R
RicardoWilkins
In today's fast-paced digital world, creating compelling demo content is essential for showcasing the capabilities of various tools and technologies. Microsoft Copilot can significantly streamline this process. In this article, we will explore how to create sample demo content using Microsoft Copilot, providing you with a step-by-step guide to make your demos more effective and engaging. We’ll explore three scenarios that make great Copilot demonstrations – Meeting Recaps, Excel, and Outlook.
Demonstrating Meeting Recap
By now, you probably know that Microsoft Teams Premium automatically creates helpful Recap notes from your recorded meetings (also known as Intelligent Recap). Here's an example:
When demonstrating this feature, it’s often best to use fictitious information in a demo tenant. However, the most effective examples often come from real-life meetings, as they involve multiple participants discussing actual topics, making the summaries far more relevant.
Luckily, we don’t always have to rely on real-world meetings to demonstrate this feature if we let Copilot generate a conversation for us. To get started, ask Copilot to create a fake script of two people chatting about a project. For example, we could say:
The result might look like this:
Once Copilot generates the initial content, review it carefully. While Copilot is highly advanced, it's essential to customize and enhance the content to ensure it aligns with your objectives and resonates with your audience. Add any specific details, examples, or anecdotes that will make the demo more relatable and engaging. Remember, the goal is to create content that not only informs but also captivates your audience.
Once we have our script, we can use the following steps to leverage it for our Meeting Recap:
- Paste your script in something that has Read Aloud features. While Copilot is certainly able to read aloud its responses, you might consider pasting the script into Microsoft Word, where there are controls to adjust the speed of the reading, as well as the type of voice used.
- Set up a new Teams meeting in your demo tenant and invite a second persona that you are also able to impersonate.
- Use one device to join as the demo user and another to join as the second user. This could be a laptop and a phone with Teams Mobile.
- Ensure both devices can hear a third device that's reading out the script. If you don’t have a third device, you could read the script aloud yourself.
- Record the meeting with each device's mic picking up the script. At this point, the tricky part is muting and unmuting at the right times for each "speaker" to make sure speaker attribution occurs correctly.
When finished, you'll have a neat Recap like the one shown at the beginning of this section.
If you're using Copilot for Microsoft 365 (integrated with Teams and other M365 apps), you can even ask extra questions about the meeting. For example, I wanted to check the tone or sentiment:
(we can be confident Copilot will notice this sentiment by deliberately modifying Copilot’s generated script to include some anxious phrasing)
Using these steps, we now have a completely simulated meeting with a recap, and even AI-generated follow-up tasks, ready for demonstration with no concerns about sharing real-world content.
Demonstrating Copilot in Excel
We can showcase Copilot in Excel by using simulated data. For example, we might request Copilot to generate mock data suitable for an accounting firm's use. For example:
In either case, we can now demonstrate the power of Copilot for Microsoft 365 in Excel by asking it to analyze the new sample data. For example, we might want Copilot to let us know the average amount of unpaid invoices…
…or perhaps ask Copilot in Excel to highlight the rows representing unpaid invoices:
Demonstrating Copilot in Outlook
Finally, we can showcase the impressive features of Copilot in Outlook, such as its ability to succinctly summarize lengthy emails, extract key points, and even draft responses, all tailored to the context and tone of the original communication, thereby enhancing productivity and streamlining communication workflows.
Emails we encounter daily contain a variety of nuances, and incorporating as many of these as possible into our sample content will enhance the quality of our demo materials. For example, consider this prompt:
This should produce a sample email with some sentiment, like frustration or anxiety, similar to the following:
After creating a handful of emails like this, ranging across different subjects and perhaps tailored to the industry or community of the persons to whom you’re presenting your demo material, we then have enough material to demonstrate effective Copilot scenarios like:
- Finding any recent emails that seem urgent or have a tone of frustration
- Finding emails that should be addressed immediately based on their content
- Listing emails in tabular form, with columns like “Need”, “Priority” or “Tone” that can be filled in based on the sample content
These queries can be run in Copilot for Microsoft 365 from the Teams, Windows, or browser interface, in addition running them using Copilot in Outlook on desktop or mobile devices.
Creating sample demo content using Microsoft Copilot can significantly enhance your ability to showcase tools and technologies effectively. By following these steps, you can leverage the power of AI to generate high-quality content, customize it to suit your objectives, and deliver engaging demos that captivate your audience. Embrace the capabilities of Microsoft Copilot and take your demo content to the next level!
-- For more info from me on collaboration with Copilot and Microsoft 365, follow me at Teamwork Cowbell (blog | vlog), on LinkedIn, or find more of my articles right here in TechCommunity.
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