From Theatre to Tech: Building AI Mindsets That Stick

00:00:06 Mark Smith
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called How to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, Let's get on with the show. We're back on the MVP show. My guest is from Germany. She's a Microsoft 365 Solution Consultant at Communicado. Welcome, Tanya, to the podcast.

00:00:45 Tanja Wiehoff
Thank you so much. Hello.

00:00:47 Mark Smith
Great to have you on. Tonight, it seems I have a lineup of guests all from the Northern Hemisphere and all from Europe, actually. Before we get started, tell me a bit about food, family, and fun. What do they mean for you in Germany?  What's your favorite food? What do you do with the family, and what do you get up to fun-wise?

00:01:07 Tanja Wiehoff
I'm A foodie, I would say. I love to go to restaurants. I love to experience new stuff from other countries, from other cultures. And I also love to cook. Right now I'm doing my own apple juice because we have an apple tree in the garden, which is pretty full. We have a good apple year here in Germany. So I'm really into doing a lot with apples, but I prefer Italian food actually. I'm originally from Austria, so I really love sweet stuff. You know, people from Austria love everything with sugar, butter and pig. That's not what I prefer. There's a lot of stuff connected to sugar and butter. Yeah, I also have a sweet tooth. I think that's the English phrase for it, right?

00:01:52 Mark Smith
Yes, yes.

00:01:53 Tanja Wiehoff
Family is also pretty important to me. Of course, I have a three-year-old daughter. I just brought it to the kindergarten in Germany right now. It's in the morning. It's not the evening show for me. It's the morning show. Yeah, and of course, family always comes first, even comes first before community stuff. But that also leads to fun, actually. I get a lot energy in the community, in the M365 community, when I'm doing, when I'm standing on stages, when I can talk on podcasts. So thanks for the invitation. I get a lot of energy from that. And that is fun to me, actually. That's kind of my, I do that in my free time, in my spare time. I love community stuff. That is fun. Yeah.

00:02:41 Mark Smith
That's so cool. That's so cool. My boy has just turned three years old. last week. So I've got one.

00:02:49 Tanja Wiehoff
We're sitting in the same boat.

00:02:52 Mark Smith
Yes, except for I've just put mine to bed because it's, yeah, he's finished his daycare day. Tell me about how you got into tech.

00:03:05 Tanja Wiehoff
That's a good question. You know, originally I... 15 years ago. I studied musical theater. So I wanted to become a musical actress actually and so I began my career in The music area then I turned into public communication. I did my first bachelor's degree in Vienna in the branch of a public communication and then I met my now husband and he was a studying, I think mechanical engineering is the English word for it. And he has a doctor's degree in mechanical engineering. And I was always good at maths. So I thought maybe I could do some business engineering. Maybe that's something, the next bachelor for me. And I studied a full-time job and then I studied after work and at the weekends. So I got into tech by studying business engineering. And then I picked up a job in Ingolstadt, which is the home base of Audi. And I got into project management when it comes to autonomous driving assistance systems. And that was my first job in the tech industry. And the next job was as a, I don't know, how can I say, assistant to the CEO actually of a startup which worked in, or which developed a learning management system. So I slided a little bit into the software assessment area. And I haven't had a course yet about software engineering or development and all that stuff. I just did it by myself. And I used a lot of Microsoft Learn stuff, of course. I watched a lot of YouTube videos. Yeah, and that's how I got into tech industry. So I'm not a techie at all.

00:05:02 Mark Smith
What was the LMS system?

00:05:04 Tanja Wiehoff
LMS is a learning management system, actually.

00:05:07 Mark Smith
No, but what was the brand? What was the brand?

00:05:10 Tanja Wiehoff
Oh, it's called Tutulio. Yeah, it's a learning management system for the healthcare industry. So for doctors and assistants in that area, and they have a lot of special courses, and they just build a learning management system just for that branch. So yeah, that was the job actually. And we rolled out M365 in the startup, and that's how I got into the M365 area five years ago. So then I switched into becoming an M365 solution consultant.

00:05:39 Mark Smith
Got you. Tell me about the last two years. The last two years where Copilot hit the world stage and has taken over your life. Tell me about that piece.

00:05:54 Tanja Wiehoff
Yeah, totally right. The last two years were fully packed with Copilot stuff. Two years ago, I came back from my parental leave, actually. And when I came back, they just rolled out Copilot or they announced Copilot. At the beginning, it wasn't open to public at all. I think you had to buy-- what was the start of Copilot? I think you had to buy 50 licenses or more to even get-- yeah. It was really hard to get a Copilot license. And it was also hard for us at Communado, as a Microsoft partner, to get a single Copilot license because we don't have 50 people in our Microsoft the Microsoft sector. So at the beginning, we had no chance to try out Copilot because we didn't want to buy 50 licenses, of course. So that changed in January, right? And before I did Copilot, I actually built a lot of intranets based on SharePoint Online. I did a lot of stuff with Viva connections, of course, to get the intranet to bring that into Teams and all that stuff. And then Copilot came. And then I decided, okay, I will focus on Copilot from now on. And I did, I still did a lot of intranets because, companies haven't had access to get Copilot, but it helped me to focus into a new technology and to learn with Microsoft. So I just built up my knowledge with all the new functions and all the new features, and that's why I'm doing just Copilot projects right now. So I'm just focusing on doing Copilot workshops and Copilot labs and all that stuff.

00:07:34 Mark Smith
And so when you do these workshops and labs, are you taking companies where they've decided they've purchased the Copilot licenses or they're going to purchase it and are you going through a program or like a change management or an adoption program? Are you showing them? the art of what they possibly can do with it, how does their work look like now with the technology of AI? How do you take them on that journey? What are the moving parts that you work with to take a group of people from not knowing about Copilot to being effective with Copilot?

00:08:13 Tanja Wiehoff
You know, the typical... The answer for that is it depends. It depends, of course, on the company, but we're doing a lot of stuff in the area of change and adoption, of course, because I think that's the most important part when it comes to rolling out Copilot is to build up an AI mindset with all the employees. I think it doesn't make any sense to teach them or to train them on how to use Copilot and then to leave to leave them alone or to not give them more time to experience or to get to know their own use cases. So I think that's the biggest problem right now that companies are experiencing from my point of view, because I already gave a lot of trainings and then we, at the beginning, we left the people alone with the technology. And you know, I'm sure you know it. I know that it, there is a lot of stuff going on with Copilot every week. There are new features, there are new functions, and it's so hard to just keep up with, always keep up with the new stuff. So, right now, we focus on... having more contact points or more enablement with already trained users. And we do not only do that, or I do not only do that with people who already got a license, I also do that with people for the copilot chat. So we enable them before they get the copilot license already. So they get to know what is copilot chat doing, what is GPT-5 currently doing, how can I use that, how can I create pictures and all that stuff. And when they are when they experience their use cases or when they think they need a license, then they go into the next level of the adoption and change program. So that's what we are currently doing. So there's not a straightforward way of doing it. It's some kind of a curvy road, I would say. And it always depends on the culture in the company. That's also a really important point.

00:10:15 Mark Smith
Yeah. You mentioned the word the AI mindset. And how do you get an organization? How do you move their culture to an AI mindset? What are some of the things that you do to start getting people to think, copilot first? How can I use AI to augment my skill set? How do you change the mindset of an organization? What's involved?

00:10:42 Tanja Wiehoff
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that has to be going on to change the mindset. I think one of the most important points is to train executives or to get your executives into the boat, right? That's one of the most important points. They have to be a role model when it comes to AI usage. And the second stuff is you have to do ongoing trainings. You have to have something like AIMA sessions, a community in Viva Engage, for example, where people can exchange to all that new stuff. You have to give them a platform, maybe a knowledge platform, to inform them about new stuff, new use cases that are currently rolling out. And I think it's also important to give them time.mThis is not something that's going to change overnight.mIt also took me months To use Copilot regularly, of course, Copilot at the beginning wasn't that good, to be honest, so that was also a technical reason why it took me months, but right now I'm using Copilot. nearly every hour. So if I have some kind of question, I have to do some research on my company data or that stuff. I'm using that really regularly right now. And it also took me a lot of change and adoption in my AI mindset. And it took me time. Even though I'm a heavy user, I'm maybe one of the heaviest users of Copilot, but it's also where I have to reflect myself. So can I do that with AI? Would it be effective to use AI. And I think what's also important is to bring fun to AI. It makes fun to build images to maybe it's some nonsense use cases. It's not maybe it's something not important, but maybe people have fun to use AI that are also good use cases, even if they don't have a return on investment. So I think that's also an important point. Not everything has to bring a return on investment when you're using AI. I think most of the time, I'm just getting better quality or I'm more creative. Sometimes I'm even, I'm even, Not lazier. Yeah, lazy. I'm always lazy when I'm using AI. I have a lazy mindset already. But I'm not faster when I'm using AI most of the time. I'm just more creative and get better quality. And I think that's really important. Also, again, in the executive area, it's not always a return on investment. It's not always saves you money. It's just giving people better quality in their working experience or working life.

00:13:25 Mark Smith
When you have the conversations with the executives, I'm very, I'm interested to see, like, how do you get them on board? What kind of like what use cases do you know will resonate with an executive audience that might be different for other parts of the organization?

00:13:40 Tanja Wiehoff
It totally depends on the executives, right? And it also totally depends on their personality. So when we are doing executive trainings, we always have a smaller group of people because they want to have a lot of interactions. They have a lot of questions and they want to be really focused. 31, fast pace, of course. They don't have the time to sit in a really slow pace training. And I think it's extremely important to find the perfect use case for each executive. And there is not a blueprint for that, right? You have to show them a lot of use cases, a lot of standard use cases to get them, to bring them into a thinking process. And then maybe they can talk about that process with you and you're just using Copilot, doing some hands-on training, say, hey, this is the perfect use case for you. And if you, what is the English word for it? If they think that's good, what is it when you bring someone to the idea that this is pretty good stuff, when you change their mind? I don't know the English word for it, but maybe you changed our mind about AI and Copilot and you really, I have to look for the word. I'm sure it's an easy word.

00:14:57 Mark Smith
It's like an aha moment.

00:14:59 Tanja Wiehoff
It's an aha moment, right? Yeah, totally. That's what I mean.

00:15:02 Mark Smith
Tell me about this latest blog post. And did you say surveys, agent surveys?

00:15:09 Tanja Wiehoff
Yeah, it's the service agent, actually. And I really like the service agent, not the use case behind it, to build up a new service or to use forms. That's what the agent is doing, actually. It's the combination of an agent pulling out forms and doing some settings for you. It's just like computer use within an agent. And it's doing also changes in the design. It's suggesting how to roll out that survey, actually. It's even telling you when to roll out the server, when to publish the survey, you can monitor it. So this is really awesome. I love the service agent because this is the future of agents, I would say, to be really assistance, not only retrievers, you know, retrieval agents.

00:15:56 Mark Smith
I love it. I love it. That's very cool and a very cool feature. I've seen it, I've used it, I've worked with it. I do love it. Tania, thank you so much for coming on the show. I can't wait to meet you at the next MVP Summit.

00:16:08 Tanja Wiehoff 
Thank you so much for the invitation. I really love to talk to you about all that stuff. Thank you, Mark.

00:16:19 Mark Smith
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host, Business Application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the nz365guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffee.com/nz365guy. Thanks again, and see you next time.