GenAI in action: Transforming learning materials with Copilot

Picture this:

Faith Omekaodinma, a senior manager in Tax, has over 12 years' experience in corporate tax compliance. Her main passion, however, is teaching, her first and former profession before joining the firm. When tasked to facilitate a client’s internal training on two tax concepts — Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax (CAMT) and Pillar Two — she was excited to start developing materials to create an engaging session.

Simply put (thank you, Copilot), CAMT makes sure big companies pay a minimum tax of 15%, even if they have deductions or credits that might allow them to pay less. Pillar Two, meanwhile, is a global minimum tax that seeks to confirm that multinationals pay tax at the appropriate rate in every place they do business. Both rules help make tax play fair.

For some of her client’s team, this would be their first introduction to CAMT and Pillar Two. "It was important for them to understand the tax rules so they could better understand their cashflow.” By understanding the tax regulations, the client’s team could more effectively gather information to keep their company in compliance with domestic and international tax laws. With her teaching cap on, she knew she had to create engaging, effective materials — this time in the form of a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation — to capture and maintain her audience’s attention. Having used Copilot a few times before as a pilot user, Faith knew it could help assist her in creating an impactful slide deck for a 30-minute training session. “I look at Copilot like an assistant. It helps me do my job better and it’s something I can use to start and then I can improve my work,” shares Faith.

Enter Copilot:

After getting the green light to use Copilot by her engagement team, Faith started by gathering existing resources and presentations that she and her team had developed and used for their own internal training on CAMT and Pillar Two. Although detailed, they were developed for hour-long presentations, and she needed to develop a deck for a 30-minute presentation for an entirely new audience.

Faith opened a blank Microsoft PowerPoint document and pasted in slides from her existing presentations. Then, she opened Copilot within PowerPoint and prompted it to help revise the content for a 30-minute presentation. Her prompt session with Copilot went something like this*:

Faith: I need a slide deck to present at a client internal training session on CAMT and Pillar Two. This slide deck features content from previous presentations used for 1-hour sessions. However, I need this deck to be revised for a 30-minute session.

Please create two background slides: one on CAMT and one on Pillar Two. The audience for this presentation is a group of tax and accounting professionals with varying degrees of knowledge of CAMT and Pillar Two.

Copilot generated two slides providing an overview of both tax concepts.

Faith: This is a great start. Please also add the computation of CAMT to the background slide. Create a new slide that compares Pillar One to Pillar Two.

The impact:

Copilot's assistance in creating concise, engaging slides was instrumental, providing Faith with a foundation that she could and did modify to deliver a successful client training. Copilot was useful in several areas of the slide deck development directly in PowerPoint:

• Created net new written content: With Faith’s strong prompting, Copilot generated two background slides — one for CAMT and one for Pillar Two — written, as Faith prompted it, in bullet points to be more easily understandable to her audience with varying degrees of knowledge about the topics.
• Created net new visual content: Copilot created data visualizations (pie charts, line charts, bar graphs, etc.) using a list of data that Faith provided the GenAI tool.
• Revised content: Copilot in Microsoft PowerPoint made recommendations to Faith’s slides to improve the written content, just as Copilot does in Microsoft Word. The GenAI tool also helped transform sentences of information into bullet point format, consolidating and simplifying the content to make the complex topics more digestible for her audience.
• Created a meeting agenda based on the slide content: Faith prompted Copilot to scan the presentation and summarize it in the form of a meeting agenda, for which it created a net new slide.
• Saved time: Copilot created data visualization elements and drafted content based on her notes and prompts. With the time saved, Faith could focus on enhancing other aspects of her presentation, such as developing questions to ask the audience and revising her speaker notes.

Faith’s usage of GenAI and the human oversight, review and judgment she applied exemplify what it means to be human-led and tech-powered. Her experience with Copilot helps showcase the transformative power of GenAI tools in enhancing work processes, helping her create an engaging, concise and effective training session on complex tax concepts. The tool not only saved her time but also helped her deliver content in a digestible format for her audience. GenAI tools like Copilot, when prompted with strong inputs and reviewed with human oversight, can transform the way we work.