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What Cowork Should Never Do Without Your Approval

Understand Cowork's approval model before delegating any action that affects others. Run this prompt first — it sets the expectation for every workflow that follows.

The prompt
Before you take any of the following actions, stop and show me exactly what you are about to do, with full details, and wait for my explicit approval:
- Send any email
- Post any message to Teams
- Create or modify any calendar event
- Share or edit any SharePoint or OneDrive file
- Schedule any meeting or invite any attendee

For everything else — searching, reading, drafting, summarising — proceed without asking.

When you show me something for approval, include:
- The exact content (full email text, full Teams message, full event details)
- Who it is going to
- What action you will take after I approve

Do not use "Approve All" for multi-action sequences unless I explicitly ask you to.

How to use it

  1. 1Select Copy the prompt above.
  2. 2Paste it into Microsoft 365 Copilot.
  3. 3Replace anything in brackets with your own detail, then send it.

Copilot gathers and drafts. You verify and decide. Check every figure, name and date against the system it came from before you act on it.

Written for

All M365 Copilot users with Cowork enabled

More for Copilot Cowork: Agentic Workflows

See all 28 prompts

From the source collection in awesome-microsoft-copilot-prompts, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.