Microsoft will now onboard your staff to Copilot in 10 minutes. Here's what they still won't know.

Microsoft has announced a guided onboarding for Microsoft 365 Copilot. A new user opens Copilot, is walked through a short set of activities based on their role and comes out knowing how to ask it for things.

It’s a good move and firms should use it. It also changes what’s worth paying for in Copilot training, so it’s worth five minutes to understand what it covers and what it leaves to you.

What Microsoft is rolling out

These are the facts as of October 2026, from Microsoft’s Message Center post MC1486291:

• A guided onboarding inside the Copilot app that takes around 5 to 10 minutes.
• Two versions. The Starter journey asks the user a few questions and tailors its examples to the answers. The Premium journey, for people with a Copilot Premium licence, uses what Copilot already knows about their role and work.
• It is off by default. An admin switches it on in the Microsoft 365 admin centre and can attach the firm’s AI policy, so staff see it as part of the onboarding.
• Admins share it by email or link and can report on who has completed it.
• It rolls out from late October to early November 2026, and only to organisations in Frontier, Microsoft’s early access programme. The announcement gives no date for wider release.

For most firms this is a signpost, not something to action on Monday. The direction is clear though: Microsoft intends to teach the basics itself, inside the product.

What it does well

The hardest moment for a new Copilot user is the empty prompt box. They’ve been told it’s clever, they don’t know what to type, they try something vague and get something vague back. Then they quietly stop using it.

Ten minutes of guided examples tied to their job gets people past that. Showing your AI policy at the same point is sensible too, because that’s when people are paying attention.

If your firm is in Frontier, switch it on when it reaches you. If not, keep an eye out for it.

What ten minutes can’t cover

Ten minutes gets someone started. It doesn’t get a firm its money back on the licences. The gap is rarely that people can’t write a prompt. It’s these five things.

1. Using Copilot across the apps as one piece of work

Most people learn Copilot one app at a time: a summary in Outlook, a draft in Word. Real work doesn’t sit in one app. A client query starts as an email, pulls figures from a spreadsheet, turns into a letter and ends in a meeting.

Knowing how to carry that through Copilot Chat, Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams without starting from scratch each time is where the hours come back.

2. What Cowork is and when to use it

Copilot Chat answers and drafts, then you do the next step. Cowork is different. You hand it a job with several steps and it works through them across your files, email and calendar, then brings back the finished thing for you to check.

Many staff don’t know it exists, or don’t know which jobs suit it. That matters because Cowork is charged by usage on top of the licence. Pointed at the wrong work it costs money. Pointed at the right work it saves a lot of time.

3. Skills in Excel and PowerPoint

A skill is a saved method. Instead of explaining every time how your firm lays out a monthly report or structures a client presentation, you set it down once and Copilot follows it whenever you ask.

Excel and PowerPoint both come with skills and let you add your own. Very few people find them without being shown.

4. Turning a process into a skill

This is the step that moves a firm from “some of us use Copilot” to “this is how we do it here”. Someone who knows the work captures the method once and everyone else gets the same result.

Today that means writing the method down or having Copilot build it from a description. Microsoft is also experimenting with recording a task as you do it and turning that into a skill, though that is early. Either way it needs someone who understands the process, which makes it a job for a practice manager or a senior in the team, not IT.

5. Where agents come in

Once a process is clear enough to be a skill, the next question is whether it should run without anyone asking. That’s an agent: something that handles a defined job using your firm’s own information, such as chasing clients for missing documents or preparing a first draft after a meeting.

Staff don’t need to build agents. They do need to know what one is, how to work with one and how to spot a task that should become one.

Why this gap is the one that matters

Microsoft’s onboarding knows a person’s role and, on the Premium journey, something about their recent work. It doesn’t know how your firm runs a month-end, takes on a new client or gets a bill out of the door.

That knowledge sits with your people. It decides whether Copilot saves ten minutes here and there or changes how a team works.

It’s also why generic training has always had a ceiling. A course built on made-up examples teaches the tool. A session built on your own workflows teaches people where the tool fits in their day.

What to do about it

1. If you’re in Frontier, switch the onboarding on when it arrives and attach your AI policy.
2. Use the completion report to see who has done it.
3. Treat that as the starting line. Ask each team which two or three pieces of work take the most time, then look at those against the five areas above.
4. Spend your training time and budget there, on your own processes, with the people who know them.

Not in Frontier? The same order applies. Get the basics covered quickly, then put the effort into your own workflows.

Where to go from here

This is the ground FiveForward works on: Copilot training built around a firm’s own workflows, and agents built on top of it. Our Agent Journey page sets out the route from everyday Copilot through Cowork and skills to agents.

If you’d like to talk through where your firm is on that route, book a free 30-minute call. No pitch, no obligation.