AI Agents: Automate Decisions, Not Just Tasks

00:00:01 Mark Smith
Welcome to the Co-Pilot 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. Hey, welcome back to the Co-Pilot Show. Today's guest is from Athens, Greece. She's a director of business value management at Microsoft. Mary, welcome.

00:00:28 Mary Pantelopoulou
Hi, Mark. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

00:00:31 Mark Smith
Good to have you on the show. An interesting discussion because I've seen bits of the tools, et cetera, that you've been involved with, particularly around BVA for many years that I've been in the Power Platform ecosystem for so long. But before we get started, tell me a bit about food, family, and fun. What do they mean to you?

00:00:49 Mary Pantelopoulou
Everything. Like you said, I'm Greek, so everything revolves around food, family, and that results in a lot of fun, right? I reflected, as you said, that I always send my brother, who lives in London, photos of my kids, my family. And he made the observation that you do not have a single photo where you guys are not eating something, right? So we play all of our activities or we land up after all of our activities, having a really good meal, you know, and just spending a lot of family time together. For me, those go hand in hand. And it can either end in tears or in a lot of fun. You never know.

00:01:22 Mark Smith
I love it. I love it. Have you recently done some travel or moving around? Because I originally thought you were based in Redmond.

00:01:30 Mary Pantelopoulou
Yeah, I recently moved because of an issue, a personal issue that I was having. Greece is home, right? The intention is to move back and then possibly retire here. But life bordered in such a way where it needed to happen a bit sooner. So life is unpredictable that way. But yeah, here I am.

00:01:49 Mark Smith
That's so true. So we're at the tail end of Calendar 2026, midway through FY26. What's top of mind for you in the business at the moment at Microsoft? What's your focus? Particularly, what are you seeing happen in the AI landscape?

00:02:06 Mary Pantelopoulou
Yeah, so very exciting time, very cliche comment, but I really believe we're at a pivotal stage, right? It feels like, you know, when the internet was introduced and it was just such a big disruptive thing in our lives. with fear and with excitement, right, when something's unknown to you. I feel we're in exactly the same position now with the AI landscape and era. So lots of unknowns. People are trying to, you know, it's the buzzword to understand it, educate themselves, and make it applicable to their lives, right? It's here to stay. It's a big fasm of our personal lives. My kids learn with AI. Fortunately or unfortunately, I'm too old to, I don't know how to think about that really. But in work also, it's just here to stay. And it's something that can make us better at our jobs, faster at our jobs, make our companies more relevant, and then obviously help society at large. Also, there are risks, right? We're not sort of ignoring the risks that come with that. But all in all, it's a very exciting time for our company being at the forefront of it all. And then, you know, on a personal and professional basis as well.

00:03:16 Mark Smith
So, in the Microsoft ecosystem, what part of it do you look after? What are you responsible for? What's your focus?

00:03:24 Mary Pantelopoulou
So, our focus is business applications, Power Platform, and recently M365 Copilot. Those are the three main areas that we focus on. And we build, we work very closely with our customers. You mentioned the business value assessment earlier. And that is a tool that we've been using as a team and an organization for at least nine years now, right? Like you said, you mentioned, I think, the same time span. And this is where we work with our customers to help them understand what is the value that you're getting from Power Platform, from agents, from co-pilots, it's difficult to understand and it's difficult to quantify. And someone who'll be investing or is asked to make an investment needs to understand what are the benefits, right? So by adopting AI, by adopting using the Power Platform and so on, what does it mean for my organization? Yes, it's cool technology. Yes, you know, it's at the forefront of everything, but how do I bite-size chunk it so that I can, you know, understand what it means for my organization?

00:04:26 Mark Smith
Just so the listeners get a kind of an understanding, can you explain what the BVA tool is, the Business Value Assessment Tool?

00:04:33 Mary Pantelopoulou
Yeah, so it's a tool that we use and we work with companies. And every single company and organization, right, they have a strategic objectives, either to increase their top line, reduce their risk, and of course, to reduce costs. Some of them have all of those objectives. So we work with our customers, and we identify what is the use case. How would an agent or how would the Power Platform help you in your organization to be able to meet those objectives? So we use different scenarios, right? First of all, we have our own, what we call customer zero, and that is we use our own technology. So we're able to understand and quantify what does it mean for us as a company? How much money have we saved? How much more revenue have we generated? If we think about our contact center, for instance, We've been able to save hundreds of millions of dollars on productivity. So we use benchmarks. We also use use cases from other customers. So we know that in a certain industry, certain use cases, agents are used in a specific way to meet specific tasks, objectives. And then we help our customers quantify that. We make it specific and customized to them. So they're able to understand if I'm spending $1, how much am I getting in return? And why should I prioritize this investment over something else? Everyone has a finite number of resources, right? People, money and so on. So how do we help, you know, prioritize the one over the other? And it's a tool that helps us bring all of this together, right? What are the benefits on the one side versus what is the cost? We also factor in things like risk reduction. Some industries are very prone to risk. So how do we put a dollar value around a reduction in the risk that they're exposed to? So let's think of it as a financial model, a business model that helps you understand all of these financial KPIs.

00:06:24 Mark Smith
 Yeah, my observation of the tool, the BVA tool, is that it's probably one of the most powerful tools that Microsoft sellers have in their arsenal. And you know, I've been in Dynamics since 2003. So 23 years in the space. And before we had BVA, Microsoft outsourced to a company called Nucleus Research and created, and back then it was Excel, right? And you'd put the data in when we were presenting Dynamics CRM, before it was even Dynamics 365, to customers. And back then the tool was incredible in that we had to downplay how good the results are of, if you shave 10 minutes a day off because you put automation in, the impact on the business is phenomenal. So the numbers were like, ROI, 3 months, for $1,000,000 project and things like this. And so what would happen is we would downplay. And then the BVA tool came and it wasn't made for partners, right? It was made for internal. And I always thought, what an incredible tool it could get into the hands of partners, apart from the fact that it has a lot of IP, of course, and proprietary information. But I felt in the last two years, sellers, and my observation, once again, looking from outside Microsoft then, in Microsoft don't understand how powerful that tool is for them in providing business data to a customer to make a really informed and powerful decision on the savings they can make by implementing Microsoft tech.

00:07:58 Mary Pantelopoulou
100%. And, you know, I've seen an evolution over the years being in this practice that our sellers, right? We used to go in and have a technical discussion because we have a lot of cool technology. That's what everyone would gravitate to. Let me tell you about this feature and that function. This is on the roadmap, which is brilliant. You need to have that conversation. On the other hand, someone who's signing a check is not that excited about the cool, brilliant technology. It's more about why should I be spending this money? That's the tool, right? That's the vehicle to help them understand that. And also, very interestingly, when you sell business applications, it has to be relevant to the business more so than IT. So if the business don't understand it, what's in it for them? How can they benefit? Like you mentioned, We can save time. And that's brilliant, right? Everyone wants to save time. And I don't think anyone will argue with the fact that technology will help you be more productive. Copilots help you be more productive. AI helps you be more productive. But for me, the interesting thing is, what do you actually do with this time? 5, 10, 15 minutes saving, right? What do you do with it? And that's also another pivot that we have that we're helping our customers understand. So for instance, Leaders really care about what we do with their time. So nurses and doctors, right, do they get to go home 15 minutes earlier and reduce their burnout, or do they get to save another life? Do customer service representatives get to answer more calls and serve more customers? Claims adjusters, for instance, in insurance, do they make more accurate assessments, right, for their customers and for their company? And then speaking like selfishly as a salesperson, if I can spend more time with my customers, It's a better customer experience for them. I get more, I feel more productive and then I can increase my companies to, you know, top line as well. So it's the business value story, as you said, between the sellers and our team has evolved to technology, to time saving, and now to what do you actually do with that time, which is the most interesting. That's effectively what everyone's trying to solve for, right? by creating that capacity.

00:10:11 Mark Smith
And it takes a bit of thinking. And this is why I feel you're very correct in that this is not just a sell to IT story, the AI story, right? Because it does affect every part of the business. And my observation is if I was to target one executive role that is most pro-AI, it's the finance department. Because they can see the benefit, the financial implications that it can bring to the organization. And recently, I've told the story before on the podcast about a law firm in the US that charged a $25,000 odd for a legal matter, a piece of work that they did in corporate law over and over again, many, many of them a year. And it would take typically 40 hours to do that piece of work. They introduced AI into the business. and they were able to reduce the time to do that work down to 1/4 of what it was taking. And so the thing is in law firms, right, they get charged by every three minute interval. They don't want to reduce their potential billing costs. What they were able to do is half the price of that matter sale, so about 12 and a half thousand they sold to the customer, but they're able to output four of them in the same amount of time that it took them to do one in the past. And I see, that's why I think the business thought through needs to be a bit more because in that case, the customer benefit, they're getting the same legal service at half the price, same quality, if not better, maybe less error. And then you have folks in the business have the ability to put, you know, 4X what they're outputting in the same amount of time. And that's why I think more and more the business sale around artificial intelligence, Copilots, Copilot Studio, and the tech from Microsoft is so much more around thinking about the business impact, even the end customer impact of what can be done with AI rather than just shaving off a few minutes. And it's here. I think it goes way beyond like the automation or productivity story we had in the past.

00:12:20 Mary Pantelopoulou
Yeah, exactly. That's a really good way of thinking about it is how do I use AI to automate complex business processes, right? And the one school of thought is I have this business process that's repetitive, right? That humans don't need to be doing the same action again and again and again. How do I automate that, right? And how do I make it intelligent? And then how do I use the data? Another way of thinking about it is what I always encourage customers to do is think about your processes, but rethink them. Does the process still need to be the way it is? And then we sprinkle a little bit of AI to do certain functions for us. And then obviously shorten the cycle, shorten the process, and have your humans work on the really thing, you know, the things that only humans can and should work on, right? So for me, it's not just... replacing the activity with AI, it's rethinking, like you said, finance, financial reconciliations, right? AI can do that for you. So if a finance analyst, you know, someone in the leadership team can get the data and spend their time influencing decisions, helping management understand trends, forecasting, taking the business to the next level where we weren't able to do so before because we didn't have the ability to analyze and action the huge amount of data that gets generated every day in every company. Humans are not able to, you mentioned Excel. I'm the biggest fan of Excel there is. I still use it for every single thing that I do. But that's not what will get a company to the next level, right? And be able to really deeply understand and make sense of the data and the trends and make informed decisions for the management team. So again, you can automate tasks, it's not a good to have anymore, right? It's AI is becoming the backbone of our modern business applications. So how do we use that to optimize our processes and rethink them? I would encourage everyone, you know, since we're doing the exercise, change things up, make them more applicable to what they should be.

00:14:29 Mark Smith
Yeah. I like that Microsoft earlier this year released the white paper on frontier firms. And really, the big takeaway I took from that is don't just, as you say, sprinkle AI over your existing processes. What about if you looked at it from a lens of, if I was to re-engineer this process or I was re-engineer this part of my business and I had the tooling of AI now, how different would it be? How, you know, to really go back to how would I re-engineer that with a clean slate, and of course, with budget allowing. One of the other things that Microsoft has indexed on heavily over time, and I don't know, because of my exposure inside Microsoft, the way this is so public as well, is the concept of 1 Microsoft. And 1 Microsoft, once again, I think it's one of the most compelling reasons to go with Microsoft as a company, But often I see then sellers, and I'm talking about Microsoft sellers not getting the full one Microsoft picture that if they would bring in a colleague from another part of the business that maybe in, if you're in bus apps, they might have been in modern work or in Azure or something, that the one Microsoft story of bringing Microsoft to bear from all its software asset bases into an organization, The synergies of that one Microsoft are incredibly compelling, but I still see so many people just selling what, I'm selling Power Platform or I'm selling Power Apps or, you know, Copilot Studio. And I'm, is there a way to, you know, get staff more on board to telling that full one Microsoft story? You know, I remember years ago being in an insurance company with a Microsoft seller, I was Back then I had a title of V, I was a V-dash that was a TSP in Microsoft. And I remember sitting down with the CTO of this large insurer and he said, the reason we weren't like Microsoft in the room is not because you have software to sell, but because Microsoft has visibility across all the industries in the world. And therefore, there might be something that you've seen in PubSec that might really apply to the insurance industry, but we've never been exposed to it. So we hope that you, Microsoft, will bring those kind of stories in from totally unrelated industries and go, you know, have you thought about it this way? And I mean, you've seen an insurance where they've got into GIS information, and of course, they're using AI massively now to adjust claims, et cetera, based on any number of parameters. And I just wonder, If that's a story that you're still promoting, is it still something that's very prevalent in Microsoft at this time?

00:17:11 Mary Pantelopoulou 
Yeah, so you're spot on. You know, having a One Microsoft approach is one of our core values, right? This is what we strive for. Are we there yet? It's a process, right? Sometimes we do a better job than others, but that is one of our core values, and this is what we're all trying to do. So we're trying to be a trusted and strategic partner to our customers, and not just a transactional partner, right? So when you have that direct customer engagement, we found that this continuous feedback loop, like what we're hearing from the customer, what we convey to engineering, marketing, and so on, that creates a higher customer satisfaction. Our customers feel heard. You know, another way of achieving this one Microsoft story is simplifying our processes, right, and reducing the complexity. So one way that we've done that is we've created now we've bought modern work and business applications together in a team called ABS, right? So AI business solutions, exactly for that reason, right? So we can simplify it for our customer. And then internally, we have one voice, right? It's across modern work. Security and Azure, I think they are separate for now because they're so technically different, right? Yeah. The modern work and business application, when we're thinking about co-pilots and we're thinking about AI, spans across both. There isn't a start and a stop, right? It's a business process. And people, individuals who are employees and the workforce itself spans across both. There isn't a start and a stop, right? It's one way of working. And then thirdly, giving our customers guidance on, like you were saying, how do we achieve these business goals and objectives with better governance, readiness, business models to help them gain that speed and adoption? Also, we have industry experts, like you mentioned, right? Like, this is what's in the industry. These are the use cases. This is what's been seen commonly in your industry or in your sector, anywhere in the world, right? Or in other companies and in other industries to help our customers adopt and just realize that business benefit that much faster. So again, it is a core priority of ours and our mission, and I think we are getting there.

00:19:24 Mark Smith
Yeah. We're almost at the end of calendar 2025, going into 2026. What excites you about the upcoming year, the potential of it, where AI might go? What's top of mind for you as you look forward to the next six months?

00:19:41 Mary Pantelopoulou
Yeah, so I think Gartner predicted something like 75% of the companies will be building new enterprise apps with low-code tools, right? So Microsoft is at the core of that, and that's very exciting, right? How can our customers, how can we continually help our customers in the digital transformation? It is a lot and it's overwhelming. I think that's what excites me the most. There's so much potential. And our customers are just, some are, like you mentioned, the frontier firms, some are frontier firms. And we co-innovating with them. They're at the front end of the game. But we have a lot of other customers who are not quite there yet, right? They're in different stages of their journey. And that excites me the most, I think, because it's how do you get everyone on board, keep companies realizing the value, employees being more productive. Like we were saying in the beginning, it's just such an exciting time and place to be in from a technology perspective. So there's just so much more to come. And that is really exciting.

00:20:42 Mark Smith
As we wrap up, my final question is around Dynamics and the Power Platform and the joining together with modern work. We've seen phenomenal growth. in BizApps, right? And as I say, the time I've been around, I remember when inside Microsoft, the BizApps team was kind of the **** of jokes inside Microsoft that it paid for the Christmas, you know, picnic, so to speak. It was never, and now it's, you know, the revenues are through the roof as a business unit. Charles Lamanna has 7,000 plus in his org. It's A phenomenal business. How do you see AI impacting business apps specifically? Probably not how do you see it or like what do you know? But yeah, are you excited about where things are going with the advent of AI coming fully into the mix of these business tools? We've already seen in things like contact center management, the multiple AI agents that now come out-of-the-box from Microsoft that absolutely empower contact centers And I think Microsoft is probably going to rise to the leader of that pack with the advancements they've made.

00:21:50 Mark Smith
Is there anything else that kind of for the Dynamics Suite and the Power Platform Suite that kind of excites you when you mix that with AI?

00:22:00 Mary Pantelopoulou
Yeah, totally. You mentioned pre-built agents, right? So currently, we have pre-built autonomous agents in sales, service, finance, supply chain, and customer insights. And this is exciting because it means that by automating multi-step tasks, right, agents can also make decisions. So it's taking it to the next level. The agents can free up time for our individuals where they can make decisions like fulfill inventory, right? If they see it at a certain level, they can perform financial reconciliations that we already mentioned. And then the traditional CRM and ERP, right, are transformed into intelligent platforms. They won't be used the way we've traditionally been using a CRM and an ERP. That whole custom, you know, user experience will change. And the data, again, like we mentioned, can be actioned and analyzed and informed decisions can be made like never before. So the concept of CRM and ERP will remain, but with the AI component, the way we'll be using it and the data that we'll be mining from it, I think that's where the difference will lie. And then again, it'll impact the customer experience, right? So with agents and analytics, we can deliver high personalized interactions. We weren't able to before, right, real time, by tailoring our offers with our customers. we again weren't necessarily being able to do that before. So I think both the CRM and the ERP, a lot of investment, like you said, from our company has gone into these applications. But probably the way we use them will morph over time from a user experience. Lots of potential there as well. Very exciting.

00:23:46 Mark Smith
Totally agreed. We're going into Christmas, end of the year. Hopefully you have a great time. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate you taking the time out. And One day I'll get to Greece. I haven't been there yet, but I'll get there one day. Yes.

00:23:59 Mary Pantelopoulou 
Open invitation should be #1 on your bucket list. Thank you and have a wonderful holiday as well.

00:24:05 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? Kakite.