Using Microsoft 365 Copilot
Copilot is the Council's approved AI assistant. It can draft, rewrite, summarise and explain. It works inside the Council's own Microsoft environment, so your work stays within systems the Council manages.
Where to find it
- In a browser go to m365.cloud.microsoft/chat and sign in with your Council account.
- In the apps look for the Copilot button in Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint and Teams.
Copilot will only appear within the Microsoft 365 apps if you have the Copilot premium subscription applied to your account.
What it is good at
- Getting started. Turning a rough note into a first draft is what it does best.
- Rewriting. Making something shorter, clearer, more formal, or suitable for a different audience.
- Summarising. A long email thread, a report, a set of submissions.
- Explaining. Unfamiliar terminology, or what a piece of legislation is broadly getting at.
- Formatting and structure. Turning notes into a table, or an agenda into minutes.
What it is not good at
- Facts and figures. It will produce plausible numbers that are wrong.
- Legislation and policy. It will paraphrase confidently and inaccurately. Check the source.
- Judgement. Determinations, enforcement decisions, and advice to Councillors are yours.
- Anything it has not been given. It does not know Council-specific procedure unless you tell it.
Writing a good prompt
Vague in, vague out. The difference between a useless answer and a useful one is usually the prompt.
Say who it is for and what it is for.
Not: write something about the new green waste service
Better: Draft a short notice for residents about a change to green waste collection days, in plain English, about 150 words, friendly but factual
Give it the material. Paste in the notes, the email thread or the draft. It cannot guess.
Say what you do not want. No bullet points. No jargon. Do not mention fees.
Iterate. Treat the first answer as a draft and tell it what to change — make it shorter, less formal, remove the last paragraph. This works better than rewriting your prompt from scratch.
Ask it to show its reasoning when the answer matters. Explain how you reached that.
Examples for Council work
| Task | Prompt |
|---|---|
| Summarise submissions | Summarise the main themes across these submissions, and note where they disagree |
| Reply to a complaint | Draft a polite reply acknowledging this complaint, explaining the next steps, and giving no commitment on timing |
| Simplify a document | Rewrite this in plain English for a general audience, keeping all the factual detail |
| Prepare for a meeting | Turn these notes into an agenda with timings for a one-hour meeting |
| Understand a spreadsheet | What are the main trends in this data, and what looks unusual? |
Before you send anything
Check it. Every name, date, figure, address and reference. You are responsible for what goes out under your name, and "Copilot wrote it" is not a defence to a resident or a Councillor.
Read it in your own voice. AI writing has a recognisable flatness. Council correspondence should sound like a person wrote it, because a person is accountable for it.
Ask whether it is accurate as well as fluent. Fluency is the easy part. It is also what makes errors hard to spot.
What not to put in
Do not paste in more personal information than the task needs. If you want help with wording, you rarely need someone's name and address in the prompt.
Do not use it to form views about individuals. Asking it to assess or speculate about a person creates new personal information the Council then holds.
Do not paste in large blocks of unfamiliar web content and act on the result. Copied text can contain instructions aimed at the AI. See Using AI at Kingborough Council.