From Copilot Licenses to a Real Investment Workflow

The firm's Private Capital team had Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses in place, but adoption was shallow. Team members used Copilot for basic email drafts and meeting summaries, missing the tool's real value across the deal lifecycle. Leadership wanted the team to see Copilot applied to actual investment work: screening a data room, building research, modeling financials, comparing terms, and preparing an investment committee package, not generic productivity tips.

Change Champions designed a Prompt-a-Thon built entirely around the team's own workflow instead of abstract Copilot features. We built a realistic fictional deal scenario, an AI data centre infrastructure opportunity, complete with a synthetic data room, financial model, and legal agreements, so the team could practice on material that looked and felt like a live deal without touching confidential client information.

The session followed the deal from first look to committee decision in one continuous thread:

• Understand. Triage a new data room and build cited market and company research.
• Analyze. Model financials, spot check assumptions, and compare deal terms.
• Create. Draft an evidence-based investment memo and assemble an on-brand IC package.
• Operationalize. Capture committee decisions and coordinate next steps.

Every step used a Microsoft 365 app the team already had access to: Copilot Chat, Cowork, Researcher, Excel, Word, SharePoint, PowerPoint, and Teams and Outlook. We also built a custom declarative agent, grounded on the firm's own investment committee materials, to help the team prepare for real IC meetings going forward.

• A hands-on prompting guide with example prompts scaled to the team's actual work
• A full synthetic deal package (data room, financial model, agreements) for safe practice
• A custom declarative agent for investment committee preparation
• A structured, scored Prompt-a-Thon session with facilitator and participant materials

The team left with concrete, reusable examples of Copilot applied to their own process, not a generic feature tour. Instead of asking "what can Copilot do," the team now has a working answer for where it fits in diligence, analysis, and committee prep, along with a prompting habit they can extend to other parts of their work.