Why Copilot Adoption Stalls and How to Fix It

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. Today, I'm joined by Danny all the way from the Netherlands. All the links that we discussed or any topics we discussed that have links will be in the show notes for this episode. Danny, welcome to the show.

00:00:48 Danny Burlage
Thanks, Mark. How are you?

00:00:51 Mark Smith
Very good, very good. You start your day, I end mine as my last podcast for the week. But when I looked at your bio, I can see you're doing a lot of great stuff in the AI space, so keen to have a chat with you on that. But before we do, Timmy, a bit about food, family, and fun. What do they mean to you?

00:01:07 Danny Burlage
Oh, well, food's really important. So we tend to eat very, very various, you know, with vegan, but also a lot of meat and fish. I love to barbecue, although I live middle in this, I live in that center city, so we don't have a garden, so it's really hard to barbecue around here. I've got a big family, four kids, all the way from two years old to 20 years old and everything in between. Yeah. I live in Harlem with my girlfriend, Kim. And for fun, I'm building a home, actually. I'm building a farm home. So right now, that's all about fun. Yeah.

00:01:49 Mark Smith
That's nuts because when you said I've got three to 20 years of age, My eldest son is 20 and my youngest son is three. It's crazy.

00:02:01 Danny Burlage
Two to 20. Yeah.

00:02:02 Mark Smith
Pardon.

00:02:04 Danny Burlage
Two to 20.

00:02:05 Mark Smith
Yeah. Two to 20. Wow.

00:02:07 Danny Burlage
Yeah.

00:02:08 Mark Smith
That's a big gap. And yeah, I've got a three-year-old and a five-year-old at the moment. So life's full on with them.

00:02:16 Danny Burlage
Oh, yeah. Oh, that's cool. I actually think that those two years old right now are a lot of fun and they get me excited all of it.

00:02:23 Mark Smith
Yeah. Yeah, totally. Tell me, what's top of mind for you in the Microsoft AI arena? You know, we're kind of like two years in with Copilot now, you know, three or four years with GenAI being the big headline act in the market. What are you seeing in Europe, in your customers, in your country? What are you seeing?

00:02:51 Danny Burlage
Well, we're seeing a lot of different things. We see AI hitting it off. A lot of different customers are really enthusiastic about the usage of AI, the possibilities of AI. However, we also see a lot of skepticism towards Microsoft, or not towards Microsoft, but towards American or US-based tech companies in Europe at this moment. We see adoption of end user or bring your own AI going through the roof, we see adoption of corporate widespread AI slacking a little bit. It's not picking up that much. However, I do believe that there's a big, big, huge wish for companies to actually go this road.

00:03:42 Mark Smith
Why do you think that after two years of Copilot being in market, is quite a disparity for, if you like, the marketing and the effort, I suppose, that we're seeing from Microsoft to the actual sold seats. I mean, just this week, it was announced how many paying subscriptions there are, and based on the M365 user base, it works out at 3.3% globally that are paying for Copilot, which after two years, I'm like, Man, that's a low number.

00:04:17 Danny Burlage
It's not like Teams. Teams hit it off really hard and was one of the best-selling products at that moment. So what I actually do believe is that when Copilot hit the market about two years ago, we just had ChatGPT hitting the market before that. And ChatGPT was a consumer-oriented product at that moment where a lot of different customers were experiencing or were trying out ChatGPT and wanted wanted the ChatGPT promise for their organizations. When they then started using Copilot, to be honest, the whole Copilot experience when they hit the market was not that great. It was not up to the ChatGPT standard. And thus the first mover users or the first mover, yeah, the first using customers were a little bit disappointed. And what I've seen ever since basically is us fighting or our company fighting that first impression. At this moment, I don't know if you did a comparison recently, but at this moment, if I compare ChatGPT towards a Copilot, I actually do believe that Copilot in many occasions is better than just GPT, especially when it concerns business data, but also for general questions.

00:05:40 Mark Smith
Yeah. I mean, I can't imagine in my own company living without Copilot, but I have done a lot of work to make sure the data that's hydrating Copilot about my organization, product line, services, everything, the entire DNA, I've particularly created a full library in SharePoint and Teams to make sure that it has a master set of data that also embeds in a master like prompt about my company inside that. And so it's become, for me, I feel like I've just gone to steroid level. Like I couldn't turn to something other, another an AI tool about my company. Nothing else has the level of DNA that Copilot has. So I definitely get what you mean there.

00:06:31 Danny Burlage
Yeah. Yeah. And I truly do believe that Copilot has all the things it needs to become the actual UI for AI, especially in corporate governance organizations where they need to control the usage of AI just to make sure that it's not widespread and that not everybody will go towards Mobbot or whatever So I do really believe that you know, to speak in the words of Donald Trump, Microsoft has all the cards and they will hit it off on the long run. What I also do believe, however, is that in the last couple of months, Microsoft has been pivoting a little bit towards end user AI, which was their initial presentation and towards more agentic AI. where it's not so much individual productivity gains, but corporate processes gains. And to be honest, when I speak to C-level about advantages of AI, nobody's interesting about in saving half an hour or an hour per employee per day. especially when it's personal productivity, they're all interested in how can we improve specific organizational wide processes. So how can we improve order to cash processes and make sure that we decrease the entire run through of a specific process or all the people used on a specific process with 25% or whatever. And we're slowly getting there. We're not there yet, but I think that we'll see huge adoption when we hit those numbers, when we can actually use Copilot as a company-wide AI to create big advantages.

00:08:33 Mark Smith
Yeah. I noticed on your website, and for those that don't realize, Danny owns a company and has done for some time, founded quite a prestigious company in the Netherlands, that you do AI adoption, sorry, Copilot adoption training. What form does that take with your customers?

00:08:53 Danny Burlage
Well, we typically start off with an envisioning about how AI can work for their organization. It's not so much Copilot, but AI in general. And of course, in many occasions boils down to Copilot. In some occasions, it's more AI embedded in products or whatever with Azure AI Foundry, but as soon as we've done an envisioning, about what our customers actually need with regards to AI, we'll make sure that we start a communication program within the organization. How will their organization benefit through AI? What kind of results will they get? And after that, we'll go into individual trainings. We either do that with games or we use specific types of software. It's across the board, yeah.

00:09:44 Mark Smith
Tell me about the games. That's interesting.

00:09:48 Danny Burlage
Yeah, so there's a couple of programs out there which actually help us. There are a couple of systems out there which actually help us do this. So Let's Copilot is one of them. Workplace Buddy is another one of them. And we'll actually use these apps. where people need to solve specific problems or where they need to find out the answers for specific questions, with the usage of AI, with the usage of Copilot. They'll get trained, performing a game, and they can get points for everything they do and everything they solve. And so it's a gamification basically of the entire learning experience.

00:10:29 Mark Smith
You know, one of the things that we saw a lot in 2025 or and heard a lot in the market was mA lot of companies did AI POCs of some sort, and the number of POCs that moved to production was extremely low across the board. And how are you moving that dial with your customers from out of POC into production, into value creation for the business?

00:10:56 Danny Burlage
Yeah, so what we see, and I'm really curious to hear what your experience with this is, but what we see is as soon as we talk about personal productivity gains through AI and how people can actually, you know, save half an hour or an hour a day just by using, for instance, a facilitator app or whatever, for many C-levels, that's not enough. And, you know, so when we go into this discussion with them about the actual advantage of AI or Copilot for their organization, and we show them that the individual can save 30 minutes, they'll tell us, you know, that's great, but they'll just use those 30 minutes to drink a cup of coffee or talk to a different colleague or whatever. It's not worth my investment in this. And so as soon as we go over into these organizations and we prove them, not only individual productivity gains, but also how we can really change company-wide processes, that's where the actual POCs go into production. And we can actually start using AI for the entire company. What's your experience with this?

00:12:12 Mark Smith
I think productivity is the wrong story. As in, I think M365's story over the last 5, 10, however long it's been in market, has been a productivity story. And I think customers didn't want to hear the story again in regards to what Copilot would do. And I have heard exactly what you've said, where C-level said it's great. So they get to spend more time around the water cooler. So what? Like, how's that moving the dial? I fundamentally think that AI has been seen as a nice bit of new tech software in the organization rather than fundamentally, it's a piece of infrastructure your organization needs and you need to bring the digital, sorry, not the digital, the AI literacy of your entire organization up by 30% and imagine the impact that would have. So let's not talk about productivity. Let's talk about totally reinventing the way this company does work or how work is done in the workplace. I think that's the...

00:13:20 Danny Burlage
Sorry to interrupt, but I'm really enthusiastic about this. So what you're saying actually is that all these C-level people which have been struggling with adoption of technology in general within their organizations, now need to believe that AI will actually change their entire company as a whole.

00:13:39 Mark Smith
I'm saying the mindset of its value to the organization.

00:13:43 Danny Burlage
Yeah, I totally agree with what you're saying. But the problem here is that those C-level people, those 50, 60, whatever year old board of directors, which don't believe in technology in itself, or which are just starting to adopt technology themselves, now need to transition and believe that AI will fundamentally change their organization. That's a huge step.

00:14:12 Mark Smith
Yes, totally. But what surprises me is that I'm surprised you have C-levels in that space. in the Netherlands, because Netherlands have always been like a very forward thinking, they founded New Zealand, they discovered New Zealand, like they've always been out frontier type activities globally. I'm surprised that you're saying that you've still got companies that are at that kind of large scale, but still not... Are you still like saying they're more paper-based and not even digitized and...

00:14:46 Danny Burlage
Well, that's a little bit off the board, but... They're digitized. You know, companies are digitized. They are really technology savvy. However, there's also a big, huge skepticism.

00:15:01 Mark Smith
Yeah, I can understand that.

00:15:04 Danny Burlage
Yeah, and there's actually skepticism right now, like there's been about 12 years ago when, well now 15 years ago, I think, when Microsoft Office 365 hit the market, 16 years maybe. And there's been skepticism towards the cloud. I see the same level of skepticism at this point towards AI. And what we've seen is Teams, you know, has been a product which was part of Microsoft 365 and was, you know, introduced just before COVID and then hit the market really, really fast. when COVID came around. So adoption was from 0 to 100 within just a couple of years. The AI story at this moment is different. Everybody sees personal productivity gains, but the actual proof of organizations really changing their entire business model through AI is still not delivered.

00:16:03 Mark Smith
Interesting. Do you think it's because it's been sold in a, to a degree, in a very generic way? Like if you see all the use cases, they're all kind of like, great, you can summarize a Teams meeting. Great, you've got a... And it's kind of like, is that it? Like this major intelligence tool and it can summarize a meeting or summarize my e-mail thread or something like that? Is it... I suppose what people are seeing in the media and then when they get the reality of the tool just so disconnected, that's creating a frustration? And how do you get beyond it?

00:16:38 Danny Burlage
I think you're right. So if you hear Dario during the World Economic Forum talk about that 50% of all starting jobs in the market in a whole will actually disappear within the next five years from now. Bill Gates during The Tonight Show just last year, or me, I think, thinking about going into a two-week work week within the next 10 years or so, and then actually the advantages that people see, realize people see With AI, there's such a difference or a distance between the two that it's almost unrealistic or unbelievable for a lot of people that they just don't believe that that's going to happen. So maybe I think you're right. There's a lot of frustration with people just not getting what's out there. However, when I talk to one of my software developers, and I don't know if you're a software developer, but when I talk to one of my software developers, Their job about 18 months ago was making sure that all those lines of code got on paper, got in their systems. And software developers are really-- they're enthusiastic about creating the best line of code. So just 18 months ago, 24 months ago, it was all about creating the best lines of code themselves. Right now, most software developers are becoming prompt engineers on steroids. And this change is something that not a whole lot of people notice. If you talk to a CFO and you explain to them how the role of a software developer is changing, from somebody who's actually specialized in creating the best lineup code towards a prompt engineer, it's a little bit far-fetched for them. The concept is a little bit far-fetched for them. But I think that there's where the real proof of the pudding is. In these types of jobs, you know, really changing around 180 degrees.

00:18:58 Mark Smith
What has to happen in 2026? for this pendulum to start swinging the other way, where companies are going, You know what? We've got to get serious about this. We've got to... Will it impact us if we don't? But really going from that hyper skepticism, and personally, I think the whole agent story has added to that skepticism. I just believe the reality of what we're sold about agents and the reality of what is possible is a massive void. And I find it hard that if I've got to spend more time creating, configuring an agent than the value it's going to get out of me, like, why am I doing this? And I feel that's where we are at the moment. But if you looked at the end of 2026, and we're in, well, February, where do you think we will be? From your perspective and looking at your time horizons in your own business and your own customer base, where do you maybe hope you'll be or where do you think the market will be at 12 months from now?

00:20:14 Danny Burlage
I really do believe that the market 12 months from now will be totally different from the market right now. I really do believe that. I think that Over the next couple of months, we'll see actual breakthroughs within companies of specific processes or entire end-to-end processes. And we will see a shift in the belief of many business leaders about how this can actually change their organization. I think that most companies will have multiple successful use cases and will start to invest more highly in what AI can actually do for their organization. I think that, you know, we've been hitting the market slow, but I do see little breakthroughs which will start pivoting the entire AI story.

00:21:18 Mark Smith
How will companies, and even talk about how you think of this, and this is really, I wanna wrap on this, is what is the best way for a company to get to a use case that's highly theirs, almost like IP development, even within that organization? So in other words, we don't want a generic off the shelf, here's a win, where it's, how do you get to that point of discovery or innovation inside the organization where that light bulb comes on and they're like, wow, if that's possible, what if we started going more broader in our business?

00:21:53 Danny Burlage
Yeah, so where I see the actual successes hitting the mark is where we're not just talking about one person or one department, but we're talking about multi-level. processes which span multiple divisions within the organization, multiple departments within the organization, for instance, order to cash. And as soon as we've got this entire process mapped out, and you can see how AI and automation, let me wrap this in one word, when we see AI and automation actually making real big changes in these processes, improve quality, improve time to market, improve the speed of the order to cash process, improve the number of people needed, or decrease the number of people needed to go through these processes. That's where we see big uptake within organizations. As long as we start, as long as we focus on individual processes and individual use, I really do believe that we're not hitting the market.

00:23:02 Mark Smith
Very cool. Personal use of AI. What's your kind of your hero's story if you're at a BBQ chatting about how you use it rather than how your customers use it? What's that for you?

00:23:15 Danny Burlage
Well, that's a personal productivity story. Since a couple of weeks, I've been using the facilitator app in individual conversations with people. So as soon as I walk out of a meeting, I've put my phone into the facilitator mode within Microsoft Teams, and I'll actually get an entire report of the meeting with all the action items, et cetera, et cetera. So for me, that saves me a lot of time. I'm in three to four meetings a day at least. And it will actually save me about two to two and a half hours of work just summarizing these different meetings.

00:23:52 Mark Smith
You know, I've seen Facilitator came on a meeting I was on yesterday with somebody else that set the meeting. And I was like, I've got to drill into that a bit more and see the goodness that's there. So that's, you've motivated me to go take a look.

00:24:05 Danny Burlage
Absolutely, yeah.

00:24:07 Mark Smith
Danny, have a great day. Thank you so much.

00:24:09 Danny Burlage
Thanks, Mark. Have a great day.

00:24:16 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.