How Copilot Is Saving 40+ Minutes a Day

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.  

00:00:47 Mark Smith 
Welcome back to the Microsoft Innovation Podcast. Today we're heading to Norway where tech meets tranquility and where our guest is quietly leading workplace revolution. Our guest is demystifying how copilot is transforming cyber security um and productivity across the Nordic enterprises from real world rollouts with Microsoft 365 Copilot to endpoint security with Defender. Find links to the show notes in the episode in the in the show notes for this episode. Please welcome Christopher, head of AI workplace. 

00:01:20 Christoffer Besler Hansen 
Thank you Mark, it's good to be here. 

00:01:24 Mark Smith 
Good to have you on the show. always like starting with food, family and fun. What do they mean to you? What do you get up to in the Nordics when you're not working? 

00:01:32 Christoffer Besler Hansen 
So for food, uh I guess pizza is my favorite food. So that's my go-to. And let's go pasta. And family, I have... I have... I couldn't remember. She's not my wife, but we are together and been together. 

00:01:58 Mark Smith 
Wow. 

00:01:58 Christoffer Besler Hansen 
and we have two children together, one of them soon turning four years and the other one is six years old. So a lot of fun and activities on those two. And for fun, guess spending time with my family is what I normally do when I'm not working. I'm also spending a lot of time. digging into everything that's evolving around generative AI and new technology. I think that's very exciting. And also try to spend a little uh bit of time playing some games when I have some free time. 

00:02:38 Mark Smith 
Nice, what game is Ian 2? 

00:02:41 Christoffer Besler Hansen 
Right now I just bought Switch 2, so I've been playing some Super Smash Bros lately on Mario Kart and waiting to get Mario Party to play together with my family and that one. that's some nostalgia for me.

00:03:00 Mark Smith 
So AI is one of my favourite topics, has been probably for the last 24 months, you know, as our world changes around us. What's top of mind for you right now in the AI space? 

00:03:14 Christoffer Besler Hansen 
So I work mostly with Microsoft 365 Copilot and I'm also leading how we do that inside of Atea. So in Atea we have 8,000 employees and we are right now at 2,600 licenses on Copilot and increasing that every month. So since the start of this year we were at 1,200 licenses and I have... been increasing every month since that. So that's my top of mind, how we can make sure that everyone in OTA can get a license and also get uh user adoption so they learn how to use it correctly. And also how can we also take that next step into co-pilot agents and use those agents on a good way.And on a more personal level, I'm also very interested to see how It all evolves around the Chachipiti, Claude and Gemini and that kind of race around that. think that's kind of exciting to follow. 

00:04:24 Mark Smith 
so much to unpack there. Let's start with adoption. know, as you've added these licenses on this year, do you go through an adoption phase first before you give the license? Do you start people on Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, you know, the free version as you're doing the kind of... the starting of the adoption piece and then what does your kind of trigger for, right, you get a license. 

00:04:58 Christoffer Besler Hansen 
So we have tried different things in Atea. Before we were kind of doing like, we started with 300 licenses. Then after a while we went up to 1,000 licenses and had that for a good while. Then we bought 250 new licenses and gave that out to people that had asked. And then we kind of switched the tactics a bit. So we said, OK, now let's say in Atea we are a people company. want the... closest leaders to decide if a user should get the license or not, not the top leaders. So we said that we give you this form. If a user wants a license, they request one. And if the leader says, yes, I want to take this cost, then it's okay. You will get the license within the next month. So we have a few things on user adoption for the normal co-op by the chat. But we are focusing mostly user adoption for those that have a license. But we are doing some early user adoption for those that don't have a license yet and want to just use Genitive AI and work, but I'm not sure where to start. 

00:06:15 Mark Smith 
who, who are the people as in not the names, but you know, like what are the roles? What, what the, do they type the type of work they do in the organization that you're seeing, you know, on the analytics side of things that are really, you know, if we're looking on a bell curve, they're the people right out front. They're the ones that they're using it. They're every task they're going, how can I, you know, bring generative AI into the mix? How can I use copilot?Are you seeing that, that there's those real people that are the hungry, the power users that are leading the way? And then my question is, what type of roles are they in that you're seeing, or is it not to do with role, it's got to do with the personality of the person? 

00:07:02 Christoffer Besler Hansen  
I think it's a mix, so I definitely think it has a lot to do with the personality of users. But I also see on the big picture that some roles are getting more out of it than others, at least what they say themselves. So we are a mix of lot of consultants working externally for other companies. We have a lot of salespeople, project leaders, and so on. And what I can see is that our project leaders are getting a lot out of Copilot. probably because they don't need to write their meeting notes so much anymore. And also our consultants say they save a lot of time, they get their quality up when using ColdBallot. So of all the roles that we have in Atea, I can see that project leaders and consultants are those two roles that are gaining most out of it. And also solution sales are getting a lot out of it. But I can see that aural are getting something out of it. So it's a win for everyone. But yeah, it's a mix. 

00:08:08 Mark Smith 
What was the mindset of the executive, maybe even up to the board, but the C-suite, the C-level across the organization? Did the desire to bring Copilot into the workplace, was it really coming from the top down or was it led by some other part of the business? Where did the kind of the leadership, you know, that probably kicked off in the two years ago or so, where did that come from? 

00:08:37 Christoffer Besler Hansen 
It came from the C level. So both our CEO and COO was involved when we got into the early adopter program uh kicked off in over three years ago when we got 300 licenses. then especially our COO has been involved all the time and we have increased our licenses. And he is also the one that I report to in my AI workplace initiative. So he is very involved in how we develop. this inside of Batéa. So he has a good passion for both how we drive user adoption and also that those that need a license should get one. 

00:09:18 Mark Smith 
Um, if you, if you can share what's the, what's, what's the, what do you hear from your CFO? The person paying the bills. 

00:09:29 Christoffer Besler Hansen 
so I haven't spoken with all of them because we have, uh, have a four swarm group CFO and may also have a CFO in each country. Uh, mostly up with, uh, our CFO in Norway, because that's where I was mainly in before I got into this new role. And, uh, our CFO in, Norway has been very positive after we started doing this user adoption. So we can be, you can say that the first year we had co-pilot, we were like. We are a tech company, we know how to do these things. So we just let everyone get the license that they need it and they can figure it out themselves. And we figured out that that didn't work. So we had like 50 % active users that first year. And we say, okay, we need to do something else. We are talking to our customers, you need to do user adoption. So why aren't we doing it ourselves? So we talked to our CFO. and said we need to spend time on this and she fully agreed. And after we did that, she attended a lot of those sessions. She said that this is really great. She also saw the real value in Copalette by using it herself. And ever since she has been very positive and she has also said inside of our company that our leaders should not look at Copalette as a cost, but what value can it bring. So I really like that that is our CFO that she thinks like that instead of just thinking about the big cost. 

00:11:07 Mark Smith 
She's amazing. Right. That's so cool. Just on that though, did you have to do any work around or have you done any kind of study on um the benefits that you're realizing because of it And you know, some people use the term return on investment, ROI, that type of thing. Sometimes I feel that doesn't necessarily capture all the benefits. It's not just strictly a financial benefit. You know, if somebody is typically working a 10 hour day and now they can work an eight hour day and go home early because you know two hours were clawed back because of the advantages that copilot Brings. Are you doing anything around monitoring that type of thing? 

00:11:52 Christoffer Besler Hansen 
Yeah, so for the last year we have asked our users how much time do you save each day by using GoPalette. And that's kind of like putting your finger in there and just saying a number. But over time, you can at least see that there are some development there. So what we see is that when users have just gotten their license, that number is usually around 20 to 30 minutes. After one to two months, it's usually around 30 to 40 minutes. And after two months and a bowl, it's usually about 40 minutes in average. And we can also see that over 20 % of our users say that they save over 60 minutes each Day. So that's one way we can look at it. But we also look at it like how has our quality of work improved. ah When we save time, maybe we can use that time to do more on that task. getting better quality. And that's also something that we can see in how we work that we are improving our Quality. And I would say especially after the two last co-operative agents with researcher and analysts, we have especially seen that the research agent has helped us a lot in improving our work and saving a lot of time on researching and taking a lot of things together. 

00:13:17 Mark Smith 
that's very interesting. That's very interesting.You're the first that I've heard that's kind of narrowed in on the value that that new functionality, you know, it's been only about six weeks to a couple of months out in market. That's very cool. That's very cool to hear that. um Tell me about some lessons you learned that you might have thought at this thing at the start of this project and this journey, and then your thinking has changed. And that can be more broadly on AI. co-pilot, whatever, but what are some things that perhaps you miscalculated at the start and your opinions change over the last two years? 

00:13:56 Christoffer Besler Hansen 
Um, that's a good question. Uh, so I think to give some context to that, uh, I have, uh, nine previous years worked as consultant, mostly on a technical level. Uh, so I'm not used to doing this kind of leading and also this kind of communication. So into this new role, um, leading this initiative, I see that the communication is a Real key part of driving adoption, making sure that everyone is informed about what we do, making sure that everyone gets information that takes a lot more time than I would have Thought. And also the time that we need to use on user adoption. It's not uh just a three month project, but it's kind of an infinite project. We don't have any end time on when we are done. We are just thinking. We doing this as long as we need to because the products are changing so fast. ah And yeah, so I wouldn't have guessed that two years ago. Then I would maybe have thought we just need to do a few workshops and then we are good to Go. But that has really changed over time. 

00:15:19 Mark Smith 
What surprised you the most as in, let's focus on use cases or workloads or tasks that people have that you might not have thought would be a big deal. Cause like we hear all the common ones, know, it allows me to summarize a team's meeting, allows me to take a 500 page PDF document and tell me what I need to know. You know, we see it summarizing and those are often the use cases, but kind ofDo you have some examples of things that I suppose surprised and delight the people in your organization? Perhaps their stories that have risen up like I found out a way how to use the tool and it's, you know, it's enabled me to do, you know, something that I never thought possible. 

00:16:07 Christoffer Besler Hansen 
Yeah, so I think we have a lot of those stories. I'll try to think of some of them. I said one of the things that might seem obvious with an LLM is that it's good at translating, but that's something that saves people a lot of time I've especially heard it after Polpite got that translate the whole Polpite kind of thing. And that saves a lot of time because We are a Microsoft partner, so sometimes we get those big points in English and just translating them into Norwegian can save us a lot of time and just doing some fine tuning. But also the other way around when we are doing a presentation in Norwegian, then maybe we also need to it in English. We can just translate it. As I mentioned, the research agent, we just shared a success story internally, which is one of the things that we try to communicate all the time that we have success stories. And one of my colleague, Marius, he shared that something that he usually used like 40 hours on, now he uses like five to six hours with the research agent. And that's not about just asking the research agent to... do everything for him, but he works alongside it.He knows what he's asking about. So he's not uh new on the subject, but it saves him a lot of time on taking all the things that they already have together, he's structuring it and writing a kind of architectural level design. So that's just... some of the things that I see that people are digging up. Also, one thing that I would mention that I don't think people have noticed that much with Copal is you have always tried to use Copal as a kind of use it to prioritize my day, what meetings do I have today, etc. And it works okay, I would say it's been better now. But try to do that with the researcher agent and it will actually go into all those meetings, it will sometimes find some team chats that you had with one of those in the meeting and will dig up a lot more interesting topics than the normal co-op and chat would do. yeah, I really think that the research agent is key to finding new ways to work going forward. 

00:18:47 Mark Smith 
I like it Let's talk about you personally now and AI and what are you doing for yourself and are there experiments that you're running? Are you inventing a side hustle that'll generate you a couple of billion dollars? It's kind of like we've got this... you know, box of Lego where it's up to your imagination what you can build, you know. So outside of your day job, how do you think about it and what are you thinking about it and what are you experimenting with? 

00:19:25 Christoffer Besler Hansen 
Yeah, so I've had some thoughts about it. How can I really make a good living on this? But I don't think I have the creativity enough to do it. And also I really enjoy where I work right now. I don't think it's, I don't really have the time to test it out. But what I usually do is that sometimes do a bit of vibe coding. So I've never really. called it myself, but using a GitHub copilot or cursor and just writing some programs and testing them out. I think this is fun. And I'm of course also using a lot of, I normally go to chat GPT on a personal level. So I use that a lot for all kinds of questions that I have or research that I need to do on a personal level. I'm trying to be fairly, let's say, skeptic about what I allow myself to share because I know what they really can do with that information. yeah, so I use that a lot. And I also tried to run a few models on my computer ah as well to test things out. I feel we are still not there that this is a good way of working with the smaller models, but they're really getting there. And I think in maybe just a few months or a year, it will be something that more people can enjoy as well. But I think it's, has, of course it has its use cases right now, especially for coding and so on. But it's more on a specific domain level, I think. 

00:21:18 Mark Smith 
Awesome. Christopher, it's been awesome having you on the show. I just learned so much from you. Thank you. ah I look forward to meeting you in person, maybe at MVP Summit next to it. 

00:21:28 Christoffer Besler Hansen 
Yeah. Yeah, thank you, Mark. It's been very nice to be here and talking with you. 
 
00:21:30 Mark Smith 
Hey, thanks for listening on 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 buy me a coffee.com/nz365guy. Thanks again and see you next time.