Most managers aren’t short of ideas. They’re short of time. Between meetings, chasing updates and reviewing documents, the real thinking gets pushed into early mornings and evenings.
That’s starting to change. Cowork, in the Claude desktop app, is an AI agent that doesn’t just answer questions. It opens your files, works through multi-step tasks and hands you a finished result. You describe what you want, and it works out the steps and does the work.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is heading the same way, with agent features built into Word, Outlook and Teams. Whichever camp you’re in, the everyday uses are much the same, and the time savings are real.
Here are three things a manager can do with it before lunch.
1. Turn a folder of meeting notes into a weekly status report
You’ve got five Teams call summaries, a few email threads and a shared doc of actions, all in one folder. Pulling that into a sensible weekly update normally takes 45 minutes.
With Cowork, you point it at the folder and say: “Summarise the key decisions and outstanding actions from this week’s meetings into a one-page report for my leadership team.” It reads everything, pulls it together and gives you a structured draft. You spend ten minutes polishing instead of an hour assembling.
Copilot in Word and Teams can do something similar, summarising meeting transcripts and drafting documents from what you already have. Either way, the report’s done before your 9am stand-up.
2. Get a briefing before a client meeting
You’ve got a prospect meeting in two hours. They’re in your CRM, there’s a draft proposal on your desktop and you’ve got some notes from an earlier call. What you really need is one page: who they are, what they’ve asked for and what to ask them.
Tell Cowork: “Read the proposal, my call notes and the company summary, then write a briefing sheet for today’s meeting.” It pulls it all together into a clean page. No copying and pasting between tabs, no blank page. We’ve got ours checking the latest business news and looking up any recent updates about the company too.
Copilot does this well inside the Microsoft world, combining CRM data, email history and your calendar into a pre-meeting summary.
3. Sort out a chaotic shared drive
Every business has files called “Final v3 ACTUAL FINAL revised2”. Tidying up a shared folder is important but never urgent, so it never happens.
Give Cowork a folder and a naming convention. It looks through everything, renames files consistently and moves them into sensible subfolders. That used to be a frustrating afternoon for someone (or, let’s be honest, it just never got done). Now it takes Claude a few minutes.
I’ve used similar tasks to check our websites for dead links and missing page descriptions. Computers are great at the dull, repetitive jobs none of us enjoy!
The shift worth noticing
None of this is futuristic. It’s happening now, in businesses like yours. The managers getting ahead aren’t working harder. They’re spending less time assembling things so they can focus on the decisions that need them.
That’s what AI should be doing: handling the repeatable work so your people can focus on what really matters.
Want to see what AI could take off your managers’ plates? Book a free health check, or call us on 0800 688 768.