Persona Mapping is a Secret to Copilot Success

I’ve written before about the transition of AI skills being similar to previous transitions that technology has created in the economy.  Think about the industrial revolution, transportation, or the advent of the smart phone.  As I’ve worked with companies that are adopting AI, in particular Copilot, I’ve seen companies that have been successful, and those that have struggled.  The ones that were successful were not the ones that just “turned it on”. The successful companies are ones that identified clear persona maps for jobs-to-be-done associated with AI efficiencies. This isn’t mainly to justify the expenditure (I’ve seen it somewhat counter-intuitively ineffective for that), but instead useful to guide users through effective adoption.  Let’s talk about what that means…

The goal is to map a role to a job-to-be-done, for each domain of the organization.  For example, think about the sales persona as an opportunity for acceleration.

For example, if you look at one of the domains, a sales executive may struggle to get started with building the presentation for their proposal.  Or, simply they might need to get started from an existing template.  As a person who writes proposals myself, I can attest to how lengthy this can be and how much busywork is involved.  What if it could be done faster?

All of this is to say that when adopting Copilot, the goal should be to identify these opportunities and then specifically train on them, vs. just generic Copilot training.  The best companies have identified 5 – 10 great use cases per persona, some of which are generic, some of which are not, then moving those into action.  If we continue using the sales persona track, we might think of these:

• Drafting proposals from established templates
• Creating drop marketing content for key events
• Building a meeting agenda
• Summarizing meetings and action items

So, what does this look like as an exercise? You’ll notice three parts, (1) as someone in, (2) I want to, (3) I’ll know this is successful when… but then other columns are hours saved, ROI, etc.

The goal then is to turn this content into actionable training that will be provided to the organization.  That training will then be measured by the activity performed by individuals in the organization.  Notice the difference between “turn it on and hope for the best” and this?  A persona-centric strategy will take a little longer, but will also mitigate the AI-letdown that happens when effective adoption has not been leveraged.

Is this the only part of Copilot adoption?  Certainly not, but it’s an important step that most companies miss.