Best Practices with Copilot Adoption

OK everybody, we are super thrilled to be talking about copilot adoption best practices today. My name is Nathan Lasnoski. I’m concurrency chief technology officer and my Co partner here on talking through copilot option best practices. Chris, you want to introduce yourself? Chris Blackburn 0:29 Good morning, everyone. Excited that you could join us for another webinar as we talk about Microsoft 365. Copilot, the commodity version of the Microsoft AI tool. I’m our solutions architect here. Concurrency on the modern workplace team been in the throes of actually talking with customers about copilot. I was trying to do the quick math. I think it’s been since, like August, so it’s crazy to think that and just a few months it’ll be a year or since all the copilot excitement is taking the world by storm. Nathan Lasnoski 1:05 Incredible. Incredible. So we’re gonna take you through a a tour of how to do this strike within your organization. We’ll breakdown the framing of this between the different technologies that you’re gonna be thinking about, the best practices on the channel and how you move through the organization to adopt and then a whole set of different capabilities to make sure you do it well from a preparation and organization standpoint. So let’s take it off. Chris Blackburn 1:32 Some. Nathan Lasnoski 1:34 OK, so I think as we start having this conversation about adopting M365 copilot, it’s really important to frame the AI conversation between two primary domains that we’re going to be using. The first domain is what we call commodity AI, and that’s exactly where M365 copilots going to sit within your organizations, this idea that everyone within your organization has the opportunity to be able to use AI to be able to be more in their everyday job and can. This is just one example of adopting commodity AI. The financial services industry has all sorts of different tools that manufacturing industry has all sorts of different tools that are going start lighting up AI within other products that you’re using. So you’re competency that you’re gaining in this project, this project to enable your organization to be able to leverage commodity AI well using M365 copilot is gonna create a muscle that you can use across other AI capabilities across your diverse application platforms that are specific to your organization in conjunction with that, you also can see that there’s mission driven technologies that are part of this picture. So it your organization’s gonna have things that are special about it, areas that you’re trying to change the market areas that you’re bringing capabilities to the table that are unique to organization, maybe it’s bringing up a chat experience to your customers and let them do self ordering or customer service or bringing manuals back for a manual machine that you sold or helping your financial planners to be able to organize the financial plans across their portfolio. These might be things that the commodity tools aren’t delivering directly, but mission driven AI is providing and that’s sort of the partner to the commodity driven conversation. We’re going to talk about how the technologies in the stack apply to these two big domains and breakdown across several of them. So when you’re thinking about your program, it’s important to understand that these are parallel lanes. You may be gaining ground faster in one versus the other, and that’s totally OK. You might find that commodity AI starts as the primary path that you’re starting to gain opportunity within your organization, or you might find that you already have spent time on mission driven EI. You’ve already gained ground. You’ve already built this into your products and commodity is kind of catching up and bringing this all together as part of the same picture. All of that is brought together by the idea that all these technologies are impacting people and so human centric AI’s are huge part of this, this idea that using capabilities to the AI is a nonintuitive capability for individual humans, and we have the opportunity to help them to be able to gain these new skills. And that’s I think if there was an initial learning from these first projects that we’ve been doing, it’s that realization that simply turning it on doesn’t work, that it leads to outcomes which are not. Align to the value of the platform that you’re buying, and by enabling very specific persona driven adoption, understanding the jobs to be done within a given area and aligning that job to be done with the capabilities of copilot to help them gain ground. That’s truly where the abilities of adopting this in a great way are gonna help you to see success. What we found with companies that don’t do that is it just kind of turned it on and they expect something that happened and they’re sort of underwhelmed by the experience that they get. We don’t want that to be the way that’s your copal adoption looks and your organization. So I think this is a really important breakdown for the IT community. Understanding how AI is going to be used across your organization. So we’re gonna kind of break this down into chunks. Oh, by the way, as we’re talking, put your questions in the chat, we’re gonna answer them as we’re going. So as you have questions, just drop me out there. We’re happy to answer them no matter it kind of how deep they are. OK, so notice how we’ve broken this down? 1st between commodity and mission driven and then there’s a downward arrow that’s moving that says more accuracy and precision. Really. What’s that’s getting at is as you have a use case that requires specific answers to be able to be answered with accuracy and precision to be answered in the right way all the time. With the specific answer you’re going to find yourself moving down to some of the more custom use cases at the top of this you can see public AI so public I would be like copilot.microsoft.com, which should be. I have the grounded. Sorry the the commercial data protection implemented version of copilot. So your people can use a chat SHPT like experience, but uses it in a protected way. It’s not being used to sell you something or it’s not being used to train some new version of the model. It’s just simply being used as part of your ability to be able to use that capability in a private sense. Right below that. Is the adoption of M365 copilot. You can see examples that we’re talking about, like writing a faster email or drafting a presentation, or mark a meeting summary or an agenda. All these things that you might be producing or when’s my next meeting with this person or tell me about my open action items? These are areas that copilot’s gonna come back with answers for it. Sometimes they’re 80% accurate, sometimes they’re 100% accurate. But there’s a sort of diversity to its ability to answer these questions, but it’s a diversity of of answer that we’re OK with because it’s not like nobody dies. If copilot answers the question wrong like it’s a, it’s giving us this ability to boost our ability to drive new capability up into our organization to be more efficient, to be able to get more done faster, right? If marketing email, it’s right up to create an agenda. All of this is fantastic within commodity AI, and your mileage varies based upon the use case, but using that skill is a nonintuitive capability, so that’s something we’ll talk about in the adoption cycle. No. When you get to scenarios where you want to start having these questions answered very specifically, maybe you want to chat with teams through the ServiceNow for your IT help desk or you want to answer questions about your employee manual or do a simple task automation. That’s where tools like Copilot Studio are a great fit. You’re probably not gonna do a really big project on uh, you know, apply, you know, months and months of energy to do some of those things, but you will apply, say, a week worth of energy or two weeks worth of energy to be able to do some of those things because good is good enough in that space. And by optimizing it, you’re driving value within the organization and creating this cascading opportunity within the business. This is where you can turn your employees into essentially copilot makers in a sort of medium impact zone that’s providing value to the business that builds on what they’re learning from. And there’s 65 copilot, and that’s really a natural next step that we’re seeing as you start having the Copilot conversation. You’re like, well, what if they could do this? And that part of the conversation goes naturally into what? Copilot Studio is capable of doing, but then right after copilot studio you get into those very high criticality use cases. I’ve high visibility chatbot. It needs the answer to the question correctly. It’s I’m asking about what kind of oil to put in my truck like that needs to be the right answer, otherwise I wreck the guy’s truck, right? Or I’m trying to do demand planning or a next best action model for financial services like what? What product should I offer to this customer next? These need to be right. They need to drive into the right direction to optimize the outcomes. You can see they’re very closely aligned to the mission of the business. In those cases, you’re building something that has a lot of guardrails around it, controls around it, and you build something that has a high quality to align to specific answers. What? We’re gonna talk about mostly today is the adoption of 365 copilot. But I want you to understand how all these other pieces fit into that same puzzle. Because when you’re adopting AI, you need to be prepared to talk about it as a group of capabilities with a lane that you’re lighting up with the M365 copilot commodity lane, you have more questions about that dropping in the chat, and we’ll keep spinning around. I think it’s important to also understand that all of this is part of a a ecosystem. So as you are starting in any one of these lanes. So, for example, we’ve had companies that have said, well, the first thing I wanna light up is a customer as a customer service bot. Will that might be something that’s built as a custom solution all the way down in the MLOPS Azure open AI space, or you might be lighting up a internal HR employee manual bot now. That’s probably a good use case for copilot studio. I’m in those all of a sudden when you light up M365. Copilot, you’re like, wait like I’ve got a bunch of bots now? How do I just chat with them all differently? Or they cascading to each other? Or what happens here? These can all fit together into the same ecosystem, so as you’re doing your rollout, you want to think about how Copilot might be talking to a bot you’ve built in copilot studio, and maybe even hand off to an agent that’s performing an action or some very high quality platform you built for your customers. All of this is part of the same space. Don’t think of them as just like completely independent ecosystems. Especially at scale where you have organizations that might have hundreds of use cases, all of which have these opportunities to be able to interact with each other separately, but also as part of the same ecosystem to hand off skills. OK, so if there’s something that early adopters have taught us, it’s it’s that people don’t wanna give Copilot back. Now the reason isn’t that it’s perfect or that it does everything right the first time, but it’s that it has enough boosted productivity to provide a benefit that says well, wait, don’t take this away from me like I’m getting value. Especially once they know how to use it and this is I think, where the key learnings come in that the ramp up time associated with learning, we need to reduce that ramp up time. So they’re time to value. Essentially, we want them not sitting in that frustration learning zone very long. We want them sitting in the zone of ohm using this for something. I’m getting value and now I’m expanding the scenarios where I’m getting value. The companies that let them sit in that frustration zone, they end up sort of like putting it to the side and not using it as often as they could to be able to accomplish the goals so early adopters are showing. Yeah, they don’t want to let it go, but B that we need to make sure they have a great Adoption experience. So this is an interesting situation Copilot available for all. You can adopt one minimum seat. This is great. This is a great thing for us. It’s a great thing for everyone. In a sense, it’s also something that Chris and I have talked about this openly. Like tell me how you really feel when Microsoft was a forcing people to adopt at the 300 user level. Chris Blackburn 12:43 Yeah. Nathan Lasnoski 12:49 It’s sort of forced people to make that decision to do this right and when they’re adopting it, the one seat purchase level, it’s sort of given them permission to, like, **** around and it gets them stuck in IT. Chris Blackburn 13:02 Yeah. Nathan Lasnoski 13:05 So we’re gonna talk a little bit about how we go through those processes in a way that really not these to an effective Adoption versus just sort of sitting in IT and spinning our wheels. So, Kristi, there’s other things on here. You want to talk about the licensing component? Chris Blackburn 13:21 Yeah, absolutely. So and then that was part of the change that Microsoft made as well. Is that being able to provide that license to anyone means that they provided it across their whole stack, whether you are an enterprise customer or 10,000 employees or whether you’re a small business customer with 10 employees. And so making that available across the different queues open up that access to the semantic index, and that access to the AI capabilities for all organizations. So make a start to realize the value of AI with that there are different levels. So if I am a business premium user, it’s a little bit less expensive, but there’s also some other capabilities that we don’t typically see within those levels. We don’t go into licensing detail and depth on this conversation, but there are those different levels. One thing to keep in mind that when it does come to all the customers that leverage Copilot, they’re all using that semantic index. And so really that first question then that we start to get from customers is around we kind of what is that semantic index, what does it actually do, how does it differ than if I were to use teams or if I were to use SharePoint or even I were to go into outlook and do a keyword search and what it does is it really builds on top of keyword searching and then starts to use some social matching capabilities. It creates almost like a numerical score for each different piece of data. Each piece of each word to figure out what its value is to another word. So in this example you know if I were to start to look at different scenarios of different types of food and different pairings that I could say, OK, what goes well with tea? What goes well for breakfast? It would start to make that vectorized index of what data works well together to be able to provide the right output, and that’s really where that semantic index comes into play as well. Is really just taking those multiple data points and clustering them together so that way they can quickly produce a story or an outcome based off of the most minimal amount of criteria possible. And then as we apply that semantic index to the Microsoft 365 environment, there are places where it will index and there are places where it won’t. I can’t just turn on the semantic index and expect to index every single component or every single piece of data within my organization. There are ways to have it connect to your on premises data, but is that the right purpose for the semantic index? I can have an applied to shared data, but isn’t really applicable to try to apply that to let’s say data that’s within a Mailbox data that really doesn’t have kind of that vectored. I used response to being able to say OK, does this really apply in the shared mailbox to other data when multiple people are accessing it? That’s really the story when it comes to the semantic index around the supported data locations, is trying to make that one to one connection to you into the data, and so that’s where it’s able to index your user mailboxes. That’s where it looks at your personal data in OneDrive and then SharePoint and being able to provide that as output when we do a search from the semantic index and to build on top of that, Microsoft is actually in implemented some specific rules around priority on indexing from the semantic index. As of January, they want the for some of the early adopters. There was a whole process that you had to go through to actually turn on the semantic index, but that’s not the case when it comes to post January, when they made it available to everyone. If I have a license and I apply that license to 1 user in my environment, then the semantic index starts to crawl everything. So I wanna be very cautious about that as we start to talk about best practices and thinking about our data that if I’m turning on the semantic index and I don’t have any knowledge of if my permissions are overreaching, if there are people that have access to data and then I start to license more users that could turn into a big problem in allowing people to be able to do a quick keyword search and pull up data that they shouldn’t. And a lot of that does really fall back to just traditional permissioning. But being prepared and knowing that you’re ready to turn that on for anyone that has access is very important. And so once that is enabled, really there’s a couple of different priority levels. So Microsoft looks at it from a customer priority. If I have more than that 300, I’m going to give them a little bit more precedence than users that might have less licenses or maybe even a business premium SKU. So it does priority prioritize tenants that have more licenses. Second of all users, it does look at the type of data that it’s going to index first. It’s going to index data at the user level, which is your personal data. Think of your OneDrive, your mailbox versus tenant level data which is going to be Team sites, teams, channel SharePoint sites. That’s data that is going to have it a lower priority because it wants to make data that is personal to the user more accessible, quicker and then third, the type of data that it indexes is going to be chat first. So if I’m communicating via a teams chat or teams channel, anything that is chat specific, just be honest, gets a little more lightweight, is going to be indexed first over anything that is within the workplace. So anything that is within a SharePoint site or a teams channel and one thing I like to call out to customers as well is they are journeying into the world of copilot that Microsoft doesn’t provide any timeline in terms of the status. There’s ways to go into the portal and look at if you’re a semantic index is running, or if your mailbox is being indexed, or your user accounts being indexed. Those are areas that we can have some visibility into through the portal, but in terms of having a status bar as to when that is done, that is not something that Microsoft will provide any sort of status around. So we talked about how the magic of Copilot works when it comes to the semantic index. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the learnings that as we engage with customers and concurrency have helped them on that journey and thinking about what that journey of success looks like and what some of those outcomes are going to look like of copilot really are their goals or should be their Northstar. And a lot of that really does come into place when we start to think about the concept of a center of excellence. What does it mean to implement a technology properly and ensure that we have Adoption across the organization? And so as we’ve talked about customers and work with them really is there’s these eight primary outcomes that we are looking to address. And first of all, it’s that users not only just pre pilot, not only just pilot, but even production users on your stand the capabilities and that they’re prepared. And of course, moving from the first phase from pre pilot to pilot to rolling it out to your organization is important because you want to set that expectation for your end users on how to use the technology properly versus throwing them to the wild and saying there’s this cool button in your outlook. There’s new button in your word. There’s a button in windows or in the office suite that you can go into and be able to leverage these technologies. You want to educate them on how to use those tools, right for the job and then using the tools right from an IT perspective, it’s us. For us, it’s important for us to implement proper guardrails to ensure that we’re not allowing access to the chat GPTS we’re showing users how to use copilot.microsoft.com instead. And with those guardrails also comes governance. It’s understanding where from a controls perspective, we want to make sure that our data is protecting those governance and controls, lead us into oversharing and reporting, to understand how our data is managed. Those are really crucial for your early adopters. Your pre pilot users before you even start to move into training and knowledge transfer to your end users and it’s also helpful to have a knowledgeable partner like concurrency that have worked with organizations to help support your rollout that have that escalation point to the Microsoft partner teams to the product teams that can send a message to the right people and ask those questions or know how to guide you to find the right answers to some of those questions. So helping be that Copilot as you implement copilot is very important as well. And then having that incremental deployment is very crucial as well. Once you get past those pre pilot pilot stages and through your first production rollout and you should ensure that you have all the right tools available to empower users to be successful, that’s when you know that you’re ready to continue to move on to the rest of the organization. But in some cases you might find that there are still some components of your environment that you still wanna have secured from any kind of results within Copilot. Microsoft has some great controls now that they’re continuing to expand. They’ve just been made available this month to be able to only allow Copilot to look at specific URLs, so those are understanding how the tool continues to involve goes back to having that knowledgeable partner that is using this day in and day out and working with customers day in and day out as well. So as we look and was we worked with customers to help them roll out Copilot, we look at them at these different stages. We look at it through and we have a four month program, but usually if there are smaller organizations, usually we can look at these as specific milestones but ensuring that we have gone through the envisioning and getting started phase properly, we have helped them from a readiness perspective. We’ve done the necessary piloting and then helping them with and incremental rollout ensures their success insures that we’ve been able to go through a proper vetting and proper checklist to validate that we’re rolling this out in a proper manner and it’s all part of that story of that center of excellence in implementing this within customer environments as we start through some of the rollout, there’s a number of different activities that will engage in envisioning and getting started as very important. We usually start off with an optimization assessment as we go through to look at some core areas within our customers environments to understand what is the proper use and adoption of Microsoft 365. If you’re not using teams and you’re not using OneDrive, that essentially could be a red flag right off the bat where we need to put some additional effort into the configuration of that tenant to ensure that it’s ready for that copilot rollout. Using the right Productivity Tools, making sure that your office is on the right rollout. Version. It has to be on the monthly channel, otherwise that your end users will never see that Copilot button in their applications. They won’t have the latest updates to be able to support accessibility to that Microsoft Cloud. Where Copilot runs and then on top of that we also have data security. We want to ensure that users can’t do searches and find data and then they shouldn’t have. Or maybe we want to ensure that data is secured and that we have labeling in place so we have file encryption for highly sensitive data. Looking at the permissioning of the data, looking at data taxonomy, those are some exercises that we do with customers to ensure that their environment is ready and so as part of an outcome of this presentation, if you’re interested in that free optimization assessment, we’ll put that information in the chat and happily to kind of give you that red, yellow, green score to let you know where you are from the readiness perspective when it comes to your M365 environment. And then outside of the optimization assessment, we look at the adoption score. If we see certain areas of Microsoft 365 adoption or low, such as ways to improve how your meeting and collaborating with your users, are you engaging in teamwork? Do you have your apps at a proper update level? Maybe you have endpoints that maybe if you were to roll out Copilot could see some performance issues. Or maybe in a hybrid workforce that you’re in, users may have connectivity issues. Looking at some of this data to ensure that as we’re looking at a full organization rollout that everyone sees, success is very important. And so the adoption score is another way to be able to help engage some of that readiness. We also look as part of some of the optimization assessment and some of the adoption score. We look at that tenant readiness as well. So looking at your licensing your Azure AD or Andrew ID, you are a OneDrive, making sure that you’re leveraging all the right tools inside of the Microsoft 365 suite to garner the best output when it comes to using copilot. Making sure that you understand which outlook to use, which version of the teams client to use for outlook. They’re maybe we’re just starting to see Microsoft roll out the new version of Outlook that does support in the integration of the Copilot for outlook for being able to do some of the type like me capabilities. Those are built into the new version of Outlook as well, and making sure that you are migrated to the new version of the teams client because the classic as of the end of March is now considered in the life and as of July 1st, it will stop working altogether. So if your organization is still using the old version of teams, this is a great time to ensure that those are being updated. Being able to use some of the loop components for better interaction. It’s a great tool. It’s kind of like a version of OneNote that allows for better collaboration and makes it more like a wiki type experience for your end users, as well as ensuring that your office suites are on that current channel or monthly channel is very important as well. And then from a data preparation perspective, you know understanding what your file permissions are, what your data loss prevention policies might be. If you have any and then reporting these are very important when it comes to your data as well. To understand if you are implementing proper permissions and you’re not oversharing, to ensure that if you want to build on top of that, if you’re a Microsoft 365 E five Customer where there may be potential opportunities to. Leverage your data taxonomy that if you have taxonomy policies within your organization and implement sensitivity labels and then from there implement data loss prevention policies and Microsoft does provide some great reporting as well to look at how your usage is for the Microsoft 365 tools as well as your data access reports. You can find some of those in the SharePoint Admin Center as well, so all these are great areas from a preparation perspective. Getting started from there, we were looking at where there is pain within your organization where you can leverage Copilot the best. This is one of the key foundational components of Copilot that will lead to the best success in leveraging the tool. Is thinking about scenarios where they take. They take a lot of time that impact a lot of people really looking at those personas and seeing those types of activities that you’re users are performing on a day to day basis and how much time that takes. And then from there, building out an ROI is really going to be important as you start to look and as we’ve worked with customers build that use case of AI for all of the organization and licensing Copilot for a user for a full year is a minimum requirement. So that’s a big commitment for organizations to understand what that ROI, where if I can justify 5 minutes of savings for a user a day, pays for copilot for a year, it’s a slam dunk. So looking at where we can help to show that value comes by way of the envisioning workshops and getting to the heart of what powers your business, it’s really those different personas. It’s looking at really that org chart from a business perspective, in this example, where is the pain within your organization? Where your users spending the most time? Where can they benefit from AI to help them save even just a few minutes a day can help them to dedicate their time to more time intensive activities that really do take their full thought and attention versus being able to allow AI to do some of those more remedial task and and a lot of organizations are very typical. You would have your C-Suite where those business functions are very core, but then as you start to get into specific industries, you might find that some of these personas will shift and they’ll change based on who is in your organization. But within all those organizations, there should be that thought process of where can we save our users time so they can do more high skilled activities. And then as we sit down with customers to really talk about those different use cases we we’ll talk to them about the right copilot, what’s the right solution? It could be just Microsoft 365 right straight out the shelf. It could be a combination of that and copilot studio, where you may get into interacting with a custom tool, but then really looking at some of the pain within the organization. It could be some of those hive tasks, because personas that do take a lot of time that could be repeated by AI and then go into more of that, that custom scenario. And so that’s why the personas and the envisioning, we do look across the board to see where we can focus on the low hanging fruit when it comes to that commodity Copilot, looking at the ROI, understanding who the sponsors are for some of these initiatives because it might be going to someone in the C-Suite, it might be a manager in helping to justify the the pain that’s in the organization and where AI could come in and help to make their job a little bit lighter. And one of that is from a priority perspective. And so as we look at visioning, as we look at the right copilot, as we look at tenant readiness, we also want to look at how we educate our users. We want to look at that from the perspective of where we can introduce them to assets that will help them be successful. There’s a lot of capabilities through not only SharePoint that can be implemented, but also through Microsoft Teams to help your end users find information on how to leverage Copilot properly. It’s leveraging Copilot scenario libraries which Microsoft is rolling out and continue to build upon based on certain job functions in certain industries that will help your users know what’s the right prompting to use to Copilot. If I’m a user that’s in marketing, I would use different prompting than someone that’s in Finance our it. I want to make sure that I am properly interacting with AI so that way it knows what my intent is and I can get the right result at the end of the day. So. Nathan Lasnoski 34:01 That’s really a I think those last two things you hit on, Chris, were like the key for getting a successful adoption is like I’m an HR. Yeah, there’s some things that I would just normally do like summarizing a meeting or writing a document. But one of their key tasks might be developing the job description or creating a an evaluation framework for employees or whatever, right? Like and, there’s a set of things that they do regularly that are jobs to be done, and the goal should be how do I understand each of those personas jobs to be done and know how to train each of those employees to use copilot to achieve that outcome? And that’s that’s more than just turning it on like Office 65, it’s about helping them to get the necessary training to be effective in their specific role versus just in a general role. And what if you do that? Well, they’re gonna be like they’re gonna be getting value from Copilot. That truly brings time back to their day, and I think that’s an important part of that. We’ve seen that that it’s objectively an important part of creating and I Adoption program that shows results versus just turns on its technology. Chris Blackburn 35:13 Yes. Absolutely, because AI is not like any other technology that humanity has dealt with because it’s not like turning on email or going to sign up for an email account or setting up an online login or using the service. It takes the right prompting and knowing how to communicate, and that’s where taking it to pass that human level to being able to have proper communication and being able to communicate with AI is really going to drive this success. And I think that’s where really we are, As for example, within technology today as we need to be able to properly articulate what our needs are and let AI really do what it’s good at in the processing to be successful. So in looking at how we engage from a center of excellence perspective, we talked about the envisioning and getting started. A lot of those really are part of what we would see is that first milestone or that first month of rolling out the technology, some of the other really important tasks as well here that as we engage with customers, we like to instill is not only be concept of information, guidance, governance, guardrails but also may I governance board. It’s having individuals within your organization that are stakeholders that are going to have a vested interest in ensuring that AI is successful and being able to have AI rolled out to everyone is that ultimate goal. But ensuring that as AI use expands and its expands past the commodity use, and especially into the semi custom and the custom areas that it is properly governed just like you would properly govern your IT department as you would your your sea level and your company has board members. It’s it’s that same concept of having the right oversight and the right input into a success. And so establishing those are very important along with some of the more technological components of rolling out Copilot and some of the oversharing and making sure that we have the right organizational wide message of how to use copilot leveraging the deployment of copilot.microsoft.com versus chat, GPT and that messaging, deploying, training and talking about use cases and scenarios. And those are all important first steps ahead of just turning on the license. See how the license it takes? Literally probably 5 minutes to go into the Microsoft portals and get the license and turn it on, but setting yourself up for success really is setting the right groundwork, and that’s where some of these activities that we talked about as part of foundational steps as part of getting started are going to garner the best success. And then at that point, when that comfort level is there and then turning it on for your pre pilot group, which in a lot of cases is it, it’s having it enabled and maybe from there expanding that out, which we’ll talk about in that next milestone, we want to ensure that that is enabled, that we’re having weekly touch points and that we’re measuring the outcomes and that can be done through multiple ways, which we’ll talk about here in a little bit of what that journey of a copilot user looks like. Nathan Lasnoski 38:32 This is also where that that first stage is also where you might be doing some briefing sessions with your executive team on what the adoption of AI looks like across your organization. Chris Blackburn 38:32 And then. Nathan Lasnoski 38:46 It don’t let yourself stay in the IT lane. The like tool lane here as you’re going through the process of adopting AI across the organization, especially even if it’s just M365. Copilot realize that that is a sea change of how people will work, and it’s a great opportunity for your executives to get in front of that message to be able to set directionally how this changes the business. Hope you on mute Chris. Chris Blackburn 39:17 Ohh sorry about that. It’s it’s. And you’re right, it’s education all the way up from. You know you’re end users that are leveraging the tool all the way up to the executives. It’s ensuring that as an organization, you’re rowing in the same direction when it comes to AI, especially for commodity tools like copilot and its use. And then as you’re looking to expand that tool set to your pilot users to your production users, it’s building on a plan. It’s looking at that envisioning session. It’s looking at those Rois. It’s seeing where you’re going to get the most value by putting this tool into your end users hands, so that way on day one when they start using it and you’ve made that investment into that one year of that copilot license, you’re getting return on investment from day one. And so that’s where the rollout plan not only looks at scenarios, but the users that are leveraging them and the proper training. And then as part of that as well, it’s introducing AI to executives and establishing that executive message. They’ll at this point in the center of excellence and the AI journey you’re Executive Team at least portions of it, especially the ones that are part of that, that board, the AI Governance Board. They should have some high level understanding, but then now at this point, as you’re looking to have AI impact, everyone is. What does that broader message across the C-Suite and what is their message that they’re going to be delivering to the organization? And a lot of that is from our perspective, making sure that their educated on its use and how that use is going to expand across the business. And then it’s looking at training assets and making sure that we have looked at that pilot user group. It’s looking at the commodity AI solutions that are across the M365 stack, some that you get it addressed and some that get identified as part of the envisioning process. And then it’s establishing that human skills AI training plan. Nathan, you want to share a couple of brief words on kind of how we’ve talked about that human skills, AI training plan to customers. Nathan Lasnoski 41:23 Yeah, it it’s in a lot of ways. It’s learning how to delegate. This is something that not everybody has a strengthen is this ability to delegate tasks to an AI agent that’s gonna perform activities for you. And we’re at the infancy of that, right. So think about Copilot as like a lot of times using it to get information and return it to you. This is not where it’s gonna end, Copilot. It’s gonna continue to move more and more into the actions space, where I’m taking something, I’m giving it to an AI platform to not only return me information, but then maybe even perform an action and it’s really important that your organization start to become comfortable with the idea of an individual taking a task and having, like a mini internal over here that’s gonna start to take that activity and perform a portion of it for them. And it might just start with simplest super simple things like finding something for you, but it’s gonna get to points where it’s creating things under your direction, and that’s where you think about human skills as this opportunity to unlock something that many people haven’t used in a little while or haven’t used their professional life in a while, which is unlocking creativity and delegation and leadership to lead other agents or activities or AI capabilities that perform tasks for them. And then bring those activities back and that may not be day one, but certainly is going to be how this technology evolves. So understanding that this is a human change, not just a technology change, is a critical piece of this picture. Chris Blackburn 42:48 That’s a great way to put it that it. I’m locking that creativity and leadership through delegation. I think that’s probably a great way to to summarize it, because it’s it’s definitely a learned skill versus one that I think a lot of us are even born with and from there, as we look to expand the the pilot group and we move into that next milestone or that next phase as we are looking to ascent setup some of the umm milestones that we’re looking to track as part of our center of excellence, we’re looking at that and we’re looking at the ROI and how we’re tracking that back to the executives and we can do. A lot of that through the reporting, that’s even as part of the Microsoft 365 Portal to show what is the use, how much are you users using it? What is the level of their engagement? That’s when we can go back to the Executive to say, hey, this is how we are able to be able to see what its use is. But at the same time also have some of those measurable activities where maybe we do need to provide additional education or maybe we need to look at some of our use cases. A lot of that is part of that feedback cycle as well, where we’re not only as part of our pre pilot group and pilot group looking at what some of the capabilities are for the Copilot technologies, but also seeing where it might actually expand out to some of those other use cases as well. And then looking at our guardrails, do we need to evolve our guardrails as we expand this out to our pilot groups and our pre pilot use and then doing some validation on training and enablement going through the feedback cycles, things like ask me anythings and then some of the use cases we may find through this whole scenario that we need to explain out some of our use cases as well. And then this continues as we continue to expand as we continue to roll this out to more users, it’s incremental training, improving our training, the feedback cycles and then expanding on the ASK Me anything, this may even be for your pilot users, they might look to pick up more information as you continue to roll this out to your broader organization. So having those feedback loops are definitely going to be important for the success of the tool as you continue to roll it out and then as we have some of those readiness activities that we talked about, those really are components that happen as part of those first phases and some of these are actually even activities that will continue through each phase and ensuring that there is those levels of readiness from a user perspective, from a data perspective, as we start to look at the environment for the user, for their licensing and their office environment, that’s important. As well, from the readiness perspective and then training as well, those are all activities that we look at as milestones for each of those waves or each of those rollouts that we continue to do as we get into production. And then as we talk through all of the implementation activities, as we talk through those measures, we have specific measures that we look at to be able to sign off for each specific milestone or each Pacific stage to ensure that it is rolled out successfully as we move through not only our pre pilot phases, but as we also look at the planning and readiness as we start to go into pilot and some of our incremental phases ensuring that we do have proper training and we do have proper feedback from their users to continue to improve on. How that technology is used and used effectively within organizations and then looking at other areas to expand outside of just the commodity Copilot. So how are we integrating with other tools? How are we using potentially copilot studio to integrate with other platforms? What does it look like to expand that outside the commodity and more into some of the mission driven areas that can continue to help our organizations and our teams be successful? And so as we look at the journey of a copilot user, as we’ve talked about the different phases, we’ve talked about the different milestones and pilot groups. Really, as we look at copilot from a human perspective, there’s really these core 6 steps that we look at. It’s helping users understand how copilot works. It’s helping them understand how Copilot can transform the way they work, and as they start to think about how they work in a day to day basis, they start to think about the pain that technology might cause to have activities or job functions take time that they could potentially delegate to an AI. That’s where really looking at some of the use cases that are specific to their job function and maybe even looking at other ways that as we get feedback from end users, we can continue to grow how we look at the use of copilot and some of those use cases and some of the new ways that potentially in the Microsoft 365 stack, we can align those two technologies and ways that potentially in some of the early envisioning we did not encounter before. And then looking at some of the training material, it’s how are we ensuring that we are educating users properly on the use and ensuring that they know where to access the right tools and ensuring that if there’s any specific job function related activities in any sort of prompting that they are educated on its use? And then from there it’s really that that cycle of measurement and evaluation, it’s once they’re license and we’ve gone through the training and they are educated on the prompting that as an IT team we can go into the copilot reporting and we can look at how our end users are using the tools as an IT organization. We can then leverage other tools such as the just the regular Microsoft 365 auditing and per view to understand what data is touched by way of copilot, and then even what prompted if we wanted to really dig in to look at some of the data behind what questions are being asked to Copilot. That’s information that is readily available, if not only if we want to have that presented it to us as an IT organization, but also if we have that level of licensing when it comes to tools like per view and then as part of that feedback loop, we’re continuing to not only look at the data from an IT perspective, but we’re also hearing and observing that data from the human perspective as well from our end users as they’re giving us feedback on how the technology is being used as they’re attending office hours as Microsoft likes to put. Them, or really more of those Q&A’s where there’s a bridge or a period of time where people can come ask questions being available for those being able to leverage the feedback in the apps. Microsoft actually is building a really nice feedback loop into the office suite to allow feedback from end users to come right to your admins into the portal. So observing that from not only a tooling perspective where people can get feedback where they are, but also engaging with them in real time and then sending out those surveys, getting engagement, hearing about their experiences, using those as stories. To go back to the organization where we can hear that Jane and HR save 50 hours of work because she was able to delegate certain tasks to Copilot, that’s a great story to take to the rest of the organization. You want to capitalize on those successes, and you want to capitalize on some of those champions and the organization that love the technology or using it all the time and that are willing to give you that feedback to really help to implement that in a more successful way as you continue to roll it out to all users. And then as part of that feedback loop, we’re also improving the training as well as part of where there may need to be more education on certain prompting or maybe how to access information on where to use the right different copilots for a specific use. Some of that is part of the training that goes to the end users as well, and it’s very important that we’re looking at how we are rolling that out to more users after your initial waves. And as you go through that full rollout of Copilot your organization, ensuring that you’re continuing to build on and improve, how that story is being told. So in close in looking at that story of a center of excellence, really thinking about how we implement copilot and help customers and implement it, we’ve touched on a number of points from the human element to the Executive element to ensuring that everyone has the right training, that we’re looking at the right use cases. It is a journey. It’s not just a matter of turning on licensing and letting your users figure it out themselves. And when is set our end users and it concurrency we wanna set up our customers for access success and by going through this center of excellence that will help them really structure that rollout and help you as customers and as organizations structure that roll out of AI and that commodity sense to everyone successfully. And so we definitely would love to help you in that journey of AI. In this, as you saw from this last hour, and there’s a lot of components that really do go into a successful AI rollout. And so for for next steps you know and again and you probably saw in the chat and we’d love to get your feedback on this presentation if you could kindly just fill out that survey list, know how we did and if you were interested in having either a free copilot adoption workshop or even in AI and copilot executive envisioning session, we love to help you impower your IT organization and empower your leadership teams to understand more about that proper journey of AI. Kindly reach out in the chat and thought that survey we’d love to connect with you. And if you have any other questions, I know we’re a a few minutes early and we definitely would love to field any of those that you might have around Copilot. Anything else, Nathan, that you like to add or or to touch on in closing? Nathan Lasnoski 53:30 Uh, I think the one main differentiation between those two things is on the next steps slide is that that second one is oriented around helping your executive team to establish a alignment between the mission of the organization and AI as a capability to help execute on that strategy. And that’s something that many organizations have done us to help with because we come in with a credible voice to be able to aid the IT viewership team in shepherding the executive team through that process. And that’s a great partner to talking about copilot adoption in and of itself as a lane. So we can do both or one of them depending upon what your needs are. And it’s a great way for you to gain ground in space. Chris Blackburn 54:20 Awesome. And again, it’s all we always a pleasure to share kind of where this story of copilot has evolved and always loved to tell people over the last eight months. I think the Copilot story, and really in the messaging is evolved 678 times, and as we learn more and as we help customers, we evolve that story and we want to help you be positioned to not only tell that story successfully to your business. Stakeholders would also to be successful in the use of this technology. Because it’s not cheap, but it is very powerful when it is implemented properly. So with that will definitely be here to watch the chat and we’re we’re really excited to help you on your AI journey. Thanks a lot.