Using Microsoft Copilot in our day-to-day

At 5miles, we're always on the lookout for tools that can enhance productivity and streamline our workflows. Recently we’ve been putting Microsoft Copilot, one of many AI assistants designed to revolutionise your workday, to the test. We wanted to share our experience with you.

As its name suggests, Copilot integrates seamlessly with the apps many of us use daily: Outlook, Teams Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Under AI’s spell, it helps us take various filler tasks off our plate—like taking meeting notes or roughly planning projects—speed up the things that matter.

Clearing the way for strategy and creativity

Productivity and creativity are 2 things we can’t get enough of. When we use Copilot for repetitive tasks, we have more time and brainspace for them. For example, when working on course creation, Copilot provides the outlines while we bring our knowledge and ideas. This allows our content team at 5miles to focus more on creating, refining, and polishing content rather than starting from scratch.

In the same way, Copilot can streamline things like data entry in Excel or formatting presentations in PowerPoint under our instruction. By automating the ‘foundations’, our team can dedicate more time to strategic and creative endeavours—which, to be honest, is where we prefer to put more energy.

Here are a couple of other ways we’ve incorporated this tool cohesively into our daily work at 5miles. We hope it’ll inspire you to explore Copilot's capabilities and improve your productivity, too.

Taking meeting notes off our hands

At 5miles, we use async communication whenever possible. So, when we do decide to hold meetings, the ideas and insights that come out are gold dust to us. Taking detailed, accurate notes that do these meetings justice can be time-consuming. Luckily, Microsoft Copilot does this for us. Copilot joins our Teams meetings, listens in, and transcribes the conversation in real-time. It then summarises key points and action items, leaving a concise summary to easily share among everyone. We love that it saves us time and ensures everyone’s left on the same page.

Pro project planning

You know what it’s like. Multiple projects, multiple deadlines, everything’s a priority, and everything’s urgent at once. Good project planning helps us ease the pain when we feel like we’re juggling too much at once. For example, when developing a new course, we tell Copilot what we’re doing, who’s involved, what our goal is, and what our deadline is. It’s then able to work backwards to give us a suggested plan. Microsoft Copilot creates our project plan outlines: giving timelines, a structure, key milestones, and a breakdown of tasks for relevant team members. We’re then able to edit and adapt it to better fit our needs.

Digest long email threads

When our inbox is brimming with important conversations, we sometimes need a quick refresher before diving back in. With Copilot’s email thread summarising features, we can easily extract the info we need for pitches or presentations, or get another teammate up to speed on what we’ve been talking about with a client or contact. This has come in handy for us many times.

The beauty of Copilot is that there’s something for everyone, and something for every business that uses Microsoft Apps. In short:

Outlook: Email drafting & management, conversation summarising, scheduling, calendar, & task management.

Teams: Meeting summaries & transcriptions, chat & collaboration, tasks assignments & follow ups.

Word: Content creation & editing, grammar & style suggestions, formatting & layout.

PowerPoint: Presentation design, content suggestions, & visual enhancements.

Excel: Data analysis & visualisation, formula assistance, automation of data entry or repetitive tasks.

Transform the way you work, make your day-to-day tasks more efficient and effective. Stay tuned for our upcoming Copilot course, where we'll dive deeper into practical tips and ways to make the most of Microsoft’s AI tool, and gain the knowledge and skills to leverage its fullest potential.

At 5miles, we’ve joined forces with our long-time partners and Microsoft Copilot early-adopters Van Lanschot Kempen to co-create a Copilot course. We've been carefully tailoring it to their company’s needs and, after letting them vet it, are happy to share it with you too.

Keep an eye out for our new Copilot course coming soon.