Stop Reacting to Emails: Set Up Microsoft Copilot Scheduled Prompts for Daily Briefing

You know that feeling when you open your inbox in the morning and it's just chaos. Meaning invites, follow-ups,

quick questions, and before you even start working, half your day is already gone. Well, imagine if you had an

executive assistant sitting beside you. Not a human one, but an AI one that reviewed your schedule, prioritized what

mattered, and even drafted responses to help you get ahead before your first cup of coffee. Now, I know what you're

thinking, but no, we're not talking about that AI. We don't have to write a better resume

today. This is actually something that you can do with Microsoft Copilot if you know how to use schedule prompts. Most

people open Outlook and React. They let their day happen to them. But what if your AI could proactively brief you

every morning, help you prioritize your task, and prep you for your meetings automatically? That's what I started

testing this month. I set up scheduled prompts in Copilot that act like a virtual assistant, ping me at specific

times of the day with contextaware questions and summaries. So, in today's video, I'm going to show you how to set

up these scheduled prompts and some of the prompts that I leverage each day to maximize my productivity. Let's go ahead

and dive in. >> Okay guys, so to get started here with scheduled prompts, I'm actually in the

team's desktop application here in the Copilot app that's on the lefthand nav. You can also be in a web browser going

to office.com, which will redirect you to their new site, but it'll default into the chat experience, which is where

you can set these up. Now, when you think about this, you want to think about a prompt that you might want to

use on a daily basis or on a weekly basis. And a lot of EA executive assistant work can actually be thought

about or facilitated through these scheduled prompts. So, this is an example of a prompt that I have today

that's on a schedule that I leverage here. You could say that this is for the past week or you could say that you're

using this on a daily basis as an example. But I'm basically saying here, I want you to summarize my email from

the past week, but make sure that those emails are ones that I haven't responded to yet. And then I want you to quantify

the importance of that email on a scale of 1 to five. And then from there, I'm asking you to prioritize a set of

actions to follow up on. And if the priority is greater than three, go ahead and start to draft an initial reply for

me. Trying to save a lot of time trying to say, you know, like we're focusing on what should be high priority items in

their inbox. I could probably give it a few more bullets of contextual information to help it decipher what is

important to me, but I wanted to see what it would do naturally as part of this. So, I'm also like to use the GPT5

model. Microsoft just announced that they're going to make this the default model, so that'll be helpful. Um, but

let's go ahead and run this and just see what comes back. Okay, so we're back here and you'll notice that it reasoned

for 27 seconds using, you know, the reasoning in GPT5. And then it gives me this focus triage of the last 7 days in

email that I don't appear to have responded to yet. Um, and then it notes here because Outlook search doesn't have

expose a definitive reply to flag. We uh prioritize unread messages and threads where I did not see recent outbound

reply from you. So, it's using some additional context there. helpful to actually understand what it's doing. But

these emails, I would say, are largely, you know, uh, contextual in the sense of the same format that you would see every

time. Importance, you know, five out of five in the sense of why it matters, timesensitive, more of an executive

summary here. And then a draft reply, I'd be transparent saying, you know, based on my experience so far, the draft

replies are hit or miss, you know, with the amount of usefulness in them. Um, but it is helpful when they are

successful because then I don't actually have to type all that out and I can quickly just run through this. So, the

big importance here to me was being able to batch my time in the sense of responding to these emails and maybe do

that twice a day versus reacting to emails that are coming through my inbox all day long, which many of us out there

might be doing today. Now, I'm graying out some information here for the sake of privacy, but you'll notice that it's

nice in the sense that it's referencing and gives you deep links to these emails that you can go in and take a look at

further. You have the consistent format, and then again, those draft replies that hopefully can use to start to speed up

this type of process. Now, if we want to go ahead and make this a scheduled prompt, we can scroll back up, as I've

done here, to when you originally just sent over the prompt. And if you hover over it, you'll now see this icon that

says schedule this prompt. And this will bring up this uh modal for you to customize here. And it gives you some

basic settings that you configure. So you can configure the start date, the start time. In this particular case,

this email, you might want to schedule it since it's, you know, from the past week, you might want to schedule it at

8:00 a.m., you know, on Monday as an example of this so that it runs, you know, every week um as part of that. Now

subsequently you could do every day and you might wanted to do instead of saying hey summarize my email from the past day

and just tick off Saturday and Sunday as an example. Now, this next setting is a little bit, you know, mixed feelings

from me because I think that when we talk about this, you can run it up to 15 times at the time of this recording,

which is at first glance not great because you think about this is going to just drop off and then I have to go

reconfigure it again, which isn't hard to be fair, but it is kind of an annoyance there. But on the other end,

when you think about this, you can see that it's going to go, you know, till January 28th in this case. If we run it

15 times, and at the time of this recording, it's October. So, it's about a quarter that you're getting this run

um before you then have to go set it back up again. It's actually kind of a healthy review process for you to say,

could I tweak this further? You know, is this still helpful to me? And so on and so forth. as an example of that. And

then this last tick box here is to say you can receive an email when responses are ready. This is just simply going to

email you a generic email with a deep link to take you to the chat, you know, that that is produced as part of this.

So, I can actually go in here and click on save. You'll see that there's a couple of duplicates because I've done

this a few different times in the sense of a demo, but this is where you can see all your um active scheduled prompts.

And in the context here, you can see um an ellipsus in the far right corner. You can click on scheduled prompts and then

see all the ones you have. You can run them on demand. You can turn them off or you can delete them as part of this.

When they do actually run on their schedule, they'll show up here in the middle nav as part of the conversations.

And they'll show up as kind of a read receipt view, meaning they're going to be bolded. They're going to have a green

check next to them. Um and they're going to be something that you can view here um after they are produced. So, this is

going to be one of the prompts that you could potentially leverage. This is just another example that I have uh running

right now. Uh to be fair, this is a prompt that I saw actually in another creators video that I thought was good.

Tried it out. Produce great results. So, you can't discredit, you know, a great prompt when you see it. This is

something whenever you are looking at this, you know, copilot obviously has this access that's different than most

AI models where it can contextually look into your emails, your meetings, your documents, and your team's messages. So,

there should be a lot of powerful things that you can do with that. But I'm basically seeing here, you know, take a

look at all this and and prioritize what, you know, I should be doing, you know, for my day as part of this as well

too. Now, while I'm showing a lot of examples from a prompt perspective around EA work, you know, looking at my

calendar, looking at my email, the scheduled prompts could actually be used for a variety of different use cases, I

wanted to show you guys another example just to get your mind into a place where you could recognize where there's

potential. And this is specifically a prompt that, you know, I'm basically trying to leverage here to surface any,

you know, contextual information around particular topics that relate back to my business. So, in this case, we're

talking about Cloud Capsule. It's an app that I built that, you know, automates security assessments for Microsoft. So,

we might want to do, you know, some automated analysis to see, you know, where um things like this might be

mentioned. You know, can we inject ourselves in there? Can we learn, you know, can we get feedback um as part of

that? And you might want to search popular sources like Reddit or Discord as part of this. Another one here that

I've used in the past also is to find mentions of your brand or your company. um as part of this use case here too.

And so you know this one I would say transparently is hit or miss as far as the results that you might get or see

here. A lot of the cases it would find resources in Reddit but they would be significantly outdated. Um as an example

of that where if you're running this on a weekly or monthly basis um that would be something you'd want to see more real

time. So just wanted to give you guys a couple of examples. Schedule prompts don't just have to be your personal

assistant. um as this particular case they can flow into various business functions. Now, when we talk about this

workflow, you know, in and of itself, the workflow term is actually what's being used on the back end. And what I

mean by that here in Teams is that there's actually a workflows app. Um, that's the engine behind kind of

triggering these things and it's based off of the Power Platform on the back end, but Microsoft specifically has

started to add this this catalog of pre-built workflows that you can use. And I certainly use in the sense of, you

know, help me prepare for my day, which is basically giving you this prompt. If you click in very similar, you know, uh,

input that you would provide it here for the parameters, which includes, you know, help me prepare for my day, help

me prepare for my week, and then you can choose to send the summary either an email or teams, which will start a chat,

which I'll show you guys here in a second. And then you can dictate the days. Now whenever you create those you

can see I have two here which is help me prepare for my day and then help me prepare my meetings uh next week and

send the summary in teams. And so this is one I schedule for Fridays to run you know earlier in the day so I can use

Friday to help you know start to prepare for the next week um as part of that or maybe restructure some things where we

might have conflicts things like that. Just trying to be proactive again uh with these. But you'll notice the UI is

very same here, you know, for the activity. The difference here is that these actually don't show up in that

same context in the Copilot app. And specifically, this will show up in chat. I've clicked on this tab here in the

workflows app, you know, for you to be able to see that, but it'll come up here just as you're chatting with another

user. Um this is an example of some of the summary that it provides here as well, too. And this is maybe a daily or

weekly um summary as part of this, but this is giving you, you know, the uh meetings that you're going to have, some

of the details um as part of that and the times. So, it's brief in nature, but it'll take you through and and step you

through a variety of different topics like important emails in this particular case, as well as recent files you've

been working on, you know, as some summary of this as well. So all in all, it's just a good recap that you get

maybe at the end of your week, maybe at the beginning of your day, maybe at the end of your day. Depends on how you want

that to be facilitated, how you work. I find it's helpful to recap my day and recap, you know, everything going into

the next week just to stay on top of things because as we all have, you know, uh, hectic calendars, hectic schedules

that come up. Okay guys, that's everything I had for you today. If you want to make Copilot actually work for

you, stop treating it like a chatbot and start treating it like an assistant. My challenge to you guys this week is to

create your own two scheduled prompts and see how they work in your environment. If you guys want the

prompts that I leverage in this video, be sure to check out my blog post in the video description. Otherwise, I'll see

you guys next