The practical follow on to last week. You marked your green zone work. This week I guide you to start breaking down your workflows into tasks while Learning and Development specialist, Valerie Merrill shows you how to hand the repeatable parts to Microsoft’s ready made AI agent, Prompt Coach. Noting that a better prompt gets you a better answer the first time. Watch the video, try it out, and you decide.
This week’s step
Take one automatable Z1 job from your list and pull it apart. A job is almost never one thing. Your monthly report feels like a single task, but look closely and it is ten or eleven small steps: gathering the numbers, cleaning them up, checking against last month, dropping it into the template. Those repeatable steps are exactly what an agent is built to take off your hands. There is also a companion article on the Hub that breaks this workflow down further and I signpost you to it at the relevant moment from this podcast so no need to look for it yet. Plus here is a PDF with screen shots of Valerie’s screen should you need a touch stone to guide you through MS Prompt Coach later.
How Prompt Coach works, in four steps
You are guided through each step and given takeaway tips. In a nutshell, you will be shown these steps first, open Copilot and find the AI agents. Second, open Prompt Coach and tell it the job you are trying to do. Third, let it sharpen your prompt so your intention is right. Fourth, copy that prompt and run it in Copilot. Then check the result in your own voice before you use it. The lesson is not the one-pager. It is that a better prompt gives you a better answer every time.
Using AI responsibly
A report is only as good as the source behind it, and only as trustworthy as your own check of it. Never send out something you have not read yourself, especially to a client or a decision-maker. Let the AI draft but remember you will be held accountable. There is more on developing judgement as part of the Jobscaping® course being published in Autumn.
Next Week
Next week Valerie goes a step further and puts AI to work as a researcher, showing you how Copilot can gather and make sense of information for you in a more powerful way than using the usual Chat function. Valerie is a Microsoft and people skills specialist and a Fellow of the Learning Professionals Institute and an award-winning L&D podcaster. More details in the Shownotes.
See you next week when we dive into Copilot’s Researcher agent. It’s one of my favourites and I think you’ll find it useful.
Stay Sovereign.
