Extracting Strategic Insights With Copilot Chat

1. Extracting Strategic Insights With Copilot Chat

Hi, and welcome back! In this final lesson, we'll explore something that goes beyond slide creation - using Copilot Chat for extracting insights and supporting strategic decision-making.

2. Why Analyze Slide Decks in Copilot Chat?

Here's a scenario you've probably encountered. Someone hands you a slide deck — maybe from another team, a vendor, or a departing colleague — and it's packed with information. Brand guidelines, sales trends, product specs, training materials, all crammed into fifty-plus slides. Normally, you'd spend hours reading through it, taking notes, trying to piece together what actually matters. And even then, important details can slip through the cracks.

3. Why Analyze Slide Decks in Copilot Chat?

But here's the good news — Copilot can dramatically accelerate this process. Copilot excels at surfacing patterns, identifying risks, and spotting opportunities buried deep in slide content. The key is knowing which questions to ask. This skill becomes especially valuable when you're inheriting presentations from other teams. Context gets lost in handovers, assumptions go undocumented, and critical details hide in footnotes. Copilot helps you uncover what might otherwise take weeks to discover. Let's see this in action.

4. Uploading a Deck & Asking Insight-Level Questions

First, we upload the slide deck to Copilot Chat — you can drag and drop the file into the chat or use the attachment button. Once it's uploaded, we start with a broad, high-value question: "Summarize the three biggest insights from this deck." Copilot scans every slide, identifies recurring themes, and distills them into a concise summary. This is perfect for executive briefings or when you need to get up to speed quickly before a meeting. What used to require multiple readthroughs now happens in seconds.

5. Extracting Cross-Team Dependencies

Now let's dig deeper. One of the most valuable things you can extract from a presentation is how different parts of the business connect to each other. We ask Copilot: "What cross-team dependencies appear in the slides?" This prompt reveals the hand-offs and connections between teams — maybe marketing depends on product for launch timing, or sales needs training materials before they can hit their targets. These dependencies are gold for planning sessions.

6. Identifying Risks Embedded in the Deck

Here's something that catches many people off guard — slide decks often hide risks in places you wouldn't think to look. A small disclaimer on slide twenty-three, a footnote about timeline constraints, a bullet point mentioning "pending approval." To surface these hidden concerns, we ask: "Identify any risks mentioned in the presentation and where they occur." Copilot scans the entire deck and points you to the exact slides where risks or blockers appear. This saves you from the embarrassment of missing something important that was technically in the document all along. Of course, once Copilot flags these risks, you'll want to validate them manually — that's the human-in-the-loop approach that keeps AI useful and trustworthy.

7. Analyzing Data and Charts

Finally, Copilot can interpret visual data directly from your slides. Say you've got a section with charts and graphs that you don't have time to analyze in detail. You can ask: "Extract the main message from the sales enablement section." Copilot reads the chart labels, identifies trends and comparisons, processes any accompanying commentary, and returns a clear interpretation. It's like having an analyst summarize the data for you.

8. Validate, validate, validate!

Now, a word of caution: always double-check the numbers. Copilot might misread an axis label or draw conclusions that don't quite match the original intent. Your job is to verify that the AI's interpretation aligns with reality. But even with that validation step, you're still getting to insights far faster than you would on your own.

9. Let's practice!

Now it's your turn to put this into practice!

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