Inside Copilot Adoption: What Works, What Doesn’t

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.

00:00:34 Mark Smith
Welcome back to the Microsoft Innovation Podcast. We're back in the UK to talk to Kevin. He's a director of modern workplace over at Avanade. From building custom copilot agents and acting like your own AI project manager to designing real world adoption insights and for massive enterprises, our guest is deep in the trenches. Of what's next, when it comes to Co? The pilot's full links are in the show notes, as always. Welcome to the show, Kevin.

00:00:58 Kevin McDonnell
Thank you very much for having me. And I I love that idea of being deep in the trenches. It does feel like that at times defending some of. The things we're doing.

00:01:07 Mark Smith
So much is happening, you know, in the copilot space and I feel. Something has changed and that now on mass companies are going, we need to get actually serious about this copilot thing, and our staff are are begging for it.

00:01:27 Kevin McDonnell
We we've had a couple of hills. I think there's been that initial. I mean, I'm still astounding that companies were paying to be on the preview for copilot. There was that much excitement and and they were flooding Microsoft with the request for that. So he had the early adopter who just went boom. Yes, I really want this. This is going to change everything. And then there was a little bit of a lull where kind of. Those who hadn't gone very early were kind of like we're gonna wait and see what happens. And now I absolutely agree. There's another burst of people going. OK we we're hearing that productivity. We're hearing good things about it. We want to carry on with that as well. And and I think agents are coming into this. So you can do even more, as you say.

00:02:07 Mark Smith
I like it. Food, family and fun. What do they mean to you, Kevin? Where are? You located in the UK.

00:02:14 Kevin McDonnell
So I'm I'm in a lovely little town called 7 Oaks, which is just just SE of London. We're just for those who know UK, the M25, that's kind of sometimes thought of the edge of London. We're just outside there, so beautifully connected. I can head into our office just off just next to the big walkie-talkie building for anyone who knows. London. But also I've got fields near us. There's a lovely park with deer there and nice space. I've got got three boys, so having space is very, very important to me. And things on that. So I'd I'd say families very important, just had a nice day with two of my boys and my wife yesterday down at the beach in Brighton and just chilling out and remembering fondly a family member who passed away a few years ago. So we we kind of used as an excuse to have a a nice fun day together, which is good there. Sadly my my other son. Is off into railing, which I'm even more jealous about. So he's travelling about to join a gap year travelling around South America so I will look on and I I have been actually looking to see if there's any conferences in South America I can find an excuse to go meet up with him there, but nothing I can afford so far.

00:03:26 Mark Smith
What did? Why did he choose South America?

00:03:29 Kevin McDonnell
I, if I'm honest, I suspect slightly. It's somewhere I've never been, and my wife's never been, so I think he's gonna go. I can beat you on this one, but I think he just he actually went to Ecuador a couple of years ago on a a school trip. They were kind of helping out in village years, doing a lot of trekking there. So he, he's seen a bit of South America and I think he wanted to. See a bit more he he speaks a little bit of Spanish, a little bit of Portuguese, so that that will help him as well. On there. So yeah, we're we're very jealous. Well, where you're going? Well, kind of fly into Colombia and then see what happens. I'm just like, oh, freedom. I remember those days of freedom from there as well. And. And to tie you back to your other questions, I'm also, I know he's going to Argentina and I'm hugely jealous of the kind of beef and gorgeous. Wine will have their a big, big fan of smoking meats and things like using sort of Weber barbecue and. Getting long, slow cooks that you spend ages kind of going back and forth checking on. I love the tech around that as well. I've got one. The kind of ink, the thermometers, so I can keep an eye on it. I was very naughty over Christmas with with my. Wifes very religious, so we do try and go to church at Christmas, but I have my phone there kind of checking the temperature of the Turkey while I'm.

00:04:47 Mark Smith
There and isn't it great? So this is on the Weber. Yes.

00:04:50 Kevin McDonnell
App, right? I diet. She used the the Inkbird app so the the web ones lovely. It's got Bluetooth but the inkbird's got the wireless so I can check it wherever I am. Uh oh, no. I can panic and kind of hustle people out the church a lot. Quicker. Make sure it's it.

00:05:06 Mark Smith
I've I've got inkbird in my greenhouse which monitors my my heat mats on when on my growing tables, but I'm on Bluetooth for the weather when I'm when I'm cooking on the weather yeah.

00:05:06 Kevin McDonnell
Needs a bit warming up. Oh, very nice. Very nice. So, yeah, that's that's food and fun merged together. But I I'd say if if I didn't have a job, I'd be doing a lot more of things like that, you know, using things like Home assistant, automating it. I, I keep getting it moving. You see some of the lights have got in the office, especially the Lego ones were hooked up with Home assistant. You know those stories people say about enterprise, where make sure you back everything up. Yeah, I didn't listen to that. Something crashed on my pie and I I lost all the configuration and haven't quite. Built up the the energy to redo all of it, so I'd I'd love to have more time, spend a bit more on that. I follow a lot of the home assistant groups, but you know, press a button, everything turns on, everything's monitored, all your power. I'd love to have that going. That's that's that keeps me entertained. When I do have a bit of time.

00:06:09 Mark Smith
If I say the wrong command right now, this whole room will just monitors everything gone. Everything goes off and the only one that I haven't you can see, there's a little LED guy up here, which is a rocket and it's the only. It's a new one and it doesn't have Wi-Fi. Built in so I've just bought a Wi-Fi depth which I need to wire into it so that it also joins the community of on and.

00:06:36 Kevin McDonnell
I'd say I'd. I'd also have on those little infrared boxes. That's kind of hooked up to home assistant. So a lot, a lot. The Lego lights. I know the the back to the future one behind me and the Lamborghini. I need to kind of manually go and switch on at the top, which I don't do very often and I've just noticed I forgot now, but they they are meant to go and. And have a disco mode. So when I'm bored, they all kind of flash in the different orders which which is just to cheer me up in the morning when I'm feeling grumpy.

00:07:07 Mark Smith
I like it. Tell me about and. It's interesting because I'm doing this podcast with you about avanade. And your role in the UK and I spoke to your counterpart this morning in the US in AVANADE and and what she's doing there with copilot, which was which was super interesting. But you've been doing this for a while now. You've been helping companies around M365. Per pilot adoption. Give me some stories from the trenches. What have you seen that works well and what have you seen that doesn't work well or where you've seen kind of poor uptake. And you have, you clearly can see why there's been poor uptake.

00:07:56 Kevin McDonnell
Now I need to get not too corporate with some of these. What what works well is that when companies engage and invest in adoption now. Now, obviously, I'd love that to be with partners and going and bringing them on to help, but I think where where companies bring people along, they invest that time to make sure the trainings there to help build that habit. I think you know, Microsoft talked about the story of saving 11 minutes per day over 11 weeks and you see a dip. You have that initial. Excitement when people get their first licence, they start using it. If you don't build the habit that will tail off, so having those ones having that gamification, having sessions that people can drop in hearing stories of your colleagues, of how they've been using it and helpful, all of those things. And I I found it myself, I I found out over about 8 weeks that I was really excited. And then I found I was only using it for demos. I hadn't built it into my day-to-day habits on there, and that habit forming is really, really important on there, cause if you don't have that, it's just gonna tailor way. And the only way to build that is by repeating those stories, repeating that this is the benefits you can get. This is the benefits you can. Yeah, you don't want to overwhelm people. You don't want to scare them. You don't want to. I'll let you bleep this out if it's not too bad, but don't wanna…. people off too much on there. You wanna keep them kind of focused on that and that that is so important. So. The organisations I've seen win from that are those that keep those those things happening and measure. We talk a lot and have not about value measurements of it. Because you want to measure how much people are using it, you wanna measure what people are doing. But you also want to get that that feeling as well from people are they, do they feel they're getting value? Can you see numbers that measure that so that that will change per organization. Different organizations will care about different things. So what that value is to them, are they looking at productivity saving? Are they looking at higher quality of? Results and interestingly, we've we've seen productivity saving on there. I can't remember the numbers. I think we've seen like an hour a day. I think it's about between 45 minutes and an hour a day of time.

00:10:13 Kevin McDonnell
Saving, but we're not seeing that that kind of come back and saying ohh great we can reduce the amount of work and we can go home early. What people are doing are reinvesting that time into quality. So the output of things is much better. And I I've seen that myself as well that I get that time back. But instead of kind of just staring at a screen and feeling that. Pain. Where do I get started or how do I rewrite this? I'm using copilot to rewrite it, getting a good idea and then spending longer on that real minutiae. Whereas before I may have gone, yeah, that's good enough. I need to get out of door, get it out that way so that that quality is coming back. Into there and to go back to your your kind of question, what are what are we seeing with companies and we've seen a lot of companies that we spoke to at the beginning who decided to go alone with rolling out copilot. They're not putting in place those adoptions. They're not helping people build those habits. They're not measuring the value. And now they're going well, hang on, we're spending all these money on licenses. But no one's really using it. Why not? It's amazing. And we're like, yeah, because people know it's amazing. But if they haven't found ways to build it into the day-to-day ways of things. They don't do it from there, so I'd say building those habits, supporting people through the adoption and measuring the value that means something to your company are three big things. I'd I'd advise people on.

00:11:36 Mark Smith
What resonated with their is the quality. Because you have the more time to spend on that, you know today I spent 3 hours writing a proposal proposal that in the past would have been a multi day activity to. But part of my clean up sequence in my Word document is I go through so I save it off to SharePoint. I then bring it back into copilot and then I say listen I I need you to now QA this. Word document and look for everything from formatting to did I mention dates at two different location like? I mean I don't give it that detail but it takes that into account right? And makes sure all my math adds up in the tables for the pricing and makes sure my dates are correct. Did I did I was I consistently with with the phraseology. The capitalisation even. Of phrases throughout the in this case 20 page proposal and that's the like. I would have never spent that time on that level of detail because I've spent so much billing. I just want to get it off my plate now, and that's what it's really allowing to do is that fine quality control. You're so right.

00:12:52 Kevin McDonnell
Absolutely. And I love the the comparison because yes, we could compare documents before and we could take different versions, but.Used to get. So many versions of that and it would be like someone to put a dot in there or they've changed formats like that. That's distracting me from what I really need to do. Almost by doing it with copilot, I can ask it to kind of hit the higher priorities and I can give it things like I really want you to focus on. I'd love to your one on kind of the common. Verbiage, and I know we're not on video, but behind me, it's a lovely T-shirt on how to spell copilot. It is a capital C and a lower case P. No hyphens and things like. Having those things but one of the things that particularly bugs me when people spell copilot wrong is when they inconsistently spell it wrong. And I think that's the same in documents. I'll be honest, if you're gonna get it wrong, just be consistent. Have that level of quality within there, because otherwise you're really hitting it. So picking up those as priorities that you couldn't do when you had just a full list of.

00:13:52 Kevin McDonnell
Things on there that again accelerates means you're getting to the higher level things. The important bits first, without getting bogged down, I really, really found that useful. And another way. I'm just such a huge fan of the researcher agent, which takes a little bit more time to generate and run, but I'm going off on a holiday. I'm pretty much off for three weeks in a row, so there's quite a fair few things I need to hand over. If I had to go through all my messages or my emails or my teams. Ones I I would miss so much and pick some there I I've run the research agent today and it's given me enough format. I I asked it to sort of pick up the key things I'm working on. I've then asked it to do it again of give me a list of tasks that I need to do of things to hand over and things I've missed and I've now got a starter. Would I just hand that over as it is no but it's giving me such a powerful starter. To get moving with and. I know with with the kind of base copilot it would have done enough, but it it only would have brought some things with the research. I know it's gone back and forth and dug to that extra level as well, which is really, really helpful.

00:14:56 Mark Smith
So what are the what are your other kind of edge use cases that you're finding? You're using it in, and if you want to blow somebody away with what you can do, you might pull this out and and I'll give you a couple of grounding examples. So 1 is. Microsoft forms, right? If you go in there and you have a robust prompt, you can build a form, quiz, whatever. That looks amazing and it's it's just brilliant, right? It saves so much time and manual entry of building, you know, laying out those and then they I was talking to somebody else recently and their feature was. Whiteboard copilot and whiteboard. And that they'll kick off a workshop and go to the the floor. What are? What are some ideas? Is and everyone's like. You know, when you start a workshop, everyone's kind of quiet. Nobody wants to take that first move. And so his thing is he goes, hey, why don't we get copilot to kick us off? And it goes and puts 4 post it notes on the board with ideas around and he goes what? It's crazy. Said everybody all of a sudden, they're off to the races and the. Just that little nudge, that little opening of of, you know, 4 post it notes going on the board and he said the whole room comes alive and they all start contributing and, you know, adding their ideas and thoughts and things like that. What about you? What are what? What are your kind of? And don't tell me. It's PowerPoint copilot and con PowerPoint, but because, honestly, my expectations are off the Richter scale. What? I'd like that to do. And it seems a long way before it's going to get there.

00:16:37 Kevin McDonnell
OK, so I'm I'm gonna answer two of your ideas and and finish them off slightly and then come to my main one that I that I really think on there. I've I've touched on researcher agent that that probably would be my go to I love that in so many different ways pulling together white papers and items on that it's so powerful but white board. I I have a slight issue because I love it. I love the copilot capability. My problem is that I don't think whiteboard's good enough for us at all. So you're gonna have to take all the problems with that. I'd. I'd love if we could take that and put it into mural or. It's another one klaxon. Clarkson on there and take that affectionately. Yeah, I I wish that had those functionality with all those different things in there. Because the the thing I actually love in whiteboards is I remember one workshop we spent two hours. We've taken all the ideas with that. This group wouldn't shut up. There was my old company, I, Steve and others. If you're listening, we had so many ideas. The debates about how we group things together took so long to get moving on there. Now in White board I can say group these together into common themes. Again, they're not always perfect. But it gave. I I tried it again and literally in 5 minutes. We had a good grouping. We spent another 5 minutes just kind of refining it slightly and we moved on to the important thing of what we do about that. I love that kind of grouping of things together that speed, that that gives you is really useful. And I have I have before actually worked in murals, kind of the one we use at avenor.

00:18:14 Kevin McDonnell
Most I've exported that put it into whiteboard, grouped it, taking it back out and continue the conversation in mural from there. So you're using those features where they're used from there. PowerPoint. Yeah, I'm not going to fight you on that one. Don't go in and just say make this look beautiful. It it's still not there. It's getting better. I've heard the work the team are putting into there, making it more able to to understand what means to you. You know, you you have your corporate templates, you have. Stars you want to do getting it to work on that. I know it's absolutely a goal. From Microsoft's, whether it gets there, whether they'll see it, I'm I'm not going to comment too much for I get in trouble on there. But I I would say with a lot of copilot keep trying things out, things keep getting improved day by day one. One things I'd love to do it. It's to write a kind of script that ran a standard set of prompts and features. Them and sort of save the outputs from that to see how it changes overtime because it evolves. Sometimes announced, sometimes not. So keep keep going back to things Excel I think has improved hugely on there, but the the one thing I'd say in PowerPoint that I love is if you've done PowerPoint courses, you know not to put too many words on there and working at a consultancy heavily connected with Excel. That is something we're not very good at. We love putting a lot of words on those screens because, you know, you're obviously paying for every word on the screen on there on that which I personally don't think you should be presenting like, so using it to kind of refine that very wordy one, taking out the bulk of the text and summarizing that saying. Make me another copy. That's a lot better for presenting with. Summarize this down into bullet points that I find very powerful within the PowerPoint use of copilot. So rather than looking at as a whole presentation, looking at almost on a slide by slide basis, you get a much better result.

00:20:13 Kevin McDonnell
But the one thing that people really should try more of is copilot notebooks, and I was actually discussing with this with the product Group 2 days ago. The proper notebooks is everyone, especially those who be connected with the Microsoft space. They go off and talk about they they're thinking of OneNote. They're thinking of loop and going ohh, why is there another thing in there? I would love it if they renamed it Scrapbook because and friends who are listening this, I'm going to go. Ohh God. Ken's going to talk about Viva topics again but notebooks is like Viva topics. It's giving you the ability to pull things from all these different places. I work in a very large consultancy. Lots of different teams in different areas, creating great content, and there's overlap between those and there's a certain amount of information architecture that can help bring those things together. But there's certain times where I. Right. So and so has shared this with me. So and so she's put this in this place. I just want this in one place that I can go to and store it together and you can store your previous chats within there. So your your sorry chats with copilot whether it's with the researcher whether that's with the standard copilot you can put all those in one place.

00:21:32 Kevin McDonnell
So I I have an agentic notebook. I have a copilot studio and every time I see something really useful from people, I bug it into there. If if there's something I can't that that maybe isn't in ad. Comment. I'll put it into a copilot page and then I'll put it into there, and suddenly I have one place that I can go back and refer to if I need to search it, then I've got a lovely prompt box within there that I can use that will just be grounded on that information within that as well. So I can ask questions about that. Because. Suddenly I've got a common topic of all the things I need to talk.Yeah, I use this a lot when we're doing bids, so I put all the big documents. I don't know if I'm gonna get in trouble for saying this. It has been known at some places that people don't always put them into their formal folder and they put into this team and there's one in OneDrive and there's different versions. I can bring those together in one place for me where I can work. On that and I can ask questions so I can go through and say, have we filled this out and it will go through and and have a look through that content not for a specific document because we've often got multiple documents we need to provide to. And when I'm going to the client, I can create a little audio summary going back to the habit conversation. I haven't built the habit. Quite as much as I feel I should have done for this, but this is something I'm trying to force myself into. It's just before you're going to the meeting, get that audio summary as you're walk into the office as you're driving. The office just put that on and listen to that and you've got that little snippet reminder and you can ask it to say, can you pull out these key these key pieces. I want you to summarize this. I want you to think about the structure of how I'm going to speak and bring me back information for that just so it's fresh in my head. It's fresh with that presentation from there.  And it's really powerful and as soon as they can get these notebooks and make them sharing it so that people can work together on these, I'm really hoping Microsoft does bring that extra functional. Quality. Then I think we'll be in a really, really good place with that and I'll, I'll lament the loss of topics a little bit less.

00:23:41 Mark Smith
I was gonna say that you must have been said when topics went away.

00:23:45 Kevin McDonnell
Absolutely gutted and and it's something we used to have an odd a lot when I joined, obviously I joined Zoe Wilson was there. And I'd be like, what? What do we do around frontline worker go and check the topic. What do we do? What are we doing around teams? Go and check the topic and genuinely people were curating the things there was finding content and people are curating it, adding bullet points and building out that single place to go to. And I'd love to get us back to a place where that's happening and powered by AI.

00:24:17 Mark Smith
Decommissioned and I've decommissioned a few other vivia things lately. Goals has gone as now isn't it?

00:24:23 Kevin McDonnell
It is, uh, very sad. I was a my, my two big things I loved in vivos topics and goals, so I I feel particularly hurt. It's it, it's fair to say on that one and I I kind of get it from Microsoft. So I I'm I'm not here to just bash them for killing things off from renaming. Microsoft looks at what things are being used, how much it cost them, how much money they're making from it, and if they don't see a change in that they will kill it off. And I I think goals especially was something that I found very sad and another podcaster was recording the other day. It was actually outside the Microsoft space and the guy said. Yeah, no one uses OK arts. I've never seen a company use that effectively. I was like I have. But yeah, not enough because you need to put in that culture. You need to build that habit. You need to teach people about how to do OK arts properly. And then the tool support that. And too many organizations just go. I want that tool that's going to solve everything for me. And that's the same as copilot, is not going to be the case.

00:25:26 Mark Smith
Yeah, my my wife worked at Google for 10 years and they used OKRS very effectively. It was an entire top to bottom organizational culture. Everybody was trained on it. Everybody knew it. Everybody understood it, and it was a common language through their business and it was very, very powerful.

00:25:45 Kevin McDonnell
And it drives change when it's done well. If you wanna hear that Google story measure what matters by John John Doer. DOE Double R absolutely fantastic. But even if you don't use OK arts, understanding how you drive, change how you align people. I love the story in that of YouTube when they were moving from. Kind of video views to hours or minutes matched and because they set that as an OK out. Everyone connected with You Tube was driven to make that change and make that change happen and it changed the way they do advertising and that's, I'm sorry to say, that's why you have adverts in the middle because everyone realize we need to win this as a goal. We need to think about ways this happen and it it it's so powerful there.

00:26:29 Mark Smith
Kevin, I could talk to you for hours already. 8-9 minutes overtime. It's been great talking to you. Let's do this again. Before too long. We won't do it on the VIP show. We'll do it. Something of a bit of a longer run format in the future.

00:26:43 Kevin McDonnell
That sounds good. Maybe. Maybe I can leave a take away, please. If one learn about agents, whether in copilot, whether in separate, think about how they can help you automate on there. Don't be scared of them. Work out how you're gonna set the boundaries. Work out how you're gonna do them effectively from that. And because if you bear your head in the sand. You're going to be left behind. With these.

00:27:06 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 buy me a coffee.com/nz365guy. Thanks again, and see you next time.