frustrated. Start with Copilot, let it handle the grunt work, and spend your brain power on decisions that actually matter. Select your content, type the prompt, move on with your day. That's it.
