Prioritizing Use Cases for Impact

Overview

Copilot can do dozens of things across Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more. Promoting all of them at once overwhelms users and dilutes your adoption message. The organizations that succeed with Copilot focus on a small number of high-impact use cases first, prove value, and then expand.

This video covers how to build a use case inventory, evaluate and prioritize use cases using a structured framework, match them to organizational pain points, and sequence them for maximum adoption momentum.

What You’ll Learn

• Use Case Inventory: How to catalog what Copilot can do for your organization
• Prioritization Framework: Scoring use cases on impact, feasibility, and visibility
• Pain Point Matching: Connecting Copilot capabilities to real organizational problems
• Sequencing: Phasing use cases from quick wins to advanced scenarios

Script

Hook: focus beats breadth

Copilot is embedded across every major Microsoft 365 application. It can summarize meetings, draft emails, analyze spreadsheets, generate presentations, search organizational knowledge, and more. That’s a lot of capability.

And that’s exactly the problem. When you tell users “Copilot can do everything,” they hear “I don’t know where to start.” The result is paralysis, not adoption.

The organizations that drive successful Copilot adoption don’t promote everything at once. They pick three to five high-impact use cases, focus their training and communication on those, prove value, and then expand. Focus beats breadth every time.

Building your use case inventory

Before you can prioritize, you need to know what’s possible. Start by cataloging Copilot’s capabilities across M365 applications.

In Teams: meeting summaries, chat catch-up, channel recaps, and real-time translation. In Outlook: email summarization, draft replies, email triage, and scheduling assistance. In Word: first-draft generation, document summarization, rewriting and editing, and content transformation. In Excel: data analysis, formula generation, chart creation, and pattern identification. In PowerPoint: presentation generation from documents, slide design, speaker notes, and content restructuring.

That’s the technology inventory. Now map it to actual work. Talk to department heads and team leads. Ask them: what takes your people the most time? Where do they get stuck? What’s repetitive? What’s frustrating?

Common answers in government: meeting preparation and follow-up, status report compilation, FOIA response drafting, briefing document preparation, email triage across high-volume inboxes, and data analysis for program reporting.

Catalog each candidate use case with three pieces of information: the Copilot capability, the team or workflow it serves, and an estimate of how many people it would affect.

The prioritization framework

Now evaluate each use case on three dimensions.

Impact. How much time or effort does this save per person, and how many people benefit? A use case that saves 30 minutes per week for 500 people is more impactful than one that saves 2 hours per week for 10 people. Quantify where you can—even rough estimates help. The Forrester TEI study found that Copilot users saved an average of 11 hours per month, but that value concentrates in specific use cases.

Feasibility. Can you deliver this use case today? Is the data in the right place? Are SharePoint permissions configured so Copilot can access the right content? Does the feature work in your government cloud environment? Some Copilot features have different availability across GCC, GCC High, and DoD. Check the Microsoft 365 feature availability documentation for your environment before committing to a use case.

Visibility. Will success with this use case be noticed? Meeting summaries in Teams are highly visible—every participant sees the value immediately. Data analysis in Excel is valuable but less visible because it happens individually. High-visibility use cases build word-of-mouth adoption. They’re worth prioritizing early even if they aren’t the highest-impact on paper.

Score each use case across these three dimensions. High impact plus high feasibility plus high visibility equals your starting point. A simple high-medium-low scoring works fine. You don’t need a complex model—you need a defensible ranking.

Matching use cases to organizational pain points

The most powerful adoption strategy connects Copilot to problems people already want solved.

Interview stakeholders across your organization. Don’t ask “What do you want AI to do?” That’s too abstract. Ask “What takes your team the most time?” and “Where does work get stuck?” and “What would you fix if you could?”

Then map their answers to Copilot capabilities. If briefing preparation takes hours of gathering content from multiple sources, Copilot in Word can generate first drafts from existing documents. If people spend Monday mornings catching up on 200 emails, Copilot in Outlook can summarize and prioritize. If meetings generate action items that get lost, Copilot in Teams captures and organizes them automatically.

The key: frame Copilot as the solution to their existing pain, not as a new tool to learn. “This is the answer to that problem you told me about” is far more compelling than “Here’s a new AI feature.”

Prioritize use cases that solve visible, widespread problems. Avoid starting with niche scenarios that only affect a few people, technically complex use cases that require custom configuration, or scenarios where the data isn’t ready—SharePoint content isn’t organized, permissions aren’t cleaned up, or the semantic index hasn’t processed the relevant content yet.

Sequencing for momentum

Organize your prioritized use cases into phases.

Phase one: quick wins. These are use cases that demonstrate value within the first week of access. Meeting summaries in Teams, email catch-up in Outlook, and draft generation in Word are reliable quick wins. They require minimal training, work with existing data, and produce immediately visible results. Quick wins build credibility.

Phase two: department-specific use cases. Once users see the basics, introduce use cases tailored to their specific work. Program managers get trained on status report generation. Analysts get trained on data analysis in Excel. Communications teams get trained on content creation workflows. This phase deepens engagement by making Copilot relevant to each role’s daily work.

Phase three: advanced scenarios. With credibility established and users comfortable, introduce more sophisticated use cases. Cross-application workflows. Custom prompting strategies. Integration with organizational knowledge bases. Copilot agents for specialized tasks. This phase expands Copilot’s role from a convenience tool to a core part of how work gets done.

Each phase builds on the credibility earned by the previous one. Document success stories from each phase and use them to introduce the next. “The program management team saved 6 hours per week on status reports—now here’s how your team can get similar results.”

Close: your use case roadmap

Document your prioritized use cases in a simple roadmap.

For each use case, record the Copilot capability, the target audience, the expected impact, the phase it belongs to, and any prerequisites like data readiness or feature availability in your cloud.

Share this roadmap with stakeholders. When everyone knows the focus areas, your training, communication, and support efforts align. Champions know what to promote. IT knows what to support. Leadership knows what to expect.

Review and update the roadmap quarterly. Microsoft adds new Copilot capabilities regularly. Your organization’s needs evolve. Use cases that weren’t feasible six months ago may be ready now. Use cases that were high priority may be fully adopted.

Focus drives adoption. Scattered effort drives confusion. Pick your best use cases, execute on them, prove value, and expand from there.

Sources & References

• Microsoft Copilot adoption resources — Use case scenarios and adoption playbooks
• Microsoft 365 Copilot overview — Copilot capabilities across M365 apps
• Copilot Prompt Gallery — Scenario-based prompt examples for use case identification