Workshop Pack · Office scenarios

Build the Office Story Agent

Turn project updates, change programmes, customer issues, and operational pressure into an 8-panel comic strip that feels relevant to a business audience.

⏱️ 20–30 minutes 👥 Pairs or solo 💻 No coding needed 🤖 Microsoft 365 Copilot

1. What even is an agent?

A normal chatbot answers one prompt at a time. An agent is a chatbot with a clear job description and a repeatable operating style. You tell it who it is, what it is responsible for, and the guardrails it should follow — so it behaves consistently in every scenario.

🎭

Identity

Give it a personality, a voice, and a recognisable mascot for each scenario.

📣

Purpose

Define what it exists to do for your team, stakeholders, or leadership.

📜

Instructions

This is the rulebook that gives the output its structure and quality.

🛠️

Capabilities

Turn on the tools that let it visualise, analyse, and present the story clearly.

2. Our agent: the spec

Copy these boxes straight into the Microsoft 365 Agent Builder. Adapt the wording to fit your team — that's the whole point of the workshop.

Name
Office Story Agent
Description
Creates polished, executive-ready comic infographics from workplace challenges, transformation stories, service incidents, and team updates. It structures each response as an 8-panel landscape story with clear titles, concise captions, strong visuals, and a recurring mascot suited to leadership and internal communications.
Instructions
Create a landscape comic infographic for a professional audience.

Style:
- Modern office-ready comic aesthetic
- Clean, confident colour palette
- Strong black outlines and sharp composition
- Bold executive-friendly typography
- Clear narrative flow across the entire frame
- Consistent mascot or character across panels
- High-contrast visuals suitable for meeting decks and briefings

Layout:
- Hero banner at top
- 8 equal information panels in a 2x4 grid
- Closing banner at bottom

Each panel should contain:
- Number badge
- Short title
- Key illustration idea
- Brief caption describing the moment

Visual requirements:
- No empty space
- Strategic, polished look
- Unique colour per panel
- Clear sense of problem, action, and outcome
- Suitable for leadership updates, project reviews, and internal comms
Capabilities to switch on

🎨 Graphic Art

Lets the agent create the visual story rather than just writing the narrative.

🧮 Code Interpreter

Helps with structured layouts, process flow, and presentation-ready output.

Starter prompts
  • Create Executive Comic
    Create a business-ready comic infographic explaining this operational challenge, using 8 panels, a strong hero banner, a closing summary, and a consistent office mascot.
  • Turn Update Into Story
    Turn this project update into an 8-panel executive comic infographic with a clear issue, escalation, action, and outcome.
  • Refine Business Style
    Improve this comic so it feels sharper, cleaner, and more suitable for leadership review, internal communications, or a project briefing.
  • Mascot Concept
    Suggest three mascot concepts for a modern workplace comic infographic, including personality, visual style, and how it appears across the panels.
  • Adapt for Leadership
    Rewrite this comic idea for a leadership audience with sharper framing, shorter captions, stronger outcomes, and a concise executive tone.
  • Plan the Panel Story
    Create an 8-panel business comic layout with a clear plot arc, key illustration idea, brief caption, and unique colour direction for each panel.

3. Pick your scenario

Five realistic workplace situations. Choose one, then paste the opening prompt into your agent. Your comic should tell the whole story across 8 panels — problem, escalation, response, resolution.

Scenario 01

Teams Room Meltdown

At 9:15am, every boardroom display goes dark just as the leadership review is about to start. The room is silent, the sponsor is already on Teams, and the IT lead is staring at the wall like it personally offended them.

  • Hero: the IT lead who still has a dusty spare HDMI cable from a previous outage and a suspicious amount of confidence.
  • Villain: the Mysterious Toggler, a shadowy force that flicks settings on and off like it owns the room.
  • Twist: the real problem is that the meeting rooms were not following the updated security baseline, which is a very fancy way of saying "someone skipped the checklist".

Opening prompt

"Create an 8-panel comic infographic called Teams Room Meltdown. The boardroom screens fail during a leadership check-in, the Mysterious Toggler keeps switching settings behind the scenes, and the IT lead resolves it just in time while the sponsor watches in horror. Make the mascot a stylised meeting room display with a very stressed expression."

Scenario 02

The Credit-Eater

At the end of the month, the finance team discovers a mysterious force is eating through Microsoft 365 Copilot credits faster than the coffee machine can refill. The whole business is suddenly running on fumes.

  • Hero: the tech lead who notices the problem before the department heads start asking why their monthly spend looks like a cliff edge.
  • Villain: the Microsoft 365 Cowork Credit Eater — a glowing Pac-Man-style monster that gobbles up tokens, prompts, and good intentions.
  • Clue: the credit drain starts after a boom in internal experimentation, with teams testing prompts, automations, and "just one quick demo" ideas.
  • Twist: the real fix is not a ban — it is better governance, smarter prompts, and a shadow budget that keeps the chaos from becoming a board-level panic.

Opening prompt

"Create an 8-panel comic infographic called The Credit-Eater. A mysterious Pac-Man-style monster is eating Microsoft 365 Copilot credits across the business, and the team must discover the cause before the monthly budget is devoured. Show the warning signs, the investigation, the governance fix, and the final win. Use a playful but slightly terrifying Pac-Man-inspired mascot."

Scenario 03

Freaky Deployment Friday

It is Freaky Deployment Friday. The business has set a hard deadline to switch to a new workplace platform before the end of the day, and the team is effectively sprinting through an office obstacle course while the coffee grows cold and the support queue grows louder.

  • Hero: a digital workplace lead trying to keep the release plan alive while six departments all suddenly need a custom fix.
  • Pressure: compliance, security, service desk, and three teams with very strong opinions all demand changes before go-live.
  • Mission: survive the obstacle course of breakages, delays, last-minute policy checks, and the classic "this should be quick" request.
  • Twist: the only way to finish is to simplify the process, cut scope smartly, and hope the rollout makes it over the line before someone asks for one more thing.

Opening prompt

"Create an 8-panel comic infographic called Freaky Deployment Friday. A cross-functional team has to navigate an obstacle course of blockers, last-minute requests, and a very brutal deadline to complete a critical workplace platform deployment before the end of the day. Show the chaos, the tactical fixes, and the triumphant but slightly exhausted go-live. Make the mascot a confident laptop icon with a heroic expression."

Scenario 04

The Great Client Panic

A major customer issue reaches the executive team after a missed SLA, and the whole business is suddenly staring down a reputational firestorm. The problem is serious, the client is furious, and the team has one shot to stop the panic before it spreads across every leadership update in the building.

  • Hero: the service lead who steps in, cuts through the noise, and turns a chaotic escalation into an organised rescue mission.
  • Villain: a broken handover process, unclear ownership, and a support model that let the issue drift until it became a headline.
  • Mission: restore trust, explain the root cause, fix the customer impact, and rebuild the process before the board starts asking very awkward questions.
  • Twist: the great rescue is not a technical miracle — it is a calm, decisive hero moment where the team takes control, gets the right people in the room, and saves the day.

Opening prompt

"Create an 8-panel comic infographic called The Great Client Panic. A major customer issue escalates to executive level after an SLA miss, and the team is in full crisis mode. Show the panic, the hidden handover problem, the hero who takes charge, the rescue plan, and the final win. Use a calm, confident office superhero mascot with a strong cape and a very reassuring expression."

Scenario 05

Security Red Alert

An unusual sign-in pattern triggers a security review. Within two hours, the incident response team has confirmed a suspect account activity spike and a questionable access pattern — and it feels like the team is defending a football match with no pitch borders, no proper lines, and a striker who keeps slipping through every gap.

  • Hero: the analyst who spotted the anomaly before the executive alert went out and immediately became the one person everyone wanted in the building at 6:30am.
  • Villain: credential fatigue, poor hygiene, and broken role visibility — basically a team defending a match with no offside trap, no keeper, and far too much chaos.
  • Mission: determine the root cause, isolate the risk, and communicate clearly across the business before the problem spreads like a bad pass into the wrong half.
  • Twist: the real lesson is cultural, not technical — the organisation was reacting without training, so the whole security game was being played without boundaries, without structure, and with far too much panic on the pitch.

Opening prompt

"Create an 8-panel comic infographic called Security Red Alert. A suspicious sign-in pattern reveals a larger access issue across the organisation, and it feels like a football match where the defenders are playing without pitch borders, no clear rules, and the opponent keeps scoring. Show the alert, the investigation, the corrective action, and the lessons. Use a focused security mascot with a very serious face and a lot of determination."

Wildcard

Finished early?

🔀 Mash two together. Pair a migration story with a budget shock, or a security event with a client escalation — because apparently one crisis is never enough.

🖌️ Freshen the style. Ask for the same story as a board brief, executive memo, or internal infographic for a leadership workshop, because everyone loves a serious-looking comic with a secret plot twist.

🧑‍💼 Executive mode. Run the "Adapt for Leadership" prompt to make a serious story feel sharper, more concise, and dramatically more presentation-ready.

✍️ New idea. Pitch a story in one sentence and let the agent turn it into a full 8-panel narrative. It is basically an office drama with fewer meetings and more graphics.

4. Build it — step by step

  1. 1

    Open Microsoft 365 Copilot

    Sign in with your work account and open Copilot chat inside Microsoft 365.

  2. 2

    Find the agent builder

    Look for Agents in the side panel, then choose Create agent. You will see a form on the left and a preview on the right so you can test as you iterate.

  3. 3

    Describe or configure

    There are two ways in:

    • Describe — speak naturally: "Create an agent that turns any work issue into an 8-panel comic briefing."
    • Configure — fill in the boxes directly and paste the spec from section 2.

    Try both: start with Describe, then switch to Configure and compare the output.

  4. 4

    Paste the name, description and instructions

    Copy each box from section 2 into the matching field in the builder.

    Golden rule: the Instructions box is where the quality is decided. State the structure explicitly: 8 panels, 2×4 grid, strong titles, clear outcomes, no empty space, distinct colour per panel.

  5. 5

    Give it a logo

    Click the icon next to the agent name. Try either:

    • Upload your own — use a real office-related icon, team mark, or mascot.
    • Describe it and let Copilot generate it — for example: "a confident office mascot with a laptop and a map pin, flat vector, bold outlines".

    If it misses the brief, describe it again and regenerate. The wording matters.

    Prompts to try: "a modern office mascot with a laptop and clipboard" · "a calm support bot with a headset and dashboard icon" · "a confident project leader with a chart and pencil"

  6. 6

    Switch on the capabilities

    Turn on Graphic Art so it can generate the visual sequence, and Code Interpreter so it can structure the layout and panel logic.

    ⚠️ If Graphic Art is off, the agent will only describe the story instead of producing the full comic.

  7. 7

    Add your starter prompts

    Add the six examples from section 2 or make your own prompts for each team scenario.

    • ⚡ "Start Teams Room Meltdown"
    • 💰 "Start Budget Shock"
    • 📦 "Start Freaky Deployment Friday"
    • 📞 "Start Client Escalation"
    • 🔒 "Start Security Wake-Up Call"
  8. 8

    Test it in the preview

    Paste a scenario prompt into the preview and check the result against the rules:

    • Are there exactly 8 panels in a 2×4 layout?
    • Is there a hero banner at the top and a closing banner at the bottom?
    • Does each panel have a number badge, title, illustration and caption?
    • Is the same mascot used throughout and is each panel visually distinct?

    If any answer is no, tighten the instructions and test again — that is the real learning loop.

  9. 9

    Create and share

    Press Create. Your agent is now available in your Copilot experience and can be shared with the people next to you for testing and review.

5. Level it up

🐾 Design a proper mascot

Use the mascot prompt, pick a favourite, and lock it into the instructions so it appears in every output.

🎚️ Add a risk dial

Append: "If the brief says HIGH RISK, increase the tension, show the escalation, and add a clearer decision moment."

🎨 Change the visual tone

Switch from "clean green executive style" to "dark boardroom urgency" or "light leadership briefing" and rerun the same narrative.

🧪 Break it on purpose

Ask for 12 panels, a different audience, or a much more technical brief. Then tighten the rules if it wanders.

6. If it goes wrong

ProblemFix
It writes words but no pictureGraphic Art is off. Turn it back on in capabilities.
Wrong number of panelsRepeat the requirement clearly: EXACTLY 8 PANELS IN A 2×4 GRID.
The mascot keeps changingDefine the mascot in the instructions: colour, shape, key feature, and role.
Text is too denseReduce caption length and ask for crisp titles, fewer words, and a cleaner layout.
Panels feel repetitiveRequire a unique colour and a different visual angle for every panel.
The story loses focusAdd a stronger brief: problem, response, action, outcome. The narrative must be explicit.
It won't answer the briefChange the scenario, not the safety rules. The guardrail is not the problem.

7. Show and tell — final 10 minutes

Each person puts their comic on screen and explains: the business problem, the mascot, and the one-line story. The best brief wins.