The thing you do by hand,
handed to Copilot

Most people in a large company have the Copilot chat window and nothing else. They opened it once, typed one line, read a polite paragraph offering to help, and never went back. Copy this brief, paste it into Copilot Chat as your first message, and it interviews you about what you did by hand this week before it says a word about your job.

Two spreadsheets open side by side on one screen, checked against each other by eye, because that is how it has always been done. Then the Copilot window, one line typed into it, compare these two files, and a polite paragraph back asking what you are looking for. The tab gets closed. The eye checking carries on all afternoon.

The chat window arrived on a lot of screens at once and almost nobody was told what to put in it. What came with it was a feature tour, and a feature tour cannot see anyone's week. The question that finds something is smaller and more personal: what did you do by hand, with two windows open side by side, or retyping what already existed somewhere, or reading twenty pages to find one line. The thing already sitting in the browser can ask that, and then do something about the answer.

• The brief itself, in one block you copy or download, so what you paste is exactly what you have read.
• The interview it runs before it suggests anything, built on the three tells of by-hand work: two windows side by side, retyping what already exists, reading twenty pages for one line.
• The four part prompt it writes with you, the checks it makes you run before you trust an answer, and the three row list you leave with.

Told there is nothing repetitive in the week, it asks about the two windows instead, and the order log checked against invoicing by eye every Thursday finally gets named. That becomes the prompt: both files uploaded, each one described, the orders sitting in one file and not the other, and the amounts that disagree, as a table. Then one row checked by hand before anything goes anywhere.