Building Copilot Habits That Actually 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. Welcome back to the MVP show. Our guest today is from Austria. She specializes in Microsoft Copilot. Amelia is a modern workplace trainer and consultant at Let's Flow 365. Welcome, Amelia.

00:00:50 Amelia Hernandez Osorio 
Hi. Hello, Mark. Thank you for having me.

00:00:53 Mark Smith
I'm excited to have you on because looking at your profile, you seem to have a lot of experience in digital transformation and helping organizations on their adoption journeys. But before we start with that, tell me a bit about food, family, and fun. What does that mean to Amelia?

00:01:13 Amelia Hernandez Osorio
Yeah, that's a very cool question. Well, to me, actually, both, I mean, of course, food and family meet a lot. going back to their roots, kind of like when I think of food, think about Colombian food, which is delicious food. I'm originally from Colombia and I love Colombian food. Like that's my highlight when I'm around. And of course, when I think about family, I think, of course, about my daughter and my son and my husband and, the beautiful family and the beautiful team we are together. And I think, of course, of my Colombian family, my mother, my father. And it kind of comes everything together for food, family and fun.

00:02:12 Mark Smith
Knowing that now that you're from, as an originating from Colombia, how did you come to be in Austria?

00:02:17 Amelia Hernandez Osorio
Yes, it's actually a love story. Yes, my husband is Austrian. And at a point we decided to establish our family and our life in Austria. Exactly. We were we've been living abroad in Colombia. I lived also in the United States for almost one year and a half. And then I moved to Spain together with my husband. And at a point we decided Austria is a great place to have a family. And yes, since then we've been here more than 18 years now.

00:03:13 Mark Smith
Wow, amazing. I've been to Austria and The last big museum built in New Zealand was by an Austrian artist or designer. Yes. So there is some connection. In fact, it's in my city, this building, which was, it's called the Hunderwasser, and it was Hunderwasser.

00:03:35 Amelia Hernandez Osorio
Oh, of course. I know him too. Of course. Ah, look at this. I didn't know in your city there was a museum of Hundatpasa too.

00:03:48 Mark Smith
Yeah, it was only completed maybe three years ago. So it's very recent.

00:03:52 Amelia Hernandez Osorio
Okay, okay. Very cool, very cool. I think he deserves it. It's a very amazing artist and, you know, a lot of very interesting architectural gifts that they have, you know, left to the human being.

00:04:12 Mark Smith
Yeah. So before he died, he lived just up the road from where I am.

00:04:17 Amelia Hernandez Osorio
Oh, very cool.

00:04:18 Mark Smith
Yes. So he was a local. He was a local. Tell me, you know, if you could just summarize your career up to this point and what your focus is right now and how did you take that life path?

00:04:33 Amelia Hernandez Osorio
It all started with my decision to study computer science. So I went to university as I was 18 years old and studied computer science. And then I decided to work with web technologies. So I was interested on web technologies, of course. The internet was in, well, in a great, what's great internet times. They are still, but at that time was everything very, very new and web technologies were very interesting. And so I decided to work with web technologies and did it for a while. Then I changed path and then at a point I decided to come back to the area of web technologies. And This path actually took me to work with SharePoint. So I exactly I decided to take a job as a SharePoint project manager and I was very happy actually to work with business process automation, Nintex, SharePoint designer and all those great stuff. And That time was 2013, and exactly at a point, I was working with SharePoint 2013 on-prem, and I realized, okay, there is a lot of things happening out there in the cloud direction, and I really wanted to move to the cloud. I tried it with all my part to help this company where I was working to move to the cloud, but it was just too early for them to take a leap. So I decided to take a leap myself and I decided to start working in cloud transformation and started to work with very traditional company for a very traditional company here in Austria. And I was working as a Microsoft 365 adoption and change specialist. And it was a very interesting job because it was a dual role. So on the one side, I had Global Administrator role, and on the other side, I was nurturing a community of volunteers and helping people to grow with Microsoft Teams and with Microsoft 365 tools. Of course, those were pandemic times, so I was in charge of the rollout of Microsoft Teams, and those were very, very, very interesting time. I learned a lot and realized how important for me and for the people is. is to to have adoption and change strategy and to work towards not only training, but towards really helping people to understand what's in it for them to understand or to help them on their way to to to embrace our related tools. And yes, and in 2023, I decided to to become an independent model workplace trainer and consultant. And right now, I'm focusing myself a lot on the area of copilot adoption and a lot of contracts in the area of copilot training.

00:08:33 Mark Smith
Interesting. And it is such a big subject, copilot, under M365. I saw a term that you've used called the copilot habit.

00:08:45 Amelia Hernandez Osorio
Yes.

00:08:47 Mark Smith
Tell me about that.

00:08:49 Amelia Hernandez Osorio
Yes. Well, you know, this is pretty much behind, the idea behind is really to take a step at a time, really to, in order to use copilot and select this task on your daily plate that is really something that Copilot can help with on the one side and on the other side something that you really need that is really frustrating you and that you could really improve with the support of Copilot. I think people in their daily work, they have already, you know, on their place to do. And out of a training session, they get out of with a lot of new features, with a lot of ideas. And it's great to get an overview, but it's very important. when people, you know, can stop and think of, okay, now how can I translate this into my daily work? And how can I make it stick? You know, because one thing is, hey, I use Copilot once and then I forget about it. And the idea is actually really to help people to stick with Copilot and improve that process, that workflow or that task that is frustrating them with the support of Copilot. And yes, therefore, you know, they are so interesting research in the direction of change, behavioral change and change in general and how people can become. And I think it's a very amazingly interesting mixture of behavior and features and how this can all match together It's really fascinating.

00:11:20 Mark Smith
So you mentioned communities before in your M365 background. When you're helping an organization go through an adoption of Copilot, what do you do? What have you found effective in establishing or growing communities inside a business?

00:11:40 Amelia Hernandez Osorio
Yes. So I think First of all, I think it's important that organizations realize different kind of communities that there are out there. So one thing... is external communities we have, we are so privileged in the Microsoft space to count with an amazing external community, Microsoft community, and I think this is part of the whole ecosystem. And companies should know this exists and this is out there and they can count on this community. Employees can count on this community too. Another thing is the communities inside organizations. So, here you can have, of course, an internal user community, and it's amazingly important for people to come together once. a month at least and kind of debrief, kind of debrief about what is it, what was so great, what is it, what was so bad and how they can actually keep on learning because we are talking about evergreen, evergreen solutions. And it's not only me, it's not only you, Mark, but it's hard to stay on track of all the changes. So the only way we can actually achieve it is within this pace of, working together in a community. So this internal community is amazingly important in order to, in order to reinforce people keep learning, keep their skills up to date, and also in order to know what is it, what is working for our organization and what is not, which may be different than any other organization. So I think to have like OK, to have to differentiate the and to know that there are different kind of communities is important. And you also have within every team an aspect of community and it should be kind of lift. So it should there should be room for teams to to to kind of contribute just, you know, to say, okay, this is what it is working for me. This is what is not working. How we can put this all together so we can improve our team's processes. So I think this three different flavors, let's say, of communities, make the whole learning experience and make the whole adoption experience really succeed. And that's like the first step to make organizations realize what's actually out there in terms of community. And then I love to work with teams because, so I usually start with teams. So, because by working with teams, you can really, you have the perfect unit, a great size of people, usually when you can, where you can really work with them together, find use cases that can be improved with Copilot and put it into into practice. So I usually work a lot with teams and then we try to, to create to create internal community that is, meeting together where teams or representative of those teams are coming, are joining. And of course, in a way, we all have to nurture the community. But it is like this that it's important to offer, to offer this space, to organize this space, to offer also the changes and the updates within this framework.

00:16:51 Mark Smith
One of the things I'm interested in is, in your observation in the various organizations you've worked with, what are some of the standout use cases that people have uncovered, without mentioning the companies, maybe you mentioned the industries it's in, just some of the thoughts that come to mind around use cases that are not the standard summarize a meeting in Teams or draft an e-mail or stuff. Like, has there been any kind of use cases that kind of really stand out to you or that you'd like to demonstrate as part of an education process with students and people on the adoption journey?

00:17:34 Amelia Hernandez Osorio
That's a very interesting question. So a use case where you think, okay, actually this is not like the usual, the popular ones. Exactly. Well, I've been working on a Copilot help desk or actually product support agent. And well, I think this is 1. one popular use case, don't you think? Yes, so it's not that it's not that rare, actually, and I think this use case is very, very interesting because, of course, you have the team of support engineers and you have here the chances to improve this support processes with Copilot. And what I've realized in this space is that you have different options. It's really very cool.So you can, of course, create a Copilot Studio full agent from the draft from the zero on, but you could also use a help IT help desk template if it's solving, of course, your or it's helping your use case. And here this is especially so to connect actually with ServiceNow. So if ServiceNow is something for you, or is an application that you are already using for your help desk, then this IT template, IT help desk template is a great idea in Copilot Studio full. And then here you also could, of course, for organizations using Dynamics 365 customer services, here you have several options. and you have the co-pilots to several options, several features that are kind of embedded in Dynamics 365 with copilot, like the copilot highlights and the copilot copilot summaries. So you have really, it's really embedded within Dynamics. It's really amazing, the drafting and so on. And one of my favorites in this space are the Copilot highlights, so it can really give you highlights about specific a topic you're trying to resolve with a customer case. And here it's also again amazing how you can see how platforms are actually coming together within the Microsoft ecosystem because what you have behind the customer service agent is actually Copilot Studio full again.

00:21:07 Mark Smith
My last question as we wrap up is, What advice would you give to companies that have just purchased maybe their Copilot licenses and they want to make sure that they get the maximum value out of the licenses, you know, the costs that they've spent on them, and they want to make sure that people are really empowered? What advice would you give them?

00:21:34 Amelia Hernandez Osorio
If they... they have got Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses. I would say do the training part. It's great. And please help the people really embrace the tools in ways that you are really having an offer for the teams. so they can really find use cases that make sense for them. Look for executive sponsor, but real executive sponsor, the ones that are really putting this into their communications, the ones that are really transporting the message to the people in town halls. So try to work not only down to top, but also top to down so the transformation, the copilot transformation can happen. I think that would be my recommendation for people.

00:22:51 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.