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FinishedStarted May 2025

Copilot in the ICB

What I did with Microsoft 365 Copilot in an NHS System Coordination Centre, and what it taught me.

  • Microsoft 365 Copilot
  • Prompt design
  • Adoption
An illustrative laptop on a desk showing a Copilot welcome screen with Write, Learn and Create suggestions, beside a notebook, a mug and a plant.

The problem

System-wide operational calls in the System Coordination Centre, with the notes written up by hand afterwards.

What I did

Built a 125-line Copilot prompt over about fourteen rounds of refinement, and a shared prompt library for the team.

Where it is

The prompt became a second reader that checked the human notes, not a replacement for them. That turned out to be the useful version.

This section documents some examples of my early experiences with AI in a work setting.

We were given M365 Copilot as part of the NHS national pilot around the same time I went on secondment to a role in the System Coordination Centre, in May 2025.

Operations is a great place to use AI you might think, however the NHS is not quite there yet. It was given to us in what felt to me like a ‘here’s a toy, see what you can do with it’ kind of way. Billed as a productivity tool but with very little in the way of training, guidance or policy.

So I toyed around with it. I played with the enterprise features (very useful on occasion, particularly given I had access to both operations and quality data) and gradually figured out some bits and pieces I could do with it, handily replacing YouTube when I wanted to do something fancy with Excel, but for a few months it was little more than a curiosity.

Then I took a course on using AI chat from the excellent Rundown University. I had come across this by chance - and it was a complete game changer.

Suddenly I was obsessed. I wanted to figure out how to get AI to do as much of my job as possible. I became more interested in understanding our workflows and where there was potential for automation.

Whilst I quickly became aware that Copilot could not do all the things I wanted, I did manage to do things like the following:

  1. Create a prompt library for myself and my team
  2. Build methods for triangulating data against our narrative sources
  3. Automate production of our twice daily system call meeting notes
  4. Combine public information with our enterprise knowledge in a fraction of the time it would have taken to do this manually
  5. Learn how to get good documents out of it once I understood how it lost the thread on longer conversations