Why Copilot Isn’t Autopilot and What That Means for You

00:00:06 Mark Smith
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Welcome back to the Microsoft Innovation Podcast. Today, we're heading to Switzerland to meet someone who's quietly reshaping how businesses actually use AI at work. Please welcome Fabio's team leader for M365 and Power platform at red IT and the guy who's helping teams to in Microsoft Copilot. From confusing add-on into a productivity engine, if you've ever opened copilot and thought now what, you're not alone. Our guest is on a mission to fix that disappointment. He's helping companies clean up their data chaos and build real use cases. Full links are in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show.

00:01:14 Fabio Bonolo
Hi Mark, I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

00:01:17 Mark Smith
Really looking forward to having a chat with you and seeing what you're doing in Switzerland in the copilot space. What have you been doing in the last couple of years, specifically in the space and and? What are you focused on?

00:01:29 Fabio Bonolo
Yes, I started out actually as a sales consultant during Corona to during COVID. It was back then the M65 environment, especially the colour parts. So how do you use teams, how they structure teams, SharePoint architecture? Governments, things like that. And it really quickly gained my interest. So I didn't just want to talk about it and sell it, I want it. I wanted to use it. I wanted to help companies and people, especially in the user adoption part, to to use this tool efficiently. And yeah, then two or three years ago, I think it was like the middle of 2023. Copilot came along and it also really quickly gave my my interest. And yeah, I just started to to produce some content. Gained a lot of projects as well where I could really do some workshops also with the support of Microsoft Switzerland and yeah, that's into this topic of copilot and the drive companies, how they can leverage copilot and AI at the workplace. And ever since it. It has become really my passion because I do really love how this AI topic evolved. Not especially from the technical part. This is also interesting, but especially how yeah, companies are adopting it and how the way we are working is changing so, so fast and yeah, and that's that's where I'm at right now doing a lot of projects and doing a lot of content. And trying to help companies and people out there and leveraging AI at the workplace.

00:03:20 Mark Smith
Tell me about resistance. When you're working with companies and individuals, people inherently don't like change. And for the first time in history, we have a piece of technology that the media is telling us it's going to take our jobs. You know, I one of the things that I heard at MVP Summit, which I thought was, you know, very poignant was that. When somebody said, listen, we're going to start using Microsoft Teams like in COVID because we're all working remote. Nobody feared that teams was going to take their job and now we're in an environment where we're told, hey, AI's gonna take your job. But hey, everybody needs to use it and they, you know, become productive. There could be a fair or risk how you're dealing with that resistance that you come across in the, you know, in the various companies that you engage with, are you seeing it or is it is more something in the media than reality?

00:04:11 Fabio Bonolo
In practice, I don't see that a lot. I I've never seen it. Actually, if I'm honest, because it's we we humans are are looking always for something new. So we are looking for the new **** we're looking to to evolve ourselves, especially the young, the young folks. In Globally it. And for me, it hasn't changed a lot since COVID or since teams because what I always said even in my in my sales and account manager days, I always say to to each C level to each end user. It doesn't, it doesn't depend on what cool technology. You develop or you deploy. You can have the coolest technology and the coolest tool. If the end users don't know how to adapt it and how to use it efficiently. It doesn't make any sense since you gain nothing from it, and this was with teams. This was with SharePoint and this is now with copilot. For me, copilot is not a technical project or an IT project. It is for one strategic project. Do I want to leverage AI in the future? Is Microsoft the right technology stack? Where I want to go when I go to this AI journey and how do I? Yeah. How how can my end users learn how to leverage and use AI? And this is something this that's the same thing as in March 2020 when everybody had to go home and work remotely. Yeah, we have now teams, which is a cool technology, but a lot of company had chaos because the people just started to you to to create teams, to create channels and things like that. And yeah, we consultants had, yeah, a lot of projects. So we could do like this because we knew we had, we had to put in some governance behind it. But it's it's the same thing now with copilot, but regarding the loss of jobs, I think this is more of a media kind of thing. I don't know how it is in other parts of the world. In Switzerland, it's not so much, not so much a topic because we have here a big startup cult. Here and a lot of startups that are growing right now, they're coming out of the woods are regarding AI. So also there's something called Finn AI, I think so for financing part of the economy, a lot of AI startups are are coming up and so. In Switzerland it is really something that it's not viewed as a threat, but it's viewed as a as an opportunity and that is something really, really.

00:06:56 Mark Smith
One one things I noticed, one of your posts is around copilot. Feeling underwhelming for some people are you are what were you referring to there?

00:07:05 Fabio Bonolo
Yeah. And there are several ways to address this. I love to use my catch phrase and my catch phrase is it is called copilot, not autopilot. So this is something that comes to mind when they think of Coppola. Yeah, he does all the work for me. No, he doesn't. And with each thing that you generate with each content that you generate, be the text, be an image, be the graphic, whatever. Be the presentation in PowerPoint, you always have to look through it. It isn't finished when copilot generates it, and the main thing that that I always tell my customers is look you are with this approach with generating with copilot and then refine it. You are much faster than if you would build it from scratch in. Manual form, as we note, as we knew from from the last one or two years and and this is one part that I that I'm approaching it so gaining or or providing some kind of awareness. And to lower or not to lower the expectations is OK to have high expectations, but to meet the realistic expectations, that's one part. The other part is yes, regarding prompting because. What a lot of people don't understand is that copilot has a lot of security and compliance boundaries within that is built with Microsoft, which is absolutely the right way in my opinion, in comparison to techie pity, to perplexity to Gemini, it is much more. Tight or tightened by these bounds. This and it cannot be as creative as. It is. For example, and this is the main reason why we as end users have to help copilot to give good answers and we help him in in terms of we give him precise, detailed instructions in the prompt on how we or expecting the answer. Of copilot that he has to generate us. And that's the main reason. Why I I I was. I think it was the day before yesterday I did. A. Session in the the topic of the European AI Act, which was which? And. Which was there, which is there since August last year and 1 resolution of the AI Act is it has to be user friendly and in the user friendly I give copilot a little subtraction so it doesn't meet the resolution 100% in my opinion because of this limitation because we as end users. Have to be precise, we have to. And spend time on our prompt in order to gain a good response from copilot, and this is something that's not quite user friendly, but it has its purpose. And this is also something that has to do with the expectations. Yeah. Put one prompt, one sentence in copilot that put the same prompt in JPT and 95% of the time JPT gives me a better answer. Subjectively. And this is the main reason why this is something that I always work on and and try to to gain awareness in my community and in my network, that it has its.

00:10:35 Mark Smith Interesting. You mentioned the EU AI act. What else are you? When you're talking with. Customers. What else are you highlighting in regards to the use of AI? Within the, you know the enforcement of that act comes in around August of September this year. What discussions are you having in in regards to it?

00:10:59 Fabio Bonolo
Microsoft is more going to the way of copilot dashboard and Viva Insights analytics and this is what they want to leverage. But my customers are more looking into compliance solutions from per view. So I have a lot of discussions around Microsoft per view and especially we are talking about two main. Things the one thing is the logging of the prompts within copilot. This is this is possible with the activation of ediscovery within Microsoft Preview, so that out means and also leaders can look into how copilot is used and what prompts are used to each time. And this is also something really big with auditing. So here in Switzerland, we have a lot of auditing going on and there can be situations where the auditor wants to have these locks. This is more a topic that we are talking. About and the second topic is also regarding purview on how to control that users don't put sensitive data or sensitive documents into AI solutions like GBT or Gemini, but you have also solutions like the data security posture management. ESPN for AI Preview, which we are, or which they're all projects in my environment that I'm. Working in to to put that up or to to configure that, and this is more the the discussions that I have on top of course of the user adoption and giving awareness on hey, we have here sensitive data, please look that you don't upload it in into captivity for example because it is outside our boundaries. And this is something that that's really going on. Also the topic of sensitivity labels, which is the basic of doing these these kind of policies in the SPM, these are the discussions that I have with my customers regarding compliance. And ethical using of of ethical use of copilot and they are.

00:13:07 Mark Smith
What are the wins that you're saying? Like where like without mentioning company names and things like where you saying kind of like real breakthroughs around perhaps taking the customer from? Be more productive, being more efficient, being more effective. Where are you seeing that kind of or, you know, do you have any examples of really some breakthroughs and stuff that have been quite exciting?

00:13:34 Fabio Bonolo
For me, the biggest one is the basic one. The organizations look at Microsoft 365 differently now that they are aiming for the implementation of copilot. Now they see, and they know. How they have to structure every 65? How permission models are important, how compliance solutions within purview are are important. And this is. Something really basic, but a lot of people are now leveraging these Microsoft 365 solutions in order to be able to use copyright. So this is the biggest win that I've seen in in the last few months. I have to admit. Needed less than using copilot. Of course. This is totally different topic, but this is something that I see a lot that Microsoft 365 teams architecture, collaboration, permission models, etcetera are looked are are being seen differently now and in a positive way. This is something that that I experienced. And in my project that I have I have like 3 or 4 copilot agents projects going on right now, so it's more like the copilot studio part. And I see that we are we have, we are team of like 6 or 7 people that is really specialized in power platform and now the biggest wins is when they are building agents like that we can build it with some topics that or or some actions that have some automation behind it and to see how we can leverage these power platform components. Within agents to serve specific use cases or specific purpose. And to see how our customers react when, when, when this automation works. This is something really, really great because this is something that they see a lot of. Yeah, a lot of benefit for them. Rather than just deploying M365 copilot and there, yeah, this is also something that that I see a lot of lot of benefits and a lot of positive reactions from my customers.

00:15:40 Mark Smith
I like it. Tell me about how you personally use it. Forget about work. Forget about that. Like in life and and let's let's drop the term copilot. Let's just call let's say the use of AI. What's your? Even in the last six weeks, what has kind of been a unique discovery that you've made, I'm not really looking for what you do all the time because I feel it's. For me personally it changes all the time. You know, I I discover a new way of doing something, but for you, what if kind of you're like. Where you felt? Like you've gone to a next level of depth in. And what you can do with that kind of collaborative relationship between you and AI?

00:16:27 Fabio Bonolo
Is in in PowerPoint and there the connection with the Organization Asset Library is something that I really liked doing because it takes the. Yeah, the the building of presentations or even building the templates to a whole other level that you can connect copilot with your organization asset library in SharePoint which I think it's a it's a really big win. The other thing that. I saw I have to. I have to think about it. Yeah. The translation. Also in PowerPoint that it can translate whole presentations into another language, which I totally love. I tried it today in Word. I have a document that I have to have translated in English. It doesn't work even with the copilot chat. So I'm looking forward for that for that one too. And and but I have one thing that I was a little bit disappointed in. This was the copilot actions. They were, they were published, I think like 2 months ago and just two weeks. Yeah, that there there was a a message in the message centre and because the feedback of the customers was not so good because copilot actions were a little bit static, not so dynamically. You couldn't use your own prompts. For building these actions and now Microsoft. Yeah, took them away in order to integrate them into the scheduled prompts, which will be available in copilot jet. All yet because they are in private preview or public preview. If I'm not mistake. This is something that I was disappointed but. Where you also see how dynamically and how fast. This this technology is evolving, that's why I'm totally understand your question. Yeah, but the biggest part for me was really the PowerPoint or I guess the organization Asset library to connect this. And yeah, as well as the interpreter agent, this is also something that I really loved, but they took it away as well. It's it's.

00:18:32 Mark Smith
I've virtually done nothing with PowerPoint apart from day one when it first came out and I was like, oh, it looks like it creates 1980s PowerPoints. And I I've never gone back to using copilot with in PowerPoint again, but now you've talked about that asset library I find interesting because I think there's a model in companies. Where you could take a presentation deck and pull it apart to almost a. A grouping of slides. Let's say you're a topic, takes 5 slides to deliver. Could we take those five slides and just put them into a SharePoint location? Could we create our, you know, our intro slides and if we have, you know, specific Staffs, faces and that gets updated? Well, we've just got one slide we can just. Pull it in no matter which presentation we're going to do, and I think that. It's super cool. I've never set it up. I don't know if that is possible. What I'm asking to do, but I think it would be very powerful.

00:19:34 Fabio Bonolo 
Kind of this So what? What? Came with the Wave 2 in October last year. Was the so-called narrative builder, so you don't create presentations within the chat like it was in. The. Beginning you, you get a new mask and this new mask gets your first structure of the PowerPoint presentation. So what's it, what it does? Is it gives you sections? And in each sections you have like 345 slides, depends what what topic it is and now with the connection of the organization Asset library in this narrative builder in this mask on the below you can choose the designs. So the problem that we have right now is that we can only use one specific design. For the whole presentation. So your idea with the intro slide and everything like this as a template. 8 doesn't work right now because it's just based on one template, the narrative builder, but you can leverage those those those templates, because there is also something a new function that is called add a new slide with copilot so you can add a new slide. It opens you up the narrative builder. And then we can use also a specific file, for example, such an intro template that you have and you can add this file and it. Dates based on the topic that that you put. Into your prompt. 212 or three additional files within the the the presentation with the narrative builder and I think this is totally a different experience than it was in in March or April last year. That this wasn't well, well done. I I would say it worked sometimes, but not really. Really good. And now if the narrative build it, it's a totally different, different experience.

00:21:27 Mark Smith
Really great. I'm gonna go have a take a take. A look at. It as we as we come to wrap up, what was your journey to becoming an MVP?

00:21:35 Fabio Bonolo
Ah, that's an interesting one. As a teenager, I always wanted to become a journalist or a sports commentator. So even when I was 11 or 12 years old, I already wrote articles for our local newspaper. So I love to write, I love to, to stand in front of people and standing in front of the. Camera and and yeah, as I said in the beginning, in early 2020, the Microsoft 365 topic gained my interest and in order to to stay on top and to stay ahead, especially in my consulting days, I had to update myself. So I started to look into the message centre started to look at blogs. Sorry to go on to conferences like build or or IGNITE and I thought to myself, yeah, well. When I'm already doing this for myself and gaining all this information, why don't I use this information and produce content with it or write about it or do a video about it? Because I love to do it anyway, so I kind of connected those two passions, the passion of. Writing, speaking, standing in front of people and the passion of Microsoft 365 and later than copilot. And yeah, then it came like this. And I believe I was at the. Yeah, right. Right topic to the right time at the right channels meant somebody from Microsoft, then. Yeah, nominated me as MVP and it it. It worked like that. So it wasn't my goal. I I heard from MVP like the first time I heard of it was in 2022, I think. And yeah, for me it was doing something good for the community. It was doing something that. I really loved. And yes, so this was the combination and all it went well obviously.

00:23:32 Mark Smith
Obviously, obviously so good. Fabio, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been awesome talking to you.

00:23:38 Fabio Bonolo
Yeah. Same. Likewise. Thank you for having me, Michael.

00:23:42 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.