Make Copilot do the work! Hands-on with Copilot Actions🛠️
Let's try out Copilot Actions, the new feature that lets AI do the work for you!
Copilot Actions was announced at the end of 2024 as a way for everyone to easily automate and make their lives easier with M365 Copilot. Now Copilot Actions is finally rolling out and I got to try it out in practice, so let's see what they have released and how it works in day-to-day work!
The Basics
The basic principle behind Actions is simple. Giving the user a simple canvas (or just a sentence), where they can fill in what they want mad-libs style to create simple automation workflows. You'll be able to find actions here or the Microsoft 365 Copilot app (That's the app previously known as Microsoft 365,which is a conversation I'm not prepared to dive into right now...)
Right now you're only able to work with the templates from Microsoft of which there are not many. I hope that in the future you can describe your fully custom workflows for Actions.
Catch up Actions
The first action I created was a simple one to summarize messages in Teams related to Copilot and our CAS service. This was simple enough to create, and actually helpful when I was visiting the US and most of the conversations happened in the middle of the night due to the time difference
All of the highlighted blue sections bring up a dropdown menu where you can choose from options like Teams Messages / Emails / Meetings and so on. Then I could freely type whatever topic I wanted it to start summarizing on.
What this actually does in the background seems to be of course a Power Automate cloud flow, but it's not visible in the Power Automate portal for that matter (And we don't know in which environment it creates these flows)
After creating that simple automation, I soon received the first recap in my Teams!
Clicking the link took me over to a Loop page with the recap it had created
Starting the day with this recap was great, and Copilot usually recaps 3-4 conversations in different Teams channels. It also provides you references with which you can instantly jump into the conversation in Teams.
Gather Actions
In addition to recapping things for you, you can create Actions that reach out to people on your behalf for specific things. For example, there is one template to request input or review on a document by a specific deadline from people of your choosing
After creating the action, it will send a message to the people you have chosen and a follow up for them 3 hours before the deadline, if they haven't marked it as done by then.
After the users sign off on it and mark the task as complete, the creator of the Action will receive an update:
It's quite a simple feature for now, but shows promise in my opinion. Especially if your work includes a lot of reminding people with short memories about a lot of things 😅
The good and the bad 👀
Okay, so let's round up the pros and cons of the feature right now
The good
✅ The creation of Actions is blazing fast, usually taking the user only seconds!
✅ You can quite quickly unlock small time saves with simple recaps on things important to you, saving you from having to navigate to them manually or prompt Copilot on your own.
✅ The feature shows great promise, once developed a bit further...
The not so good
⛔ There are only so many templates, and many workflows people would want to automate include much more complicated scenarios. I'm eagerly hoping I would be able to type my whole scenario out without having to use the templates.
⛔ The recaps are created as Loop pages, but the content is always behind a link rather than displayed straight on the message (even though we know that's totally possible)! Supposedly this will be fixed in the future!
⛔ There is no way to edit the Action after you created it. This is quite a big downside, but not huge yet since the workflows are super small so recreating them isn't a long task. But if you want to edit your action, you have to delete the old one and re-create it... not a very elegant way of working.
⛔ No way to change the scheduling. Along with the last point, you cannot change the time that scheduled recap Actions run, it just starts running from the moment you create it. So now with my morning recap Action I created while in the USA, it now runs on the evenings due to the 10 hour time difference...
In review
Copilot Actions seems to be following the same blueprint as many Microsoft products in the past where the first version is only a rough sketch on which new features will be built on in the future. Will this change everything in the coming month? Probably not. Is it something you should keep your eyes on as the feature evolves? Absolutely.
It's important to remember that big bottom line shaking time savings are built out of bunch of small, few minute saving optimizations. I think Copilot Actions could be right in the middle of this, as long as it matures first.