The people getting the most value from Microsoft 365 Copilot today aren’t necessarily the most technical. They’re not the fastest typists, the best PowerShell writers or the ones with the biggest AI budget.
They’re the people who ask better questions.
That might sound obvious, but I think it’s one of the biggest mindset shifts happening right now. For years, many of us have been trained to search for information using a few keywords. Type something into Google, scan the results, click a link, repeat. The skill was finding information.
With Copilot, the skill is becoming framing the problem.
I see this regularly when working with SMBs and MSPs. Two people sit in front of the same Microsoft 365 Copilot environment. One gets a generic answer that doesn’t really help. The other gets a detailed summary, actionable recommendations and a useful first draft. The difference is rarely the technology.
It’s the question.
Most People Stop Too Early
A common pattern I see is someone opening Copilot in Teams or Outlook and typing a very short request:
“Summarise this.”
“Write an email.”
“Analyse this document.”
Copilot will do something, but not necessarily something valuable.
The better approach is to provide context. Why do you need the information? Who is the audience? What decision are you trying to make? What concerns do you already have?
The quality of the answer often improves dramatically when the question becomes more specific.
Think about a conversation with a trusted employee. If you walked into their office and said, “Help me with sales”, you’d get a confused look. If you said, “Review the last quarter of sales reports and identify the three biggest opportunities in our existing customer base”, you’d be much closer to getting a useful result.
Copilot works in a similar way.
Copilot Rewards Curiosity
One of the biggest mistakes I see is treating Copilot like a command-line interface.
People issue instructions instead of having a conversation.
The real value appears when you start exploring.
For example, after Copilot produces a meeting summary in Teams, don’t stop there. Ask what wasn’t discussed. Ask what risks were mentioned only briefly. Ask which actions have no assigned owner. Ask which topics are likely to create issues next month.
Each follow-up question improves your understanding.
What fascinates me is that the process starts to resemble working with a highly capable colleague. The first answer is rarely the destination. It’s often the starting point.
The people who get the best outcomes are usually the people who are naturally curious. They’re willing to ask one more question.
Then another.
Then another.
This Changes How We Learn
I think we’re moving into a world where knowing everything becomes less important than knowing how to investigate effectively.
In the past, expertise often meant storing large amounts of information in your head. Today, much of that information can be surfaced instantly from SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams conversations and Outlook messages through Copilot.
The challenge becomes directing that capability effectively.
When I use Copilot in Word to help draft content or in Outlook to analyse a long email thread, I rarely accept the first result. I refine it. I challenge it. I ask for alternatives. I request different viewpoints.
In many cases, my role is becoming less about generating information and more about guiding the process that generates it.
That’s a different skill set altogether.
The Real Competitive Advantage
I don’t think the winners in the AI era will be the organisations with the most AI tools.
I think they’ll be the organisations that teach their people how to think clearly, define problems accurately and ask better questions.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is already showing us this reality. The technology is becoming easier to access every month. The differentiator isn’t the tool. It’s the person using it.
A poor question gives you a poor starting point.
A thoughtful question opens entirely different possibilities.
That’s why, when people ask me what skill they should develop to get more value from Copilot, my answer is increasingly simple:
Learn to ask better questions. Everything else gets easier from there.
CIAOPS 