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AI at work

Quick Response or Think Deeper

The button in the corner of Copilot that nobody touches, and which mode to use for which job

Top left of the chat. If it says Auto, Copilot is choosing for you.

Sort your own week

Paste this straight into Copilot. It interviews you about your actual job first, then hands back the two lists for your work rather than a generic version. Nothing to fill in.

I use Microsoft Copilot at work and I want to stop leaving it on Auto.

Interview me first. Ask me, one question at a time, about the things I actually use you for in a normal working week, and keep going until you have a proper picture of my job.

Then give me back two lists: the tasks I should send on Quick response, and the tasks worth waiting for Think deeper, with one line of reasoning each.

Finish with a single rule of thumb I could remember without the list, and tell me which of my tasks I have most likely been getting the wrong answer on.

The rest of this page is the reasoning behind it: what the button actually does, and how to pick without the prompt.

What Auto is actually doing

Auto is Copilot deciding, on your behalf, how much thinking your question deserves. When it guesses right you never notice. When it guesses wrong you get one of two annoying outcomes: you ask something simple and sit there waiting for an essay, or you ask something that genuinely needed working through and get a shallow answer back in two seconds.

The useful way to think about it: same colleague, two different requests. You can grab someone in the corridor for a quick answer, or you can hand that same person the work and send them off to do it properly. Both are useful. You just want to be the one deciding which.

The two modes

The corridor answer

Quick response

Speed
Depth

Copilot answers more or less straight away, off what it already knows. You get something short, fast, and usually close enough. Most of what you do in a day sits here.

Use it for

  • Rewrite this email so it is shorter
  • Summarise this thread
  • Tidy these notes into bullet points
  • What is the formula for this in Excel
  • Draft a polite chase message

The one you send away with the work

Think deeper

Speed
Depth

Copilot spends longer working the problem before it answers. It costs you time and it gives you more back, which is exactly what you want when the answer needs reasoning rather than recall.

Use it for

  • Compare these two options and tell me the trade offs
  • Poke holes in this plan
  • What am I missing before I send this
  • Work through this properly, step by step
  • Turn this messy problem into a recommendation

The rule of thumb

Before you send it, ask yourself one question: would I have taken this to a colleague, or just done it myself?

Anything you would have done yourself, and you already know roughly what good looks like, goes on Quick response. Anything you would have walked over to someone about, because you wanted a second brain on it, is worth the wait on Think deeper.

What this will not do

Think deeper is not the better mode, it is the slower one, and most of what you do in a day genuinely does not need it. Turning it on for everything just means waiting longer for answers you would have been happy with anyway.

It also cannot think its way to information it does not have. If Copilot has not been given access to the document, the inbox or the file you are asking about, more thinking will not fix that, and a confident wrong answer looks exactly like a right one. That is a different problem, and it is worth knowing which of the two you are actually hitting.

Taking this into work

If you are the person in your team who ends up explaining this, the short version fits on one slide:

1. Copilot has a mode selector in the top left, and it defaults to Auto.

2. Auto guesses how much thinking your question deserves, and it is often wrong in both directions.

3. Quick response for anything you already know the shape of. Think deeper for anything you would have taken to a colleague.

4. Picking it yourself takes two clicks and is most of the difference between Copilot being useful and Copilot being annoying.

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