Join me exploring Microsoft Copilot through each letter of the alphabet. This week, astonishingly, we’ve made it all the way to Z.

Z is for Z-list.

Not the reality TV kind (although, sort of). The Copilot features and use cases that don’t get invited onto the red carpet.

A lot of what I see and write about Copilot, and AI generally, focuses on the terribly exciting or new stuff. Agents! Automated workflows! Replacing whole jobs! Fancy bells and whistles! 

Not every AI story is paparazzi-worthy. I think some of Copilot’s most useful little features are getting overlooked. They’re not big or particularly clever. They won’t transform your entire organisation while you sleep. They’ll improve the way you work just enough to make a tangible difference, though. 

So, for the final letter of my A–Z, here are some of my less glamorous but surprisingly useful Copilot wins.

Dipping in and out of a meeting

I’ve used this little Copilot feature a lot recently. If you use it in a meeting that is being transcribed, it can be surprisingly helpful.

Important clarification: I’m not talking about Facilitator here. (For more on Facilitator, check out the F blog, obviously.) 

You can find it at the top of a meeting window:

It opens a Copilot chat pane at the side of your meeting window. Nobody can see what you’re typing into it. 

It came in handy when a meeting I wanted to attend landed right in the middle of the school run.

I didn’t want everyone else to arrange the meeting around me, so I joined on my mobile for as long as I could, disappeared to do the pick-up, then rejoined from my laptop when I got back.

Instead of returning and spending ten minutes trying to work out what everyone was talking about, I asked Copilot:

What did I miss?

It gave me a concise summary of the conversation I’d missed, including anything that sounded suspiciously like it might be an action for me. 

This relies on Copilot having access to the meeting transcript, and obviously it isn’t an excuse to wander in and out of every meeting you attend. But for those moments when real life collides with your diary, it’s a useful stand-in.

Checking whether a meeting is achieving its purpose

Another win for in-meeting Copilot. If you have a clear aim for the meeting (every good meeting should) you can use Copilot halfway through to check whether the meeting is on track.

My boss had asked me to talk to the wider team about a project idea and get some specific feedback from them.

Halfway through the meeting, I started wondering whether I was actually getting the information I’d been asked to get. Were we having the right conversation, or had I allowed it to wander off into one of those interesting-but-not-entirely-relevant tangents?

So I privately asked Copilot something along the lines of:

When I spoke to my boss on Monday about [subject] he asked me to speak to the team – am I getting the information he wanted? 

(Note I didn’t even feed Copilot what the required information was, I just referenced another meeting transcript!)

Copilot cross referenced the two meetings; the one with the boss, and the current one I was in. Copilot gave me an answer based on the discussion so far, with evidence of what we had already covered and what still appeared to be missing.

That gave me the chance to steer the conversation while it was still happening, rather than realising afterwards that I’d had a lovely chat but had not achieved the thing I’d been asked to do.

It wasn’t running the meeting for me. It was acting as a second pair of ears, comparing what I needed from the conversation with what was actually being said.

Sorting out numbered sections in Word

Numbered sections in Word documents are one of those things that should be simple.

They are not simple.

A section gets added, another one moves, the numbering changes, and suddenly the rest of the document is full of references to sections that are no longer where they claim to be.

Normally, that means carefully working through the document and finding every reference that needs to change. Copilot in Word sorted it out for me with a simple ‘sort out this numbering’ prompt.

Nobody is going to invite me onto a stage to explain how AI saved me from some rogue section numbers, but it removed a fiddly job that would usually have taken ages.

Always check the result, though. This is not the sort of task where you want Copilot confidently directing someone to the wrong section of a contract. (More on the importance of checking in H for Hallucinations.)

Assigning tasks in Planner

I think Planner might itself be a bit of a Z-list Microsoft app. 

It doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves, but it’s a handy little thing. I blogged about it a while ago and had a good whinge that Copilot couldn’t do some of the basic task-management jobs I wanted it to do.

Lo and behold, now it can.

I asked Copilot to assign every task in a particular plan to me. It did it!!! (This does mean I need to revisit my whole Planner blog, but that’s a problem for another day…) 

I didn’t even have to actually touch any of the tasks, I just asked Copilot to assign them all for me and it was done. 

That’s a bit of a different way of working too. Imagine updating progress statuses and due dates in chat without having to fiddle around with a plan. I personally don’t mind getting down and dirty with a UI, but for some, just asking Copilot to take care of it will make the tool much more user-friendly.  

Finding the meeting where somebody mentioned that thing

Scanning the diary, I noticed a mysterious ‘hold’ had appeared for an event coming up in a few weeks.

I contacted the person who had requested it to check whether it was still needed. The only problem was that neither of us could remember what it was actually for. (Bad diary breadcrumbs by me.)

There was almost certainly an old email, message or meeting somewhere that explained it. So I asked Copilot:

What did Andy need the hold on 12 November for?

Copilot found the previous discussion and reminded me that it was connected to a partner event. “Ah yes, that!” It jogged Andy’s memory enough for us to carry on the conversation like two people who definitely knew what was going on.

No digging through notes. No trawling through emails. Copilot simply found the context I needed.

The tiny things still count

None of these examples is going to generate a dramatic “AI transformed our business” case study.

They did not save thousands of hours. They did not require an agent, a workflow or a carefully constructed ten-step prompt.

But they did help.

They helped me rejoin a conversation, keep a meeting on track, avoid some painstaking document admin, update a plan, and find a forgotten discussion.

Helpful Copilot use cases aren’t always the ones where it does the most impressive thing. Sometimes they’re the ones where it takes away the task that made you sigh when you realised you had to do it.

So, if you’re not sure where to start, look for the tiny annoyances.

The repeated clicks. The fiddly formatting. The meeting you had to leave. The context you know exists somewhere. 

Those Z-list jobs might be exactly where Copilot earns its place on the red carpet.  

TLDR

Not every Copilot win deserves a red carpet. Some of the most useful bits are the Z-listers: catching up on what you missed when real life drags you out of a meeting, privately checking mid-meeting whether you’re actually getting what you came for, fixing Word’s rogue section numbering, assigning Planner tasks just by asking, and tracking down why that mysterious diary hold exists. None of them will transform your organisation, but all of them remove a sigh. Look for the tiny annoyances; that’s where Copilot can help. 

And with that, I’ve finally made it to Z.

Twenty-six letters. Ruddy hell.

I’m definitely not done, though. Copilot is changing ALLLL the time, which means some of my earlier posts already need revisiting. Planner can now do things I previously moaned that it couldn’t do. New features have appeared. Existing ones have improved, moved or are hiding under new names.

So although this is the end of the alphabet, it isn’t the end of me poking around in Copilot and writing about what happens.

There are revisits to do, experiments to try and, almost certainly, more mistakes to make.

If you’ve got a letter you think I should revisit first, drop me a line in the comments. We go again!