Shared iQ

Two-day masterclass · November 2026

Microsoft 365 Copilot at Work

Getting real value from the AI already inside your organisation

Two days of practical, hands-on training for the people who actually produce the correspondence, reports, packs and analysis. Every delegate works in a live Microsoft 365 training environment with a full Copilot licence, on realistic organisational data.

Register a delegate See the programme
2Days
11Labs
20Max delegates
14Days access

The case for Copilot

Your organisation is already paying for Microsoft. The AI is already inside it. Almost nobody is using it properly.

Most organisations that buy Microsoft 365 Copilot licences see them go unused by week three. Not because the technology fails, but because nobody was ever shown how to fold it into the work they already do, or where it can be trusted and where it cannot.

This programme fixes that. It is not a product demonstration and it is not a lecture about artificial intelligence. It is two days of supervised practice on the tasks your people carry out every week, ending with each delegate holding a written thirty-day plan for their own role.

Why Copilot rather than a public chatbot

  • Already in your tenant. No new procurement, no new vendor security review, no new contract.
  • Your data does not train the models. Prompts, responses and Microsoft Graph data are not used to train the foundation models.
  • It inherits your permissions. Copilot cannot show a user anything they could not already open.
  • Governable with tools your IT team owns. Purview, DLP, sensitivity labels, retention and eDiscovery.
  • Data residency, including South Africa. Microsoft 365 Advanced Data Residency covers South Africa, with Copilot as a covered workload.
  • Frontier models without another vendor. Models from OpenAI and Anthropic, reachable under Microsoft's own terms.

Outcomes

What a delegate can do afterwards

01

Choose the right surface

Explain what Copilot is, what it can see and what it cannot, and pick the right Copilot surface for a given task.

02

Write prompts that work

Write and iterate prompts that produce usable first drafts rather than generic text.

03

Finish real tasks

Use Copilot in Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Teams to take everyday work end to end.

04

Ground it in your own material

Ground Copilot in the organisation's own documents, mail and meetings, and verify what comes back.

05

Build and share an agent

Build a no-code agent for a recurring task in their own role and share it with colleagues.

06

Work within the rules

Apply the organisation's data protection obligations to daily AI use, and recognise what must never go into a prompt.

Programme

Five modules across two days

Day one covers everything that works with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, which most organisations already have at no extra cost. Day two covers what the paid licence unlocks. Delegates whose organisations have not yet purchased still leave with skills they can use on Monday, and with the business case for the licence.

1Copilot Foundations and PromptingDay 1, morning
  • The three Copilot surfaces: web chat, work-grounded chat, and Copilot inside the apps, and why the same question returns a different answer in each
  • What Copilot can see in your organisation, and what it cannot
  • Where free Copilot Chat ends and the paid licence begins
  • Microsoft's four-part prompt: Goal, Context, Expectations, Source
  • Referencing files, people and meetings directly in a prompt; giving Copilot a role and a named audience
  • Iteration, saved prompts, and building a team prompt library
  • What Copilot is genuinely bad at: confident wrong answers, arithmetic, recency, meeting attribution
Lab 1.1 Sandbox orientation. Run one request across all three Copilot surfaces and record how the answers differ.
Lab 1.2 The prompt rewrite clinic. Rewrite six weak prompts, run them before and after, then score a partner's rewrites against the course rubric.
2Email, Meetings and Daily CommunicationDay 1, midday
  • Summarising a long thread, and the catch-up pattern after leave
  • Drafting with explicit control over tone, length and register
  • Coaching by Copilot on a draft you wrote yourself, often the higher-value use
  • Extracting commitments, deadlines and owners out of a thread
  • Meeting recap, decisions register and action items with named owners
  • The Facilitator agent during a live meeting
  • Attribution errors, recording etiquette, consent, and who can see a recap
Lab 2.1 The Monday morning inbox. Triage fifty messages, draft three replies at three registers, then find the point in a twenty-two message escalation where the decision was reversed.
Lab 2.2 Meeting to follow-up. Turn a recorded programme review into a recap, decisions register, action list and the email.
3Documents and DraftingDay 1, afternoon
  • Drafting from a prompt, an existing file, or a meeting transcript, and why the structure Copilot returns is the real output
  • Rewrite, tone and length: shifting register for a board, a donor or a colleague
  • Working inside your own branded templates so documents arrive on brand
  • Agentic capabilities in Word: multi-step work that restructures and rebuilds a document
  • Verifying like a professional: opening every citation and confirming each claim against its source
Lab 3.1 Consultant report to board memo. Turn a fourteen-page report and a meeting transcript into a two-page memo on the house template, then an executive summary, five speaking notes, and one unsupported claim corrected.
4Data, Analysis and PresentationsDay 2, morning
  • Why Copilot in Excel needs a proper table: headers, consistent types, no merged cells
  • Asking questions of data in plain language; generating and explaining formulas
  • Conditional formatting, PivotTables and charts by instruction rather than by menu
  • Agentic capabilities in Excel, and the Analyst agent for heavier analysis
  • PowerPoint: a deck built from a document, on your brand template, with speaker notes
  • Where the ceiling is: dense data slides, and anything where the visual argument matters
Lab 4.1 The procurement extract. Clean three thousand messy rows, summarise by department and quarter, build a board chart, and catch the text-formatted column that makes the obvious total wrong. This is the most important half hour of the two days.
5Agents, Governance and AdoptionDay 2, afternoon
  • What an agent actually is, in plain language, and when it beats a saved prompt
  • The pre-built agents: Researcher, Analyst and Facilitator
  • Agent Builder hands-on: instructions, knowledge sources, starter prompts, testing and sharing
  • Model choice, including Anthropic's Claude models, and why an administrator may have switched it off
  • Permissions and the oversharing problem: Copilot surfaces only what you could already open
  • Sensitivity labels, DLP, retention and eDiscovery of Copilot interactions
  • POPIA, NDPA and data residency in Africa; what must never go into a prompt; when to disclose that AI helped
  • The thirty-day adoption plan, and measuring time actually saved
Lab 5.1 Governance tabletop. Six real-shaped scenarios decided in groups, producing a draft acceptable-use one-pager for your own team.
Lab 5.2 Build and share your own agent, then a personal thirty-day plan.

The labs

You will not be watching a demonstration

Every delegate receives a personal account in a live Microsoft 365 training tenant with a full Copilot licence, provisioned by Shared iQ. Nobody needs a licence from their own employer to take part, and nobody has to touch their organisation's real data to learn on realistic material.

The tenant is populated as a working development organisation: mailboxes with a fortnight of real correspondence, recorded meetings with transcripts, SharePoint sites of policies, board packs, grant reports and procurement files, and a finance extract with the kind of faults that actually turn up in finance extracts.

Access continues for fourteen days after the course, so delegates can practise before applying any of it to live work.

What is waiting in the tenant

  • Seeded mailboxes, including a twenty-two message procurement escalation
  • Three recorded Teams meetings with full transcripts
  • Four SharePoint sites and roughly 120 documents
  • A 3,000-row procurement extract with deliberate data faults
  • Branded memo, deck, minutes and donor-report templates
  • A Planner plan, a Loop workspace and a Forms survey with responses

Who should attend

Built for the people who produce the work

Administrators and executive assistants

Producing the correspondence, minutes, packs and schedules that Copilot handles best.

Programme and project officers

Drafting reports, proposals and donor submissions against deadlines.

Finance, grants and procurement staff

Working with data, reconciliations and compliance documentation.

HR and communications professionals

Producing high volumes of written material for varied audiences.

Managers and team leads

Who want their teams adopting Copilot properly rather than sporadically.

Organisations already holding licences

Anyone who has bought Copilot seats and is not yet seeing a return on them.

Everyday user of Microsoft 365 assumed. No technical background, coding or administrator rights required.

Delivery

In-person or online

The online programme is not the in-person programme on a video call. It is redesigned for the format, with shorter blocks, structured pre-work and a follow-up clinic.

In person

Two full days, 08:30 to 16:30

  • Thirteen hours of contact time
  • All eleven labs run in full
  • Group governance tabletop in the room
  • Refreshments and delegate workbook included
Online via Zoom

Two half days, four blocks of seventy minutes

  • Ten hours of contact time, 09:00 to 14:20
  • Forty-five minutes of pre-work sent five days ahead
  • Labs run in breakout rooms with facilitator support
  • Sixty-minute follow-up clinic at day thirty, where delegates bring measured results

Available as an in-house programme, tailored to your organisation's own documents, templates and policies, and delivered at your offices or on your own tenant. Ask us for a quotation for groups of up to twenty.

Dates and fees

Public cohorts, 2026 – 2027

Fees are per delegate in US dollars and include the training tenant licence, delegate workbook, prompt library, fourteen days of post-course lab access and the Shared iQ certificate.

DatesFormat and venueFeeStatus
16 – 17 November 2026Online via ZoomUS$ 1,650Open
25 – 26 January 2027Hôtel des Mille Collines, Kigali, RwandaUS$ 2,350Open
15 – 16 March 2027Online via ZoomUS$ 1,650Open
19 – 20 April 2027The Capital Empire, Sandton, JohannesburgUS$ 2,100Open
12 – 13 July 2027Online via ZoomUS$ 1,650Open
8 – 9 November 2027The Capital 15 on Orange, Cape TownUS$ 2,350Open

Group bookings of three or more delegates from the same organisation qualify for a reduced rate. Indicate the number of delegates on the registration form and we will quote accordingly.

Track record

Professionals from these organisations have trained with Shared iQ

African Development BankIslamic Development BankUNICEF UNEPIFADOxfamGIZ International Finance CorporationEU External Action Foreign, Commonwealth & Development OfficeRoyal Norwegian Embassy Embassy of the Kingdom of the NetherlandsRepublic Bank Centrale Bank van ArubaInternational Rice Research Institute EPA Guyana

Registration

Reserve a place

Complete the form and we will confirm the place by email within one business day, together with a proforma invoice for your finance team. No payment is required to hold a seat.

How payment works. Places are confirmed on registration and invoiced to your organisation. Payment is due within seven working days of the invoice, by wire transfer, credit card or PayPal. Delegate substitutions are permitted at no charge.
Needed to raise the invoice. You can send this later if you prefer.
Who approves the spend, if not you.
This does not affect eligibility. Every delegate is issued a licensed account in our training tenant. It helps us pitch the second day to the room.

Prefer to talk first? Email info@sharediq.org and we will come back to you within one business day.

Questions

Before you register

Do we need to buy Microsoft 365 Copilot licences first?
No. Every delegate is issued an account with a full Copilot licence in the Shared iQ training tenant for the duration of the course and for fourteen days afterwards. Day one deliberately covers the capabilities that work with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, which most organisations already have at no extra cost, so those skills transfer immediately whatever your licensing position. Day two covers what the paid licence adds, and ends with delegates writing the business case for it.
Will you touch our organisation's real data?
Not on a public cohort. All labs run inside the Shared iQ training tenant on fictional but realistic material. Delegates apply what they have learned to their own work afterwards, in their own environment. In-house programmes can optionally be delivered on your tenant with your own templates, which we scope with your IT team beforehand.
What do delegates need to bring or have?
A laptop with a current browser, and for the online cohorts a stable internet connection. A second screen is strongly recommended for online delegates, since you will be following the session on one screen and working in Microsoft 365 on the other. No software installation is required.
Is this a technical course for IT?
No. It is written for business professionals: administration, programmes, finance, procurement, HR and communications. No coding, no administrator rights, no prior AI experience assumed. A separate programme for IT teams and Copilot champions, covering deployment readiness, permission hygiene and Copilot Studio, is in development.
How do we pay?
Places are confirmed on registration and invoiced to your organisation. Payment is due within seven working days by wire transfer, credit card or PayPal. Full banking details appear on the invoice. A cancellation in writing more than twenty-one days before the event incurs a twenty-five percent fee; inside twenty-one days the full fee is due. Delegate substitutions are always free.
Do delegates receive a certificate?
Yes. Every delegate who completes both days receives a Shared iQ Certificate of Completion naming the programme and the dates.
Can you run this for our team only?
Yes, and for most organisations it is better value above about six delegates. In-house delivery can be tailored to your own document templates, policies and terminology, and delivered at your offices or online. Select the in-house option on the registration form and we will send a quotation.
Microsoft changes Copilot constantly. Will the material be current?
The course content is reviewed and re-versioned quarterly against Microsoft's own documentation, and again in the fortnight before every cohort. Where a capability differs by tenant configuration or region, we say so in the room rather than letting delegates discover it at their desks.