Copilot’s Real Impact: Transforming Productivity in Business

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. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the MVP show. Today's guest is from Missouri. Welcome to the show, Alan.

00:00:41 Alax Cox
Hey, great for having me. I Appreciate it.

00:00:44 Mark Smith
Alan, I always like to start with food, family, and fun. The side of you that's not in the technical limelight, what do they mean to you? Food, family, and fun.

00:00:55 Alax Cox
Man. Food, man, that's a tough one. Probably Italian is probably Italian or Mexican food across the board is my favorite. So yeah, I'm not too far from Kansas City, so BBQ would be a really close third from that. So family, let's see, I've got my wife and I have raised four boys, ages now from 24, 23 to 27. with from that we have 3 grandsons and one granddaughter with one grandson on the way. So we're, they are wasting their time. So that's, that is a lot of that fun. Mostly the lake. We just got back from our lake house. We trying to get one more, maybe one more after this lake day on the boat. We'll see. It's cooling down. But yeah, that's a big part of what we do. And my wife and I, we're at a point where she can travel with me, which is nice. We went to Memphis to get a conference I just did there. She's going to Austin with me and she's going to Dallas with me. So we're in a really good spot where she could do that. So we do enjoy traveling and whether that's around conferences or fun, going on cruises, we'll do that in April, go down to Honduras. So That's a lot of it, but lake by far is anything around waters are family time.

00:02:22 Mark Smith
So what were you doing in November 2022? ChatGPT hit the world stage. We're all at different places in our tech career. How have things changed for you from that, you know, the last couple of years? How has AI entered the scene for you, copilot and the likes? How's it changed what you do?

00:02:43 Alax Cox 
I got to tell you, it has completely transformed really my entire direction as far as my focus around the 365 stack. Honestly, I have, and it's funny, I tell people, you know, if I'm going back 10, 12 years, I've got PowerPoint presentations to tell people why they should not go to Microsoft 365, right? Or back in those days, you know, it was just, it was just, you know, it was pretty much e-mail, right, singing through all of that. And so then I've always been an exchange guy all the way back to five, five days. I was always that guy. And so, and then of course, as that evolved into the cloud and Exchange Online, and then that expanded into the whole collaboration space, we were talking Teams and SharePoint, how it all kind of meshes together. And I will never forget, I was on the phone with a friend of mine, a guy I worked with for years.was talking about this ChatGPT. And honestly, I had never really give it much thought several years ago, and I never really thought a little bit about it. I've heard some of the AI stuff. And honestly, we tell our clients all the time, AI is nothing new to Microsoft. They've been doing it for decades. When you think of flash fill in Excel, right? That's looking for patterns and things that it can and the focused inbox inside of inside of Outlook, right, is using some algorithm to kind of determine what should be focused versus not focused. So nothing new to Microsoft. But then when this started evolving in Copilot, I always tell clients, Microsoft has a tendency to kind of start flat. They just do. They, in my opinion, I think Microsoft kind of goes to market a little bit early on some things. The reason that they do is because they're so focused on the compliance side of things and the security side of things. They want to make sure that is right before they really introduce good quality into the product. But now when we fast forward, so a lot of the negative things I hear about Copilot today, it's a year and a half, two years old. It's thinking in the last six months, anybody that's worked with Copilot in the last six months, really since Frontier, it's a completely different product today. Microsoft is definitely gotten their feet under them on this, even just this last week when you're talking, agent mode in Excel and Word and the analyst agents and the researcher and all of the stuff introducing Claude into there as well now, right?

00:05:20 Alax Cox
So when Microsoft gets going, nobody competes with them. It's just, they are a little slow to start, but where it has taken me in the last year, honestly, I don't know that I would be, because this is my first year MVP. I don't know I would be an MVP without Copilot because it really lit a fire under me. And even though I've always spoken at conferences and I've helped communities, I've tried to do that. But I think that this was the, I tell people, this is the best thing Microsoft came out with in Teams back in 2017. And I think it's even more than that. But What we tell our clients all the time is that, when me and my trainer on my staff, we run a jumpstart program for Copilot to help organizations keep going with Copilot. And what we tell them all the time is, you know, today, as much as all the greatness you're seeing in Copilot, it's as bad today as it's ever going to be. So when you think of that, but it is really, it really, I would say, accelerated and motivated me to really, I feel like Microsoft has a much bigger story to tell. And as part of that evangelist for 365, we all now have a better story to tell around that. And so So really that's, if you go, I have a newsletter that I put out, almost 99% of the content there is about copilot. I'm doing YouTube now, relatively new, but that's mostly about copilot. Every topic I speak on is about copilot for the most part. It's just, yeah, so it's, it has definitely accelerated, really changed the direction instead of just 365, status quo, okay, great, Teams is awesome, SharePoint's cool, But what Copilot's now doing, and now the knowledge agent inside of SharePoint, every day, 250 changes between now and December is coming out. So.

00:07:22 Mark Smith 
When you first engage a new company and they've decided that they're going to acquire the, you know, the $30 SKU from Microsoft, they're going to get Copilot in for that. How do you take and where their executives are saying, hey, will we get a return on investment? Like, how do you make sure, or how do you enable an organization to really get to the point where there's no longer a discussion that the value exchange of the price of the product to what they, the staff get in return, it's a no-brainer.

00:07:54 Alax Cox
Yeah, that's a great one. When I, when I first, when Copilot, when I first heard about the price point that Copilot was going to land, I was like, wow, that's not too far off of an E3 license, right? I mean, that's kind of steep. But then as I started really digging into it myself and as it matured and the product started really growing and I started, I started running some ROI numbers myself and I, and I started just the numbers themselves, you know, for example, If a person is drawing a salary of 70,000 US dollars a month, a year, they only have to save themselves 54 minutes a month in order to recoup that time, that value. So when you start thinking, if I can save $54 a month and I've got somebody that's making 70,000, of course, if it's double that, then it's double the time, but I save that every day, every day. Microsoft has a stat and I've seen it firsthand. 83% of their people see that it saves them about 29% of their day. So almost 1/3 of their day. So way that translates from Copilot, what I do when I get on a call with a client, I had several today, I give them some baseline questions to make sure that Copilot's going to be the right fit for them in general. And then I shift to Let me not talk about it. Let's show you what it does. And so that's where we introduce our Jumpstart program. And that's a program that in my trainer, who used to train for a very large software training company that's out there, even trained Microsoft's executives on their own product. So, and I, this guy came available. I've known him for years. We hired him. He's on my team. He and I developed a jumpstart program because more often than not, we come across a client that says, well, I bought 5 copilot licenses and I really don't know what to do with it. I'm not really sure how to use it.And so they become frustrated, and then they don't get any return on that investment because they can't see the value.

So that's a situation where I say, let us walk you through it. Let us do a jumpstart where we take you through Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, Outlook, and OneDrive, and show you what it does in each of those apps. I'm just going to throw spaghetti on the wall, and you tell me if anything sticks, right? So that's what we do, and by the time they're done, they're like, That's going to save us so much time just in Teams, maybe just in Outlook, maybe in Excel, but somewhere we've seen some value and this is going to save us a ton of time. We've done probably 30 or 40 of those of Jumpstart and not a single time has we have we left that conversation and a client says, I don't think Copilot's going to work for us. Not a single time. We've always gotten work out of it too. So So the value that and the return on it is really a no-brainer. It looks steep at first, but when you start looking at the amount of time it saves you, I actually had a client says, say, What do we do with all of the time we've gotten back?

00:11:18 Mark Smith
That's amazing. That's amazing. In the various organizations you've worked in, have you found use cases that kind of took you by surprise that you were like, oh, I hadn't thought of that? Or as people start embedding it into their workflow and their daily business processes, has anything taken you by surprise as into a novel or a new unique way people are using it to to, improve their workdays.

00:11:47 Alax Cox
Probably the biggest thing, I don't know if it was so much of a surprise other than what I tell people is, because, there's a side of Copilot that people don't even realize exists, and that's the whole agentic side of Copilot. You know, they're, they're, they're used to the day-to-day productivity, oh, it's in, it's in Teams, and oh, I see it over here in OneDrive and in Outlook and, and now in SharePoint and all of that. It's, it's front and center, right? You open a Word document, it's like, like Copilot, Copilot, Copilot, it's everywhere, right? But when I introduce them to the agentic side of Copilot, and basically I tell them, if you can imagine if Power Automate can do it, then Copilot can do it. If you just think of it that way. And so when you think about probably the, I don't know if it's as unique, but we do get requests for organizations that say, you know, like if it's a recruitment organization and they want emails that come in and have a resume attachment, they want that resume to kind of be sifted through by Copilot. They maybe have that resume taken into a SharePoint site, sort it, categorize it, add it to a SharePoint list, do all of this thing, and then start sending notifications out to, hey, here's a candidate for this, you know, particular role, this position. We definitely see that sort of a situation pretty often. Anymore, not a whole lot necessarily. surprises me, but we definitely come across a lot of unique, a lot of unique situations. Our industry or our business for our organization is mostly in the private equity. So we deal with a lot of financial firms. And so a biggest ask that we get and the biggest part of that conversation is governance and compliance.

And so the security of it all, and that's where I, even in our jumpstart, we demo kind of how the security follows a document. For example, if you have a label or classification on that document, it follows that document. We demo this and we do, you know, we do emphasize the importance of getting your data ready, making sure you're not over permissioning and over sharing. And so, but that's, you know, that's probably the biggest biggest vertical that we deal with. So a big question of compliance and governance, which is why, you know, I tell clients, yeah, you can use ChatGPT and you can drag data into your context of your conversation, but where does it go from there? I'm not really sure, but if Copilot, I know exactly where it goes. It stays within that governance boundary. So it's a big conversation we have, but I don't. I don't know that anything really necessarily surprises me, but we do have a lot of, we do have a lot of use cases, because we deal with manufacturers that, product comes in or a customer has a question about a certain skew that they're doing.

00:14:44 Alax Cox 
And we do autonomous agents where that agent automatically looks up everything that customer's asking about from a known knowledge source, SharePoint site or documents, and responds to that e-mail. with nobody even having to see the e-mail that customers just getting answers back through e-mail using an autonomous agent. That's probably the most unique one right now, but we're coming across different use cases all the time.

00:15:11 Mark Smith
Have you come across any resistance in some of the organizations that you're in where people are perhaps, they've seen the media, they're concerned that AI is going to take their role and therefore that's projected then onto their implementation of Copilot?

00:15:27 Alax Cox
I do see some hesitation there sometimes, but we try to spin it in a way that Copilot is your assistant. Think of it like you're hiring somebody else to help you. It's not to take your job. In fact, here's in order to comfort folks, I tell people that Copilot still, I've not, this is a number from Microsoft. I've not seen this true in my own experience, but like with Excel, Copilot's accuracy is at 57%, which is way above everything else. But the human accuracy is still at 73%. So it still needs eyes and ears to see what's happening. In fact, on Microsoft's website, absolutely no joke, it says severe, serious bodily harm or injury or death could occur essentially relying solely on Copilot in certain situations. In other words, you don't want to rely on Copilot for life or death situations, medical practice, for example. You don't want to rely on it for financial decisions. Sure, it does good modeling. It does good forecasting. But you don't want to rely on it there. There's still human interaction needed. And I think that's not going to change. The way I look at it, I wrote an article about it a long time ago, is you're an agent boss. So you have a bunch of little agents and you just kind of tell them to go, you know, do things on their own, if you will. But that's how we describe copilot is it's literally like a copilot.

00:17:01 Alax Cox
It's there to help you. It's not the pilot, it's the copilot. And I think it's intentional. So.

00:17:08 Mark Smith 
When you get into the compliance side, are you looking at it fully from a, tools like Purview and Sentinel and the other Microsoft products that provide that level of governance? Or do you also get take organizations on the kind of, things like AI councils and really be thinking about AI a lot more strategically than just a hey, it's a new fancy new software tool that we're using at the moment. And really, I suppose, re-engineering the way we work, how much of those type of conversations are you seeing with customers?

00:17:46 Alax Cox
 Quite a bit. In fact, my team, we do talk about having an AI governance board or some sort of governance committee. We do frame those for organizations. We write policies. We help organizations write policies around AI and governance and responsible AI, right? But from a technical standpoint, it doesn't get any better than DSPM for AI inside of purview in monitoring what's happening, not only Copilot, but any AI that's running in the environment, whether it's hitting sensitive data or whether somebody's asking unethical things, it'll pull all of that information in, whether it's Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, it doesn't matter. If it's hitting 365, Copilot or Purview is aware of it. It is an E5, so you do require an E5 compliance. which because of the nature of a lot of our clients, they are on at least a compliance E5, so it's an easy discussion with them. But absolutely, again, the technical side is there in purview, but it doesn't replace human, you know, presence interaction with actual policies, written policies, right, so.

00:19:06 Mark Smith
Very good, very good. As we wrap up, tell me, What's the best bit of advice you'd give to people considering implementing Copilot in their organization?

00:19:17 Alax Cox
Have an understanding of your data. Copilot is about the data. Copilot is not going to access anything that you don't already have access to. So that's key. And that's something a lot of people are afraid of. And initially that they're like, oh, we're going to unleash AI into our environment. What's it going to surface and all that? Look, it's no different than Delve. It's no different than OneDrive. It's connecting all of the dots. So don't be afraid of it, but at the same time, do some legwork, make sure your data's not over permission to overshared. The other thing is start off with a pilot group. I always start off with executives that probably have access to everything anyway, because you get them on, it's just gonna filter down. They're gonna like, oh, Sally in HR needs this, and you know, everybody's gonna need this.

00:20:06 Alax Cox
So, get your ducks in order as far as protecting your data, make sure that you're good there. Start off with a pilot group. And then technically, treat it as if it's an assistant. Give it very detailed instructions when you're working with it. You know, I want you to write this, draft this article, draft this job description, and I want these things to be in it, in this tone, and all of this. very casual conversations. You don't have to, talk like you're a programmer or think like a robot or any of that. It's just very natural language and have fun with it. That's it. You can't, you're not going to hurt anything. Just look Copilot, just do it. And that's the biggest thing is just, have fun. Literally, I talk to copilot so much, sometimes I actually find myself apologizing to copilot because I misstated something. It's kind of weird. It's kind of weird because we're literally living completely immersed in that environment.

00:21:12 Mark Smith
Alan, thank you so much for coming on the show. I love your tip there about get the executives on board. They'll see the value and drive it out to the organization. Thank you again for coming on the show.

00:21:22 Alax Cox 
I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Anytime. Thanks.

00:21:29 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 forward slash nz365guy. Thanks again and see you next time.