Copilot Automatic Performance Reviews with GPT-5
As we head toward year-end, a lot of us are in performance review mode.
That usually means re-reading goals, digging through emails and docs, and trying to remember how the work actually came together to pull an end of year summary.
This week, I used Microsoft 365 Copilot to help pull all of that together, and it worked far better than I expected!
Because Copilot is already embedded in the tools we work in every day, I was able to use a single prompt to:
• Summarize progress against each goal
• Pull evidence from emails, meetings, documents, and dashboards
• Frame the write-up around business outcomes, not just activity
The quality of the output — especially with GPT-5 — was noticeably stronger, more contextual, and much more ‘exec-ready’ than when I tried a similar prompt last year.
Even if you don’t have a formal end-of-year review, this is a great exercise for reflecting on impact and outcomes over the year.
If you’ve got a strong prompt you use for year-end reviews, I’d love to see it. Drop it in the comments!
And here’s the prompt:
Help me prepare for my annual performance review. This write up should summarize progress, open issues, and performance trends from internal documents, meetings, and dashboards related to my stated goals and associated deliverables for each goal (included below). The target audience is our executive leadership team. Each section should lead with key business outcomes my work influenced, and how the deliverables for each goal contributed to that outcome. Stated goals: [LIST YOUR GOALS HERE]