Most people cannot list their repeatable tasks from memory. If your company runs on Microsoft 365 with a Copilot license, Copilot can read your mail, calendar, Teams messages, meetings, and files and do the first pass for you. This page walks through that pass, what to ask, and what to do with the list.
Verified against Microsoft's published documentation as of September 15, 2026. Where a detail could not be confirmed, the text says so.
Microsoft's name for the intelligence layer inside Microsoft 365 Copilot. Microsoft's product page says it "helps Copilot and agents know you, your job and your company" by connecting data, context, and tools. Microsoft Learn describes the data part as unifying "signals from files, emails, meetings, chats, and business systems across Microsoft 365." Microsoft reported general availability of the Work IQ APIs on June 16, 2026.
In human terms: Work IQ is what lets Copilot answer a question like "what did I send the owner's rep last Tuesday" instead of only answering questions about the web. That is what makes it useful for skill mining. The evidence of a repeatable task lives in those places, such as a status email that goes out every Friday or a spreadsheet that gets opened every Monday morning.
Where you see it. In Copilot Chat, Work IQ is a toggle at the top left of the window. With the toggle off, Copilot answers from the web and from what you attach. Microsoft's support documentation describes the on position this way. "Work IQ on: Copilot can reference your work data, your emails, files, chats, meetings, people, and projects across Microsoft 365, alongside the web and anything you attach."
Permissions. Copilot only sees what you can already open. Microsoft states that Copilot does not access data the user does not have permission to access. The list you get back is a list of your own work.
What it cannot see. Anything outside Microsoft 365 that has not been connected. If your estimating lives in a separate system, or your project records live in Procore, Copilot will not find those tasks on its own. You add them by hand in pass three.
Five things to have in place. The first two are required. The other three make the results better.
A Microsoft 365 Copilot license on your account. Microsoft's Copilot Chat FAQ ties the Work IQ toggle to a Microsoft Copilot license. Copilot Chat without the license answers from the web and from files you attach, which is a thin starting point for this exercise.
The Work IQ toggle on. It is at the top left of Copilot Chat. If you do not see it, ask whoever owns your Microsoft tenant whether your account has the license.
Meeting transcription turned on. The idea prompt asks Copilot to check your meeting transcripts and recaps, but Copilot can only read a meeting that was transcribed. Turn on transcription (or recording) at the start of your recurring meetings, and give it a week or two to build up a record before you run the prompt. A status call you never transcribe is a task Copilot will never find.
Copilot Memory, if your tenant allows it. Under Settings > Personalization, look for the Saved memories control. Microsoft Learn states that memory is available to Copilot Chat users with and without a Microsoft Copilot license, and that it is in preview under the Frontier program. If the controls are grayed out, an admin turned off Enhanced personalization for the tenant. Microsoft says the memory can recall "your communication style, favorite topics, work goals, and recurring tasks."
Ten minutes and a place to paste results. A Copilot Page, a Word document, or the intake form itself.
This is the same idea prompt from the Skill Factory page, rewritten to name the sources Copilot can reach and to ask for citations. Citations matter here, because Copilot will show you the email or file it used, and a task with no citation is a guess.
Read the results as a starting point. Copilot ranks by what it can see, and it sees email better than it sees your ERP. Pick the two or three tasks you recognize as real and frequent, and submit those through the intake form.
I want to find tasks I do repeatedly that could become reusable Copilot skills. A skill is a written set of instructions for one repeatable task, saved so it runs the same way every time.
Look through my work data in Microsoft 365: my Outlook email, my calendar, my Teams chats and channel posts, meeting transcripts and recaps, my OneDrive and SharePoint files, and anything you remember about me from saved memories or past chats. If you cannot reach one of those sources, say so and skip it. Do not guess or make up tasks you have no evidence for.
From what you find, list up to ten tasks that meet all of these conditions:
1. I have done it, or asked for help with it, more than once.
2. It follows roughly the same steps each time.
3. The output has a consistent shape, such as a report, a summary, an email, a checklist, or a spreadsheet.
For each task, give me:
- Task name
- The evidence you found, with a citation to the email, file, chat, or meeting
- How often it seems to happen, and on which days if there is a pattern
- The inputs I supply each time
- The output it produces, and who receives it
- A one-sentence description of when the skill should be used
- Data sensitivity: does the task touch client, financial, health, or personnel data
Rank the list by how often the task happens and how much time it seems to take. Put the strongest candidates first.
At the end, tell me which sources you were unable to check.Copilot Chat is built for quick answers. Researcher is Microsoft's agent for multistep work across many sources. Microsoft describes it as gathering, analyzing, and summarizing information from the web and, at work, from files, emails, meetings, and chats you have access to. Microsoft also warns that its answers can take minutes instead of seconds.
Licensing note. Microsoft's support page states that Researcher is available to Microsoft 365 business and enterprise users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on license, and to Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers.
Where this usually breaks: Researcher over-reads. It will find a task you did twice in March and call it recurring. Check the dates in its citations before you submit anything.
The two prompts above read across everything. The places below hold evidence of repeat work in a form you can read yourself.
Open a thread you get every week and select Summary by Copilot (on some versions the button reads Summarize) at the top of the thread. Microsoft documents this for Outlook on Windows, Mac, the web, and mobile. Then ask Copilot Chat in Outlook: "Which requests have I received more than three times in the last 60 days? Group them by sender and by what they asked for."
In a chat or channel, Copilot summarizes the conversation. After a transcribed meeting, the Recap tab holds AI notes. Ask in the channel where your team's requests land: "What has this channel asked me to produce more than once since July?"
Under Settings > Personalization, open Manage saved memories. Microsoft says memory recalls "recurring tasks" among other things. That list is the set of tasks Copilot has already noticed on its own. Read it before you trust the prompt output.
In Copilot Chat, Teams, or Outlook, open the Prompt Gallery and the Your prompts tab. Every prompt you saved is a skill that has not been written down yet. Copy the ones you rerun into the intake form.
If your tenant has Copilot Cowork, its built-in skills include Daily Briefing, Enterprise Search, and Deep Research. Run the Daily Briefing for a week and note which items appear on more than one day. Cowork is billed by usage, so keep this to one week.
Add tasks from your ERP, Procore, or any other system by hand. The intake form does not care where the evidence came from. A task you can name and time is enough.
A department champion runs the monthly idea prompt for their area. Microsoft also gives the company three sources that show where Copilot work is happening across the tenant, and one that shows what people typed. They are listed here in the order you should use them.
Microsoft Learn states that admins can export the prompts users saved, liked, or shared in Prompt Gallery, and the prompts shared with a specific team. This is the cleanest company-wide signal, because people chose to save and share those prompts. Ask IT to run the export and hand each champion the shared prompts for their team. A prompt that three people saved is a skill waiting for an owner.
In the Microsoft 365 admin center, under Reports > Usage, the Microsoft 365 Copilot page shows enabled users, active users, prompts submitted, adoption by app, and a per-user table with last activity dates. Microsoft's documentation says the per-user data is anonymized by default. The report shows where Copilot is used heavily and in which app. It does not show what anyone typed. Use it to pick the departments to run the idea prompt in first.
The Copilot Dashboard gives leaders usage and impact metrics across Microsoft 365 apps, and Microsoft documents a data export of de-identified, user-level, weekly Copilot metrics. It serves the same purpose as the admin report, with more history and a view for managers.
This tool exists, and a champion should know it exists before someone else brings it up. In Microsoft Purview's Data Security Posture Management for AI, the activity explorer's "AI interaction" event includes the prompts and responses for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat when auditing is turned on. Seeing them requires compliance permissions, such as membership in the Compliance Administrator role. Microsoft also notes that prompts and responses are stored in the user's mailbox.
It is a security and compliance tool. Whether anyone reads colleagues' prompts to harvest skill ideas is a governance decision, and it belongs to the steering committee's IT or security lead under your company AI policy. Ask before anyone opens it. Prefer the Prompt Gallery export and the two usage reports, which either aggregate the data or draw on prompts people chose to share.
The Work IQ toggle is missing or off. Your account needs the Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Ask whoever owns the tenant. Until then, write the list by hand from your calendar and your sent mail.
Copilot lists tasks without evidence. Reply with "Show me the citations for each task, and remove any task you cannot cite." Keep only the cited ones.
Copilot cannot see the system where the task lives. Add those tasks by hand on the intake form. Name the system, how often the task runs, and how long it takes.
Memory and personalization are grayed out. An admin turned off Enhanced personalization for the tenant. Pass one and pass two still work. Skip the saved memories step.
The task touches client, health, financial, or personnel data. Mark it on the intake form. The skill will hold instructions only, and the person supplies the data when they run it. The IT or security lead on the committee reviews it before it is shared. The Skill Factory FAQ covers this.
Researcher takes a long time or asks a lot of questions. That is how it works. Give it the 90-day window and a clear definition of a task, then let it run while you do pass three.
Yes, for the work-grounded passes. Microsoft's documentation ties the Work IQ toggle to a Microsoft Copilot license, and Researcher requires the Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on license for business and enterprise users. Without it, Copilot Chat answers from the web and from files you attach.
The usage reports in the Microsoft 365 admin center show counts, active days, and last activity dates, anonymized by default. Prompts and responses can be surfaced in Microsoft Purview for accounts with compliance permissions when auditing is on. Check your company AI policy for how that access is used.
With Work IQ off, Copilot answers from the web and anything you attach, so the list will be thin. Get the license, or write the list by hand from your calendar and sent mail.
Save the response to a Copilot Page or a Word document, then submit the tasks you recognize through the intake form. The saved page is your evidence when you nominate the skill later.