Enhance productivity and creativity with enterprise-ready AI Chat

  • 7 minutes

Copilot Chat (Basic) is a versatile AI assistant designed to streamline workflows, enhance productivity, and support decision-making across various tasks. From summarizing key insights and generating content to analyzing files, visualizing data, and coding, Copilot Chat provides powerful capabilities in a conversational format. Whether you need market research, content brainstorming, data analysis, or AI-generated images, Copilot Chat (Basic) simplifies complex tasks with intuitive prompts. Explore its features to stay informed, create efficiently, and leverage AI for smarter work.

Important

Your experience with Microsoft Copilot may differ from what is presented in this training based on your version. See What Copilot License do I have? for reference.

Get summaries and stay informed

Copilot Chat (Basic) excels at summarizing large amounts of data into concise, easy-to-digest insights, helping users quickly catch up on important information. Ask Copilot Chat (Basic) to gather and analyze market trends, competitor strategies, product developments, or customer insights, thus making it a valuable tool for business research. Copilot provides access to the latest research papers, articles, and tutorials, supporting continuous learning.

Try these prompts:

  • Summarize recent statements made by the CEO of [company name]
  • Prepare a daily brief of news from the [finance] industry regarding [cryptocurrency]
  • How do you say [thank you for your time] in [Japanese]?
  • Give me step-by-step instructions for [making an Instagram reel]

Brainstorm and draft content quickly

Copilot Chat (Basic) helps you to brainstorm ideas, draft, rewrite, or refine content based on anything from a storyboard or a blog post to a newsletter or an executive summary. Guided by your instructions and web insights, Copilot turns raw ideas into polished content.

Try these prompts:

  • Rewrite this to sound more professional and less verbose: [insert content]
  • Suggest inexpensive ways to optimize our website for organic search
  • Draft a blog post about the latest on [specific topic]
  • Help me come up with questions for a user research survey on [specific topic]

Gather insights based on your files

Copilot Chat (Basic) can analyze the content of files you upload in the chat box. Upload any file to the chat and ask Copilot questions, to provide insights, summarize key points, or generate new content based on the content you added. Copilot Chat (Basic) supports uploads of Word documents, PowerPoint decks, Excel spreadsheets, images, and PDFs.

Adding files to your prompts in Copilot Chat (Basic) is simple. You can reference documents directly by typing “/” in the prompt box to add individual files from your organization. If you want to upload a file, select the + button or drag and drop the file into the chat box, then send your prompt as normal. These options make it easy for Copilot to reason over your content and provide more relevant, tailored responses.

Note

File upload limits apply, and any files you upload are stored in your OneDrive. You can delete uploaded files at any time, and per enterprise data protection policies, these files are never used to train the AI model. Accessible enterprise content via "/" search includes files (and emails if using Copilot Chat (Basic) in Outlook), but doesn't extend to chats, meetings, or sites without a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. If you regularly find yourself wanting Copilot to reason over meeting recaps, team conversations, or broader organizational data, that's a strong signal you're ready to advance to the full Microsoft Copilot experience.

Try these prompts:

  • Help me rewrite the introduction paragraph to make it clearer and more concise in this document: [/file]
  • Suggest 10 compelling titles for this blog post: [/file]
  • Recap the findings of this research paper and list three recommendations and three challenges: [/file]
  • Describe the image in a couple sentences: [/file]
  • Help me analyze the data from my experiment using this: [/file]

Visualize your data

Copilot Chat (Basic) allows you to quickly transform your data and ideas into unique, AI-generated images for projects like campaigns, product launches, and social media posts by describing the image you want. It also includes built-in capabilities to graph and visualize data relevant to your prompts, making it a powerful tool for both creative and analytical tasks.

Note

Image generation limits apply.

Try these prompts:

  • Illustrate a [romantic pop art image] of [an office worker experiencing a dramatic coffee crisis]
  • Create a pie chart showing the [market share of smartphones] in the United States
  • Create a line chart showing the relationship between [inflation rates] and [interest rates] over the last 20 years
  • Design an image of a drawing of a [database in colored pencil]
  • Create a word cloud based on the latest [financial news]

Generate code and formulas

Copilot Chat (Basic) enables you to generate new code or analyze existing code. Describe what you need in plain language and Copilot produces working code — Python scripts, SQL queries, formulas, and more — that you can copy and use in your own tools and workflows. You can also paste in existing code and ask Copilot to explain it, find bugs, or convert it to another language.

Try these prompts:

  • Tell me what this code does: [insert code]
  • Help me find errors in this code: [insert code]
  • Write a Python script to perform binary search
  • Convert this code to TypeScript
  • Write a SQL query to return all columns from the table where [the sales are above 10000]

Add a Microsoft 365 Copilot license

With a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, enhance Copilot Chat (Basic) by allowing it to reference your work data through Microsoft Graph, providing seamless access to organizational resources like OneDrive documents, emails, meetings, and chats. With this integration, you can draft emails, manage your calendar, prepare for meetings, and catch up on discussions. Ask questions about specific files and messages, or find information you know is out there, but you can't remember where it's stored. Use it to get the latest updates on a project, a new company policy, or find recent communications from a colleague or manager quickly.

To reference specific work content in your prompt, use / followed by a file name, # followed by a meeting name, or @ followed by a person's name.

Try these prompts:

  • What's the latest from @person, organized by emails, chats, and files?
  • Help me find the Teams chat about [the new vacation policy]
  • Draft a to-do list from #meeting
  • Help me plan for [my day]

Compare Copilot experiences at a glance

Understanding which capabilities are available in your current experience helps you make the most of what you have—and recognize when upgrading would serve you better.

Capability Copilot Chat (Basic) Microsoft 365 Copilot
AI chat grounded in the web ✅ ✅
File upload and analysis ✅ (limits apply) ✅
Copilot Pages ✅ (basic) ✅ (full collaboration)
Image generation ✅ (limits apply) ✅
Pay-as-you-go agents ✅ ✅
Work-grounded chat (emails, meetings, chats) ❌ ✅
Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams ❌ ✅
Researcher & Analyst agents ❌ ✅
Copilot Notebooks ❌ ✅
Priority model access ❌ ✅

If you find yourself regularly wanting Copilot to reason over meeting notes, email threads, or specific organizational files, that's a signal you may be ready for a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Talk to your IT admin about what's available in your organization.