COPILOT WEEKLY
Tue, October 6, 2026
6-minute read
3 QUICK WINS · 2 BIG IDEAS · 1 POWER PLAY
👋 Hello, Hello.
Last week Microsoft rebuilt Copilot around Home, Code and Autopilot. Kushank sat down with the person running all of it: Jacob Andreou, EVP of Copilot at Microsoft.
He brought Jacob the questions you keep asking us. Why does Copilot sometimes feel dumber than ChatGPT or Claude? Would he let Autopilot email Satya Nadella? And what does the guy who runs Copilot actually use it for?
Every answer is in a clip below, so you can watch him say it yourself. 👀
IN 5 MINUTES, BE THE ONE IN THE OFFICE WHO KNOWS COPILOT:
Why Copilot's boss stopped opening his inbox.
The setting behind "Copilot feels dumber."
The one habit that keeps your AI work from looking like slop.
Why smarter AI still isn't changing most people's jobs.
How AI helps beginners and experts at the same time.
Which Copilot tab he opens for which job.
3 Quick wins, straight from the person who runs Copilot
1. 📥 He stopped opening his inbox. Autopilot reads it for him.
About a month ago, Jacob gave himself a challenge: no more Outlook inbox. Autopilot became his inbox instead. His first message to it was basically: "I'm going to stop looking at my inbox, so you need to be on top of this. Check every five minutes and sort everything."
(Of course, he got Autopilot early. For the rest of us, Microsoft hasn't shared a release date yet.)
It sorts every email into four buckets:
No reply needed.
Worth a read.
Needs his reply because he's blocking someone.
Critical, tell him right now.
The surprise was everything after that. He got pulled into a long thread with senior leaders right at the end. Instead of scrolling, he asked Autopilot to catch him up, asked a couple of questions, gave it a few bullets, and it wrote the reply in his tone and sent it. All of that happened in Teams.
The tip: Save his first prompt for the day Autopilot reaches you. Write down who your key people are and what counts as urgent for you, so you're ready to hand it your inbox on day one. For simple stuff like scheduling, he says the draft is already waiting for him. For high-stakes threads, he still writes the bullets himself.
Your inbox turns into a conversation.
2. 🧠 Copilot feels "dumber"? Check the effort setting.
A lot of people say the same model feels smarter in ChatGPT or Claude than in Copilot. So Kushank asked him straight.
His answer: other AI apps change how hard their models think pretty often, week to week, depending on demand. So Copilot handed that control to you. In Cowork, you can set the effort level for whichever model you pick, including Auto.
He also explained why Auto can save you credits. Other agent apps write a giant script from scratch every time you ask for a deck. Cowork works out the best way to build a presentation once and shares that skill with everyone, so you get a better deck for fewer tokens.
The tip: Before you decide a model is worse in Copilot, check the effort level on your Cowork task. Turn it up for the hard stuff, leave it low for quick jobs.
Same model. More brain.
3. 📎 Send your prompt along with the AI output.
Kushank asked Jacob if he'd ever send Satya (Microsoft's CEO) an email written by Autopilot. He said: raw, never. But he did send him something Cowork drafted: a map of the whole Copilot system, built by looking at who works on what across the company. It even suggested owners for each piece and caught places where teams were building the same thing under different names.
He fixed a few boxes, told Satya it was AI-generated and edited, and it ended up clearing things up for the whole team.
The habit he asks of his team: When you share something AI helped you make, paste your prompt with it. The prompt is the short version of your thinking. The output is the long version. People want both.
Nobody has to guess what you actually meant.
2 Big ideas, the why behind the new Copilot
1. 🚰 Smarter AI is no longer the hard part
Jacob's biggest worry: the models keep getting smarter, but that doesn't always show up in your work. He calls it the diffusion bottleneck. Smarter model on one end, your job getting easier on the other, and a lot can leak out in between.
His example: GPT-3 only clicked once we got the chat box. Later models needed tools like Cowork before you could feel what they could do. He thinks we're in that gap again with the newest models, and Autopilot and the new Home tab are Microsoft's bet to close it.
If AI hasn't changed your job yet, look at where you're using it before you blame the model.
2. 🪜 AI raises the ceiling and lowers the floor
Beginners can now go much further than before, and experts can do way more with what they already know. His example is coding. Microsoft's best engineers ship faster, while people who were scared of a command line can finally build things. That's exactly who the new Code tab is for.
You can build your own tool now, even if you've never written a line of code.
1 Power play
🎯 How the person running Copilot uses Copilot
We saved the question everyone wants asked for last. Jacob splits his day into three jobs, one per tab:
Chat is for quick answers. The company acronyms he's still too scared to ask about after two years. Finding the right "Julia" in a company with a lot of Julias. How much buffer he has between meetings before he leaves for the airport.
Cowork is for pulling data together. He used to start every morning reading the thumbs-down feedback from Copilot's top 15 customers by hand. Now one Cowork routine pulls usage, answer quality and sales-team feedback from three different systems into one conversation. He drafts his docs there too.
Autopilot is for anything that needs watching. If he knows exactly what he wants, he uses Cowork. If he needs something monitored, or he has a big goal and no plan yet, he hands it to Autopilot and lets it figure things out.
The rule of thumb:
Need an answer in ten seconds? Chat.
Know the steps? Cowork.
Know the goal but not the steps? Autopilot.
Three tabs, three jobs. Now you know which one to open.
🎤 Ask us anything. Show us what you built.
A Copilot question you can't crack, a prompt that won't land, a feature you keep seeing but don't quite get: reply to this email.
Built something with Copilot? A workflow, a prompt stack, a skill file that saves you an hour a week? Reply and tell us. The whole point of this list is people sharing what they're shipping so everyone learns together.
Don't forget to rate today's post
That's your Copilot 3-2-1 for the week. Reply with the one question you'd ask the person who runs Copilot.
Kushank and team
Copilot Samaritan · Copilot Weekly is a PracticalyAI newsletter · practicaly.ai/copilot
