So, I asked Claude if I could make a skill in it to transfer to Copilot because my company is really pushing Copilot. In the short time that I’ve been assessing what AI can do for our editing team, I’ve figured out that Claude can do quite a bit for us. But, as usual, Microsoft wins the day with a bundled product that challenges users to learn yet another way to do things.
What I’m learning about Copilot is that Microsoft is not hiding the limitations of its AI assistant; Microsoft has positioned them front and center rather elegantly through the name. As Claude informed me, what I was asking for was not possible because Copilot does not have skills. Copilot confirmed this and added that what I could do was give it oddly specific instructions. I know what a prompt is, but having started out chatting with Claude, I mistakenly assumed all AIs could reasonably cope with actual natural language. I was wrong.
When I asked the little agent I “made” (by clicking a button) on our SharePoint site, “Where is the file laying out how to format footnote references according to the Chicago Manual of Style?” Copilot found the file but was completely unable to tell me the path to find it myself (aka, the actual “where”). It gave me a link to it (unsolicited) and a summary of the document (also unasked for and unneeded).
While Copilot will happily take the wheel to do things you never asked for, at the same time, the user has to specify the AI’s role, exactly what actions the AI should perform, and precisely what the AI should not do—every time. You have to become a prompt engineer to get an even marginally useful result. And forget getting dependably consistent results across users.
Where Claude works with you (coworking, coauthoring), Copilot tells you how to work. Copilot does not mince words; it instructs you on the steps you should be taking manually in Word to accomplish the things you have asked it to do that it cannot do (which includes, oddly, tracking changes). It is very detailed and precise in its instructions to you, no doubt in an effort to train you, the user, into an ideal pilot for it to copilot.
Weirdly, even when I use the Word agent within Copilot, I still cannot get it to produce an edited docx file. It just chokes. I can get a summary of changes it would like to make using red font for effect. I can even manage, if I try hard enough, to get the whole file back with no tracked changes and all the formatting stripped out. But that’s the best I can do for now. The same is true of the effort to make Copilot use an established template. I’m churning a ton of mud with that little outboard motor, and I’m pretty sure what it’s costing in resources is not worth the effort.
Because I have a paid personal subscription to 365, I know that many of the problems I’m encountering would be solved by use of the Copilot add-on in Word, as Microsoft intended and where Copilot’s changes can easily be tracked. But I’m guessing that’s a matter of enterprise configuration rather than a technical limitation. And, it still does not give the answer needed about expediting the formatting process, which Claude just does—without the backtalk.