The Copilot Prompt Taxonomy

The Prompt Studio

Four cognitive layers. Eighty anchor verbs. Change one word, and Copilot changes from an auditor, to a project manager, to a designer, to a visionary.

The master formula — your foundation

Act as a Role. Anchor Verb this Source for the Audience in a suitable Tone and place it into a Format, for any Context, to ensure I can meet the Goal, subject to the following Constraints.
Everything below fills this formula. The one slot most people never choose on purpose is the Anchor Verb — that is the whole game.
Live-demo document loaded: “Project North Star” — a $12M cold-storage expansion proposal for Liberty Provisions Co., a fictitious Brooklyn, NY food distributor. Generated prompts below use it as the source. Switch to random business documents

1  ·  The four layers

Click a layer to open it, then click any verb to generate a detailed, ready-to-use prompt.

2  ·  Try it by app

Pick a Microsoft 365 app to see four ready prompts across the layers — the anchor verb is highlighted in each.

Where it comes from — the cognitive ladder

The layers map onto Bloom’s Taxonomy, the questioning framework used to teach trainers. A low-level verb keeps thinking shallow; a higher-order verb forces real analysis, synthesis and evaluation. The same is true for AI.

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