Why AI Agents Will Replace How We Actually Work

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, welcome back, welcome back to the Microsoft MVP Show. Today, I'm joined by my guest from Belgium, Cass. Welcome to the show.

00:00:42 Cas De Morree
Yeah, thank you, mate.

00:00:44 Mark Smith
Good to have you on. Keen to talk to you and how you're dealing with productivity and M365 and Copilot and all 00:00:54 Mark Smith But before we get there, tell me about food, family, and fun. What do they mean to you and your part of the world?

00:01:00 Cas De Morree 
Oh, wow. Food. Love it. Fun. Yeah. Wow. You kind of surprise me with that one. But family. I've got a family, if that's what you mean. I've got a wife, two kids, two daughters, to be honest. I love him. They're eight years old and six years old. Well, at least the daughters are. My wife's a bit older, but yeah. Sorry. It's been a long day over here. It's like 8 p.m., so.

00:01:30 Mark Smith
It's seven in the morning for me. I'm at the other end of your day, but I'm on Thursday. You're still hanging around on Wednesday.

00:01:36 Cas De Morree
Yeah, that's really, all right. Nice. So we'll catch up. We probably won't. Yeah, fun. I love having fun. I think it's important to have fun in life. A kind of cliche, but yeah, it's... And that ties into food as well.I love food, which is also fun. I don't know what else to say.

00:02:02 Mark Smith
You're located in Belgium. And when I first looked at your LinkedIn profile, I was like, my gosh, there's nothing in English on this profile. Will you speak English? And like, come on in, of course, you're absolutely sweet. Are you working, like I noticed that you're doing a lot of freelance and a lot of independent contract work. And I find it interesting, and why I say this is that I've said for a while, I believe the way people work is going to change dramatically in the next five years, in that I feel the metaphor of a movie, creating a movie is much more applicable to how we'll all work. In other words, we'll have our specialist skills, we'll get called in and be part of a project, the project will complete, conclude, and then we'll move on and go to another project, and we'll be known in the industry for these skills that we can bring to bear on multiple projects. So we work for multiple companies, multiple projects over time, rather than the steady, I just work for employee B and that's my company I work for. It looks like you've already got well on that bandwagon. How do you find it? Like biggest question is how do you pick up new work or identify new work and how do you maintain your connections with new opportunities?

00:03:22 Cas De Morree
To be honest, it's for me, it's mostly LinkedIn. And I post a lot on LinkedIn. It's like you said, it's mostly in Dutch. That's where my customers, that's the way, or at least the language my customers use. Yeah, I do speak a bit of English. That is true. But yeah, it's mostly LinkedIn, to be honest. And then word of mouth, I reckon it's It's I get called in all the time and I do get a lot of references as well because I'm in several AI groups and I do feel that I focus mainly on Copilot and I feel that a lot of AI experts focus on all AI applications except for Copilot. So that's kind of my, yeah, that's where I come in most of the time. To me, it's kind of like the Internet Explorer versus Edge discussion that we've had for years now. People hating on Edge because Internet Explorer sucked. And it did, but Edge is cool. And the same goes for Copilot. Everyone dislikes it and doesn't look further. And I believe it is complex, right? It's compared to other AIs. It's complex because of all the features that it's got. And it's not perfect in every aspect, but it's I think it's a real contender, especially it being tied into your graph, obviously. But I feel that a lot of AI experts are just now getting started with Copilot because they didn't understand it. They just compared it to ChatGPT and it wasn't as good in the beginning, but they forgot about the entire plugged into your work. your work data, and that's what Copilot is, that's what it's good at.

00:05:15 Mark Smith
The interesting thing is, I don't know, whether Microsoft stumbled over the last three years, they seem to have this massive, moat advantage three years ago with their contractual relationship with OpenAI, and And now, you know, the earnings reports at the start of the year show a 3.3% adoption of Copilot based on the M365 install base, which is, you know, we've just seen in the last two weeks, massive reorg inside Microsoft, specifically on AI. But one thing, and I've been working for 30 years in the Microsoft ecosystem, is that Microsoft might take longer to get there, but it gets there and then it owns the space and does super well. Do you think it's just that teething journey that we're on at the moment and the misunderstanding and the low quality experience compared to ChatGPT that we had in the initial, you know, they were still on very old models in the copilot experience and very much black box what was going on. And now we're seeing this clarity. I mean, heck, yesterday I just noticed in, the model, I can choose a anthropic model in the normal chat experience, not just the researcher or the analyst type experience. And I'm just like, Hey, this is really starting to give the customer choice that... I feel like sometimes the promotion is always for the lowest contender on Microsoft products, but they forget that they've got experienced contenders as well that understand models and understand what they get from a particular model they choose. What's your observation the last three years and why we're here and where do you think we're going in 2026?

00:07:03 Cas De Morree
To be honest, it was a rough start using Copilot. And they do what they usually do is they try to get way too much, way too many features from the start instead of focusing on it being stable and having a good proper product. but they get all these features in and then, but it's not as developed as you want it to be. So they always have a lot of catching up to do. And I do feel that they could talk to each other a bit more sometimes to kind of align what they're working on. But they are catching up, obviously, and I've, I have been cheating a bit. Well, not on my wife, but I've been cheating on Copilot with Claude this weekend, and I've seen Claude co-working Claude code, and I'm absolutely amazed and blown away by what it can do. The fact that is coming to Copilot as well, it's going to be a game changer because it's going to be secure, it's going to be protected, and it's got Anthropic in there as well. And I think that's where Copilot is not Microsoft doesn't have to choose this one model. They can get in Anthropic, they can get in OpenAI, and who knows what? Well, maybe, probably not Google, but anyway, so why not, right? And I think that's the strength of Microsoft and Co-Found it.

00:08:33 Mark Smith
Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right. What you can do with Coworker is mind-blowing. At the start of the week, I decided to migrate a website off Squarespace that had been on Squarespace for years. And you know, with any content management system, you've got baggage, right? You've got a lot of, they have created this architecture to suit every type of customer to make it simple for non-technical. But of course, it comes with weight, as in literal file weight, chroma, overheads and stuff. And I just went to Claude Coworker and said, Hey, I want to migrate this to a headless serverless and architecture. I don't want any CMS. I just want to be able to give you markdown files and you publish them as pages on the website.It took about three hours and I closed down a $500 subscription, gone, and I've got a lean, highly SEO optimized, highly LLMO optimized site. Because of Coworker, what you can do, like you can do it like literally, it will keep iterating on a task till it gets to the destination. And I think this is the start of outcomes engineering rather than prompt engineering being a big deal. What's the outcome you want to achieve? Okay, cool. You've set the target. Now let me work on it.

00:09:56 Cas De Morree
Yeah. How cool is that? And also the fact that you can give it multiple tasks as well so you can queue them up so that you, okay, when this is done, I want you to go and I can get a coffee. and go to the toilet baby and they'll come back and it's done. It's, and I like what you said, because I don't even think it's going to be 5 years, but the way we work is going to, it's completely going to change. Well, for some, because it's always, you've heard of the productivity paradox, right? We get all these new tools and, okay, so we got all these new tools and that's been happening for years now, but we, and we always feel like we're going to be more productive, but we're not. We're still, How about language now? But we're still ******* around, right? It's we're still busy. We're still doing **** jobs. And I hope things are going to change now that Copilot is, or at least AI is getting some traction. And I do believe that this is going to completely change the way we could be working, and some people will be. And you can the things you can automate, the things you can have AI do for you instead of you having to do it. That being said though, I just recently had a conversation with one of my customers and she, it was this woman, she said, after we started using Copilot, we got all these extra meeting notes and stuff like that. And I asked her why. Yeah, because AI generates more meeting notes and we send them to everyone. I said, why? You can just go to Copilot and you can actually talk to Copilot about the meeting you just had. Why? would you send out meeting notes to everyone? It makes absolutely no sense. And the same goes for, I had this customer, he said, I want to use it to send emails. Okay, sure, yeah. It can. To customers or internally? Yeah, internally. Okay, so what's going to happen is you're going to send an e-mail using Copilot. Your colleague's going to have it summarized by Copilot. He's going to have it reply. Why? It's insanity. But I, yeah, I'm positive. I think at least for me.

00:12:08 Mark Smith
It reminds you of that time when emails, you'd go to an office and they were printing out their emails, right? Back in the day. And that'd be like, I need a hard copy. And it's just like, why would you do that? Yeah. And it's the same thing, right?

00:12:25 Cas De Morree
Yeah, yeah. Sorry. It reminded me of a story that I used to work at this company and they had this huge PDF file and they had to save it. into separate PDFs. So what they did is they printed it and so they, and afterwards they would scan it into, sorry. I just came to mind. Yeah. Insanity. But that is the thing. We expect all this magic from these new tools. Same for AI. And I hope, I absolutely hope things will now change, but I'm not entirely sure whether things will change, to be honest.

00:13:01 Mark Smith
What type of groups? I'm interested in this. Like, I'm not involved in any groups like that in my part of the world. What are you joining? What are they about?

00:13:10 Cas De Morree
Well, groups, nothing special. It's just some WhatsApp groups that I've been added to. And everyone, all these AI experts, they share all their information, all their insights about everything except for Copilot, obviously. So yeah, and it's hugely inspiring to see what these people can create. I'm just trying out. to catch up with all the new features, but there's people creating not just websites, but entire learning environments. And it's crazy what they all can do.

00:13:49 Mark Smith
So what's top of mind with everybody? Like we're three months into this year. We're now in April. It's your April 1st, so you must do any jokes? Do you have April Fool's Day over there?

00:13:59 Cas De Morree
Yeah, but I tried to stay away from that as far as...

00:14:02 Mark Smith
We're on day two of the month, so it's all gone behind us now. But what's top of mind in the first three months of the year? I feel like there was a shift in the AI landscape globally. I feel like this year, I've done more with AI in the last three months than I have in the last three years. And I wrote a book on AI last year, so it's not a lot like that I wasn't in the space. But I feel the first three months of this year has been a seismic shift. And if you'd talk to me, for example, about-- What do you mean? What was that?

00:14:35 Cas De Morree
Sorry, what do you mean by that? What was the shift in your opinion?

00:14:40 Mark Smith
Open claw was the shift.

00:14:43 Cas De Morree
 All right.

00:14:44 Mark Smith
As in because, you know, as we built through last year, and Microsoft's been very heavy on the agentic story and agents and agents are going to do. And it's kind of like hype, hype, hype, hype, hype, because It was more work to build an agent than the productivity gains you'd get from it. And what I saw a lot about how agents were described or defined was really automation. It wasn't agenda. It was just, you're finally automating some parts of your business that it's been around for 15 years, but you've never really understood automation. And so now we've got, you know, really maybe some fancy automation, but In the end of December, start of January, I started looking at, you know, I was on X watching what was happening and OpenClaw came out and I started using it and everything clicked for me around the agent architecture and what you could create and the concept of soul, which comes from Anthropic, right? Giving your agent a soul, a personality. So I've got 22 agents now. And in December, I had none, never, didn't know how to create one, nothing. Now I've got 22. I've got an agent called Dobby. He's my house elf, and he runs my entire household. He has over 1,200 sensors on IoT devices and stuff on my property, my weather station outside, my home automation. I totally rebuilt, you know, Dobby's rebuilt it, and it's just... changed or touched everything. Dobby the other day wrote a solution to do my weekly grocery shopping that gets delivered. Just went over, analyzed the site. The site's designed to block AI, right? And no problem, we'll get around that. And worked out how to do it, how to credential in, fill my shopping cart with the items that we order every week, and then notify me and say, Hey, the shopping cart's ready for you to make the payment.

00:16:47 Cas De Morree
If someone would have told you this three years back, what would you have said?

00:16:52 Mark Smith
I would have said, I don't, I'm not a developer. I don't know how. I don't know how to do this.

00:16:57 Cas De Morree
Oh, this is science fiction stuff, right?

00:16:58 Mark Smith
I mean, honestly, I've taken over $2,000 of annual cost out of my business SaaS expenses in the last two weeks because of what I've been able to build software I've been able to build.

00:17:11 Cas De Morree
She said, I have to get into OpenCloud.

00:17:13 Mark Smith
As in honestly, my advice to everybody in the Microsoft space, I run mine on Azure, in a VM on Azure. I recommend, and the whole Azure cost is maybe $110 New Zealand dollars, and New Zealand dollars is like monopoly money when it comes to exchange rates, right? It's pretty at the lower end of the field. And as I say, easily $2,000 in subscriptions, and by the end of April, I would have taken another $2,000 out. And It's just like, you know, I used to use Bitly, you know, the URL shortener. I built my entire own Bitly system in maybe two hours, and it does exactly what I needed to do. It creates the QR codes. It's branded. It auto does it just via API now for any of my web blogs or anything like that. And if I'm doing a PowerPoint, I just call my API, automatically generates, does as an SVG, the image, so it never, you know, degrades. It puts Google tracking UDM tags on everything. So I have, if I do a blog post, it automatically generates a URL for X, a URL for LinkedIn, a URL for the blog. And therefore, because the UDM tags, I can tell which traffic's performing the best myself. I don't have no more third-party anythings. So I built a business operating system, so that has 11 departments of my business. Each one has its own agent, so an agent in marketing, an agent in sales. They all have their own names, their own visual representation, and they all collab and work together. And honestly, it's just blowing my mind. You know, I've run software development teams all my career, but I've never been the software developer. And I'm writing 1,200 lines of code a day assisted like never before. It's just like how my mind is now constantly, what can I build? What can I create? What can I make? And my recommendation is to everybody in M365, and my background is the Power Platform, is Get yourself a VM, get OpenClaw on it. You might not be on it in a year's time, but it will transform your understanding of authentic AI much more than anything Microsoft has available at the moment. The biggest challenge that Microsoft has, I feel, is their licensing. They need to go to tokens as a form of licensing everything. Get rid of... The thing is, people are fearful of blowing out massive debt on Microsoft infrastructure With the licensing model, everything's licensed, right? Like, I created a RAG system to ingest data. Like, if I send a photo of a magazine article, click, it automatically ingests it, it extracts all the text, it deletes the photos so it doesn't, you know, create storage costs, and puts it into a RAG system, tags it, codes it, and makes it available to the agents of my team that need it. To do that, it's a zero cost operating model for me a month for that system. To do the same thing in Azure, that's $200 a month flat fee. And this is why I'm saying get on it 'cause it's low cost way to have really like the whole idea of the claw creating unlimited arms and legs to do your work. It's just, yeah, like, yeah, phenomenal. Honestly, I used to be somebody very active in social media and stuff. Now I'm like, I ain't got time for that. I'm building stuff constantly. It's just, it's getting addictive because it's just unlimited creativity you have in your fingertips.

00:21:11 Cas De Morree
Okay. That is the thing, right? It's the only... Limitation is your own creativity at this point.

00:21:17 Mark Smith
But it spurs it.

00:21:18 Cas De Morree
Yeah, it's insane.

00:21:19 Mark Smith
It keeps growing it because he realizes that you can do one thing while you can do, and now you can do another thing. And like you just talked about people doing the training software. And I use a big LMS for a course that I run and have run for eight years now from when I was living in London. And I'm literally going, you know what, I might build my own platform for this. That wipes another $1000 a year off my subscription base. And but the beauty is, is building software that's 100% tailored to your needs. I'm not trying to sell it to anyone. I'm not doing it for anybody else. It's just for me. So yeah, it's it's it's so it's it's interesting times.

00:22:02 Cas De Morree
Yeah, it it is. It is. And I'm. I'm hoping everyone will get on board as well, at least most people, but I I'm I I'm not sure. I still feel a lot of. hesitation when it comes to, and sometimes you tend to forget because we're all in this AI bubble and we're all trying to inspire each other. And just you talking now is, tomorrow I have a customer, but this week, probably somewhere the weekend and I've got two weeks, two weeks holiday, there's going to be some open claw there for sure.

00:22:36 Mark Smith
You got to. And listen. Don't try and build it on Windows. So my first OpenClore I built on Windows is my core VM. I lasted maybe 2 days and the overhead that you get with the user interface is not worth it.And so I blew that away, then created a VM with Ubuntu on it. AndI built a CRM last week, a full operational headless CRM. Now, I've spent 22 years in Dynamics land building CRM systems for organizations, won global awards for the big systems of build. And I was able to sit down and architect a full headless modern day CRM that has really only got two components in it, which is people and signal. And it was just like, that was me riffing with Anthropic going like, what would a modern CRM be? And it said, well, first of all, let's get rid of this concept of accounts, leads, contacts. That's like, aren't these, isn't it just a people that has a certain state of any time with you? And aren't you really just looking for signal? So rather than tracking every e-mail or tracking every meeting, why don't you just extract from those things, the signal, the thing that you need to do? rather than the baggage of everything else. And I'm just like, after 20 something years of doing this, and it's just, it was so on the money. We're stuck with 25 year old thinking. And honestly, once again, it took me maybe half a day, and I've built a highly scalable, but all the interaction with that CRM is all via agents, my marketing agent, my sales agent, my legion.

00:24:22 Cas De Morree
And this is exactly what I meant by this is the way that we should be working from now on, or at least that's the change. And I really, really hope that this will be the change. But well, at least let it be for us then. But especially with all these agents and I see people building entire companies with agents and it's, yeah, well, just like you told us now. Yeah, you've inspired me actually to get into this. Yeah, really cool.

00:24:55 Mark Smith
Yeah, I'd love to hear your feedback in two weeks' time, to see how you're going, what you're building, because the beauty is, I'd set a challenge to any Microsoft partner to give all your consultants a VM and OpenClaw, and no other directive except for let's come back in two weeks time and let's see what you did. Because I don't think you need to tell them to go and build X or go and build Y. Just let's see what people come up with. It's just, it's like the never ending game. It's just like you're going down the ramp, oh, wow, I can do this. It's just ridiculous. And it needs each individual's personality to be fed into it because everyone will come up with something different based on what's their priority.

00:25:39 Cas De Morree
And it's just all within our grasp now. It's so cool. It's crazy times, right?

00:25:45 Mark Smith
Cass, it's been awesome talking to you, and I am really interested in seeing what you come up with by the end of your holidays.

00:25:52 Cas De Morree
I'll let you know.

00:25:54 Mark Smith
Yeah, hit me up, flick me on LinkedIn. Lizel will probably reach out before we post the show live, but hey, thanks so much for coming on.

00:26:03 Cas De Morree
Yeah, it was nice talking to you, mate. Very good.

00:26:06 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.