Introduction
Think about the work that comes back. Some of it's quick: the Monday briefing you pull together, the reply you draft every time a certain client emails. Some of it's a real lift, like the monthly business review you assemble from a dozen sources. Large or small, they have one thing in common. They repeat. And the effort is rarely in figuring out the work. It's in remembering to start it and redoing it the same way, every single time.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork takes that repeating work off your plate, from a two-minute task to a multi-step project that spans several apps. You describe what you need in plain language, and Cowork does it: drafting documents, sending email, posting in Teams, searching across your organization, and more. This module goes a step beyond the one-time request. You set work up once so it runs on its own or reproduces your process, and you stop doing it by hand.
You'll learn how to:
- Decide when to make a task run on its own and when to capture a repeatable skill.
- Set a task to run on a schedule or in response to an event, like a briefing every morning or a reply drafted the moment a key email lands.
- Build a custom skill that captures a process or a writing style, then share it with your team.
- Recognize how plugins and connectors extend Cowork into the other tools your organization uses.
- Stay in control of work that runs on its own, approving what matters and tracking what Cowork did.
You stay in control the whole way. Cowork doesn't act on its own without your say-so. You decide what runs automatically, and which actions still need your approval first.
Note
This module covers how to automate recurring work. Cowork can do far more, and it keeps gaining new capabilities, so treat what you learn here as a starting point.