Junior consultants spend their first 2 years learning what senior partners do automatically.

Walk into every meeting prepared. Know every open item before the client brings it up. Have a clear objective before the first word is spoken.

Senior partners have EAs and years of experience for this. Junior consultants lack time and often experience to know what to prioritize.

That gap just closed.

Microsoft Copilot in Outlook now does in 10 minutes what used to take 30–45 — or an EA's entire morning

Here's the exact workflow I use every morning — and how you can set it up in under 10 minutes.

Personal experience hook

Every morning I ask Copilot to do three things before I open a single email: summarize my meetings separated by client-facing vs internal, scan related emails and flag open items before each call, and give me a clear agenda and objective for each meeting. What used to take 30–45 minutes of inbox archaeology now takes under 10.

The workflow — 5 steps

Tool ratings: Ease of setup 9/10 · Time saved 30–45 min daily · Cost: included in M365

You are my executive assistant. I'm going to give you my calendar and key emails for today.

1. MEETING SUMMARY — list each meeting flagged as [CLIENT] or [INTERNAL]. Who's attending, what it's about, time allotted.

2. OPEN ITEMS — for each client meeting flag: commitments I haven't resolved, questions unanswered, anything that could derail the meeting.

3. AGENDA & OBJECTIVE — one clear objective, 3 agenda items in priority order, one thing I must not leave without resolving.

Keep it tight. I need to read this in under 3 minutes.

[PASTE CALENDAR + RELEVANT EMAILS HERE]

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Not in Outlook — Paste your calendar and key emails into Claude and run the same prompt. Takes 2 extra minutes, same output."

→ Microsoft Copilot now drafts email replies in your writing style — available in M365 Business now. Your EA doesn't just prep your day, it handles your inbox too.

→ Google launches AI meeting prep inside Calendar — Gemini surfaces relevant docs and action items before each event. Your clients on Google Workspace already have this running.

→ EA tasks are the fastest-growing category of AI augmentation — firms aren't replacing EAs, they're making them 3x more productive. The skillset is being democratized.

Run the morning briefing prompt tomorrow before your first meeting. Do it every day for one week. By Friday you'll wonder how you ever started a meeting without it. Going further: save the prompt to your Cursor prompt library from Issue #2 — now it's one keystroke away every morning.