The most common complaint about Copilot, once people have had it a while, is not that it doesn’t work. It is that nobody knows what to ask it.
You can now do something about that centrally. Organization prompts let you write prompts and publish them to everyone in the tenant, and they get suggested to people as they type. In this post I am going to show you how to set them up.
What you need
- The AI Administrator or Search Editor role
- Nothing else – no licence change, and the feature is on by default
Note the roles. This is deliberately not Global Admin territory, which means you can hand it to the people who actually understand the work – a communications lead or a Copilot champion can own this without anyone giving them the keys to the tenant.
Creating one
In the Microsoft 365 admin center, expand Copilot and select Prompts. On your first visit the list is empty – it just says No prompts have been added.
Select Create prompt and a panel opens on the right. The fields are:
- Title – what people see in the prompt gallery
- Description – when and how to use it
- Display Prompt – the display text
- Prompt – the actual prompt, up to 8,000 characters
- Supported apps – Copilot web, Copilot work
- Department, Task type and Language
Then Publish.
Four of those are required – Title, Display Prompt, Prompt and Supported apps. Fill in Department and Task type anyway, even though you don’t have to. They are how people filter the gallery once there is more than a handful in there, and going back to add them later is a dull afternoon.
Microsoft’s documentation says to allow around three hours before a published prompt shows up for users. In my tenant they were there within minutes, so don’t panic if you go looking straight away – but if yours aren’t showing, give it the three hours before you start troubleshooting.
Where users see them
Open Copilot Chat and look at the suggestion chips under the message box – Summarize Content, Draft Something and so on. Those are Microsoft’s built-in ones, and your prompts are not among them.
Click the … at the end of that row. That opens Prompt Lab, and your prompts are in there under Suggested, each one labelled Promoted by your organization.
Worth knowing, because “I published them and users can’t see them” is going to be the first support question you get. They are not missing. They are one click further in than people expect.
Two things I did not expect, both worth knowing:
They show up for users on Copilot Chat (Basic) too. I assumed the organization prompts would need a full Microsoft 365 Copilot licence to appear. They don’t – they were listed in Prompt Lab on an unlicensed account.
Prompt Lab has Topic and Department filters at the top. That is why the Department field is worth filling in even though it is optional – it is doing real work here. Leave it blank on twenty prompts and you have given your users a flat, unfilterable list.
Import, export, and the pin limit
If you already have prompts written down – and most organisations that have run any Copilot training do – there is an Import prompts button on the toolbar, so you don’t have to type them in one at a time. Export all prompts sits next to it, worth running occasionally as a backup.
The limits are 100 prompts per file on import, and 1,000 published prompts per tenant.
But the number that will actually shape what you do is on the right of the toolbar, and it is easy to miss – Pinned 0/4.
You can pin four. That’s it. Everything else sits in the gallery for people who go looking, and most people won’t go looking.
So the real question is not “what should we publish”, it is “which four”.
What actually makes a good one
The setup takes ten minutes. Choosing what to publish is the real work, and this is where these get wasted.
Be specific to your organisation. “Summarise this document” is not worth publishing – Copilot suggests that sort of thing on its own and everyone worked it out in week one. “Draft a project status update in our standard format, covering progress, risks and next steps” is worth publishing, because it encodes how you do it.
Aim at repeated work. The weekly report, the standard client email, the meeting summary that always needs the same four sections. Anything a lot of people do slightly differently every time.
Publish few, and well. Twenty good prompts that people use beat two hundred that clutter the suggestions and get ignored. You can add more later, and it is much easier to add than to take away.
Watch what gets used. There is an Analytics tab right next to Published on the same page, and it is more useful than I expected.
It lists every prompt with Submissions and Active users against it, filtered by a date range – Last 7 days by default. There is also Export prompts with analytics, so you can pull the lot into Excel.
On day one it is all dashes, which is what you would expect. Come back in a month and it tells you something worth acting on. Two prompts with real numbers and four that nobody has touched is a normal result, and the answer is to delete the four – a prompt list nobody prunes stops being trustworthy, and people stop opening it.
The distinction between the two columns is the useful bit. High submissions with low active users means one person leaning on it heavily. Low submissions across many active users means people tried it once and didn’t come back – which usually means the prompt is fine but the content behind it isn’t.
