How to Train an AI Agent for Your Business: Copilot, ChatGPT, or Claude

Your operations manager knows exactly how a new client gets set up. She knows which questions to ask first, which details always get missed, and what to say when someone needs it done this week. Almost none of it is written down. It lives in her head and in a few notes she keeps for herself.

Someone on the team asks an AI tool to draft the welcome email for a new client. The draft comes back polite, well organized, and nothing like how your organization handles it. The tool did its best with what it had. It just didn't have her.

That gap is where most teams are with AI right now. The tools are capable. What they're missing is your method. Training an AI agent for your business mostly means giving it that method in writing, and the people who hold it are already on your team.

Short answer: pick a task your team repeats, have the person who knows it write down how it's done, give that page to the AI as its instructions, and have a person review what it produces. The steps are the same in Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude.

What's the difference between an AI agent and a skill?

The agent is the doer. It reads the request, pulls the right files, and drafts the answer. The skill is the how: a written set of steps, rules, and examples that tells the agent how your team does one specific job.

Each company has its own name for it. Claude and ChatGPT call it a skill. In Microsoft 365 Copilot, it becomes the instructions you give an agent. Different labels, same idea: an agent on its own is a capable assistant who has never seen your files, and a skill is the page someone on your team would hand that assistant on its first day.

How do you train an AI agent for your business?

The steps are the same in every tool.

1. Pick one job your team repeats. Something that happens every week, follows a pattern, and takes real time. Follow-ups after a sales call, first drafts of proposals, welcome emails for new clients, answers to the same onboarding questions. Start closest to revenue, where time saved shows up fastest.
2. Have the person who knows the job write it down. The steps, the rules, the exceptions that trip people up, and one or two examples of what good looks like. A page is plenty, and it belongs to the person who knows the job.
3. Give that page to the AI as its instructions. Paste it into the instruction field or save it as a skill, and attach the reference files it points to.
4. A person reviews anything that leaves the organization. Emails to clients, anything headed to the board, anything with a donor's or member's name on it. The agent drafts. Your people own every decision that goes out the door.
5. When it gets something wrong, update the page. Correct the draft, then add the missing rule so the next one comes out right. Over a few weeks the page gets sharper, and the agent improves with it.

No time to write it down? Tools can capture it as they work. A process-capture tool like Scribe records someone clicking through a task and turns it into a step-by-step guide, which makes a strong first draft of the page. Claude can also record someone doing the task on screen and draft the skill for them to review.

Want a guided first pass? Our free Agents and Skills Starter is a three-page PDF that walks through building a first skill, using Claude as the worked example. Download the Agents and Skills Starter (PDF)

Step two does most of the work. The tool matters less than the page, and the page is something only your team can write. It also gives your strongest people time back for the work they were hired for, because the questions they answer every week finally have a written answer.

How do you train a Copilot agent?

If your team already works in Microsoft 365, this is often the natural place to start, because the agent lives where your files and permissions already are. Your page becomes the agent's instructions, and you point it to the documents it should use, such as files in SharePoint or OneDrive.

One thing every leader should know: Microsoft says these agents respect the permissions you already have on SharePoint and OneDrive files, so people only see what they could already see. Files uploaded directly into an agent work differently, because anyone who can use the agent can reach them. Keeping sensitive material in SharePoint, where your rules already apply, is the safer default. What your team can build also depends on your Microsoft licenses, so a quick conversation with whoever manages Microsoft 365 saves surprises later.

Does it work the same in ChatGPT and Claude?

Yes. The five steps don't change. Only the place the page lives changes.

In Claude, your page becomes a skill, and on business plans an administrator can share it with the whole organization. ChatGPT is heading the same way: OpenAI has said it plans to retire custom GPTs and move that work to skills. If your team already built custom GPTs, the instructions inside them are a head start, because they're your method already written down.

• Claude: a skill
• ChatGPT: a skill (custom GPTs are being retired)
• Microsoft 365 Copilot: an agent's instructions

All three can do this well. What decides how well it works for you is the page your team writes.

If the open question is which tool fits your team in the first place, our comparison of ChatGPT vs Claude vs Copilot walks through that decision.

Start with one page from your team

Pick one job this month. Ask the person who knows that job to spend an hour writing the page: the steps, the rules, the exceptions, and one example of a finished piece they'd be proud to send. Load it into whichever tool your team already uses. Run it alongside them for two weeks, with that person reviewing every draft and adding to the page each time something's off.

By the end of those two weeks you'll know whether the agent saves real time. You'll also have your team's method in writing. It belongs to your organization, and it moves with you if your tools change.

Your team already holds the training material for any of these tools. If you'd like a second opinion on which job to start with, send us a note.

Sources

1. Anthropic, "What are Skills?" Claude Help Center. Skills are folders of instructions, scripts, and resources Claude loads when a task calls for them. support.claude.com. Accessed 2026-10-20.
2. Anthropic, "How to create custom Skills," Claude Help Center. Main file holds the name, description, and instructions; enabled under Customize, then Skills; Team and Enterprise admins can provision skills organization-wide. support.claude.com. Accessed 2026-10-20.
3. OpenAI, "Skills in ChatGPT," OpenAI Help Center. Reusable, shareable workflows with instructions, examples, and code, under Plugins, then the Skills tab, for eligible workspaces. help.openai.com. Accessed 2026-10-20.
4. OpenAI, "Creating and editing GPTs," OpenAI Help Center. Plans to retire custom GPTs and recommends moving workflows to plugins. help.openai.com. Accessed 2026-10-20.
5. Microsoft Learn, "Declarative agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot," updated 2026-09-30. An agent is a defined purpose, instructions, knowledge, and actions. learn.microsoft.com. Accessed 2026-10-20.
6. Microsoft Learn, "Agent Builder overview," updated 2026-10-12. Runs in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app and Teams; agents needing actions or connectors are copied to Copilot Studio; capabilities depend on tenant licenses. learn.microsoft.com. Accessed 2026-10-20.
7. Microsoft Learn, "Add knowledge sources to an agent in Agent Builder," updated 2026-09-30. SharePoint, OneDrive, and uploaded files; agents respect existing permissions and sensitivity labels; anyone with access to the agent can reach directly uploaded files. learn.microsoft.com. Accessed 2026-10-20.
8. Anthropic, "How to create custom Skills," Claude Help Center, recording section. In Cowork in Claude for Mac (Pro, Max, Team), "Record a skill" captures a screen walkthrough of up to about 10 minutes and proposes a skill for review. support.claude.com. Accessed 2026-10-20.
9. Scribe, "New User Guide: Scribe 101," Scribe Help Center. A Scribe is an automatically generated step-by-step guide with screenshots, text, and cursor clicks, captured from a browser extension or desktop app. support.scribehow.com. Accessed 2026-10-20.