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Microsoft · Applied Futures Academy

Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot agents and GitHub Copilot. 6 platform modules plus 22 that apply to every platform.

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Three modules, in order: the required trio for the AF Copilot Practitioner credential.

  1. Step 1:
    Module 401 · Track A

    Copilot 101

    Which of the four things called Copilot you actually have, what each can see, and how to get a first useful result out of the one in front of you.

    CopilotBeginners8 lessons · 90 min
  2. Step 2:
    Module 02 · Track A

    How to Prompt

    How current frontier models follow instructions, and the five fixes that turn vague prompts into precise ones.

    All platformsBeginnersIntermediate10 lessons · 60 min
  3. Step 3:
    Module 402 · Track B

    Copilot Notebooks and Pages

    How to stop treating Copilot as a chat window: Pages as a persistent canvas you and your team edit, Notebooks as a curated set of files Copilot grounds on, and the personalisation settings that carry who you are between sessions.

    CopilotIntermediate6 lessons · 90 min

Credentials

Four levels, earned rather than attended: required modules, a verified skill check, and an artifact for the two upper levels. Every credential carries a public verification URL.

  1. Level 1

    AF Copilot Practitioner

    3 required modules · skill check

  2. Level 2

    AF Copilot Power User

    5 required modules · skill check

  3. Level 3

    AF Copilot Agentic Engineer

    3 required modules · skill check · artifact

  4. Level 4

    AF Copilot AI Leader

    3 required modules · skill check · artifact

Modules

Showing 28 of 28 modules

Module 02 · Track A

How to Prompt

How current frontier models follow instructions, and the five fixes that turn vague prompts into precise ones.

All platformsBeginnersIntermediate10 lessons · 60 min
Module 101 · Track A

AI at Work 101

What a large language model actually is, what that makes it good and bad at, and how the four assistants most organisations use ({{fact:general_assistants}}) package the same idea in different surfaces.

All platformsBeginners7 lessons · 90 min
Module 102 · Track A

Choosing Your AI Assistant

How to choose between {{fact:general_assistants}} for an organisation, starting from what you already pay for rather than from benchmark tables.

All platformsBeginnersLeadership6 lessons · 60 min
Module 401 · Track A

Copilot 101

Which of the four things called Copilot you actually have, what each can see, and how to get a first useful result out of the one in front of you.

CopilotBeginners8 lessons · 90 min
Module 04 · Track B

Sound Like You

How to capture your writing voice, taste, and hard rules in one compact file any AI can use.

All platformsIntermediate6 lessons · 120 min
Module 05 · Track B

Stop Writing Like AI

The patterns that make text read as machine-written, from negative parallelism to banned vocabulary.

All platformsBeginnersIntermediate5 lessons · 60 min
Module 06 · Track B

Stop Prompting, Start Briefing

Why maintained context files beat repeated prompting, and how to manage them with Obsidian.

All platformsIntermediate7 lessons · 60 min
Module 402 · Track B

Copilot Notebooks and Pages

How to stop treating Copilot as a chat window: Pages as a persistent canvas you and your team edit, Notebooks as a curated set of files Copilot grounds on, and the personalisation settings that carry who you are between sessions.

CopilotIntermediate6 lessons · 90 min
Module 403 · Track C

Copilot in Microsoft 365

What Copilot actually does inside Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, why the Graph grounding behind it makes it different from any standalone chat, and where each app's output is trustworthy and where it is not.

CopilotIntermediate7 lessons · 60 min
Module 404 · Track C

Copilot Agents and Copilot Studio

What a Copilot agent is, the two architectures Microsoft documents, how to build a declarative agent in minutes with Agent Builder, when to move up to Copilot Studio for knowledge sources and actions, and how agents are governed before anyone else can use yours.

CopilotIntermediateAdvanced7 lessons · 90 min
Module 12 · Track D

AI Slides

The research-first pipeline that produces decks worth presenting, plus the brand setup that keeps a whole team on-style.

All platformsBeginnersIntermediate5 lessons · 90 min
Module 104 · Track E

AI for Your Team

A five-day rollout playbook that works on any of the four assistants, built around recurring deliverables rather than general enthusiasm.

All platformsLeadership9 lessons · Half day or 5-part series
Module 18 · Track F

Prompt Engineering Deep Dive

The complete prompting toolkit, from structure and roles to hallucination control and complex industry prompts, plus how to measure prompt quality with evaluations.

All platformsIntermediateAdvanced8 lessons · Half day
Module 20 · Track F

Agent Harness Engineering

How agents actually work under the hood: the model supplies intelligence, and everything else is a harness you can build.

All platformsAdvanced7 lessons · Full day
Module 21 · Track F

Agentic Futures Briefing

Where agentic engineering is heading across three horizons: what's standard practice now, what arrives within a quarter, and what's forming six months out.

All platformsLeadershipAdvanced6 lessons · 90 min, also quarterly 1:1
Module 405 · Track F

GitHub Copilot for Developers

How GitHub Copilot's surfaces fit together, from completions and chat through agent mode in the IDE and the CLI to the cloud agent that opens pull requests, and how instruction files, custom agents, MCP servers and code review turn it into a workflow a team can share.

CopilotAdvanced8 lessons · Full day
Module 103 · Track G

Working Safely with AI

What may and may not go into an assistant, where personal data and the EU AI Act touch everyday use, how prompt injection reaches you through connectors and browsing, and how to keep a named human accountable for every output that leaves your desk.

All platformsBeginnersIntermediateLeadership8 lessons · 60 min
Module 140 · Track H

AI for Sales and Revenue Teams

The five sales workflows where an assistant pays for itself: pipeline triage, account and meeting prep, proposal and follow-up drafting from a brief, objection practice, and forecast commentary.

All platformsIntermediate7 lessons · 90 min
Module 141 · Track H

AI for HR and People

How to turn a role brief into a job ad and an interview kit, draft and plain-language a policy, build onboarding material, and run a bias check on all of it, without ever pasting a candidate or employee record into the wrong place.

All platformsIntermediate6 lessons · 90 min
Module 142 · Track H

AI for Finance

A verification discipline for finance work with an assistant: assumptions before formulas, formulas before numbers, a reconciliation check before anything leaves your desk, and commentary that points at the cells it came from.

All platformsIntermediate7 lessons · 90 min
Module 143 · Track H

AI for Project Managers

To turn raw updates into a status report people read, keep a decision log that survives staff turnover, write stakeholder communications for the audience rather than the project, maintain a risk register that changes, and schedule the recurring briefings where your platform supports them.

All platformsIntermediate7 lessons · 90 min
Module 144 · Track H

AI for Legal and Compliance Teams

Three contract-review patterns (clause extraction, playbook comparison, plain-language summary), how to build and use a clause library, and the four guardrails that decide whether any of it is safe: confidentiality, privilege, hallucinated citations, and what never leaves the firm.

All platformsIntermediate6 lessons · 90 min
Module 145 · Track H

AI for Content and SEO Teams

Two half-sessions with their own exercises: content (briefs to drafts in the house voice, editing, repurposing across channels, and the anti-AI-writing habit) and SEO (keyword clustering, search-intent mapping, on-page briefs, metadata at scale, and checking what AI answers say about your brand), plus the short list of what not to automate.

All platformsIntermediate7 lessons · 90 min
Module 146 · Track H

AI for Tech Teams

The non-agentic developer workflow: the reading-and-writing work around the code that an assistant in a chat does well today, on any platform, without touching your repository. Documentation and ADRs, code review summaries, ticket triage and refinement, incident notes and post-mortems, runbooks.

All platformsIntermediate7 lessons · 90 min
Module 130 · Track I

AI Strategy Briefing for Executives

What has changed in the assistants over the last eighteen months, what an organisation should do in the next ninety days, and how to frame build versus buy, capability versus tools, risk posture and return on investment so the board can decide rather than defer.

All platformsLeadership7 lessons · 90 min
Module 131 · Track I

Measuring AI Adoption

What the admin dashboards on all four assistants actually measure, how to take a time-saved baseline that survives a finance review, which quality signals to collect, and what good looks like at three, six and twelve months.

All platformsLeadership6 lessons · 60 min
Module 406 · Track I

Copilot for Leaders

What a Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout actually costs and buys, the Purview and Copilot controls that decide whether it is safe, the dashboards that tell you whether it is working, the Microsoft training and certification landscape, and a 90-day plan that survives contact with a real organisation.

CopilotLeadership7 lessons · 90 min
Module 31 · Track J

Build Your Own MCP Connector

How the Model Context Protocol works and how to wrap an internal tool or API as a connector any MCP-capable assistant can call.

All platformsAdvanced7 lessons · Half day

Tracks