We Only Had Copilot. We Built Real AI Automation Anyway.
Everyone thinks GitHub Copilot means "AI chat in your IDE" - nice to have, not a real automation engine. We thought so too, until we had to build real automation with Copilot as our only tool. Turns out Copilot has a coding agent, agentic workflows, and Spaces - features most teams never touch. In 5 minutes: how we went from "just chat" to auto-assigning Jira tickets to Copilot and getting real automation out of it - and why you're probably underusing the tool you already pay for.
Our team only had a GitHub Copilot license - no budget for extra AI tooling - but we still needed real automation in our SDLC. This talk walks through what we discovered along the way: three underused Copilot capabilities (Coding Agent, Agentic Workflows, and Copilot Spaces) that go well beyond IDE chat, and how we used them to build things like automatic Jira-to-Copilot ticket assignment. It's a practical, honest account of turning one license into an actual automation platform - not a Copilot sales pitch, but real lessons from a team that had to make it work with what we had.
Lead System Engineer at EPAM with over 10 years of DevOps experience, working across traditional DevOps, solution architecture, and AI.