Microsoft Copilot Cowork for Beginners

What if you could delegate an entire project to AI, not just a single prompt. That’s exactly what Microsoft Copilot Cowork is designed to do. In this beginner-friendly walkthrough, Devin Knight shows what Cowork is, what you need to use it, how admins enable it, and what it looks like in action inside Microsoft 365. Cowork is Microsoft’s new agentic layer for M365 Copilot. Instead of answering one question at a time, it takes an outcome you describe and executes multi-step work across apps like Outlook, Teams, calendar, SharePoint, OneDrive, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, while keeping you in control with approvals before sensitive actions. You’ll learn the requirements including licensing, Frontier availability, EU defaults, and the OneDrive and SharePoint file requirement. Then Devin walks through enabling Frontier, allowing Anthropic as a subprocessor, verifying the Cowork agent is enabled, and adding it from the agent store. Finally, he demos a real scenario where Cowork plans and builds a phishing awareness training program, generates a Word outline, creates a PowerPoint deck, coordinates tasks, and prepares follow-up quiz communications. Prompt used in this video: Help me plan and deliver a phishing awareness training program for my organization. First, review our existing content in SharePoint and OneDrive and show me a summary: • Any existing security awareness or phishing-related training materials we already have • Previous training outlines or course structures we've used that could serve as a template • Any gaps in our current library related to phishing, email security, or cybersecurity awareness Before building anything, ask me clarifying questions. For example: • Who are the attendees — which team or department is this training for • What is the skill level of the audience — have they had any security training before • How long should each training session be • What specific phishing topics should be prioritized — for example, spoofed sender addresses, urgency tactics, suspicious links, fake login pages • What week is the live training scheduled, and what week should the daily quiz emails go out • Are there any topics or scenarios I want to make sure are included Then build the training program in this order, waiting for my approval before creating each deliverable: Step 1 — Training outline Create a day-by-day training outline in Word that covers the full week of content. Each day should include a topic, key learning objectives, and a summary of what will be covered. Follow the same course outline structure we use for other Pragmatic Works training programs.* Step 2 — PowerPoint presentation Build a PowerPoint slide deck for the training based on the approved outline. Use our standard Pragmatic Works slide template if available in SharePoint. Include one slide per key concept, example phishing emails as visual references where appropriate, and a summary slide at the end of each day's section.* Step 3 — Split the work between me and Allison Gonzalez Review the outline and assign modules between me and Allison based on a roughly equal split. Show me the proposed assignment before finalizing anything. Then find available time on both of our calendars over the next two weeks where we can block focus time for content review and planning — avoid any existing meetings or conflicts. Add the calendar blocks with a note explaining what each block is for.* Step 4 — Daily quiz emails during training week On each day of the training week, send attendees a personalized email that contains a single quiz question testing their knowledge of that day's topic. Each question should be multiple choice and directly tied to what was covered that day.* *Start with the training outline so we can align on structure and topics before anything else gets built. Once I approve each step, move to the next one.*‌‌ 00:00 What is Copilot Co-work and why it’s different 00:44 What we’ll cover: why it matters, setup, and a real demo 01:22 Co-work as agentic AI across Microsoft 365 apps 03:06 Requirements: licensing, Frontier, EU defaults, cloud files only 04:39 Enable Frontier in the M365 admin center 06:13 Enable Anthropic as an AI subprocessor 08:05 Verify the Co-work agent is allowed and available 09:03 Add Co-work in M365 Copilot and open it 10:46 Demo scenario: plan a phishing awareness training program 14:44 Co-work execution: steps, approvals, and deliverables created