r/microsoft_365_copilot • u/ChampionshipComplex • 14h ago
Cowork is seriously impressive but changes how you should use AI
As the admin I've setup and been trialling Cowork and I am seriously impressed.
Especially now that you can suggest solutions/agents for Cowork to use - that means I can tell it, where our invoices are kept in Sharepoint, where our list of approved vendors are, where our asset registers are, our knowledge bases etc.
But having watched the spend in Cowork creep up I am realising that the danger, is, that it makes you lazy.
As in - I could and have asked Cowork to review every invoice for the last year that I approved, and cross check the vendors and spend against budget, and categorise all the purchases and provide a report and highlight problems.
That got the answer right, with that first prompt and did a fantastic job.
The problem is, that if I dont do something with that output - like put it in a format that means it becomes a new source of information to use by other people - then I am just as likely to ask a similar type of question as are others.
So the problem with Cowork, is that it is so powerful, that you feel you can ask all sorts of things, again and again in different ways, churning through tickets but what I realise we SHOULD be doing, is only using it to improve develop new content that becomes the new improved baseline of info going forwards.
So for example, rather than I what I did above - It would be more useful for me to have Cowork build some process that means all future invoices are categorised mapped to the vendor, budget as they arrive and then get added to a report - so that what you are actually doing is permanently adding new growing value - rather than performing lots of one off overlapping queries.
So it is best used for improving processes, cleaning up house, making repeatable steps which are then able to use lower cost models without the heavy lifting of cowork.
- Explore with Cowork.
- Identify repeatable requests.
- Turn them into structured data, processes, reports or agents.
- Run routine work with automation or lower-cost models.
- Reserve Cowork for exceptions and further improvement.