I wanted a morning briefing: something that lands in my inbox before I open my laptop, summarizing what I need to know and what needs my attention. Not a dashboard I have to go check. Not a set of notifications I have to piece together. A single, coherent brief. So I built one with Copilot Studio. ## What it does Every weekday at 7:15 AM, an agent runs that pulls from four sources: my Outlook calendar (today's meetings and prep notes), my Planner tasks (anything due today or overdue), a SharePoint list where my team logs blockers, and a curated RSS feed of finance and AI news I track. It synthesizes all of that into a structured email that hits my inbox by 7:30. The email has three sections: 1. **Today's schedule**: meetings listed with one-line context pulled from the invite body or prior notes 2. **Action items**: tasks due today, overdue items, and any team blockers flagged in the last 24 hours 3. **Signal scan**: two or three headlines from my RSS feed, each with a one-sentence summary ## How I built it In Copilot Studio, I created a new agent with a scheduled trigger. The data connections were the most time-consuming part: getting the Outlook connector, Planner connector, and SharePoint connector all authenticated and pulling the right scopes took a couple of hours. The RSS piece uses a Power Automate flow that fetches the feed and passes the items to the agent as context. The agent's instructions are straightforward: "You are a personal chief of staff. Summarize my day in a brief that is scannable in under 60 seconds. Be direct. Flag conflicts or risks. Do not editorialize the news, just summarize." I iterated on the formatting a few times. The first version was too verbose. I added an instruction to keep the entire brief under 250 words, and that constraint forced the agent to prioritize. Much better. ## What surprised me The calendar context feature turned out to be the most valuable part. The agent pulls text from meeting invites and prior email threads to add a line like "Follow-up from the Q1 forecast review, Sarah had questions about headcount timing." That kind of context before a meeting is genuinely useful. The news scan is the weakest link. It sometimes picks up irrelevant articles, and I'm still tuning the feed sources. But even at 80% relevance, it saves me ten minutes of morning scrolling. ## Would I recommend this? If you're already in the Microsoft ecosystem, absolutely. The setup cost is a few hours, and the daily payoff is real. I spend less time context-switching in the morning and more time actually working on what matters. --- Related: [[signal/Copilot Studio Update|Copilot Studio update]] ← [[Lab|Back to /lab]]