Agent & Copilot Podcast: Lisa Crosbie on AI Delegation, Copilot Cowork, Need for Human Expertise, and the ‘Next Wave’ of AI
In this episode of the AI Agent & Copilot Podcast, Shawn Dorward welcomes Lisa Crosbie, Microsoft MVP, Copilot Lead, Barhead an Akkodis Company. The two discuss how Microsoft Copilot Cowork changes work from prompt engineering to effective delegation, review, and human judgement.
Key Takeaways
- Overview: Lisa Crosbie is an Australian-based YouTuber, Microsoft MVP, and Copilot Lead. Her content is focused on Microsoft Copilot, her learning journey, and other AI topics.
- Impressions of Copilot Cowork: Lisa notes that the way users have to think about prompting with Copilot Cowork has become “quite different.” Cowork requires less prompt engineering and more delegation, and users need to strike a balance between the two. She explains that “delegation looks like me saying, ‘This is what I want to achieve. Here is a detailed brief that I have thought through, and all of the context that I want you to bring to it, and my expectation of the output’… The human effort in delegating effectively actually becomes a really big part of the necessary skill in using these tools.”
- Human judgement and review: Shawn describes the conflict between the value of reviewing AI’s output and doing the task himself. Lisa gives her opinion, which is that AI changes jobs by shifting people from doing the work to directing, reviewing, and refining it. As a result, human oversight and collaboration are essential to ensure quality and prevent poor outputs. Shawn reiterates the need for human judgement and review in work overall. “I believe people will choose people, and the same thing is true with the outcome of these kind of Cowork requests. That there has to be that element still intact,” he says.
- Learning journey with Cowork: Lisa explains that her experience with Cowork is both “fun and frustrating” because its effectiveness depends heavily on prompt quality, model selection, and her skill in directing it, sometimes producing remarkable results and other times disappointing ones. The greatest value of the AI tool comes when it augments human thinking by organizing research, creating useful resources, and expanding what’s possible. She says a big challenge can be “What do I do with it [Cowork]?” but this is where community and colleagues come in, to asssit in generating use cases.
- Closing thoughts: In closing, Lisa says she doesn’t feel the intensity around AI slowing down anytime soon. She thinks the “next wave” of AI will be around autopilots that are running in the background and increased use of voice interaction. In regard to the pace of innovation, she says, “we’ve got to just find a way to manage the overwhelm and the intensity.”
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