Training People to Use Microsoft 365 Copilot Effectively

Making Sure People Know How to Use Copilot

I don’t usually seek technology advice from taxation authorities, but a recent LinkedIn post explaining how the UK Revenue and Customs authority (HMRC) prepares people to use Microsoft 365 Copilot seems to take a sensible approach. The course uses a mixture of short video and reading over four modules to explain:

1. An introduction to AI and Microsoft 365 Copilot (30 minutes).
2. How to access Microsoft 365 Copilot (20 minutes).
3. Writing effective prompts (15 minutes).
4. Security and AI-generated hallucinations (15 minutes).

HMRC has 50,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses, so they’ve made quite an investment ($18 million annually list price). Being good with figures, I’m sure that HMRC is keen on realizing a return on their investment, and that means making sure that people can use Copilot effectively to achieve measurable business outcomes. I’m sure that they’re measuring how people use Copilot to identify where people need some extra help and possibly to free up licenses for reassignment to other employees.

The Rapid Change of Copilot

One challenge for Copilot training is that Microsoft changes the Microsoft 365 Copilot chat app (BizChat) and the Copilot integrations with the Office apps so quickly. For example, here are four recent examples of changes to Copilot announced by Microsoft:

MC1193695 (10 December 2025): Introduction of natural language commands to allow Outlook users to triage busy inboxes. The supported options include pin/unpin messages, flag items, mark tasks as complete, and mark messages as read or unread.

MC1192003 (4 December 2025, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 532736): A model selector switch is available to allow users to select how much reasoning to apply when answering prompts. The options are automatic, quick response, and think deeper. Obviously, users need some guidance about when to go for quick responses and when it’s better to have Copilot reason a little deeper.

MC1187799 (last updated 26 November 2025). Tenants that enable the Anthrophic models (soon to be the norm) see new agents in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to help working with content in these files. These are “frontier” options for now, but they will be core functionality in due course.

MC1189911 (25 November 2025): Users can schedule prompts to run automatically. Prompts created in BizChat and in agents like Analyst and Idea Coach can be scheduled to run automatically (Figure 1).

MC1197144 (15 December 2025): The inclusion of natural language calendar search in Microsoft 365 Copilot. The results include who attended a meeting and what was shared during an event.

Other topics, such as using BizChat to reason over the contents of a shared or delegate mailbox are of interest to people who need to interact with these types of mailboxes.

What’s obvious from the type and quantity of change is that follow up training is required to supplement a solid initial foundation. The training could be provided as short videos accessed through a SharePoint Online site or a Teams channel.

We’ve Been Here Before

The volume of change seen in Microsoft 365 Copilot (or indeed, across the agentic landscape within Microsoft 365) is reminiscent of Teams in the 2019-2023 period. At the time, Teams seemed to be adding new features or adjusting the user interface weekly, especially when the Covid-19 pandemic took hold and people had to work from home. The resulting spike in demand in Teams usage drove improvements in scalability alongside planned work on features like private and shared channels. It was an exciting time to work with Teams.

Teams is a pillar Microsoft 365 application, but Microsoft gives Teams precious little oxygen in terms of publicity in recent analyst briefings or large events. Microsoft last updated the number for Teams monthly active users (320 million) in October 2023. I can’t recall seeing much about Teams at the recent Ignite conference. The agenda was dominated by Copilot and agents to align with Microsoft marketing imperatives. Perhaps Copilot and agents will reach an equivalent state of banalness by 2029, or whenever Microsoft launches its next great campaign.

Training is Core to Success

In any case, the point is that good user training is an essential success factor for the deployment of any software application. This was true for Teams and it’s true for Microsoft 365 Copilot. Throwing someone a Copilot license and advising them to “get on with it” isn’t likely to succeed. That is, unless that person is an avid student that keeps themselves updated over time. There are few users in that category.

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