← Back to portfolio
Microsoft AI Hackathon · March 2025 · Runners-up

Copilot Instructor

New employees spend their first weeks asking colleagues to walk them through tasks. Those colleagues lose hours to training that never quite sticks. We built a product that captures how your best people work and turns it into a guide for everyone who comes after them.

Team
Het Shah · Walsh Kang · Octavio Pinto · NYU Stern MBA
Timeline
One-week hackathon · March 2025
Result
Runners-up · Invited to present at Stern TechCon
Stack
Microsoft Copilot M365 SharePoint Figma

The Problem

Every organisation has the same onboarding problem. A new analyst joins and needs to learn how the team works — how they build models in Excel, how they format decks, how they run their weekly reports. The answer is always the same. Shadow someone, ask around, figure it out.

This is expensive in both directions. Senior team members lose time to informal training. Junior employees learn inconsistently, picking up whoever's habits they happened to observe rather than the team's actual best practices. And none of it is documented, so the cycle repeats with every new hire.

Most companies have tried to solve this with written SOPs or video recordings. Both go stale fast and nobody watches them. The knowledge lives in people's heads and walks out the door when they leave.

What We Built

Copilot Instructor is a Microsoft 365 integration that watches how your team members complete tasks, synthesises the best practices across multiple people, and turns them into interactive tutorials for new employees — all without anyone having to sit down and write documentation.

1
Copilot observes
When a team member completes a recurring task in any M365 app (Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams), Copilot records the sequence of actions with their permission.
2
Best practices are synthesised
Multiple team members completing the same task gives Copilot enough signal to identify the most efficient, accurate approach. It does not just record one person. It learns from the whole team.
3
Tutorials are created and stored
The synthesised workflow is turned into a step-by-step tutorial stored in a searchable SharePoint library. Each tutorial is tagged to the team, the tool, and the task type.
4
Copilot guides new employees in real time
When a new analyst starts a task for the first time, Copilot detects it and offers to guide them through the tutorial interactively — step by step, inside the M365 app they are already using.

My Role

I led the product definition and the pitch. In a one-day hackathon there is not much time for division of labour — everyone does everything. My focus was on making sure we had a clear problem statement, a product that actually solved it, and a story that judges could follow in five minutes.

I built the wireframes in Figma showing the Copilot sidebar experience, the tutorial library interface, and the onboarding flow for a new analyst. The wireframes made the idea concrete enough that the judges could see exactly how it would work inside tools they use every day.

We were judged by Chris Smellie and Mike Pell from Microsoft, who pushed us on scalability and privacy — how does Copilot know which actions to record, and how do you prevent it from capturing sensitive information? Those were the right questions and we had good answers ready.

The Result

#2
runners-up out of all competing teams
+1
invited to present again at Stern TechCon two days later
1 week
from blank page to finished pitch
"Copilot Instructor — a new way to capture best practices within a team to create the perfect tutorial for new employees. It curates tutorials for each unique team in an organisation, helping new employees learn quickly, deeply and accurately — without taking time away from colleagues for training."
Team writeup, Microsoft AI Hackathon 2025

What I Took From This

A good PM frames the problem before the solution The teams that did not place had interesting technology but unclear problems. We spent the first hour of the hackathon making sure we agreed on exactly who was frustrated, why, and what success looked like for them. The product came out of that, not the other way around.
Wireframes do more work than words in a pitch Showing judges a Figma prototype of the Copilot sidebar experience made the idea real in a way a slide deck could not. They could see themselves using it. That is what separates a convincing product pitch from a concept pitch.
The hard questions are a gift When the Microsoft judges pushed on privacy and scalability they were telling us exactly what a real PM at Microsoft would have to solve to ship this. Preparing for those questions and having good answers is the difference between an idea and a product.
← Back to portfolio