AI Agent & Copilot Podcast: Copilot Use Cases for Navigating Tariff Complexities
In this episode of the AI Agent & Copilot podcast, Shawn Dorward reviews how tariffs can impact businesses and highlights Copilot use cases to be proactive in navigating these complexities.
This episode is sponsored by the AI Agent & Copilot Summit NA, taking place March 17-19, 2026 in San Diego, California.
Key Takeaways:
- Communication: When there’s tariff news, it must be communicated and disseminated internally across your organization. Using Copilot Chat, users can ask Copilot to summarize the latest U.S. trade rep’s announcements. Rather than combing through the information, Copilot can be prompted to summarize and draft an internal email breaking down the tariff news.
- Empowering teams: Providing the information to the teams in your business empowers them to answer more direct questions. They would be equipped to answer customer questions about the impact of tariffs on your business.
- Context of announcements: Many world trade policies come out in the form of lengthy PDF files. To consume this information, you can upload the policy into your internal graph and use Copilot to summarize key sections that mention your industry. Further, you can ask Copilot to identify associated compliance responsibilities. Another tip is to ask Copilot to highlight changes between the previous and new iterations.
- Financial impact: Business leaders have to decide how to manage the financial impact, such as whether the cost will be completely passed on to the customer. “There’s an attrition balance to compete against because customers may choose to go to a different supplier of whatever you’re selling.” You need to know the margin impact of the tariff rules and the price impact on your customer base to make the decisions. Copilot in Excel can model these costs.
- Internal reports: Business leaders must consider how they will report on the impact of these trade policy announcements. As there are different layers of reporting requirements, reports must be developed at the right level of summary for various roles, teams, and departments. Copilot can be applied to combine updates from different teams, like logistics, finance, and compliance. It can create PowerPoint presentations and different versions of reports as needed.
