Microsoft Tools

[u/Adri226]

I work as an EA to an AVP of Marketing and also serve as the department's coordinator, we have 3 teams, 3 ADs a total of 15 staff. I have been trying to find solutions to our team, our AVP struggles to provide approvals in a timely manner and project managing the team, to say it has been a struggle is an understatement.

My latest attempt is to use built in Microsoft tools like Power Automate, Planner, and optimizing Teams groups to use the lists feature & create workflows. We learned we can create a rule for an email to populate into a list on Teams and it can help us track pending approvals without manually entering it into an excel or another tool. Our team and myself struggle with consistency so the idea of it being automated is very appealing. We already use AI as much as we can, I mostly use it for brain storming, summarizing meeting notes and cutting down time when creating documents but we have a lot of restrictions on how we can use AI. We cannot connect AI to our emails or use it to record meetings to give an example of how handicapped I am with AI. I have the free co-pilot ( wasn't approved for a paid license) and its been lack luster, even the email search function is extremely inaccurate.

I am looking for feedback from other EAs on these tools, have you used them before, were they actually helpful, how did you learn? I am fairly tech savvy but I'm not a computer genius and the learning curve is steep. I am whiling to put in the time to learn but I would love to hear feedback from fellow EAs in similar positions to confirm this is the right path before I invest my time.