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Agentic AI: Microsoft Copilot Cowork

Course Summary

This course moves knowledge workers from prompting AI to delegating to it. Participants learn to hand off complex, multi-step work to Microsoft Copilot Cowork and steer it to a finished result rather than assembling the pieces themselves. Agentic AI concepts are covered briefly and purposefully, primarily to support hands-on delegation across Office apps, built-in skills, and a custom skill participants build themselves.

Prerequisites:

In order to succeed in this course, you will need:

  • An active Microsoft 365 Copilot User Subscription License (USL) with Cowork enabled
  • Day-to-day comfort with Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams
  • Access to a OneDrive/Documents library you can write to
     
Purpose
Build the skills to delegate complex, multi-step work to Microsoft Copilot Cowork
Audience
Knowledge workers and team leads adopting agentic, multi-step AI workflows
Role
Knowledge Workers | Team Leads | Business Professionals
Skill level
Beginner
Style
Lecture | Hands-on Activities 
Duration
1 day
Related technologies
Gen AI | Microsoft Cowork | Microsoft 365 | Copilot

 

Learning objectives
  • Explain what makes a system agentic
  • Explain how Cowork plans, executes, and delivers work across apps
  • Choose correctly between Copilot Chat, a single-purpose agent, and Cowork for a given task
  • Delegate multi-step tasks by describing outcomes and grounding them in your work context
  • Steer running work using checkpoints, risk indicators, and pause, resume, and cancel controls
  • Author and invoke a custom skill using a SKILL.md file in OneDrive
  • Apply oversight, governance, and cost-awareness practices to real workflows

What you'll learn:

In this course, you'll learn:
 

Understanding Agentic AI

  • Shifting from reactive assistants to agentic delegation
  • Overview of Agentic AI in practice
  • Human-in-the-loop as a first-class concern
  • Trust, oversight, and knowing what to hand off
  • Brainstorm your own agentic workflows    

Introducing Cowork

  • What is Cowork?
  • How grounding works
  • Choosing the right tool for the job: Copilot Chat, a specialized agent, or Cowork
  • Submit a simple request to Cowork    

Delegating Your First Tasks

  • Outcome-based prompting
  • Grounding a task in your own emails, meetings, and files
  • Steering work while it is in flight
  • Delegate a two or three step task grounded in a sample file set, add mid-task guidance to redirect the work without restarting it, and use the risk-level indicator to practice pause, resume, and cancel    

Working with Built-In Skills

  • What are Skills
  • The built-in Skill set: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, email, scheduling and calendar, daily briefing, enterprise search, deep research, adaptive cards
  • Matching the right skill, or combination of skills, to a real deliverable
  • Produce a formatted deliverable, run a research request, and draft a coordination task from raw notes and calendar data, then compare finished artifacts to identify which required the least rework

Building Custom Skills with SKILL.md

  • What are Custom Skills
  • Where Custom Skills live
  • Anatomy of a good SKILL.md
  • Create and invoke a custom skill from a recurring task, then review the result

Oversight, Governance, and Cost

  • Microsoft's security, identity, and governance framework
  • Enterprise controls: observability, transparency, and the ability to review, guide, or stop work
  • Cost literacy: usage basis and Copilot Credits
  • Map approval checkpoints and estimate credit cost for a sensitive team workflow

Agentic AI: Microsoft Copilot Cowork

real world content

Real-World Content

Project-focused demos and labs using your tool stack and environment, not some canned "training room" lab.
expert practitioners

Expert Practitioners

Industry experts that bring their battle scars into the classroom.
experiential learning

Experiential Learning

More coding than lecture, coupled with architectural and design discussions.
fully customized

Tailored Outlines

Once-size-fits-all doesn't apply to training teams. That's where we come in!

Dive in and learn more

When transforming your workforce, it’s important to have expert advice and tailored solutions. We can help. Tell us your unique needs and we'll explore ways to address them.

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