Year one with Microsoft Copilot – an MVP’s perspective

Episode 141: An MVP’s take on Microsoft 365 Copilot

[00:00:00.000] – Mark Rackley

And the best phrase I ever heard was when they first announced copilot, Microsoft said, It’s not autopilot, it’s Copilot. It’s not supposed to be doing your job for you. It’s supposed to be helping you get your job done. So anybody who wants Copilot to generate an email and send it without you reviewing it, that person needs to be smacked up the head or something because you don’t want Gen AI doing that for you. You want humanize on it to make sure that it’s what you want to say before you send it.

[00:00:32.110] – Nancy Goebel

I had the pleasure of welcoming the esteemed Mark Rackley to the Digital Workplace Impact podcast studio. As a Microsoft Practice Director at Protiviti and a celebrated Microsoft MVP and an early adopter of Microsoft Copilot, Mark’s insights are just invaluable. Our introduction, courtesy of Florin Rotar, Chief AI Officer at Avanade, set the stage for a fascinating conversation about Microsoft 365 Copilot. I have to say our conversation couldn’t have been more timely, considering Mark’s deep-rooted experience as an MVP and early adopter of Copilot, paired with Microsoft’s recent release of their one-year retrospective about how AI is changing the nature of work. In this episode, Mark shares his expert perspective on how Copilot is revolutionizing the digital world of work and the Microsoft ecosystem. He shares valuable lessons, tangible benefits, seasoned advice, and his vision for the future of Copilot. This is an episode you won’t want to miss, and it promises to transform your approach to AI in the digital workplace.

[00:01:55.920] – Nancy Goebel

This is your host, Nancy Goebel, Chief Executive at Digital Workplace Group. And as always, Digital Workplace Impact is brought to you by DWG. Happy listening.

[00:02:05.700] – Nancy Goebel

Mark, I’m just delighted to welcome you to the Digital Workplace Impact podcast studio.

[00:02:12.160] – Mark Rackley

Thanks for having me, Nancy. We’ve been talking about getting We’ve been seeing this going for a while now, so it’s great to finally meet you and do this. I’m excited.

[00:02:20.460] – Nancy Goebel

Same here. And of course, we were connected by mutual friend, colleague, partner, Florin Rotar, who is the Chief AI Officer at Avanade. And anytime Florin recommends someone to have a chat with, it’s a must do. And so that’s really the genesis for this conversation coming together. So thank you, Florin. But also, Mark, I know that you have been operating as a Microsoft MVP for some time now, and we love to bring in MVPs into the studio from from time to time because there is so much going on in the land of Microsoft. And of course, Copilot has continued to grab a lot of attention, not only with DWG members, but our industry at large. And so it felt, especially off the back of Microsoft, recently sharing a year of learnings in reflection of the one year anniversary for Copilot to have you come in and share some of your experiences, your insights, and maybe even some thoughts for the future.

[00:03:32.250] – Mark Rackley

Happy to do so. Hopefully, some of what I say will even make sense.

[00:03:37.570] – Nancy Goebel

I’m sure it will. And so a starter question for you would be to ask how, with your lens as a Microsoft MVP, you see Copilot changing the landscape of productivity tools within the Microsoft ecosystem.

[00:03:55.810] – Mark Rackley

Yeah, I think there is so much change going on right now. And I’ve actually been using the Copilot for Microsoft 365 for over a year now, since last March, I was part of the Compass program, one of the early adopters. And I think the biggest thing I’ve seen is there are so many copilots. When you say copilot, what exactly are you talking about? I think in one count, there’s over 80 copilots within the Microsoft ecosystem. So I think the way it’s changing the landscape, especially, it’s just like what It’s the whole new vocabulary we have to learn. And it’s how you can’t just go to someone and say, I have copilot, as well as, What copilot do you have? And it’s just been such a flood of information. It’s been so constant and it’s been so rapidly changing that a lot of organizations are either… They’re in a couple of positions right now. They’re in the FOMO stage. They’re scared of missing out. So they don’t know what it is, but they want it. And there’s those organizations who are like, I’m not so sure about this. I’m not sure about Gen AI. I’m just going to sit back and watch.

[00:05:07.730] – Mark Rackley

And it’s been an interesting wave for sure. I think that the organizations think they’re simple to deploy it. They run into some issues, and those who overthink it, they also run into issues. It’s a new world. I think people are just trying to figure out what is the best way to adopt this technology.

[00:05:27.310] – Nancy Goebel

I think the other thing to factor into the mix is that, of course, Microsoft has a very strong marketing machine. And so people have been trying to make sense of that story as it’s been evolving and to internalize it for their organizations to the point that there are boards and even leadership teams that are asking, what is the return that they can expect? How will it change their lives as leaders? And the list of questions go on and on. So I think I would add to your list that it’s also creating almost a mindset shift about how we are thinking about the changing nature of work and will command lots of new skill sets, not the least of which is thinking about the need for continuous learning and also sparking a new level of natural curiosity for individuals. Because if you think about the nature of the assistance that Copilot is providing, you live in a world of prompts where you ask questions, and the better your questions are formulated, the better the answers that come through, and you can start to explore things on new levels. I think, yes, it’s both a challenging time, but equally exciting, and the pace of change is likely to continue as the proliferation you talked about, not just in the land of Microsoft, but looking Looking at AI, especially generative AI, broadly speaking, is likely to continue.

[00:07:05.750] – Mark Rackley

Yeah, I agree. And you brought up a few really good points that maybe we’re going to talk about later on, but since I’m thinking about them, we can talk about them now. One of those being ROI. Everyone’s asking, What is the ROI? What is the ROI? The people that are very pro-ROI is like, Well, if it saves you 30 minutes a week, it pays for itself. So they’re looking at how do we pay for Copilot or, Oh, are our employees going to be more productive? That’s going to pay for it. I’ve always had a different lens on this, and I hope organizations maybe think about it because you can’t directly measure ROI the way they want to. Just because I save 30 minutes a week doesn’t mean I’m going to do 30 minutes more work. But I do like to point out that since post-pandemic, we’re still talking about the pandemic, but since post-pandemic, most people have been overworked. They’ve been doing the job of multiple people. They are stressed, they’re frustrated. I think one of the great things that generative AI can potentially bring to the table is not that I’m going to get more work done, but I’m going to get the work done that’s on my plate and not have to work as many hours.

[00:08:12.390] – Mark Rackley

Rather than looking at this as a tool that’s like, Oh, it’s going to increase our productivity, how about a tool that’s going to help our employees keep their sanity and not have to work the crazy, crazy long hours to do their jobs? I think that’s something that we can look at, that maybe you’re not getting two more hours’ worth of work out of your employees every week, but they’re able to get two hours of their life back because they were working way too many hours before, and it’s better for their mentality, and it’s better for their happiness, and maybe you’re going to retain more employees because of this technology.

[00:08:42.910] – Nancy Goebel

I would add to that that I also think in a lot of ways, it will increasingly start to reduce friction. You think about how much context switching we all have to do when we’re trying to find things on a very basic level. People, especially knowledge workers, can spend as much as eight hours a week just looking for stuff. And that takes you out of the head space where either you were attentive in a meeting or heads down time to do some planning, thinking, innovating. And so by reducing some of that friction, it can help with output on the other side, including forward thinking.

[00:09:23.670] – Mark Rackley

And this goes back to your other point that you made about prompting. And what I’ve seen is when you just drop Copilot in people’s lap, they’re actually getting less work done because they’re trying to figure out those prompts, and they’re not used to it. It’s a new skill. And they may spend an hour crafting a prompt to get the response they want. And some people find that very frustrating. Some people think, Well, this tool is not great because of that. Instead of understanding that, No, it’s a new skill you have to build. So maybe it took you an hour to figure that prompt out the first time. But you know what? The next time, you’re going to do it a lot faster. You’re going to get more efficient in the technology. So You’ve got this… You mentioned people that are curious that want to dig into it. Those people are going to Excel at this technology. But then you have the other people who are like, They just want it to work. They don’t want to play. They just want to do their job. And that segment of people, they’re going to be a little more frustrated unless you can give them the training they need to understand that you do have to put some effort into it.

[00:10:20.180] – Mark Rackley

You do have to think about how you’re going to use it to get the best results possible.

[00:10:24.400] – Nancy Goebel

And so we talk a little bit about friction. We talked a little bit about almost giving employees time back as part of their daily work lives. What other sorts of benefits are you seeing today or even foresee as this really starts to take hold inside of organizations?

[00:10:47.380] – Mark Rackley

I think there’s a couple of things. I guess a lot of the air is being taken out of the room by Copilot from Microsoft 365. So what a lot of people are looking to in order to find that. I think when they look at that, they’re looking for what are the killer features, what’s the silver bullet, what are the things that make this worth the investment? I think universally, people love the Teams meeting recap. I think that is just such a game changer for organizations to be able to ask questions about a meeting, ask questions about, Hey, what’s the follow-up that should happen from this meeting? What tasks have been assigned to me? You can summarize the meeting where I’m at because I got distracted by another email. I think that capability alone is just… It allows us to understand what’s going on like we never did before. And I love that feature of Copilot for Microsoft 365. Another one I really like is the email summarization, where you got a huge set of emails being able to summarize that so you don’t have to go through and read all that information. And I think that’s the things that people are looking for.

[00:12:02.100] – Mark Rackley

I got to Microsoft 365 Copilot space is where are we going to get our big benefits? But then looking forward, I think where a lot of effort is going to is in the extensibility of Copilot for Microsoft 365. How do we reach knowledge outside of the Microsoft landscape? How do we integrate with other business systems? And how do we make that single pane of glass even more productive to get more done, to take actions? Because by default, Copilot for Microsoft 365 doesn’t actually do anything. It returns you information, but it won’t take any actions for you. So looking at extensions to be able to actually take some of those actions, I think will go a long way into helping people really take advantage of the technology.

[00:12:48.370] – Nancy Goebel

And certainly thinking about strategic insights that will come as well, because as access to information and data becomes more readily available, then as these capabilities mature inside of Copilot, then supporting data-driven decision-making becomes another power play, so to speak, in the suite.

[00:13:15.610] – Mark Rackley

Yeah, agreed. The other thing I like to point out, too, is not everything is Gen AI. You don’t have to use it for everything. Everybody wants to throw Gen AI at everything. And the simple answer is it’s not. It’s not the answer to everything. It’s going to enhance Certain functionalities for sure, but it doesn’t mean you need to apply to everything you’re doing today. All the things we’ve been doing for years, it’s still completely valid. Don’t try to make it fit where it doesn’t fit.

[00:13:43.310] – Nancy Goebel

And to pick up on one of your points along those lines, it’s not as though Copilot is making decisions for the organization. You still need individuals thinking things through, understanding the climate, the context, the work that needs to get done to sit in front of this. So the human-centered approach still remains strong. It’s changing rapidly, but it remains strong nonetheless.

[00:14:09.480] – Mark Rackley

Yeah. And the best phrase I ever heard was like when they first announced Copilot, Microsoft said, It’s not autopilot. Copilot, it’s copilot. It’s not supposed to be doing your job for you. It’s supposed to be helping you get your job done. So anybody who wants copilot to generate an email and send it without you reviewing it, that person needs to be smacked up the head or something because you don’t want Gen AI doing that for you. You want humanize on it to make sure that it’s what you want to say before you send it.

[00:14:35.540] – Nancy Goebel

I guess one of the things that we’ve talked about, even in our early moments together, is the idea that copilot is proliferating. But I will say the level of challenges is as well. There are just some conversations that we’ve had with DWG members and others that suggests that Copilot may be moving into the trough of despair a little bit in the hype cycle. There are still some individuals who are really struggling with where it fits in and will it deliver on the promise in the future, or will it go the way of parts of Viva, such as Insight, which initially had great promise when it was being introduced to the marketplace and didn’t quite get there and make the meaningful difference. I’m curious to know what your thoughts are around this.

[00:15:36.360] – Mark Rackley

Generative AI is… Ai is nothing new. Ai has been around forever. But I think generative AI and ChatGPT just really brought this technology into the forefront, made it consumable by the average person. And I think it is a game changer. I don’t think it’s going anywhere. It’s not something that’s going to go the way of Viva Insights. It may not look like today. Tomorrow may not look like what it looks like today. It won’t. It’s going to get better better and better. But if you look at the investment Microsoft is making, they did not make this investment in Viva. They did not release PCs that have Viva built in. It is definitely something that has some staying power. There’s way too much investment going on, and there’s too much potential because the potential really is there. I think that a lot of the problems we’re seeing is the cost is relatively high if you just look at the price tag, if you don’t think about what do you get for it. And I think the other one is Microsoft has been showing some amazing functionality that’s just not quite there yet. I mean, I’ve seen so many demos of the PowerPoint Copilot creating these beautiful, amazing slides in the demos.

[00:16:47.430] – Mark Rackley

But when you use it in real life, it’s like, Oh, it doesn’t look anything like that demo at all. Or the whole extensibility story, like I was talking about earlier, there’s been some fantastic demos going on for that, and there’s a lot of progress being made there, but it’s still not to the point that they were demoing a year ago. And it’s because it’s very complicated. I get it. It’s complicated. They’re moving fast. But I do think there needs to be I tell people, just be patient, right? I mean, this is something that has been rolled out so quickly across all of Microsoft, across all these products. And they’re seeing what sticks. They’re working through things they didn’t think about. They’re working It’s something that will continue to mature. I had a conversation with some Microsoft friends, and I was actually talking about the fact that I was complaining. I know it’s hard to believe that I would complain about anything, but I was complaining. I was saying the extensibility doesn’t work. I can’t get it to trigger. There’s no way to prioritize information to make it work correctly. They just told me to stop.

[00:17:52.890] – Mark Rackley

They said, Look, do you not think we have thousands of people actively working on these problems right now? I’m Okay, that’s a good point. So it’s not like these problems that we’re experiencing, Microsoft is just ignoring. You’d be like, Yeah, that’s just the way it works. They’re actively working to fix everything that is frustrating people because it is the future, right? How is it going to end up being adopted everywhere? We’ll see. But generative AI is absolutely the future of computing for a while, and it will not be going the way Viva. So if you’re on the ledge, you don’t think you’re ready to adopt it, I like to point people saying, look, if $30 a month is just too expensive for you, look at something like Azure OpenAI, which is a lot more cost effective. You’re going to do some more custom development to make it work. But you can do a lot of the same functionality that you can do in Copilot using something like Azure OpenAI for a fraction of the price. But then you have to pay someone like me to build it for you, which, hey, you’ll have my contact information in the podcast.

[00:18:53.100] – Mark Rackley

They can reach out.

[00:18:56.270] – Nancy Goebel

Well, I can’t help but ask you if your impressions have changed over time because you did start as part of the Compass phase, and here we are a year later?

[00:19:11.820] – Mark Rackley

Absolutely. No, I mean, it’s absolutely my thoughts have changed. When I first started using a Copilot, I did not think it was worth the investment. I’m like, going to market way too soon. The functionality is just not there. If you looked at the very early versions, like the Excel copilot, things that did not work well. It was slow. The responses weren’t great. In the very beginning, one of the things you can do is create something called a Graph connector. And this allows you to search outside of your content in Microsoft to get information from a ServiceNow database, knowledge base. And we had one of these deployed, and it never worked. It never, ever worked. And when people were like, well, let’s talk to clients about extensibility, I’m like, No, it doesn’t work. Don’t even say it because right now it doesn’t work. But I’ve seen that greatly improved over the months as well. I remember when it first started working, I was like, look, here’s why we can’t demo this. And I went to show them that it didn’t work, and it worked. And I’m like, oh, well, it’s working now. And I guess that’s the biggest thing.

[00:20:21.400] – Mark Rackley

Things are constantly changing. Just because something worked, actually, but just because something didn’t work two weeks ago, doesn’t mean it won’t work now. So continually go back and try that. On the flip side, just because something worked two weeks ago doesn’t mean it’s going to work today. Because things, again, are changing so, so very rapidly. We’ve never been involved in something changing this rapidly before, accelerating this much before that has had, like you said, this much hype before. I think people have to try to have some grace for that, some understanding for that. I know it’s hard when you’re paying $30 per user per month to have that grace and to have that understanding. But at the same time, I know Microsoft is keenly aware of every struggle we face, and I know they want to solve every struggle we face because they are wholly invested in this as well. So it’s improved greatly over the past year and so many months. I expect it to continue to improve. And the other thing I say is Microsoft says this a lot, too. When you’re using Copilot and you say a little thumbs up and thumbs down, if you don’t something, hit that thumbs down because they pay attention to that and they are working to make it better.

[00:21:35.620] – Nancy Goebel

Your line of sight around living examples or real-world scenarios must be quite extensive, given the nature of the work that you do. Can you share any examples of either impressive or unexpected ways Copilot has been used?

[00:21:56.740] – Mark Rackley

So this one’s only anecdotally. I didn’t see it in person, but I liked it so much. I like to share it, and I can’t take credit for it, though. I was talking to someone, and they were saying that they had this example where they had a job description of, here’s the role we’re trying to fill. And they had two resumes. And so they asked Copilot, using this job description and these two resumes, Who is the most qualified for this position and why? And Copilot actually responded. And the response that it generated was… They had already predetermined their their own thoughts by looking at it manually and what Copilot returned and the recommendations exactly match what they were thinking about beforehand. So I think when you look at… A lot of people use Copilot just to ask questions about where’s this document or what’s this mean or just random information. If you look at actually using it to analyze content and be able to feed that content to it, like the job description and the resumes, and look for the results that you’re going to get, think of ways to use it other than just creating a presentation, creating a document, or asking questions about a meeting.

[00:23:02.480] – Mark Rackley

Think about all the other ways you can take advantage of the technology, I think, is a big piece of that. But I really like that story. That was a good one.

[00:23:09.480] – Nancy Goebel

It comes back to the idea of being naturally curious, right? You’re only limited by the questions or prompts that you can come up with in this space.

[00:23:19.600] – Mark Rackley

Exactly. People always say, What happens if I ask it this? I’m like, Don’t ask me. Ask it. Try it and see. You’re not going to break anything, people. Go play, go try, and see what you can find out and see what you can do with it.

[00:23:31.720] – Nancy Goebel

I’m curious to know what you think about Copilot relative to digital workplace teams and how their roles will need to evolve. We’ve talked a lot about how individuals as users will start to feel their jobs change, whether it’s in terms of task completion or meeting summaries and so on down the line. But let’s click down specifically on digital workplace teams.

[00:24:00.660] – Mark Rackley

That’s a good question. And I think the biggest impact, I think, is on content creators, obviously. And I think that as that technology… Like today, when someone generates content with Gen AI tools, you can read that and say, oh, that’s Gen AI. And I think that actually turns a lot of people off to the content when they see, obviously, that this was Gen AI content, that person would never use that word. But I think as the technology advances, the Gen AI is going to start looking at the tone of you and know your content and the way you write and start creating content that sounds like something you would write. And I think that’s going to get better and better along the way, as well as the design tools, like with the SharePoint copilots for creating pages and designing pages. I think all that’s going to continue to improve. So I think from the content creation aspect of it, that’s going to just continue to better and better. Another cool tool that I’ve been playing with, this is outside of the Gen AI space. Well, specifically like the large language model space, there’s now a lot of speech technologies that Microsoft is working on where you can feed it your voice and it will train on your voice.

[00:25:17.170] – Mark Rackley

And then you can write entire blog posts, you can write articles, and it will read back as if it sounds just like you. So I think that for some of the content creators is going to be great, I guess, for the hearing impaired or for the sight impaired, being able to hear an article from the voice of the person who read it, maybe that CEO, just having that article read out without having to record over and over again. Content creators who do blog, like podcast, you don’t have to necessarily have this face-to-face conversation we’re having. We could theoretically have an email, a chat exchange, and then have that text-to-speech turning into something that sounds very natural of us speaking. I don’t know, I’m liking that one because that’s someone who produces content, produces blogs, and being able to say, you know what? It’d be nice to be able to not have to record 10 times because I flub a line and have to start over. It’d be great if I could type it out and then it reads it. It sounds like me, and I can save that time. And again, just being able to organize our lives, I think, is a big piece, too.

[00:26:22.760] – Mark Rackley

Being able to go in there, schedule meetings, find times when everyone’s available and get that meeting scheduled. I think that’s the things that people are looking for it to do and help us keep our lives organized. One of the articles I saw posted recently was about proactive prompts where you can schedule prompts in Copilot. The thing about copilot, sorry for rambling a little bit, but the thing about Copilot is you have to go in there and do something. It’s not proactive. Copilot is not going to say, by the way, you have this email you need to respond to. It doesn’t do that. But based on the article I read you’ll be able to set up a workflow so every morning at 08:00 AM, it injects a prompt into Copilot saying, Hey, what emails should I be responding to today? So it’ll proactively respond to that prompt to you so that we do start to get some of those things where you’re not having to remember to go to Copilot to do things, you can schedule it for you, the schedule prompts, and it will present that information to you as you tell it to. And I think that’ll be a big piece to, again, help us stay on top of our workload and follow to go up with things.

[00:27:31.350] – Mark Rackley

And someone, me or the age I’m getting to now and the things that I forget, that’s going to be very helpful to me to make sure I stay on top of what I should be doing.

[00:27:40.850] – Nancy Goebel

And I also think about how it will help make the world smaller. And I say that from the standpoint that, keying off of the content discussion, that content will be translated readily for individuals. And think about that CEO example you gave earlier, where suddenly people hear an executive in their own voice speaking their language, and suddenly that feels like it creates a space where that individual is suddenly more comfortable asking questions or initiating a conversation that might not have happened otherwise. And so organizations spend lots of money to have translation services or a bench strength. And to suddenly have conversations in local languages happen more effortlessly, yes, that will take time, but there are market improvements already.

[00:28:49.350] – Mark Rackley

Exactly. Then just the real-time stuff going on with the GPT-4o, you’re seeing the improvement in speed and quality. It’s just going to keep accelerating. So it’s great stuff. And the other thing I like about the translation in Gen AI is it’s not a word for word translation. It’s actually translating the thought and the concepts. So hopefully that translation is actually much better. It sounds much more natural than doing that the word to word translation that maybe you were previously doing.

[00:29:19.740] – Nancy Goebel

And we’ve nibbled a little bit on the edges of the future. Are there any specific features or improvements you’d like to see?

[00:29:29.900] – Mark Rackley

I mean, extensibility. I know that’s the nail I keep hammering is extensibility because I think that’s where the future is. That is where you’re going to start seeing the real power, being able to integrate with other systems, being able to take actions, being able to search an external knowledge basis and get the right answers and also get the answer that you’re looking for, not just a random result that came back because someone wrote a PowerPoint presentation about it years ago and it happens to come back. So I think extensibility is something that everybody should be looking into, be it extending Copilot for Microsoft 365 and potentially creating custom copilots using things like Copilot Studio. I think that’s where we’re going to start to see real power, because with Copilot for Microsoft 365, within that chat experience, that team’s chat experience, it’s searching everything you have access to in Microsoft 365, everything. And most organizations, environments are a mess. And it’s old content. There’s stale content. There’s content that was overshared with you. There’s content that’s undershared that you should have had access to, you don’t. And that affects the responses you get, and that affects a lot of the frustrations people have.

[00:30:44.770] – Mark Rackley

It’s because of the state of their content. I think being able to properly extend Copilot, create custom Copilot is going to help you target the responses that you’re wanting and get much, much, much better results, which is going to improve the efficiency. It’s going to improve people’s attitudes. And I think it’s going to help. That’s going to make the biggest change, I think, is that piece of the pie, extensibility and Copilot Studio. So go make it work.

[00:31:17.500] – Nancy Goebel

And are there any specific resources that you would recommend as an MVP, specifically for digital workplace teams who are really looking to put their best foot forward with Copilot?

[00:31:32.660] – Mark Rackley

I would probably say for a digital workplace team, especially if you don’t have necessarily a Copilot license, I would start looking for Copilot Studio. Go look at the Microsoft Learn articles. You can sign up for a Copilot Studio trial for free. So even if you don’t have Copilot, you can create copilots with Copilot Studio. You can start playing with that technology. Right now it’s set up to where the trials don’t expire. You just keep extending your trial. And Microsoft is, of course, doing that to increase the adoption, I’m sure. But I would definitely start there because it allows you to get a handle on the technology of generative AI, allows you to start trying to build your own solutions and think about how it can be used. There’s a lot of examples because Copilot Studio used to be called Power Virtual Agents. So it’s been around for years, but they just added a lot of Gen AI functionality to it. So it’s actually from that standpoint of building stand-alone copilots with the Copilot Studio, it works fairly well. And I think that’s a great place to get started.

[00:32:33.480] – Nancy Goebel

And just as we’re wrapping up our time together, is there any advice that you would give to organizations, whether they’re in the early stages of thinking about adoption or are along the journey that you’ve described?

[00:32:52.820] – Mark Rackley

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. The one piece of advice is, get your environment in order, clean up that overshared content. Again, when you’re using these tools, Copilot for Microsoft 365, specifically, it has access to everything you have access to. Get your content cleaned up. Get rid of the old content. Archive it. Finally, move it somewhere. People don’t want to get rid of old content. But when you got that much noise out there, it makes it that much harder for Copilot to give you the response you’re looking for. And it’s also the reason why you have to spend an hour creating a really complicated prompt because you’ve got to create a prompt that works around the mess in your environment. Well, if you just clean up that mess, if you make sure things are shared properly, make sure the old content is gone, get rid of as much noise as you can, it’s going to make your life easier creating prompts because Copilot doesn’t have to reason over as much garbage to get you what you’re looking for. And on the same note, under sharing is actually also a thing as well. So you thought you shared something with the entire organization, but you didn’t.

[00:33:55.640] – Mark Rackley

So I don’t have access to it. So I can’t use that in my prompts. I’m not going to get that response back. So get that environment set up. It’s things we should have been doing anyway. You should have done it 10 years ago. But Copilot is really making it that much more visible that your environment’s a mess. Your results are going to be a mess because of it. And jump ahead of that. You can start doing that today, and you should, no matter what. Even if you don’t believe in Copilot or Gen AI and think it’s all a big hoax like the Moon landing. I’m kidding. I don’t think the Moon landing was a hoax. But if you think it was a hoax, you still should be cleaning up your environment and you’re getting in a good shape. So that’s what I would say.

[00:34:33.600] – Nancy Goebel

And pivoting your advice engine for a moment, if you had to think about advice from either an adoption or change management standpoint, what would that be?

[00:34:46.860] – Mark Rackley

That’s another easy one. I think it was in that Microsoft article that you shared as well. It’s like, you don’t just get Copilot and drop it in people’s laps and walk away. That is a surefire way to make sure it fails. You have to train your users. You have to train them on prompting. You have to help them understand how to create an effective prompt, help them understand where the content is coming from, do things like office hours to meet with them regularly to find out how they’re using it. Make sure, use those new dashboards that are out to see how people are using it and to see if people are using it. If someone’s not using the tool, go to them and say, Why aren’t you using this tool? It’s something that until that habit is formed of using this tool every day and understanding how to write prompts, you’re not going to get great results and great adoptions. So you have to stay on top of it because this is a new skill. It’s a new way of doing things. And it’s not something that all people are going… Most people aren’t going to naturally do.

[00:35:40.140] – Mark Rackley

They’re going to have to, even for me, I’ve been using this for a long time. I still have to remind myself to go use it because it’s not something that I’ve done in all these decades of my life I’ve ever used before. It’s just not a muscle I’ve used. So please don’t just buy it and expect it to work magically. You will be frustrated.

[00:35:59.430] – Nancy Goebel

I have to say I really appreciate your clarity and pragmatism. I guess just to cap off our time together, is there anything you were hoping I’d ask you and didn’t, or just a parting reflection that you’d like to share?

[00:36:21.290] – Mark Rackley

I mean, nothing’s come to mind of the things I wish you’d ask me. I think that this is, I guess the parting reflection would be and is just to keep an eye on the space. This is not something that is going away. I realized the hype is insane. I realized that the noise is just crazy. It’s sucking the air out of the room. Sometimes you go to speak to clients and that’s all they want to talk about. Don’t let the hype take away from the fact that this is something game changing that will be around that will be there. It’s not quite where the marketing says it is yet. Keep that in mind as well. But don’t let it be discouraged because I do believe it will get there. I do believe that Microsoft is learning as they go as well. And I think that in another year, it’ll look completely different than it does today, but in really good ways. So don’t give up. Don’t get too frustrated. If that price tag is still too high for you, look at alternatives to still take advantage of the same functionality. I’d like to point out you don’t have to buy Copilot for everyone in your organization.

[00:37:23.400] – Mark Rackley

Find the people who are going to make the best use of it, and then look at how you can give your other employees access to Gen AI tools that aren’t Copilot. Because again, using something like Azure OpenAI, you can implement other solutions that don’t cost as much that still give you some great benefits. So stay tuned and see what happens.That’s what I’m going to say.

[00:37:41.890] – Nancy Goebel

Well, that certainly is some sage advice. And the idea that you have to crawl before you can walk and run stays with me as part of this conversation. And that not only goes for us, but for Microsoft as well. And so, Mark, thank you so much for coming into the studio today for what has been such a fascinating chat about all things Copilot.

[00:38:06.290] – Mark Rackley

Thanks for having me, Nancy. I look forward to next time.

[00:38:11.010] – Nancy Goebel

Digital Workplace Impact is brought to you by the Digital Workplace Group. DWG is a strategic partner covering all aspects of the evolving digital workplace industry, not only through membership, but also benchmarking and boutique consulting services. For more information, visit digitalworkplacegroup.com.