Prompting with Co-Pilot for Automators leverages natural language instructions to accelerate development. You can undo or delete the output, rephrase your prompt, and run it again for your desired results.

Automation Co-Pilot (Co-Pilot) assists professional and citizen developers to bring their ideas to life, translating high-level concepts into a workable series of steps with ease. By interpreting the user's intent and filling in the gaps with logical steps, Co-Pilot simplifies the automation creation process, reducing the dependency on technical expertise.

Co-Pilot page and entering prompts

Include all instruction before sending prompt

Detail your whole scenario and then press the Enter key or click Send for Co-Pilot to generate output.

Minimize while not in use

After sending a prompt, keep the Co-Pilot Assistant page open while you continue development. You can minimize the interface, when necessary. Prompts are not saved and conversation history cannot be retrieved when the screen is refreshed or a new session is started.

Reasoning and planning capability

Before writing your prompt, consider the capabilities of Co-Pilot and how your prompt will be handled when sending. Co-Pilot processes multiple operations to deliver the best output from your prompt.

Clarity and reason

Co-Pilot is designed to think through and reason on the automation scenario you provide. Reasoning and planning is programmed into Co-Pilot capabilities, thereby accelerating the process to reach a finished automated solution for a scenario. Keep in mind, best results come from providing a clear and specific automation scenario.

Assisting with cognitive load

Co-Pilot reduces the cognitive load on developers by planning and reasoning, enabling users to iterate quickly and efficiently. This ensures that the automation aligns with user goals, thereby minimizing errors and enhancing productivity.

Identifying intent

A big advantage of Co-Pilot is the ability to turn abstract ideas into working automation. Identifying the reason of your prompt is particularly helpful for citizen developers with less technical expertise. This also allows professional developers to focus on the high-level design of the automation. This capability bypasses the tedious work of coding each step, until such detail is required. The planning capability of Co-Pilot further improves usability by rendering necessary actions that align with the overarching user goals, even if the user has not specified them in the prompt.

Detailing the scenario

Co-Pilot analyzes the prompt and considers all the detail to understand the goal of your automation scenario. This helps ensure the automation meets your intention. Co-Pilot fills in gaps from your instruction to create a complete automation work flow. Co-Pilot thinks through the prompt, analyzes the context and determines the necessary steps to achieve the desired outcome.

Describe your whole automation scenario in your prompt to better leverage the planning capability of Co-Pilot. With a complete scenario, Co-Pilot can determine the logic and conditions that need to be applied, and provide the necessary output.

Consider the following example prompt that only outlines the automation goal. Co-Pilot analyzes the prompt for reasoning and includes the complete logic in the output. 
Combine the two spreadsheets 'a.xlsx' and 'b.xlsx' from c:\temp by using the column AccountNo to match. Save the new file as 'c.xlsx'. Skip any rows where the CustomerName contains 'Chad' or the Phone is '555-5555'.

Image demonstrates an output generated from the example prompt.

Working with the output

The output generated in the Bot editor is designed to help developers skim through the scenario and quickly understand results. By default, Co-Pilot renders collaborative actions nested in the Step element. Additionally, comments display in the list view that explain the rationale for each generated action. This documentation is crucial for understanding the automation process and for future maintenance or updates.