Lab 10 — Researcher vs Analyst vs Chat: tool selection challenge
| Level | Duration | Primary apps | Sample files |
|---|---|---|---|
| 200 | 20 minutes | Copilot, Researcher agent, Analyst agent | All datasets and documents |
Department and industry focus
All departments and all six business units. Every role — HR, Legal, Marketing, Sales, Finance, Customer Service, Operations, and IT — faces the same choice between a quick answer, a researched briefing, and a calculated result, so this lab is deliberately industry-neutral and draws its examples from every other lab in the workbook.
Scenario
Choosing the right Copilot surface is a core skill. For each question, decide whether Copilot Chat, the Researcher agent, or the Analyst agent is the best tool, justify it, and define how you would validate the answer.
Learning objectives
- Match a business question to the right Copilot surface — Copilot Chat, the Researcher agent, or the Analyst agent.
- Justify that choice to a colleague using the nature of the task, not the tool’s novelty.
- Describe how you would validate each type of answer, from a quick summary to a code-backed calculation.
- Recognise when a question needs two tools chained rather than one.
Exercise — Decide and justify
| # | Question | Best tool | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Which departments are most over budget and by how much? | Analyst | Calculation and ranking over structured data with transparent logic. |
| 2 | How ready is Contoso Group for the QBR across all sources? | Researcher | Multi-source synthesis; needs attribution and evidence-vs-assumption split. |
| 3 | Rewrite this escalation update for an executive audience. | Copilot Chat | Single-step drafting from known context; no deep analysis. |
| 4 | Is CSAT worse for higher-priority tickets? | Analyst | Numeric comparison over structured data with method transparency. |
| 5 | What decisions should leadership make this quarter? | Researcher | Combines charter, risk, cost, and ops context into decisions. |
| 6 | Summarize the campaign brief into five bullets. | Copilot Chat | Quick single-source summarization; deep reasoning not required. |
Forecasting and what-if questions — for example, what full-year variance looks like if spend holds at the current run rate, or what the quarter closes at if late-stage probabilities improve — belong with the Analyst agent or Copilot in Excel, because both can show the formula, assumptions, and columns behind a projected number. Copilot Chat is the wrong surface for them: it can describe a scenario in words, but it cannot calculate one reproducibly, and no surface should be asked to project beyond the periods the source data covers.
Reference guidance
| Tool | Best use | Validation focus |
|---|---|---|
| Copilot Chat | Quick summaries, drafting, single-source questions, brainstorming. | Is the answer sufficient, or does it need deeper research or analysis? |
| Researcher | Multi-step synthesis across files and broader context. | Source coverage, evidence vs assumption, completeness. |
| Analyst | Calculations, trends, correlations, code-backed data work. | Columns, filters, joins, sample size, correlation vs causation. |
💬 Debrief question: For question 5, when would you run Analyst first to produce evidence, then hand it to Researcher to synthesize? Discuss chaining agents.