ICM in Copilot Cowork? Yep, sorted.

EDIT: the use of copilot-instructions.md is very unreliable. Despite clear instructions to load the ICM workspace and read the setup.md at launch, 9 times out of 10 it fails with no meaningful error. Copilot itself tells me that these instructions are more like suggestions.🤣🤣

Instead I have built a skill in Copilot co-work and I have built an agent for the standard Copilot chat. Both of these will reliably launch into my ICM workspace.

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We've gone back and forth, here, on whether ICM can work inside Microsoft Copilot. I can now say it definitely does, and that Copilot Cowork is where it works best.

I spent today rebuilding my own ICM workspace, currently in Claude, for Copilot — routing file, room context files, a voice file, branding, shared references — and it maps over almost one-to-one. The folders-and-markdown approach we use is almost exactly how Cowork is built to work. Your files live in OneDrive, Cowork reads them on demand, and you get the same context-on-demand behaviour we're used to.

Two things make Cowork good for ICM, particularly in a business environment:

It reads your ICM folder tree straight from OneDrive, so you stop re-explaining yourself each session.
It has native access to Outlook, Teams, calendar and SharePoint, so rooms that interface with those apps or their data get easier

The adjustments were small: Copilot itself rewrote my Claude.md to a Setup.md, native M365 instead of connectors, and tightening the original markdown, which had grown, to keep token use down.

NB: Copilot, to me, seems a smidgen slower than Claude (Yes, I have Opus 4.8 enabled in Copilot)

Guide and blank template at RockfieldIT/icm-copilot-cowork: Implementing ICM in Microsoft Copilot Cowork

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