When you're entering a question or instruction into Copilot Chat, what you're doing is prompting it to give you a desired answer or response. A prompt can be a request for action, information, or perhaps a question you need an answer to.

Think of a prompt as part of a conversation you have about a subject or topic. The subject provides a context for your conversation. Your prompts, combined with the responses from Copilot, should build around the subject you're exploring.

Unfortunately, as many of you will already know, you don't always get back what you want and that can be quite frustrating.

Imagine for a moment that you walk into a coffee shop and just shout the word “drink”. You're probably not going to get the drink that you want. It's better to be more specific, like saying, “I'd like an extra-large cappuccino with semi-skimmed milk to go please.”

Now this may seem obvious, but the same applies to writing prompts in Copilot Chat. If you're not specific about what you want, you're probably not going to get the response you're looking for.

Luckily, there are lots of techniques and approaches that can help you get better at prompt writing, or prompt engineering, as it's also called.

The one we'll look at here is called GCSE. It stands for Goal, Context, Source, and Expectations.

Your goal is all about what you want Copilot to do. For example, do you want it to write a presentation or summarize a document?

Then context. What's the context around your prompt? Is it for a meeting with a customer, for an interview, or for your next board level report?

Source is about what data sources you want Copilot Chat to focus on. That might be specific web content, like a particular web page. If you have the work-based version, you can include information from within your organization, like your calendar or emails.

Finally, expectations. What do you want the response to look like? Is there a particular style or tone of voice you want it to follow?

It's worth saying that it won't always be practical or necessary to include all parts of the GCSE framework in your prompts, and they don't always have to follow the same order as the framework.

But when you consider things like your goal and context, your prompts are more likely to steer Copilot Chat in the direction that's most helpful for your given task.

Prompting best practice

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