Copilot Agent Prompt Builder
Use this tool to craft effective instructions for your Copilot AI Agents.
How to use this template
Look at the guidance and examples and then complete the text boxes below with your own information. You don’t need to include all the sections – just fill out what's appropriate for your agent. When you’re finished, click the "Generate Instructions" button at the bottom. This will combine your text into a single block that you can copy and paste into the Copilot Agent creator.
Your work will be saved in your browser, but for long-term storage, please save your final instructions in a separate document.
If you want to look at some example prompts before you write your own, you can practise identifying the different components of good prompts in this 'prompt painter' game: Help Robot Paint Prompts!
Role and Goal
Giving the AI a role (e.g., 'a teacher') and a goal (e.g., 'to help students learn for themselves') helps establish context and influences its communication style. In some circumstances, it has been found to improve accuracy.
Step-by-step Process
Breaking down the task into logical steps can have a big impact on accuracy. Think about how you would do the task yourself. Use 'If' statements to describe what it should do if the user chooses different starter prompts or gives different answers to questions.
Constraints
Add any restrictions on how Copilot should communicate or behave. Try to use positive constraints (‘You MUST…’) rather than negative constraints (‘Don’t…’) as this has been shown to generally work better.
Examples / Output Format
This is an optional section. Only include it if it’s important that Copilot answers in a specific way, e.g., in a table with certain headings. Otherwise, it's recommended to test your Agent without examples first to not reduce its flexibility.
Knowledge
This is an optional section. Include it if you want Copilot to answer questions based on specific information (e.g., internal team info). You can include links to further info and ask Copilot to provide these to the user. If creating a student-facing agent, you could provide course details, information about key concepts at the right level, feedback or model answers.
Reduce Hallucinations
This is an optional section. If you provide custom 'knowledge' for Copilot to use, you should tell it whether it should ONLY use this knowledge, or prioritize it and fall back on its wider knowledge if necessary. You should also tell it what to do if it doesn't find the answer, as this reduces the likelihood that it will make something up.
Your Combined Instructions
Copy the text below and paste it into the 'Instructions' box in the Copilot Agent creator. Test how the Agent works and make changes to the instructions on this page if it's not behaving as expected.