Microsoft Copilot Cowork & Agentic AI Masterclass [2026]

Name: Microsoft Copilot Cowork & Agentic AI Masterclass [2026]
Rating: 4.7 (220 reviews)

Master Copilot Cowork, Plugins and Skills to Automate Enterprise Workflows, Build Agentic Solutions and Deploy AI Agents

Created byProf. Ryan Ahmed, PhD, MBA, Stemplicity Inc.

Last updated 8/2026

English

Arabic [Auto],English [Auto],

What you'll learn

Master Copilot Cowork Agents to automate real work in finance, legal, marketing, data analysis and research, and reclaim hours from repetitive busywork.
Learn how Agent "Skills" and "Plugins" work under the hood, then install and use them to give your Copilot Cowork agents powerful new capabilities on demand.
Master Copilot Cowork end to end and switch between Anthropic Claude Opus 5 and OpenAI GPT-5.6-Sol to pick the sharpest model for every business task.
Connect Copilot Cowork to email, calendar, OneDrive and external tools with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) so your AI acts on real data and maintain context.
Master Copilot Cowork with Excel to clean data, perform conditional formatting, handle missing values, visualize data, & create dashboards.
Automate the creation of branded PowerPoint presentations and professional executive reports directly from raw data and deep-dive research.
Master prompt engineering, Meta prompting, & context Engineering techniques to optimize Copilot Cowork performance.
Build a reusable brand skill with your logos, fonts and colors, then auto generate PDF reports and slide decks inside your company's official template.
Build, ship, share and test your own Copilot Cowork plugin, master the plugin manifest and package it as a zipped folder your whole team can install.
Chain prompts into brand new custom skills, then use the Skill Management Skill to create, evaluate, improve and delete them as your library grows.
Leverage specialized plugins to clean data, perform statistical analysis, and automatically build visual dashboards and comprehensive reports.
Automate your inbox end to end: triage mail, draft replies, attach the right files and walk into every meeting fully briefed in minutes, not hours.
Generate complete branded marketing campaigns, images and copy in Copilot Cowork while locking in a brand voice that never sounds like generic AI.
Schedule recurring tasks so market updates, monitoring workflows and status reports research themselves and land in your inbox before your day starts.
Design and manage a team of autonomous AI agents to handle end-to-end projects, from initial research phases to final automated email distribution.
Understand the concept of "Subagents" and "Agent Teams" to handle multi-step, advanced complex projects.
Forecast revenue and financial trends using ARIMA and SARIMA models in Copilot Cowork, with no statistics background or Python coding required at all.
Run deep research with the Researcher Agent, apply Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and build your own custom agent for your exact daily workflow.
Deploy the Analyst Agent to clean messy datasets, run sentiment analysis on free text and perform predictive analytics without writing a line of code.
Construct professional, Wall Street level financial models with Copilot Cowork, even if you have never built a three statement model from scratch.

Course content

9 sections • 70 lectures • 10h 21m total length

The Power of Microsoft Copilot Cowork!6:17
Instructor Introduction & AI Agents 1019:24
Masterclass Outline and Key Learning Objectives10:42
Download the Masterclass Materials0:02
Key Success Tips2:21

Introduction to Microsoft Copilot Cowork6:29
You are way too early!4:36
Project Overview and Key Learning Objectives6:22
Generate Hero Images with Copilot Cowork15:07
Learn to generate a hero image for a grand opening flyer using Microsoft Copilot CoWork, select GPT 5.6 Sol, and save branded assets to OneDrive.
Generate Branded Assets with Copilot Cowork14:53
Practice Opportunity Question: Generate Branded Assets in Copilot Cowork2:30
Practice Opportunity Solution: Generate Branded Assets in Copilot Cowork15:39
Master practice opportunity solutions in Copilot Cowork by generating a branded hero image and a print-ready grand opening flyer for Hound & Home through structured prompts and asset management.
Prompt Engineering Fundamentals & Pro Tips8:44
Meta Prompting9:39
Master meta prompting to craft high‑quality prompts with ai, enabling data‑driven, structured swot analyses (context, instructions, input, output) for competitive benchmarking in tools like Copilot.

Module Overview and Key Learning Objectives4:06
Agent Connectors and Model Context Protocol (MCP)7:22
Copilot Cowork for Files Management and Excel Work16:27
Master Copilot Cowork to organize OneDrive folders, classify receipts, invoices, and agreements, and generate a receipts summary Excel sheet; connect Outlook to send emails from Copilot.
Using Copilot Cowork to Send Emails via Outlook3:56
Understanding Tokens in Large Language Models (LLMs)6:29
Context Window in LLMs3:55
Practice Opportunity Question - Tokens in LLMs1:45
Practice Opportunity Solution - Tokens in LLMs2:56
Managing Emails in Outlook with Copilot Cowork10:07
Use Copilot Cowork to Prep you for a meeting12:03
Use Copilot Cowork to prep for a meeting by reviewing Outlook calendar, emails, and OneDrive context, then generate a prep summary and a two-slide PowerPoint deck.

Agent Skills16:02
Learn how to enhance Microsoft Copilot CoWork with agent skills by creating markdown skill files, attaching them to llms, and dynamically loading capabilities for PowerPoint, Excel, PDF, and Word tasks.
Project Overview - Create PowerPoint Slides from Data Using Skills12:58
Build Slide Deck without a Skill in Copilot Cowork18:15
Upload a new skill to Copilot Cowork & Comparison with Codex and Claude Cowork9:45
Build Slide Deck with Skills in Copilot Cowork15:06
Practice Opportunity Question - Leveraging Agent Skills in Copilot Cowork2:52
Acquire the LinkedIn post skill, upload it to Copilot Co-Work, then generate a LinkedIn post about McKinsey's state of AI report to showcase agent skills.
Practice Opportunity Solution - Leveraging Agent Skills in Copilot Cowork9:50

Project Overview - Create New Skill and Automated Workflows9:30
Perform Research and Generate Microsoft Word Reports in Copilot Cowork13:15
Create Excel Sheets for SpaceX10:49
Organize SpaceX performance data into a professional Excel monitor with a dashboard, fundamentals, sentiment, and news tabs, including color-coded indicators and benchmarks against the NASDAQ and SPY.
Create a new spacex-monitor skill with Copilot Cowork19:34
Test the new spacex-monitor skill4:23
Test the space x monitor skill by launching slash space x monitor; the workflow builds space x valuation, sentiment, an Excel tracker, and SPY comparisons for market context.
Schedule Automated Workflows in Copilot Cowork7:15
Practice Opportunity Question - Build New Skills in Copilot Cowork1:20
Practice Opportunity Solution - Build New Skills in Copilot Cowork16:04

Module Introduction and What is an Agent Plugin?12:33
Project Overview - Building Finance Agent Plugins7:33
Builds a finance plugin named Meridian that bundles three skills—accounts payable, accounts receivable, and cash position—into a shareable, organization-wide plugin with a manifest and health validation.
Data Overview and Uploading Files to OneDrive5:41
Build 3 Agent Skills Using the "Skill Management" Skill in Copilot Cowork16:57
Build three finance agent skills with Copilot Cowork’s Skill Management to form the Meridian Finance Toolkit: AP aging, AR collections, and cash position, using OneDrive data and age-by-due-date logic.
Create a New Custom Plugin in Copilot Cowork10:39
Agent Plugin Manifest Overview5:11
Package a plugin as Zipped folder in Copilot Cowork7:23
Test the Plugin and Calculate AR and AP8:26
Test the plugin - Develop a Cash Position4:17

Enterprise AI Agents: Use Cases and Opportunities11:15
AI Agents in Microsoft Copilot: Guided Walkthrough5:30
Discover two built-in Copilot agents: a researcher agent for online research, fact-checking, and reports, and an analyst agent for Excel, databases, data analysis, EDA, and visualization with Matplotlib/Seaborn.
Copilot Researcher Agent: Deep Research in Action10:47
Shows how to run the researcher agent inside Microsoft Copilot for deep research, including investment research templates, private company analysis, and generating final reports, summaries, and Word and PDF outputs.
AI Research Showdown: Copilot vs. Gemini vs. ChatGPT19:09
Copilot Analyst Agent: Cleaning Messy Data9:22
Copilot Analyst Agent: Analyzing Text Data5:13
Practice Opportunity Overview: Solve a Data Problem with Copilot Analyst3:14
Explore the SAS monthly metrics data with Copilot Analyst, perform exploratory data analysis, create ten visualizations, and generate a concise summary of insights on mrr, churn, and nps.
Practice Opportunity Solution: Solve a Data Problem with Copilot Analyst5:57
Copilot Analyst Agent: Predictive Analytics & Machine Learning15:25
Understanding Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)8:16
Build Your Own Custom Agent with your data in Microsoft Copilot13:07

Introduction to Forecasting7:01
Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) Model Intuition10:17
Train an ARIMA Model for Sales Forecasting Using Microsoft Copilot Cowork17:37
Leverage Copilot Cowork to perform Hyperparameters Tuning and Optimization7:24
Practice Opportunity Overview: Perform Forecasting with Copilot Cowork1:16
Train an S-ARIMA model on the provided data, forecast testing data, and evaluate with MAE and MAPE, then compare with ARIMA, discuss seasonal advantages, and explore hyperparameter tuning.
Practice Opportunity Solution: Perform Forecasting with Copilot Cowork4:11

Requirements

No programming experience is required, the course is open to anyone with a laptop and internet connection!

Description

Welcome to the Copilot Cowork Masterclass. In this course, we will go far beyond typing prompts into a chat box and learn how to put an AI coworker to work inside the Microsoft files you already use every day. You will learn how to run Copilot Cowork on both Anthropic Claude Opus 5 and OpenAI GPT-5.6-Sol, and how to switch between them so you always have the right model behind the task at hand. We will cover prompt engineering, meta-prompting, and context engineering in depth, so you can get professional, ready-to-use output on your first attempt instead of your fifth.

Next, we will get into the part that changes everything, which is Agent Skills and Plugins. I will show you what a skill really is, how it is built, and how to install proven skills from public sources in a couple of clicks. From there, you will chain your own prompts into brand new custom skills that run complete workflows from start to finish, and you will use the Skill Management Skill to create, test, improve and delete them as your library grows. We will also build and package your own plugin so your whole team can install it, schedule recurring tasks that research and report on their own, and use Subagents and Agent Teams to handle large projects that a single chat window could never finish.

Then we will apply all of this to real business work through hands on projects. You will connect Copilot Cowork to email, calendar and OneDrive using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), automate your inbox, and organize the files you have been avoiding for months. We will clean and format data in Excel, generate executive reports in Word, and produce branded PowerPoint decks and PDF reports in your own company template using a brand skill that holds your logos, fonts and colors. We will also build Wall Street level financial models, forecast revenue with ARIMA and SARIMA, deploy the Analyst and Researcher Agents, and create dashboards your leadership team can act on. Whether you are a corporate knowledge worker buried in Outlook and Excel, a founder running a lean business, or an analyst who wants predictive modeling without writing Python, you will finish this course with a portfolio of working projects that keep saving you time long after the final lecture. I am excited to have you on board, so let us get started.

Who this course is for:

Enterprise Knowledge Workers & Corporate Teams: Automate the Outlook, Excel, Word and PowerPoint grind that eats your week, using agents your team can share.
Startup Founders, Solopreneurs & Small Business Owners: Run a one person company by handing reporting, decks, outreach and admin to Copilot Cowork agents.
Consultants, Executives & Managers: Turn raw client data into polished reports, decks and briefings in your firm template, in minutes instead of late nights
Marketing, Legal & Operations Professionals: Automate branded campaigns, document review and compliance checks that currently eat entire billable days.
Data Analysts, Researchers & Academics: Clean messy data, run predictive analysis, build dashboards and do deep research without writing a line of Python.
AI Enthusiasts & Prompt Power Users: Graduate from one off chat prompts to autonomous agent teams that finish real multi step work inside your own files

Microsoft Copilot Cowork & Agentic AI Masterclass [2026]

What you'll learn

Explore related topics

Course content

Masterclass Introduction, Success Tips, and Welcome Message5 lectures • 29min

Create Branded Marketing Assets with Microsoft Copilot Cowork9 lectures • 1hr 24min

Copilot Cowork for Business & Enterprise (Emails, Excel and File Management)10 lectures • 1hr 9min

Agent Skills7 lectures • 1hr 25min

Create New Skills and Schedule Tasks in Copilot Cowork8 lectures • 1hr 22min

Create Presentations & Reports Using Company's Branded Template5 lectures • 39min

Create Custom Plugins in Microsoft Copilot Cowork9 lectures • 1hr 19min

AI Agents in Microsoft Copilot11 lectures • 1hr 47min

Forecasting with Microsoft Copilot Cowork6 lectures • 48min

Requirements

Description

Who this course is for: