Prompts - an introduction

A prompt is the technical term for asking Copilot something. "What are five stocks expected to grow over the next year?" "Can you give me more information about The Vita Coco Company, Inc (COCO)?"

These are both prompts and getting the most out of AI is learning how to create prompts. Remember before Google was around there was a search engine called "Ask Jeeves?" It was a search engine based on asking questions in normal language. So you could ask "What's my 2006 Honda Accord worth?"

Then Google came around and you would type "2006 Honda Accord price" The 2006 Honda Accord price would essentially be a prompt for Google. With Copilot you can use more basic language like Ask Jeeves but the better you learn how to ask your questions the better the response you'll receive.

Most prompts fit into 1 of 5 categories: Create, edit, understand, ask, and catch up or CEUAC (pronounced COOACK!) for short. (I just made that up)

I'll give a brief introduction to all 5 but we'll cover them in more detail later.

CEUAC

Create

Create is when you want Copilot to create something. "Please write 5 tweets to promote my Copilot course"

Edit

Ask Copilot to review something or re-word something. Maybe you have a tweet that took off and you'd like to try and capitalize on it. Ask Copilot: "Can you reword this: XXX". Or make something more clear: "Can you reword 'Maybe you have a tweet that took off and you'd like to try and capitalize on it.' to make it more clear?"

Understand

Another great feature of Copilot is learning something. You can simply ask Copilot. "How do I block phishing emails in Microsoft 365?"

Ask

You can ask Copilot to summarize a text or something for you or translate a conversation.

Catch up

This is where Copilot starts to shine. I was just on vacation and I came back to 400 messages in the project channel in Microsoft Teams. With Copilot Pro I can simply ask "What happened in the week? Please call out any action items for me." Boda bing. Boda boom. All caught up.