

Unlock 100% of Microsoft 365 with Copilot
Brian Shaw
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👉 Full Show Notes
https://www.microsoftinnovationpodcast.com/746
Microsoft’s Brian Shaw shares how AI and Microsoft 365 Copilot are transforming the way professionals work. From unlocking hidden features in familiar tools to managing digital agents, this episode explores how to scale productivity, delegate effectively, and build applied AI capability across your organisation.
🎙️ What you’ll learn
- How to unlock 100% of Microsoft 365’s features using Copilot
- Ways to integrate AI agents into daily workflows
- How to delegate effectively to digital workers
- Strategies to drive Copilot adoption beyond first impressions
- Practical use cases for Copilot in Excel, Word, Forms, and Whiteboard
✅ Highlights
- “Copilot can use 100% of the features if it needs to do something.”
- “We put Copilot where you do work.”
- “You click a button, you get a result — no prompt needed.”
- “The M365 Copilot chat is the Copilot to rule them all.”
- “Researcher and Analyst are like having two new team members.”
- “I’ve got a data scientist working for me now.”
- “I didn’t know Copilot could do that — I didn’t know Excel could do that.”
- “The Copilot you’re using today is the dumbest you’ll ever use.”
- “You’ll be managing a digital workforce.”
- “Use it for a few weeks and you’ll see how it saves you time.”
- “Copilot is doing things we used to do manually.”
- “People who don’t embrace it are the ones saying AI is taking their job.”
🧰 Mentioned
- Microsoft 365 Copilot - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-copilot
- Microsoft Graph - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/overview
- Microsoft Forms - https://forms.office.com
- Microsoft Whiteboard - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-whiteboard/online-whiteboard
- Outlook with Copilot - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-life-hacks/everyday-ai/how-to-use-copilot-in-outlook
- Excel with Copilot - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-started-with-copilot-in-excel-d7110502-0334-4b4f-a175-a73abdfc118a
✅Keywords
microsoft 365, copilot, ai agents, digital workforce, productivity, outlook, excel, word, whiteboard, researcher, analyst, microsoft graph
Microsoft 365 Copilot Adoption is a Microsoft Press book for leaders and consultants. It shows how to identify high-value use cases, set guardrails, enable champions, and measure impact, so Copilot sticks. Practical frameworks, checklists, and metrics you can use this month. Get the book: https://bit.ly/CopilotAdoption
If you want to get in touch with me, you can message me here on Linkedin.
Thanks for listening 🚀 - Mark Smith
00:02 - From Machine Learning to Microsoft 365 Copilot
04:40 - The Copilot Advantage: Unlocking 100% of Microsoft 365
07:50 - Three Flavours of Copilot: Tools, Agents, and Chat
10:50 - Meet Your New Teammates: Researcher and Analyst Agents
17:49 - Proposal Writing Reinvented with AI
21:34 - Managing a Digital Workforce
28:34 - Overcoming First Impressions: Driving Real Adoption
00:00:01 Mark Smith
Welcome to the copilot show where I interview Microsoft staff innovating with AI. I hope you will find this podcast educational and inspire you to do more with this great technology. Now let's get on with the show. Welcome to the copilot show. Today, we're joined from Microsoft by Brian, a tech strategist whose work and reshaping how IT leaders use Microsoft 365. copilot full links are in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Brian.
00:00:32 Brian Shaw
Thank you for having me.
00:00:34 Mark Smith
Brian, good to have you on. I'm quite excited about having this chat with you, just cause your experience and tenure inside Microsoft. But before we do that, just update me food, family and fun. What do they mean to you? What part of the US you're based in? What do you get up to when you're not thinking about work?
00:00:51 Brian Shaw
Well, I've been around the tech industry for quite a while. I've been at Microsoft for 18 years now. Family. I've got 4 grandkids, so they're pretty much my main focus. They come over all the time, swim in the pool just, you know, hang out. So. They're pretty awesome. Family. I'm living in New Jersey because of my family. I started Microsoft in Charlotte, NC they moved me out to the mothership, which is out in Redmond, and so I was out there for 10 years and then everyone started working from home during the pandemic and I thought, well, that's perfect. Time to be closer to my grandkids. And so I moved to New Jersey and. Now I'm a mile and 1/2 from them. But I like to tell people I took a wrong turn in Albuquerque. So how I ended up in New Jersey.
00:01:26 Mark Smith
I love that. I love that. I love that. And do we mention food?
00:01:36 Brian Shaw
Now I try to stick away from food looks. Like I've had. Enough food during my. And I don't need to talk about it, dude. So, but yeah, it's, you know, it is what it is. Pizza obviously. I love it. Brisket. Whatever.
00:01:51 Mark Smith
You know from that defining point in November 2022 when when open day I came to market.
00:01:57 Mark Smith
With. What was gonna redefine most people's perceptions of what AI is in the world, even though you know it's been around since the 60s? What is it meant for your career? What are you doing now? What's your focus inside Microsoft when it comes to AI?
00:02:13 Brian Shaw
So within Microsoft we had this conference called M Lads, our machine learning and data. And So what? What this conference did is it's twice a year, one in the spring, one in the fall and it would basically developers and engineers getting together to talk about machine learning. And you know, this was before AI was really talked about, but just machine learning and data science and learning that at one point in my career, I thought I might become a data scientist. And even, you know, took the courses to become a data scientist. Just never. Followed through on it. But you know, I've always been interested in, you know, machine learning and what it could do. I could see at its early stages what people were doing with machine learning. You know, they're talking about image analysis. And so, you know, like there was the early applications like, you know, which dog are you? Right. That was an early application that Microsoft came out with like. You could actually install it on your iPhone and you could, you know, take a picture of you and it would tell you what dog you were most like. I mean, that's a silly use of AI. But you know it, it is a use early on that they were doing one of the things I I didn't like as much is I would walk past, they'd have a camera set up at the conference and the camera would guess your age based on your image and it always guessed me like 10 to 15 years older. I guess it's because my long white.
00:03:28 Mark Smith
Wow.
00:03:32 Brian Shaw
Beard or so? I didn't like that too much, but. I learned to deal with it so, but yeah, I've been following AI for a very long time. When they first announced the copilot, you know, I'm a currently a principal csam, which is a customer success account manager.
00:03:36 Mark Smith
That's cool. That's cool.
00:03:48 Brian Shaw
And so I've got, you know, 5 customers that I deal with right now. But when they first announced it, it was actually on my birthday when they announced it. So it was kind of like a gift to me. And so they announced it and I started following it and right from the beginning, I was trying to figure out, you know, well, how can I use this to make myself more successful? Because if I can make myself more successful. And I could tell my customers. How they can be more successful and so early on I was trying to figure out the technology and I went through the whole, you know, doldrums of belief and disbelief and all the things you go through as part of the copilot journey. But I went through that early on and so I got to the point where, you know, I could see the future. I could see the vision. I could see where it was going. A lot earlier than others, and so there's a lot of doubters out there. And so I just kept beating the drum and, you know, teaching and learning as much as I could about coping.
00:04:41 Mark Smith
I love it. So copilot and let's let's just narrow it down for the audience. We're gonna talk about M365 copilot explicitly. So really coming in two formats. See the chat, which is the freemium version or it comes with an M365 license. Would that be E3E5 in your organization? And then there's the $30 skew. And so I really want to. Narrow down and into this space here. When when you talk about with your customers around enablement with. Let's say the web experience that you get. We also have it in teams. We have it in outlook and of course a lot of there's hardly an M365 app that you could touch these days that don't have copilot in right and right. And I find some of the edge cases. And when I say edge tools that perhaps a lot of businesses are not using regularly and. The one that will jump to mine for me will be things like whiteboard would be Microsoft forms. If you've used copilot in either of these two products, prepare to be amazed because it's pretty epic, right? What you can do with them.
00:05:44 Brian Shaw
Thanks for a great demo.
00:05:46 Mark Smith
Yeah, but like I found, like, you know, the whiteboard one for example, if you're in a a meeting, let's say you're, you know, even might be a meeting with executives and you're trying to come up with a I use cases, and you can go, hey, to the copilot. Give me 4 conversation starters and just put them on there as notes and let's.
00:05:46 Brian Shaw
Definitely does, yeah.
00:06:06 Mark Smith
And then people start going ohh. The board's no longer blank. There's somebody else. In this case, I put some ideas up there and it seems to unleash something. And then if you take the the forms tool, I am blown away about how effects. As long as you've given it a good example of what the form is going to be used for, what you're giving it the subject, the main area, blah blah. Amazing. Like for me, a massive time saver because then I can just do the final edits to, you know, put Polish on it. Let's go back to the web experience and and the interface M365. You know, experience that a lot of people would have. You've got the web, you've got the, the the focus on your company view, right, you plugging into office. Sorry, the Microsoft graph, it seems you can tell when someone's been in the space of all right, using old old nomenclature. Tell me about. How do you get people to that? That big aha moment where they can go. Oh my gosh, this is going to be so awesome for what I do in my role.
00:07:13 Brian Shaw
So a little jump back a little bit. So when I was at 10 years in Redmond, I was in office engineer. Right. And so I worked on the office team and so we knew that, you know, this product had like millions of lines of code. I think when I was out there, we reached like 10 million lines of code, maybe 100 million lines of code. So it's huge, huge code base. But you know it's been around for so long that people kept adding features here and features here and features here. And there's all these features and there's feature.
00:07:40 Brian Shaw
Glut or overload, right? And so the one thing that grabbed me about copilot. As we as an average user use about 5 to 7% of the product power, users will use 10 to 15% of the features of the product. But then you get compile, it comes wrong. Guess what, it can use 100% of the features if it needs to do something, it can use any one of those features to get it done so. What you see from copilot is some of these more advanced presentations. Some of these more advanced PowerPoints. These more advanced Excel formulas, you know, all these things that we would have to take time to learn copilots just spitting those things out. Right. And it's presenting this polished, beautiful output that we just need to tweak a little bit here and there and we're done and it looks like we've spent, you know, weeks on this presentation, it's it's taking minutes, right. So it's those type of things that I find really impactful when it comes to copilot. And you talked about, you know, there's copilots everywhere. That causes a problem and the fact that certain release channels come out quicker, like you will always get the most recent copilot in the web. So if you're using the web interface, it's always going to be the most recent release that probably multiple times per day. I mean, these things get released very. Whereas if you're using M365 copilot in teams, not the Teams Copilot, but still the M365. Yeah, may act differently than the web and so that confuses people between the two. You know, at some point we're going to get feature parity and everything's going to be stable, but the product cycle is moving so fast. It's hard to understand like I've done demos in the morning and those demos work differently or don't work in the afternoon that work that morning and I'm like, well, what? And so I have to pivot and you just have to be available for that and understand that this is a fast moving, growing product. Yeah.
00:09:33 Brian Shaw
And again, you talked about there's copilots everywhere. One of the things we like to say is we put copilot where you do work. So if you do work in whiteboard, we give you a copilot to help you out. If you do work in Word, we give you a copilot. If you do work in Notepad now, we give you a copilot, right? I mean, there's a copilot everywhere because you're doing work everywhere.
00:09:44 Mark Smith
Yeah.
00:09:54 Brian Shaw
And so we try to make it, you know, simple. Also, there's there's a classification that I like to think about is there's really 3 flavors of copilot. There's the tools. In other words, you click a button, you get a result like your e-mail, you click summarize, you get a result. You don't have to type a prompt. You don't have to say anything. You just click a button, you get a result, right? The second type is an application. Specific. So if you're in Outlook. And you want to summarize your emails for the past week, you know that copilot has been specially tuned to work with Outlook, right? It knows about your calendar. It knows about your emails, and it can do anything in outlook, but you can't really ask that one to to go do something in PowerPoint, right? Because it's not tuned for that. It's not designed for that. That's like the whole new idea of agents. And so you have agents to perform certain tasks and agents perform great at that task, but they may not perform great at at different.
00:10:48 Brian Shaw
Task same way with the application specific. Think of those as really agents for that application and then you've got the M365 copilot chat which is I like to call it the copilot to rule them all, if you will, which actually can do your entire Microsoft graph has access to all your data you can pull in more data. You can use agents. I mean, it just gives you so much flexibility. You can say create a Word document once you've created that you can say OK, now create a PowerPoint based on that Word document. It could do that, right? So it just works across the entirety of the stack.
00:11:22 Mark Smith
I I like that one agent to rule them all. And you know, last year I really liked the concept of copilot, the UI for AI. I love that concept. I think I would like to see that concept extended so much further and that employees don't have to know which AI interface to use. Just they could use a single one. And it would step them into any other world that they needed to. Ultimately, when you talk, you know with customers and you and you have, you know, the web experience and then over on the left hand side, we've got 2 agents that sit over there. We've got research.
00:11:59 Mark Smith
Yeah. And the analyst agent, so how do you talk about those and how folks in business should be thinking about those two agents specifically in context of their main chat experience?
00:12:13 Brian Shaw
That's interesting. You bring that up because I literally did a training this morning for a customer on researcher and analyst. And so when I presented it it, it's like having two additional people on your team, right? Normally you would hire a researcher to go and do work. They research certain things for you. Well, now you have a built-in researcher. That can do that work on you. Behalf. Right. So you ask it a question, it comes back, it asks more clarifying questions to make sure it understands you. You know, you clarify, you give those questions. Now it's not a fast experience. It's not designed as a fast experience because it's what's called a multi shot agent, right? It doesn't just go out, get an answer, come back and you're done, right. It's it's built on. ChatGPT 440 and so it's a multi shot agent and then you've got analyst which is 40. Mini, right. And so the mini 1 is much smaller, but again these are agents that have been fine-tuned to do the kind of work that they're suggesting, right. If you want research done, you use the researcher. If you have data that you need to analyze well, you've got that analyzer. And so remember how I talked about earlier becoming a data scientist. Well, guess what? I've got a data scientist working for. For me now, right. So I've got this analyst agent and I can ask it to go out and they can do Python code in the background. I don't even know Python. I've been trying to learn Python And now I basically every time I run analyst, I open it up and look at the Python code and I read it because I want to understand it and learn it right. So not only is it doing work for me, but it's helping me learn along with it.
00:13:47 Brian Shaw
And along that journey, and so it can take an Excel spreadsheet that you haven't been opened up and say, you know, hey, go analyze this this spreadsheet. And it'll give you. It'll take all the data in all the tables that are in that spreadsheet. It'll do comparisons. It can compare multiple files like you know what's changed between this file and that file. You know, that sort of thing. So there's a lot of things that analysts can do and give you, you know, you can say create a bar chart or a pie chart or whatever you need, and it's going to generate that graphic. On the family using Python. So it's really cool. It's like when they added Python into Excel, right? Excel when it first came out. Sorry, but it sucked, right? Because you go in it and maybe it could change the format of a column, it could change the font, might highlight a row or two, but it didn't do anything right. It didn't do anything.
00:14:31 Mark Smith
Yeah.
00:14:36 Brian Shaw
Useful. But then they went back and they reengineered. And now you can do this deep analysis and. You can like bring in multiple tables and compare them together and do you know V lookups on multiple data values and put them into a single column and then it does. You know Python that automatically generate graphs for you and pivot tables and pivot charts and all these different things that you know. Again we used to be those advanced users. That could do that, right? But now copilot is giving that ability to use that that advanced feature set that wasn't available to you before. And so a lot of people are realizing, oh, my God, I didn't. Not that I didn't know copilot could do that. I didn't know excel. To do that. Right, because it's a feature in Excel that very rarely got used, and so now we're highlighting those advanced feature sets of the tooling.
00:15:27 Mark Smith
I love that and I've experienced it first hand. The ability to do stuff that I had given up on my career doing because it didn't play to my strengths, but I am now able to do it and and I'll give you a simple example. In my career, I've always been involved in in large teams and I I was mainly in what you would call a pre sales space. I would be the one that did the orals presentation to the customer of how this piece of tech was going to transform your business before I got there, someone in the team had to have written a proposal that got us to that. Shortlist that got us to there and wouldn't touch proposals because. Is dyslexic. You know, I I'm not good with words. Well, I never thought I was right and so, but right now, I have a proposal template in Word, right, which covers everything that a modern proposal would need to respond to and pitch some form of technology to a customer. That proposal template is 50 pages long. Actually, it's 51 pages long, and all those 51 pages are prompts. It's only prompt, there's there's. There's no data in it, it's only prompt so. Right. What I've found you talk about one shot prompting and you know multi, you know prompting is that I start with researcher and I research this the customer I'm going to deal with based on all their public facing assets etcetera. It goes, dude does a whole big research apiece for me. And then I because I prefer to listen than read, as in I use a a tool that reads that entire research piece to me, and now I feel like I know this customer. I know them right because it's it's brought in such that richness. Then I go into the normal interface and I start with my grounding prompt.
00:17:18 Mark Smith
Where it asks me 10 questions about what I'm about to do. Who is the customer? What's the name of the proposal? Are there any files that I'm aware of that I want to include so I'll go? Hey, there's this OneDrive file. This was their brief from the customer. There's been these three teams meetings with their transcripts. There's been 5 emails with different people, right. I want to pull that in. I'm not just going to let the graph find them. I want to make sure I'm grounding on all the subject lines, etcetera. With that, and then I'll give in to what I propose that the pitch will be like if we've got five ways of delivering a service, I will go through, it's going to be this one, it'll ask me things about what currency are, you know, EUR, pounds, USD. All this grounding stuff and at the end of that prompt it spits me out a JSON file and this is really important because by the time I'm about 2/3 through this prompt stream, it says. Your tokens are basically run out. We can't carry on the conversation, but because I have created that JSON output, I can just create a new conversation, drop that JSON in and it's like a we're off, but it's got all the context of everything that's happened. And what is amazing to me is the ability to match and mirror the customer's wording now against the product and services. So they when they read it, they literally see their own language coming through. And I don't think people understand just how powerful for any part of business that is for them.
00:18:52 Mark Smith
Right to have that, that rich Microsoft Graph data set of your organization, the research of the customers organization and then focus it around a particular business process writing proposal in this case. And how it creates such a richer experience to all parties that then consume that document.
00:19:13 Brian Shaw
Yeah. And they're taking it a step further, too. You're talking about a lot of, you know, copy and paste and this and that. But they're taking it a step even further with agents, right. You'll be able to receive an e-mail from a customer and assuming they followed a certain format that you define when you receive that e-mail, an agent will pick that up. It'll do 90% of the work. It may come back and ask you a few clarifying questions.
00:19:29 Mark Smith
Yeah.
00:19:37 Brian Shaw
You know, like you said, what dollar? You know, figure that sort of thing and then it will complete that. It can create a teams room, it can add everybody who need. To have a say in this proposal and then it can attach the completed proposal to that team's meeting and then start the meeting for everybody. Right. And so now everybody's on the call, everyone's got the completed thing. All you got to do is.
00:19:50 Mark Smith
I love it.
00:19:56 Brian Shaw
Work through it. Finish. It and you're done. Right. So you're taking that manual staff and those things you need to follow up on. And it's following up for you. It's becoming your digital. The worker. Right. And that's where, that's where agents are going. You know, it starts off by, you know, copilot, was your assistant, right? It's your copilot. Right. So it's sitting there, it's helping you. And then soon it's gonna be, you know, doing tasks for you. Like you can distribute work to it. It'll go off and do that work and come back soon. We're not going to be.
00:20:08 Mark Smith
I love it. I love it.
00:20:27 Brian Shaw
We're going to be managing a digital workforce, right? And so we will have an army of agents working for us and all we do is make sure that the data is fed correctly into the agents to do the work, to deliver the product. Right. We're not going to be delivering the product. The agents are going to be delivering the product back to us that we can then use to and and people who don't embrace that are the ones that are on the train like, Oh yeah, he's taking my Job. Well, embrace it, right, understand it. See how it can help you. Let it make you more successful, right? And those are the people that are going to be around a long time.
00:21:04 Mark Smith
Yeah. So, so it's really interesting what you've you've you've highlighted and touched on there is around. One maybe 2 skills that I think are going to be really important for people to understand is that often in your career, unless you've done formal management training, you've never taught how to delegate, how to delegate effectively. In other words, putting here's what I need done. This is what what the a good result looks like. Here's my time frame. Here's my expectations and hey. If you have any questions, don't guess. Come back and ask right like good delegation. And so you know, sometimes I I think of this as being a good director. You're gonna direct things to happen. They're gonna be done, and then you're gonna get an output and result that you need to validate 7. How do we start training people like you talked about a digital worker and I think that this is coming at us at a speed. I don't think a lot of people realize how much we are going to be commingled in the workforce with digital workers. They will have the now, so they'll have this SME, the expertise of their subject area and say they're a marketer and HR, digital worker, etcetera, that will bring all that knowledge to bear in a very tight fashion. But your role as a person is going to perhaps have to coordinate and and you, you know, facilitate. Love that infra now has this concept of a digital agent is still ideed as a a user right? So now you can really understand the parties and. Involved, which I think is is so critically important, but how do companies start reeducating taking their workforce on a change journey of a workforce that is not just going to be made-up of flesh and blood people?
00:22:57 Brian Shaw
Yeah. One thing that's fighting against us is the media, right. You get in the media, you get all these people saying, you know, that's not accurate. It's hallucinating. It's doing this or that. And so I started working with a customer about six months ago. And the first thing they told me is, well, copilot can't do my year end clothes because it's not accurate. So I can't use. Pilot and that was such a short sighted view as to what copilot is. A lot of times our biggest challenge when talking to a customer is opening their eyes to all the things that AI is now doing, right? Yes, it's doing generative AI. Yes, it's coming up with text for you, but it's doing so much more.
00:23:20 Mark Smith
Yeah.
00:23:37 Brian Shaw
It's, you know, answering your emails is classifying your your meeting invites. It's doing categorizing your e-mail. It's doing all these things that we used to have to do manually, and it's doing it for us so that we can be more efficient and. You know, do things a lot easier than we used to do before. One of the things I do a lot of presentations and so I would spend an hour, maybe an hour and a half after every presentation just you know, coming up with notes. I'd rewatch the video. I'd take notes. I'd do all these things just to come up with a good follow up e-mail. Now, I basically say copilot. Good recap of this meeting and I send that out and it takes me, you know, 3 minutes. Something that you take? An hour and a half. And so you know, just those savings are huge.
00:24:17 Mark Smith
Yeah.
00:24:21 Mark Smith
You know, when I like, I'll give you an example from the legal profession. I've heard recently, you know, the legal profession operates on a model of bill by. A minute. I think they in New Zealand they have a three minute cycle that I understand is that every 3 minutes it needs to be allocated to. If I say if you're photocopying 3 minutes, whatever it gets allocated to a bill, right. And that's why often lawyers have seen it as expensive. And this organization, they were doing a legal matter. At scale for businesses, they charge $25,000 every time. They did this for a customer and we're talking about in commercial law, right? So you know, the high end of town, absolutely. It was 40 hours of work for a lawyer to do this, which was charged at $25,000. They turned round and implemented AI as part of that procedure and reduced the time to do that 40 hours of work to four hours. Right now, the company might go hang on a second. It's. We can only Bill 4 hours for something we're billing 40 hours before that's gonna hurt our business. What they did was it said, hang on a second. We now can have that lawyer do X, factor the number of these same things in a 40 hour period. What we're going to do is half the price of it in my. Pocket. For our customers.
00:25:45 Mark Smith
But we get this massive X Factor of the number we can put out. So we're actually going to make a lot more yet drive down the price for the customer. And I'm like that is amazing win win scenario of using AI to create better outputs at scale. Everybody wins the the law firm can do more work of this type and therefore build really more. Hours through the leverage they've created and the customer gets it at half of what their traditional buy price and market was.
00:26:12 Brian Shaw
That's the economies of scale. That's what's made Walmart so successful, right? Because they can buy in such huge bulk, they get cheaper prices. They just discount cheaper than the competitors, but they're still getting the same markup, but they're getting are even more because they bought in such discount. So yeah, that's the economies of scale. So as you scale this up, you can't think about the individual, you know, difference in it. You got to think about how many more would that allow that lawyer to do right.
00:26:25 Mark Smith
Yeah.
00:26:40 Brian Shaw
Or do you even need the person that was doing that? That's a salary that you might be able to get by without now again, that we come back to people is all fearful of losing their jobs to AI, but just you got to position yourself in the right way to understand how it can help you and your business. And you will be successful.
00:26:56 Mark Smith
Yeah.
00:26:59 Mark Smith
My last question, as we draw to a close is how do you get beyond the concept of first impressions and and what I mean by that is that I've noticed when copilot is implemented in organizations where the IT just turns it on roll out, let's say 2000 licenses, they don't do any adoption program, no training program. And then three to six months later, they. You know or. It it's useless. Nobody's using it now. Dana shows nobody's interested, etcetera. And I feel like the first impression to everybody was not a great impression because they were never taken on a journey and showing the art of the possible, and therefore that and so how do you move people from that first impression been bad. Because what I've noticed is that all of a sudden they're looking over the shoulder of somebody that. Hits it. In fact, I was doing this today with somebody in Canada. I showed them how I was doing that proposal type stuff and their eyes just like exploded out of their head because I could see the neurons firing in their brain, so to speak, of all their use cases that now just opened up to them beyond what they were thinking. And so. How? How have you found to move folks from their first bad impression to actually this tool is gonna revolutionise my life.
00:28:14 Brian Shaw
So that's a great point because when we first saw Copa that come out, you know there we haven't seen a desire for a product this high. You know that we say internally the best way to get a large attendance to your meeting is to put AI or copilot in the title and your meeting attendance will double or triple because everybody's interested in it. But even the art of the possible.
00:28:30 Mark Smith
Yeah.
00:28:34 Brian Shaw
The art of the possible gets you excited about it, but once you get it, you try those 3-4 or five things that you've seen in the art of the possible. Then you go Yep, that works, and then you go back to doing your day-to-day job. It's not an immediate grasp of the tooling. And so when? We first started up, we we had a lot of these competitions to see how many people could use copilot consistently, and we have called daily active users, right? So the Dow. And so we're trying to get our Dow up because they say you have to use the product and save at least 20 minutes a week over A7 week six or seven week period.
00:29:10 Mark Smith
Interesting.
00:29:11 Brian Shaw
And then you understand how it can save you long term, right? Then you get it. And that's when the light bulb goes off and you understand it. So even just doing it for a week, if you don't, it's if you don't train your.
00:29:22 Brian Shaw
Yourself to go back and use this and you know, use it for learning. Use it for summarization, use it for you know, what did I do last week or what? What was the status of this issue that we ran last week? I forgot it was last Friday, right? It's a three day weekend. I forgot everything that happened last week, right? So reminding me what happened last week so I can follow up on those things this morning.
00:29:39 Mark Smith
Yeah.
00:29:43 Brian Shaw
That sort of stuff. Those are the things that are going to have you reusing the product every single day, so.
00:29:50 Mark Smith
Of it, Brian, it's been so cool talking to you. I've learned so much and I love when I I talked to a person's, been at Microsoft for a long time, where a lot of folks in their careers get tired of the company they work for. They don't.
00:30:03 Mark Smith
Angle up and get even more excited and I can just see that excitement coming through from you.
00:30:08 Brian Shaw
Oh, I'm very passionate when it comes to copilot and and all the things that can do. I mean, I always tell myself I can't wait to see where it's going to be in five years. And I also tell people that the copilot you're using today is the dumbest copilot you'll. For use because it's constantly getting better, it's constantly improving and before you know it, I mean you're going to look back and go, what was I doing with copilot? I was making funny images of unicorns standing on the moon. I mean, what, you know, could it do it? Yes. But why was I doing it right? Because I was. Learning to use the product so. The product is awesome. So many different features and more and more features coming out every single day. So give it a shot.
00:30:47 Mark Smith
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host, Mark Smith, otherwise known as the nz365guy. Is there a guest you would like to see on the show from Microsoft? Please message me on LinkedIn and I'll see what I can do final question for you. How will you create with copilot today? Kakute.

Brian Shaw
As a Customer Success Account Manager at Microsoft, Brian Shaw works with a portfolio of enterprise clients to help them achieve their business goals and maximize the value of their Microsoft products and services. He brings over 15 years of experience in the computer software industry, with a strong background in technical support, service engineering, and customer relationship management.
His core competencies include Microsoft Azure, Dynamics CRM, Power BI, Windows 11, server architecture, group policy, PowerShell, and automation. Brian also has a keen interest and expertise in generative AI and artificial intelligence for business, and he holds multiple certifications in these areas. His mission is to empower his customers with innovative and scalable solutions that enhance productivity, efficiency, and growth.