

How Microsoft Scaled Copilot with Zero Budget
Cadie Kneip
Get featured on the show by leaving us a Voice Mail: https://bit.ly/MIPVM
🎙️ FULL SHOW NOTES
https://www.microsoftinnovationpodcast.com/722
What happens when one person reimagines enterprise AI adoption from the ground up? In this episode, Cadie Kneip shares how she built Microsoft’s Copilot Champs community—an 8,000-strong grassroots movement—without a budget, formal mandate, or traditional training. Discover how she turned digital marketing tactics, gamification, and storytelling into a scalable model for human-first AI enablement. If you're leading tech transformation or struggling with adoption, this conversation is packed with practical inspiration.
🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Peer influence scales faster than policy: Cadie reveals why authentic, peer-led storytelling drives deeper AI adoption than top-down training.
- Gamification works—even without a budget: Learn how badges, leaderboards, and playful incentives created momentum across Microsoft.
- Short-form content beats polished production: Bite-sized GIFs and clips proved more effective than high-production training videos in a fast-changing tech landscape.
- Digital marketing tactics apply to enterprise learning: Cadie adapted campaign strategies to build a thriving internal community.
- You don’t need a big team to make a big impact: With just one person and smart automation, Microsoft scaled Copilot readiness to thousands.
đź§° RESOURCES MENTIONED:
👉Learn more about Microsoft’s Copilot Champs Community
Driving Microsoft 365 Copilot Adoption with Our Copilot Champs Community
Return to Summer Camp: Making Microsoft 365 Copilot Fun with Camp Copilot
Unlock your productivity: Here's our Top 10 tips for using Microsoft 365 Copilot every day
👉 Clipchamp - https://www.clipchamp.com
This year we're adding a new show to our line up - The AI Advantage. We'll discuss the skills you need to thrive in an AI-enabled world.
Accelerate your Microsoft career with the 90 Day Mentoring Challenge
We’ve helped 1,300+ people across 70+ countries establish successful careers in the Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 ecosystem.
Benefit from expert guidance, a supportive community, and a clear career roadmap. A lot can change in 90 days, get started today!
If you want to get in touch with me, you can message me here on Linkedin.
Thanks for listening 🚀 - Mark Smith
03:32 - From Film to AI: Cadie’s Unlikely Journey to Leading Copilot Adoption
07:00 - The Secret Sauce: Digital Marketing Meets Enterprise AI Adoption
11:01 - Peer Influence > Prescribed Learning: The Human-First Approach
16:00 - Building a Scalable, Budget-Free Learning Ecosystem
31:02 - Advice for New Adopters: Kickstart Your Copilot Journey
00:00:01 Mark Smith
Welcome to the copilot 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. Welcome back to the Microsoft Innovation Podcast. Today, we're heading to Seattle to meet someone who's quietly transforming how 8000 plus employees inside Microsoft are embracing AI from the inside out. She's the lead of customer 0, as we call it. Then copied. That Cadie, welcome to the show. It it's good to have you on and as always in the show notes will be any links around any resource that we discuss. But with that welcome.
00:00:45 Cadie Kneip
Thanks so much. Happy to be here.
00:00:47 Mark Smith
Good to have you on. I was so excited when I came across your name and and someone referred and said listen, this person actually was customer 0 rollout and has massively impacted how adoption of M365 copilot has happened. And because you know, I've been writing a book on the same subject. I was like I must. Talk to Katie. Perfect.
00:01:07 Cadie Kneip
Amazing. That's so nice. I can't like. It's so nice to hear that somebody thought of me too. That's.
00:01:12 Mark Smith
Yeah. So good food, family, and fun. What do they mean to you? What do you do when you're, you know, you're not on the clock with Microsoft?
00:01:19 Cadie Kneip
Yeah, I am extremely close with my entire family. I live within two blocks of every single one of them. I'm the oldest of four kids and yeah, my twin sister lives literally. 2 streets up from me and then you know. Yeah. So my family and I are very. Very close and I have a daughter who's going to be 3 in September and she is just wild and a blast. And then he like all foods, like all foods and then for fun, I do a lot of crafty things and I have an Etsy shop where I make custom.
00:01:41 Mark Smith
Nice.
00:01:54 Cadie Kneip
Like merchandise like swag, things you know, so cool. It's just, you know, it's like the little creative out.
00:01:56 Mark Smith
This is.
00:02:00 Cadie Kneip
But and then I am not a runner historically, but before my next birthday, I'm going to try to do 2 half marathons, so getting a little bit more to running and then like lately just as like looking for something that's like more like quiet time for me and soothing I've gotten into kind of like. Gaming for comfort. So Disney Dream Night Valley is my go to comfort game right now, so every night I'll play that for like an hour before I go to bed and. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, we're we're not doing work and champ stuff. It's next family and then kind of all the little hobbies try to keep busy. Circle.
00:02:40 Mark Smith
Wow, my son turns 3 in September as well, so very similar age. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:02:43 Cadie Kneip
Oh My gosh. Wow,
00:02:48 Mark Smith
So crazy coincidence that got my interest tell me.
00:02:49 Cadie Kneip
Yeah.
00:02:53 Mark Smith
Customer zero with Microsoft and the rollout of M365 copilot. You know, obviously head of the curve of the rest of the world and what do they say? Copilots. You know the version that we have has been around, I think 2 years now. We're coming up two years. So it's not like a long time 8000 users a heck of a lot of folks, you know. That's part of your champions network.
00:03:15 Cadie Kneip
Yeah.
00:03:16 Mark Smith
How did the job end up on your plate to start? With.
00:03:19 Cadie Kneip
Oh, that's such a good question. So I actually kind of an interesting role at Microsoft. I think my title is technically right now. It's a senior business program manager, but my role in particular focuses on employee readiness and historically. Over time, my job is not at all the original job that I was hired for. I think when. I was originally hired. We were. So like you know, doing stuff on like Azure deployment or things like that. And so we did a lot of readiness meeting our employees where they are. That's kind of always our goal and at that time we were doing live facilitated trainings in person and they probably did that for six months when I was enrolled before we had lockdown. And so then my job was quickly switched to entirely hybrid or no. First it was entirely virtual, so we went to creating videos and thankfully like I have a background in film, my major is marketing and film. And so making videos all day long when we're in lockdown was a blast. And I was at the time. Sign to Viva. So I think I made like 35 videos showing people how to use Viva topics alone and. So we did that with Viva and that was great. It was a really cool new experience how people learn virtually and then in the middle of that I got pregnant when on maternity leave, thought I was going to come back to, you know, 5000 views on life. You were topics video and I came back and there was like 5. And I was like. There's something's not working here. We can't keep making videos and not having because it's not that they're not helpful or that people don't need to learn this stuff. It is that they, especially Microsoft, so massive and there's so many resources out there and it's just we things don't have the ability to.
00:05:04 Cadie Kneip
Gale the way that that's most effective in a virtual environment. And so that's such a roundabout way of getting to your answer, but we learned a lot during that phase and I was so jaded coming back from maternity leave kind of coming to grips with that. And so they were like, OK Katie, we want you to come on to this new thing. And help with the readiness for copilot. And we want you to do exactly what you did for Viva. And I was just like, there's absolutely no way I'm doing that. It's a waste of time we don't need. Those and so they were like, well, we need you to work on it. So figure it out. And I have the best manager and managers in Microsoft at Microsoft Digital best team, where they will say, you know, if you don't think something's right or you think we can do something differently, go ahead and try it. And I was so lucky that they. Took a chance on me trying something different and basically that's how I came to run the copilot champs community was, you know, identifying this issue this way, that we're doing things isn't working. Let's try something. Different and I basically took the same concepts that we use in digital marketing and how digital marketing was working during lockdown and during a more virtual or hybrid world. Take those same components and apply them to our business. So that's how we came up with the concept for the copilot champs community. It's all a lot of what we do is built. On the basis and same structure as a digital marketing campaign. So yeah, because I kind of. Took the chance and started it. I've just kind of been the one person to keep maintaining it and running it this whole time. So yeah, I think that's kind of the genesis of copilot champ.
00:06:47 Mark Smith
So what's the secret sauce? How do you apply those lessons learned from the marketing side if you were to? If I said, listen, build me the ultimate Champs community now for copilot. Let's say a customer outside of Microsoft so you don't have the nuance of being your own tools in house and. What are kind of when you think of those building blocks? What should be put in? Yes.
00:07:13 Cadie Kneip
Yeah. So it's interesting. We'll get back to kind of the role that customer 0 plays in this. But what's great with program like Microsoft does with Customer 0 is there's a lot of room for experimentation. But when you're getting to the concept of like, what elements in a digital marketing campaign translate to. Internal enterprise readiness or adoption strategies? It's probably, I don't know, something that I haven't really experienced in my corporate roles and that is this concept of having like true stories. I think that the younger generation. And like Gen. Z is really good at calling this out like they're really good at noticing when somebody's forcing an idea onto them or being like this genuine, they're really quick to call out if you're reading off a script or if you're you're overheard. And I think that's something that translates when people. Are you know, really influence like through social media influencers, right? Those are the people who, you know, marketing has known this for a long time. If you want to make something go viral or really have success, you're gonna meet your audience, A tailored audience. Through, you know the different algorithms that social media puts you through and you're meeting your targeted, specific audience where they are. And so it's really hard to imagine that that's something that could translate in a corporate environment, especially someplace like Microsoft where we have a gazillion different roles in a different like organizations and. No two people really have the same job. It's. Kind of hard to. Imagine that you can find that common ground with people, but that's what we've done. And that's like everything that we do that's experimental, that has a.
00:08:58 Cadie Kneip
Human 1st and grassroots feeling to it is by far the most effective and I think that's also when you see something that's just like you can't take your eyes off of it and social media is. That's kind of like the underlying you know meaning behind. I won't go on a rant about it now, but we could have an entire hour or two conversation about my obsession with gamification and octalysis also, and I think the the combination of the two things like social media marketing, digital marketing concepts and and gamification are kind of the the main ingredients to the secret sauce of copilot. Yes.
00:09:35 Mark Smith
Interesting. This is interesting. I want to unpack this a bit more. So are you saying that you rather than creating, let's say, traditionally in my training career we would have done a one week class? That's how I started out was a one week, 6 hours a day, intense training on a piece of technology when I was in Sun Microsystems, it would go to a week and 1/2. Maybe two weeks type course where you'd come. Nobody's got time for that these days. And so, you know, when we look at it from a TikTok perspective, we're looking, what, 30 to 60 to, let's say, 90 seconds, I think 4 minutes Max, right. You've gotta either communicate a concept, move on, but really open with a compelling hook. Why will I stay in that first kind of 10 to 15 seconds? Otherwise, I'm off to something else and of course in the corporate environment, what we're seeing is. This this massive bombardment of you gotta learn so much. There's so much more to learn. How do I filter out and learn the stuff that's gonna move the dial for me personally, rather than all the prescribed learning that you know, an organization the size of Microsoft has a, you know, probably millions of hours of content that that people could commune. Thank you, Sir.
00:10:48 Cadie Kneip
Yes, and the keyword that you use there is prescribed. Learning. And I think what we've. Come to accept is that. For copilot in particular, and we'll say AI, and we'll just say new technologies going forward that in our experience so far peer influence scales faster than policy. And you're entirely right. Where something that a prescribed training it's work. And I think there's something subconscious about that too, where it's like I'm just going to get through this hour long training so that I get my credit so that I don't get an week right. And when it's peer run.
00:11:27 Mark Smith
Yes.
00:11:31 Cadie Kneip
There's that, you know, intrinsic, like community style like influencer element of it. That's kind of like enticing. And then it is that personalization and tailored content with real stories that make something feel like because it makes things feel real when you are going through a lot of. Kind of typical trainings, it's learn this out of the book because. We talked to you. And the way that peer training is modeled, particularly the way we do it, is look what I did and listen to the value that I feel from this product. Or this you know, or whatever the topic is that we're training on, we're not necessarily training. We're storytelling and you can take what you want from that story. What was it? A lot is people hear these stories and be like, how did you do that? Show me how you did that and how I can make it relevant in my workflows. Tool. Because you basically sold me on a story you show you sold me on a feeling something that is. Is, you know, a gut instinct, something that's human and so like the tombstone have come out. That chance community is gonna say human first AI adoption. And that's like the the main thing that's kind of like through what works with social media and digital marketing and what works with. Enterprises is if you're have got this human first feeling first approach, it's just we're seeing that it has an impact in the way that people take interest.
00:13:05 Cadie Kneip
Scale adoption, you know, have more open mindedness to try something new and to share it with their friends, right? Or like one of the things we saw when copilot first came out was we had an entire group of employees in certain roles who tried copilot. You know, the first few months, the first year when it was still like very, very infant who tried it and they were like, this isn't what I expected. This isn't a I I don't want to try this anymore. I'm done. And we've seen overtime that the only effective way to get that person to try it again is if a peer shows them that value. So I tried copilot, it didn't do what I thought it would. I hate it. I've never tried it again. Again. You know, two days later or months later. Marks using copilot, and he's showing me how he's using it. It's improving. You know, something in his workflow and I, you know, trust and respect him. And I want to y'all try something because he did it. So I guess I'll. Give it another. Shot. That's the one way we've seen to really. Not only pull somebody back into a product that maybe they've been disenchanted with, but convert them to be a champ because we have groups and groups of people who came from particularly technical roles, who I've kind of taken an extra interest in them to help nurture them through this, but they end up being the strongest. Stamps at the end of the day, because they've been on both sides of, like, like drinking the kool-aid to a degree, right? Especially with the program. There's like a little bit of optimism we try to. But I mean they end up having like once it clicks for them and they find the purpose. For it, they're. So excited to go share that story with their peers. So it's something that works, you know, in enterprises in work environments and and you know, all kinds of digital marketing and.
00:14:56 Mark Smith
Social media. So if I'm sitting in the role of somebody in traditional L&D. Might role in an organization and they hear, hey, you're just gonna let other people educate the people, and we're gonna have no formal program. They're gonna go hang on a motor. How do we measure 1? How do we know people are learning things? They need to know. And how do we measure this? Those are kind of the, you know, from somebody that wants to have a, you know, 50 people got to 20% of the course 100 got to that. But this is a different way of looking at it. So how did you kind of make sure you had a mechanism to show advancement to show adoption was happening and then how did you enable these mavens these champs? These. You know champions of early adoption. How did you equip them and enable them to do their storytelling, to bring people into that journey?
00:15:47 Cadie Kneip
Totally. That's a great question. There's a few things in there. One is, yes, my team generally does L&D and we do have metrics that we need to measure. And success, you know, KPIs that are based on the material that we produce in the. 1st place and so the Champs model is kind of you think of like a hub and spoke model and you think of like my team and employee experience success is still going to create videos, gifts, training decks based on our amazing relationships with the product group and customer experience groups and things like that we have like. All of these great relationships where we can build really rich content and I'm just gonna break about my team for a second. I'm one of three of these readiness BPM's content creators. And I would challenge anybody to throw any kind of topic at them and they'll create totally top of the line training material in very quickly too. They were really, really talented group of people. So they're not taking away from the content that's being created at a baseline. So what we've done with that hub and spoke model. Well, is traditionally we use BPM's to help scale our trainings across the company. So a BPM will be assigned to different organizations and kind of like work with that chief of staff to make sure like you get the latest you know. Training next and stuff what? Does BPM stand for business program managers? Yeah. So just like partner with different orgs. And they also do.
00:17:10 Mark Smith
Got you. Yep. OK. Amazing work and they're super crucial to our champs community as well.
00:17:18 Cadie Kneip
To kind of like maintain those relationships, make sure that like something that a champ makes helps kind of scale that through that ecosystem as well. So by the way, if you go to the inside track blog and the Microsoft Inside Track blog and you search for copilot champs, you can find our copilot Champs Community framework. And that's where we have some slides that go through exactly what I'm talking about. So if you're like me. And I'm so visual. If you're talking to me and I can't visualize so that I'm going to forget it in a second. So if you're like me, go grab that slide to understand our hub and. Model. So yeah, that's kind of our two layer traditional model and then for copilot we added this outer layer which is our champs community. So for copilot chance, by the way is 8000 employees totally voluntary almost every role represented across the company including vendors and every organization. Across the company, every. Three global program and anybody can sign up to do it. The only requirements that we have are that you are passionate about AI, that you're the kind of person that wants to drive adoption in your team and the other rule that we have, you kind of sign at the end is that you're going to be nice about it, that you're not a jerk. That's the only way I would ever.
00:18:31 Cadie Kneip
Kick somebody out of the program, I. Love them. But when you sign up, we like I said, gamification is big for us too. So we have like like. Badges and photo wrappers that people earn from completing some of these baseline trainings. So you sign up, you automatically get an e-mail from me. That's kind of like personalized and has this list of trainings for you to take so you can earn your chance badge. And in that, training is included in like getting you up to a certain degree of. Kind of competency with copilot as a product and then two or three train the trainer sessions so you learn from David Van Gilder. My peer, directly from him. How he would train on copilot. And so then the materials we give them. Are, you know decks with screenshots or the a script to do a live demo if they want, but if even if you're not that familiar with it, you're not comfortable, you can totally use the screenshots he provides and in very detailed talk track so you anybody day one could use this out-of-the-box solution to demonstrate copilot to their teams. So that's how we quickly and. I think effectively in. Enable, like many LD teams across the company with the same content, it is kind of just like we built this program around that. So yeah, again we could talk for hours about like how that works at scale because I am one person that runs it and we have this kind of rich onboarding experience.
00:19:44 Mark Smith
Yeah.
00:19:58 Cadie Kneip
And it's, you know, we use power automate, we use forms we use and 365 groups. There's all kind of like little tricks that you can do to make things a lot easier and more efficient. And also like a real. The rich experience that feels personal with, you know, also no budget, you know, like one person and no budget. And we can still have an experience that feels, you know, really complete well. It is very grassroots, but we never have anybody say like, oh, this is sloppy or this is boring or anything like that we have. A very dynamic program.
00:20:29 Mark Smith
So you talk about. Gamification and badges and things like that. One of the things that I've noticed from implementations being done around the world of copilot. One of the big things the word swag keeps coming up, which I find consistently people love swag and particularly, you know, copilot logo is pretty awesome. It looks pretty amazing. It wears well. Is swag part of your arsenal there or is it more like just digital swag? Or is there any kind of physical outworking of that you find drives or moves the needle?
00:21:00 Cadie Kneip
At all, yeah, so. Again, we don't have any budget, so I do have some elements of physical swag that I pay for out of pocket. But I think that that like, it's not reasonable for everybody. But for me, I have like, so much appreciation for it's only for people that, you know, go out of their way to be helpful, what we call superstars in the Champs community. Everybody that presented in our last big training. Event that was company wide. I gifted them. A piece of like a custom swag like a a sweatshirt or a backpack. And last year our big thing was friendship bracelets for The Champs community.
00:21:34 Mark Smith
Very Taylor Swift.
00:21:35 Cadie Kneip
Yes, of course. Yeah. So last year that was kind of the thing, but yes, there are things like that that feel very special, but it's not kind of our standard. The standard definitely is credibly badges, which is fantastic, cause that'll scale beyond your Microsoft experience. Exactly. And we really love to celebrate. Different kinds of lines with that. And then we have internal like that is our internal like digital tokens too. I obviously I love using generative AI to create images and I'm pretty good at Photoshop. So we have all kinds of like photo wrappers and backgrounds and teams, backgrounds and things that custom made for the copilot champs community. So. Yeah. And then also this year, I think Microsoft's making a blatant effort to reduce, you know, carbon emissions. And part of that is through reducing the amount of, like, physical swags that Microsoft employees use internally, which, you know, I was already already not doing it because my team just doesn't have. That's not something we normally do, because we're usually not on that side of the fence, but I think we'll start to see more people come up with other ways to be creative with gamification. And so yeah, the end price tends to be a digital badge, if not like a one off piece of swag. And then it's an interesting concept. Like we're building out an. Nap game right now they'll be internal to start. Hopefully we can publish it externally. That's kind of running under the same concept as like a Duolingo where you make progress. You complete challenges and then your gratification is coming from watching yourself earn points and climb up that leaderboard. And we're developing this in a way where it's very important at Microsoft Digital in particular, that we really respect our users privacy and works Council policies. So we don't automatically track your individual copilot usage. But in this game, you can write, you know, personal attestation to that. Message and provide lead feedback and you'll get points. That way you get points for watching some of our training courses and upscaling yourself in copilot. And and so there will be like lots of little challenges for you to earn points and get that gratification of that leaderboard. So there are even things that don't result in a prize that can still incentivize people to participate.
00:23:56 Mark Smith
Nice, nice. I know exactly what you mean. When I was in the power platform space, I built a tool that was. And organizational enablement on the power platform and I stole the concept from Duolingo that when you leveled up around your picture was a band with what and you could choose any number of bands that you had earned. And then we had this concept of XP. So experience you could always see your experience line which is taken straight out of you know gaming. And you know, if you delivered a small group of, you know, enabled. You would get XP if people attended it. They would get a certain amount of XP and so the whole thing. Then there's a whole leaderboard and people were, you know, wanting to do more and want to earn more points. And of course he kind of kept it dark around what earned the bigger points. But it was incredible and it's all opt in, right. And we weren't tracking anything outside of.
00:24:41 Cadie Kneip
Right. Yeah.
00:24:47 Mark Smith
Attendees to a registered class and things like that, but it was very cool and it was all opt in, but it was people love for whatever reason, little gaming it does have. Unpacked just on your video side of things, you know, are you going to much more short form video when you do your those fundamental learning pieces and just a bit of it's not necessarily technical, but tell me a bit about tool sets. Are you using things like clipchamp or are you using the Adobe suite to create? You. Your e-learning content. Are you going as far as making it SCORM compliant or are you you don't have time for that. It seems like scoring is a very old school way of. When things and is it a case of just your, you know, making it bite size and consumable, right? Everyone's busy, but you might, you know, be on a commute and you can watch a couple of videos and you wanna get the whole concept without being stopped halfway through. And then yeah, I never get back to it type thing. Yeah. How are you thinking?
00:25:40 Cadie Kneip
About that. Yeah. So I think you're totally right. And I think that the four. Copilot again because my background is in film, so like I used to, I could say that, you know, using like the entire Adobe suite and make something like super polished and amazing. And like, yeah again we get like 5. And with the rate of change with copilot, there was a period where we would get really frustrated in taking the traditional amount of time that we would on production because the turnover was so fast. We would create something one day and it would be different and out of date like immediately. So we kind of had to come to grips with that reality and say things don't need to be super polished. And in fact with what we're seeing with, like copilot champs and things like that, the more grassroots or like less poll or something is as long as it's still clear is you know more. So what I do with the chance community in particular does what my peers are have been doing with copilot creation, I would say follows like very simple like instead of doing a three hour training video on how to use copilot to summarize your inbox, which is like 2 clicks. A lot of things like that, we create gifts instead and then for what I do with champs, content is monthly. We meet as a group and we have people share their wins, best practices, and demos with copilot. And we record those and I will 1st and you're going to know exactly what we're going with here because you do this kind of like podcast, you're doing some self promotion and social media is the longest form of content you have it. And then you have, like that hour long video, right? You have that hours worth of content. Imagine, then we cut it into 15. Minute segments and if somebody wants 15 minute, you know deep dive on something, they can have it, we cut it in half from there and then we cut it into the little bite size things, maybe a couple of seconds or whatever, and that's what we'll post. Be engage or something like that, or have a clip of it like, you know, embedded in an e-mail or a newsletter to get somebody to go to the other video like you see with YouTube, where you have an hour long podcast and then you have the five seconds of shorts and people you know you can still get. A lot of Information from a short so that's kind of the.
00:28:02 Cadie Kneip
Strategy that I've used with the content that we get from champs and yeah, so with champs we have, you know, a landing page. We have engaged channel. We have a teams channel and we. Kind of cut up and stretch every piece of content that we have in scale it. So that's kind of the way that we do it. So I have been using Clipchamp and I think when Clipchamp first came out, I was kind of like snobby and thought like I'm not we're going to use Adobe Suite. Come on. And now because it is just like. Especially like the in window editing. You can do like in stream without even opening the the platform. It's like ohh I just have to trim here and there, it's fine. Yeah, somebody's microphone died in the middle of it, but they come back in a couple of seconds, you know. These things that I would have never let go from an editing perspective in the past, but it just it works now and we can do things so much faster. I do still going to make some fun like original content because I make like fun, like parody promotional videos like silly commercial type. Things and for those you will see me, you know, crack open Adobe, but then also use programs like 11 labs and murdering other things that we that, you know, aren't necessarily in the copilot suite where there's text to voice and things like that because we can and you know. One of the things I hated the most about making training videos was doing voiceovers. And now I can. I don't have to worry about. That so yeah, it's been really cool. That's been a different side of AI adoption tools because I think most of my AI stuff that I use is in that enterprise work environment and getting into the play side of things or whatever creative side of things is very cool too.
00:29:48 Mark Smith
This has been so interesting, incredibly so. My this tool that we use in Riverside after the export as and once it's compiled, it allows me to create and it's using AI to identify all the magic. What they call magic clips, which can be. Yeah. You know, anything from 30 or even from 10 seconds through to 90 seconds or 120 seconds long. But and it verticalized is it it does the, you know imprint of the closed captions or open captions across them and it is what hooks people in right those social media bite sized pieces. So interesting to hear you talk about that before I let you go. What's the advice after all this experience that you would have to a brand new company, they've just gone out? Yeah, they've bought $5030 a month per person. You know, a copilot, M365 copilot. Houses and they have allocated somebody to do adoption inside the organization. What quick fire advice would you give those folks?
00:30:49 Cadie Kneip
Yeah. So I have customer engagements a lot where we we answer this exact question and the challenge that people come up with is we don't have the capacity, the headcount, the budget, the maybe even people who are enough people who are interested enough in copilot to learn about it and then train on it. And so they really love when I come to them and say like. I've built this program by myself and up until recently where I got one or two people to help me. I did the entire program with 8000 people by myself. It's my side of desk job, you know, and the customers love to hear that and we have, we could do it basically for free and we do have these kits online, can't copilot in a box is one of them. And so if I had a customer, you know, come and. Say our sure your chance program concept sounds great our. We don't have chance. We don't have people who will be willing to learn this with us or somebody who's maybe like already interested in AI. Even we haven't. We don't know how to identify those people. Then I would start with the can't copilot in a box because what we have in there is a. Virtual skilling framework, which sounds like OK, anybody can host a virtual skilling event, but we really break it down step by step with the concepts and like best practices that have worked for us in Microsoft and then we provide you some of those really cool train the trainer decks that I talked about that have the screenshots. They have the complete. Rock track and you know, I think for Camp copilot and copilot Expo, some of these bigger internal training things we've done, there's. 30 and now 80 sessions. And. Then and for camp copilot, we trimmed it down to what are the three. Things that you need to know to get started on your copilot journey, like how do you kickstart that so we have a copilot, Kickstarter, just like tell you kind of the INS and outs of how a Gen. AI works in in Copilots model. But my favorite one of all time is the art of prompt engineering which is a really cool exercise where you learn. Like the parameters of prompting iterative prompting through copilot and designer, so you're making different versions of a picture of a Pomeranian the whole. Time and it's just a blast. And then the end. By the end of that, in just these three courses, the last one is make it real. So that last one is how to apply copilot in your daily workflows. The next version of this will be how to apply copilot in your daily workflows with agents. Last year when we published IT, agents wasn't, you know. The priority it was more things like things that people do every day with their inbox and teams making generations and stuff, which is amazing. Maybe the next version will have will be all about agents, like a couch to 5K beginner to build our journey with agents anyway, so we we are putting the information and kits like that out for our customers over time and it's all stuff that started with the Champs community and then we package it up and deliver it so that if your. Champs Community or your adoption enablement effort is lacking thing. Just that that that human element isn't there yet. You can kick start that if you're one person IT department, you have the tools that you need to try it and then again they'll take our advice in the deck and infuse it with your personal stories. You're bound to attract more people. And and build that community out overtime. So we have a few kits like that to kind of help cultivate that in a in a smaller company.
00:34:27 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 the copilot today? Kakie kite.

Cadie Kneip
Cadie Kneip is a Senior Business Program Manager in the Employee Experience Success team at Microsoft who believes that work should feel a little more like wonder. With a passion for building community, sparking innovation, and making tech feel more human (and a lot more fun), Cadie aims to bring a spark of magic to everything—from strategy decks to surprise-and-delight moments.
Cadie leads the Copilot Champs Community at Microsoft and has been the creative force behind unique, peer-driven experiences like Camp Copilot and Copilot Expo, where learning feels more like an adventure than an agenda. Whether it’s designing gamified dashboards, championing privacy-first solutions, or crafting immersive community journeys, Cadie leads with empathy, imagination, and a get-it-done attitude.
Known for turning “what ifs” into “heck yeses,” Cadie thrives at the intersection of people and programs—where collaboration meets creativity and spreadsheets meet storytelling.