A personalized Copilot team starter guide

Your sidebar lists Agents, Notebooks, Library, Create, and Apps. Here’s the plain-English version, in roughly the order you’ll use them.

One thing in your top bar worth understanding

The Work/Web toggle and the Quick / Deep / Auto thinking control. Keep Work selected for almost everything—that’s what grounds Copilot in SharePoint and your other internal content. Switch to Web only when you genuinely need outside-world information.

On thinking depth: your instinct to start in Deep was right. Quality drops with each follow-up turn if you start in Quick, and starting in Deep mostly avoids that problem. Quick is fine for “rewrite this in a warmer tone.” Deep is for proposals, investigation framing, anything with real judgment in it.

Several layers, in order of how much they’ll help you.

Your SharePoint grounding is already doing the heavy lifting

When you saw Copilot pull from your HR-outsourcing materials and cite them—that’s the most important “context” mechanism, and it’s already working because your client files, templates, and prior work live in SharePoint. The Microsoft Graph stitches it together. You don’t need to do anything else for Copilot to use those sources, as long as the user has permission to see them.

Custom instructions

The next layer. In Copilot Chat, open settings (the gear icon) → Custom instructions. This is where you tell Copilot persistent things about how to respond to you:

“Default to a warm, direct, plainspoken tone; never consultantese.” · “When drafting external communications, sign as ‘Jodi Schafer, HRM.’” · “Always ask before recommending termination language.”

These follow you across every conversation until you change them. They’re per-user, not per-tenant—so each person on your team sets their own.

Brand Kits

The tenant-wide layer for visual identity—logos, color codes, fonts, approved imagery, brand voice. You create them in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app under Create → Brand kits. Once published as an “Official” brand kit, anything generated through Create or Copilot in PowerPoint follows them. Caveat: full Brand Kit functionality typically requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot Premium license, not just the standard add-on. Check what tier you’re on before going down this path.

Prompt Gallery

The tenant-level home for shared prompts. In Copilot Chat you can save a strong prompt and share it with individuals or groups; over time you build a library of “the way HRM asks Copilot for an inquiry response,” “the way we ask for a job description,” and so on. It’s a lighter-weight standardization tool than full agents—good for the team while you’re still figuring out which workflows deserve their own agent.

Work IQ

Microsoft’s name for the underlying intelligence layer that connects all your tenant data, memory, and custom instructions and feeds them into every Copilot interaction. Not something you “configure” directly—it’s the plumbing. But it’s why grounding in your work content works as well as it does.

One honest caveat: there isn’t one simple “load HRM’ brand voice once and every Copilot answer from every team member now follows it” switch. The reliable way to get consistency is the four-layer stack above—clean source documents, custom instructions, Notebooks, Agents—plus shared prompts in Prompt Gallery where it helps.

Before any of the agent or notebook work, take an afternoon and build a small, deliberate “AI-ready” SharePoint area. Keep it cleaner than your general client archive. Permissions matter—Copilot only surfaces what each user can see, but it will happily surface anything they can see, so check before you publish broadly.

A starter set of folders worth having:

While you’re at it: archive or delete obviously stale templates, lock down sensitive client and investigation folders, and check for overbroad sharing. SharePoint hygiene is the single biggest predictor of how good Copilot’s output will be once you start pointing agents at it.

Microsoft’s own recommended structure is four ingredients: goal, context, source, expectations. It’s worth making this HRM’s default and putting it in your shared prompts.

The point isn’t bureaucracy—it’s that “draft an inquiry response” gives Copilot 90% less to work with than the version above, and the difference shows up in the output every time.

You have two tools for this. For everything you described on the call, you want the simpler one.

Agent Builder

Lives inside Copilot itself (Agents → New agent). No code, no separate portal. You describe what you want, point it at SharePoint folders or specific files for knowledge, write instructions in plain language, and share it with named people or groups. This is the right tool for proposal drafting, inquiry responses, job descriptions, and any of the other repeatable work you mentioned.

Copilot Studio

The heavier sibling—a separate web portal at copilotstudio.microsoft.com. It exists for agents that need to do things outside Copilot itself: talk to a CRM or HRIS, trigger approvals, route inquiries by service line, publish to external audiences, multi-step workflow logic. You don’t need it yet. If a use case ever outgrows Agent Builder, Microsoft lets you copy the agent into Studio without starting over.

Three agents worth building first, in this order.

A note on the video-to-content workflow: it can also live as a Notebook (one per video, with the transcript plus your style guide plus an example article you liked). Both work. The agent version scales better once you’ve nailed the prompts; the notebook version gives you more room to iterate on a single piece. Try both on the next video and see which feels right.

Don’t try to build all three agents at once. Pick one—probably proposal drafting—and get it actually good before moving to the next. Test on three real recent examples, refine the instructions, share with one person on the team, and watch them use it. The SOPs Carl mentioned on our call belong inside the agent’s instructions; the level of granularity that feels almost obsessive for humans is exactly right for an agent.

The frustration you described—Copilot drafting in the right-hand chat pane but no clean way to get it into the email—was because you were using the wrong entry point.

Two more useful things while you’re in Outlook: typing / inside an email body opens a quick menu including “Draft with Copilot.” And Coaching by Copilot, on the same icon, does the opposite of drafting—you write your own message, then ask Copilot to critique it for tone, clarity, and how it might land. Often more useful than having Copilot write it for you in the first place.

Microsoft has gotten more model-pluralistic over the last six months. As of mid-May 2026, here’s what you’ll typically see.

Both are at the top of the field. The differences are real but subtle, and any honest comparison says try both, pick whichever sounds more like you on a given task. For a high-stakes deliverable—a proposal you really care about, a sensitive client communication—running it through both and picking the better starting point takes 30 extra seconds and is worth it.

One administrative note: Anthropic models in Copilot Chat roll out through Microsoft’s Frontier Program. As of January 6, 2026, they’re enabled by default in US tenants (EU, UK, and EFTA tenants still require admin opt-in). You likely already have access. If Claude doesn’t appear in your model picker, that’s the box to check, under Microsoft 365 Admin Center → Copilot → Settings → User Access → Copilot Frontier.

Your hunch that pricing has come down was right.

So you’re probably paying $18 or $21 per Copilot-licensed user, depending on when you signed up. Worth confirming in the admin center under Billing → Your products, or with your Microsoft reseller. If you signed up before SMB pricing existed and you’re still on the old $30 rate, ask about switching to Copilot Business—you qualify.

The promotional $18 rate locks in if you renew before June 30, 2026, so that’s a real deadline worth knowing for your renewal timing.

A short version you can hand to the team verbatim:

Skim Microsoft’s documentation for Agent Builder and Notebooks when you have a quiet hour—both are short and current. Search “Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent Builder” and “Microsoft 365 Copilot Notebooks” on learn.microsoft.com.

Holler with questions as you go—happy to look at an agent’s instructions and tell you where they could be tighter, or to talk through whether a particular workflow belongs in an agent versus a notebook versus a quick chat. And let’s get something on the calendar to walk through what you’ve built once you’ve got a couple of agents running.