Paper short abstract

We use discourse analysis to analyse a 2-day 'chat' with Copilot in which we instructed it to perform an relatively simple teaching admin task, but which led to many difficulties before it was done. Our data analysis highlights its and our rhetorical strategies in identifying and solving the problem

Paper long abstract

The main intellectual contribution we make is to apply established approaches from conversation and discourse analysis to explore the sequence of discursive moves in an extended 'chat' between Co-Pilot and the three authors (all of whom teach the 'dissertation' module of the MA Education and Technology at UCL). We aim to build on existing research into team coordination and cooperation in workplaces, but extend this to the analysis of AI as an additional, new agent in the performance of work tasks.

The data we draw on are the transcripts of our 2-day chat with Co-pilot in February 2026. It was not generated as research data: we did not set out to research discursive positioning and task negotiation in the operation of a teaching task, but to use AI in the administration of the course's dissertation module. However, this proved more challenging than we expected, for several reasons: CoPilot produced unusable results but could not explain why; Copilot's capabilities varied unexpectedly depending on the licensing conditions of the account we used; we made assumptions about the semantic coherence of the data we gave it, because it was coherent relative to our teaching aims. We will present the main points of our detailed linguistic analysis to explore how we re-defined the task repeatedly to make it manageable for Co-Pilot, and also how Co-pilot maintained 'face' and communicated the complexity of its labour to us as its users. Our analysis shows the work required to make AI useable in higher education teaching.