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The AI MythBuster: Demystifying Organizational AI Blockers
55 Plays7 months ago
Welcome to the inaugural episode of the AI Insights Podcast, hosted by Tony Stewart, Manager of Digital Innovation at Alithya. In this episode, Tony is joined by Robert Gates, Principal Cloud Solution Architect from Microsoft, to explore the transformative world of artificial intelligence (AI).
Join Tony and Robert as they explore both the thrilling potential and the underlying concerns associated with the rapid evolution of AI technology and Microsoft Copilot. Robert shares his journey in the tech industry and provides insights into common blockers organizations face when adopting AI, such as privacy, security, data and change management. Learn proven strategies from real client experiences to overcome common AI project blockers and discover effective ways to measure the return on investment (ROI) and business impact of Microsoft Copilot. Additionally, Robert will highlight key takeaways from the latest Copilot Wave 2 announcements.
Whether you're a technology leader, business executive, AI enthusiast, or just curious about the potential of AI, this episode is packed with valuable information and practical advice. Don't miss out on this engaging discussion that will leave you inspired and equipped with knowledge to navigate AI in your organization.
Tune in to AI Insights with Tony Stewart on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube Music. Stay connected with us for more episodes and exclusive content! Subscribe now and leave a review to let us know what you think. Your feedback helps us improve and bring you more insightful content.
Alithya’s Technical Readiness Assessment helps your organization prepare your Microsoft 365 data estate for a successful and secure rollout of Copilot. For more information, visit alithya.com/TechReady.
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Transcript
Introduction to the AI Insights Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome to the AI Insights Podcast, where we explore the transformative world of artificial intelligence. I'm your host, Tony Stewart, Manager of Digital Innovation at Alithia. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Robert Gates, Principal Cloud Solution Architect from Microsoft.
Embracing AI: Excitement and Apprehension
00:00:23
Speaker
On today's episode, we'll be exploring the excitement and apprehension surrounding the rapid advancements of AI technology. Power of AI can be both exciting and intimidating, so let's look at demystifying some common blockers organizations are facing while tackling AI projects.
Meet Robert Gates: Tech Journey and Role
00:00:43
Speaker
Before we start, I'd love for our listeners to get to know you a little bit better. Can you tell us briefly your journey in the technology industry and a little about your role today? Yeah, thanks, Tony. um So yeah, Rob Gates, I'm one of our principal solution architects focused on the model of workplace solutions. I've been doing Copilot and Copilot for M365 for about a year and a half now. And over the past several decades, I've been doing lots of different technologies covering voice, telco, communications.
00:01:09
Speaker
Obviously, Teams falls into that. And then weaving in, obviously, GenAI and a lot of the data services around it. Awesome. Yeah, we met in the Teams space. So really excited for you to to join us for our first episode here.
Overcoming AI Adoption Barriers
00:01:22
Speaker
So I wanted to kind of start digging into this and and discuss what are some common blockers for copilot adoption? um So we've seen some repeat scenarios around privacy, security, um but you know be interested in your opinion on what are sort of the highest level issues that organizations are facing right now.
00:01:42
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. I think there's really a couple of things that kind of come into play. I mean, I think what fundamentally the first piece is just organizations and folks inside of their and their organizations just understanding the AI's potential, right? and And where can we leave CoPilot in? Where can we leverage CoPilot to amplify, accelerate, streamline their different workflows and processes, right? Allowing people to maybe be more creative, innovative, potentially removing friction in the business process. So there's a lot of need to just get the understanding of the AI potential capabilities.
00:02:15
Speaker
And then I think as people start to understand the power of Copilot and then weaving that into business process, usually one of the next key questions is security, compliance, governance, how is my data protected when working with the LLMs and that my data is not being shared out across ah the LLMs, maybe to other organizations. um and So that's usually a hot topic. And then I think you know if we look at it, data management, data quality is definitely a topic that comes up quite a bit. you know We probably all have legacy data that's been around for five, 10, 20 years. I know I've personally migrated data from M365 or from old file servers into M365 or you know what used to be called BPOS at the time.
00:03:00
Speaker
And so is that data relevant to the business? And so you know a little bit of data management will also come into play. um So it's it's you know it's tricky, but it's you know I think once we get past a couple of those, then it's really focused in on that business impact. Yeah, we've we've seen the data migration or data quality part of that really come up a lot as well. um Do you see different
Copilot Interaction and Data Management
00:03:23
Speaker
blockers based on the different sort of stakeholder groups that are involved in a co-pilot project?
00:03:28
Speaker
I mean, a little bit. it's not I think fundamentally, the co-pilot experiences are probably kind of similar across the board. It's just the focus of the tasks and and the things and the functions that those individuals do. um So I think it's important to focus in on like how does each department, user persona, group, et cetera, how do they work? Where's the friction or the frequency in a particular business process?
00:03:55
Speaker
And then on kind of understanding like the associated data, right going back to the data, what data is there to support it, and and kind of how does that weave into the overall flow. um So I think a lot of it's more just about that individualized experience and then just knowing where to weave the tools in. Some things can be very repeatable. right And in those cases,
00:04:16
Speaker
We've got new things that that are coming out around copilot agents and some of the automation. And in those use cases, having the power of like a gen AI and a copilot basically doing the task for you is powerful. But you've got to identify those those common patterns that can be repeatable versus where do you want to amplify a person's abilities. But I think from from what I've seen, whether it's IT, security, HR,
00:04:42
Speaker
the At the end of the day, people are doing tasks in the amount of work tools, they're working with data, they're creating output. um It's just homing it on to you know what's specific to them, where is that data, et cetera. Absolutely, yeah. i I think we're primarily connecting with IT resources or human resources as the primary stakeholder in these projects. um So really interested to see of My experience has been that there is similar repeatable ah blockers or concerns in the space. um A lot of that handled from the education space, but love your love your input on that.
00:05:17
Speaker
um So any thoughts as far as for the those initial learning hurdles or the the initial challenges you're seeing from organizations, what are they doing to start overcoming those or start beginning their projects? It's really, ah you know, again, getting people to understand the the overall premise of how we're going to weave copilot into business process and ah processes flow. um Unpacking sort of the It's the understanding of how like an LLM works, inferencing configuration, where it's there to just provide a request, that there's no data being stored in there. That's that's kind of some key things that get passed. Then you really need to think about sort of that data estate. A couple of interesting things. We talked about security there for a minute in the beginning there.
00:06:08
Speaker
ah But there's almost an inverse aspect, right? So when you start thinking about the adoption and obviously security concerns, privacy, and driving the the the you know driving things forward,
00:06:22
Speaker
It's understanding those business processes and the associated data to help that individual, that department or team get something done. One of the things I've seen is as you start unpacking those business processes and you're kind of looking at how a particular job or task gets done, in some cases, it's not that the data is over-permissioned, it's actually the inverse. Turns out as you unpack those business processes that there's key data across the organization that we need to get to those folks who are doing those tasks. um So it is a bit of a balancing act of maybe opening up permissions in some cases, tightening things down and and locking it down.
Technical Readiness and Measuring Success
00:07:01
Speaker
And it's also important to think about not just data locations and applying permissions to the location, but also classification and and really securing the data itself. So that typically comes up quite a bit in in some early adoption journeys. Yeah, that's a great point. i had it
00:07:18
Speaker
seem too much of the idea of opening up additional permissions. But that makes sense, especially you when you look at what your copilot has access to. If you're inheriting the permissions of a file based on who needed that information at that time or who that presentation was made for, that information, if it doesn't need to be locked down, can become vital for copilot answering for another user that never had that file shared with them.
00:07:42
Speaker
Yeah, well, you know when you unpack some of these these sort of business processes, what you're finding is that somebody's calling somebody else, or they've got to go ask for data or an answer from for you know to get some specific information from someone in the organization. And that's friction, right? And so it's being able to identify those things and say, OK, well, you really need access to the data. Is it something we can share with you? Great. OK, now let's figure out how to do that.
00:08:08
Speaker
So it's actually interesting. It's like, yes, we're we're we're always always concerned about security and compliance. We want to definitely lock things down to just the individuals that need access and at that particular time. But I'm finding a lot of situations where we've got to actually open stuff up. So it's <unk> interesting. it's It's kind of a tough challenge, right? You want to be super secure, but you want to make sure you've got the right data to the right people.
00:08:31
Speaker
I think we could explore this for a while, but I would love to think about the or you know the notion of, especially with the SharePoint co-pilots being accessible, you know that starting point of your technical readiness. you SharePoint is a ah place that you start to dig in and organizations have legacy SharePoint sites and they've likely been through several migrations.
00:08:51
Speaker
So it's a very easy starting point for the conversation of, well, how much of the stuff do we still need? And and we want we want this one to be a little bit different, but knowing that there's almost a rising use case for more accessible information in certain SharePoint environments or on SharePoint sites, especially when you can just kind of click button to start building co-pilots off of that is a really interesting conversation tying back into maybe not necessarily the technical readiness aspect, but the, what are the plans for the organization side of it.
00:09:21
Speaker
Agreed. So kind of on that topic of what you're seeing, um do you have any examples of real clients that kind of ran into an initial block in that ah their project and and kind of what they were able to do to start moving forward?
Case Study: Copilot in Manufacturing
00:09:37
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's it's a wide range of of companies that I've spoken to and I've worked with them through the co-pilot journey across a lot of different verticals. And I think it's When you look at it again, it goes back to clarity of where the potential benefits are. um These technologies are moving fast and so being able to stay connected to the change and the updates and the improvements. If you look at where Copilot was,
00:10:05
Speaker
you know, a couple of you know months and and over a year ago to where it is today with even our announcements that we had just recently, you know, what we call our wave two event. ah You're seeing continued innovation and really simplification of the tools across the journey.
00:10:21
Speaker
um I recently worked with a manufacturing customer. And one of the things they do in there, they do a lot of unique ah custom builds for customers. And it requires a lot of interaction, discussions, and prep work and before they can go in and create those products.
00:10:38
Speaker
And so what they did was they actually started building templates and using Copilot through the workflow to basically streamline that journey, but also make it easier for the customer to go in and have dialogue with some of the more common configurations, and then request the ability to go in and do more specific elements or specific customization if needed. And just kind of weaving that into that journey, because there's a lot of back and forth between the customer and the folks internal that to review, to validate, to confirm it's something that can be tweaked or customized.
00:11:08
Speaker
um You know, co-pilots definitely helped there. And I think it was around, it was about 50% savings in time. And so if you start looking at all the touch points across the organization, it can can really add up you know from a cost savings, but also freeing up those individuals potentially to do more impactful work for the organization.
00:11:28
Speaker
um So it's not just, you know yeah, we can save 10 hours or we can you know make a few extra bucks in this particular particular area. It's, hey, we can actually start a new business line or you know do some more innovative things for our customers that have maybe a higher margin. ah So it it can it can really get in you know and intricate and and interesting at the same time.
00:11:55
Speaker
Is your organization ready to unlock the full potential of Microsoft Copilot? Before you dive in, it's crucial to ensure the organizational data is accessible to the right people. Alithia's technical readiness assessment guides you through the best practices to discover, classify, and secure your data so you're fully prepared to leverage Copilot's capabilities. From setting up sensitive information types to implementing data loss prevention, we cover it all. To see full other details and book your assessment, visit alithia.com forward slash tech ready.
00:12:24
Speaker
The link will also be available in the description box.
00:12:29
Speaker
Yeah, that brings up a good point on the, um, you know, how organizations are measuring these things, especially as you start these projects. I, my personal thought is you, you kind of want that statement ahead of time. Uh, the measurement of time, I think is fantastic for this in in terms of saving 10 hours.
00:12:48
Speaker
but you kind of bring up a great point in that's not time that means nothing. That's time that then means 10 more hours of doing something else. And what's the business value there? Yeah, I mean, I think when when we kind of look at it and and there's sort of out of the box experiences, right? When you deploy Copud from 365, like you're in a Teams meeting, you can do the meeting recap, summarization, you get a lot of benefits out of the box, right? And we're at Excel, PowerPoint. But when you weave it into those business processes, it is kind of like what you're saying. it's It's important to identify not just what is that outcome that we're trying to optimize for, but what is the potential financial benefit?
00:13:28
Speaker
like take a sales process. And if I could maybe handle twice the number of proposals or maybe you know RFP responses in a given weekly cycle,
00:13:40
Speaker
is that potentially giving us the opportunity to double sales? right Because if we have a 50% close rate, I now have doubled the number of proposals or RFPs that I'm um processing. And now how does that translate through the system? So as you start to identify those business outcomes, you've got to look at those potential metrics around there. Is it increasing sales? Is it time savings? And if we're going to have time savings, where do we invest that time savings into other areas of the business?
00:14:06
Speaker
So I think the KPIs are super important to help justify, you know, obviously deploying and and leveraging the tools, but then being able to go back to folks across the organization to show them the impact and and help drive more innovation.
Pilot Programs and User Adoption
00:14:21
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. My next question was going to be, what what would your advice be for organizations that are starting these projects and saying, what is our return on investment going to be or how do we measure it?
00:14:32
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think it's, A, when you're thinking about a deployment, it's it's important to get a sampling of of individuals, departments, and groups. right it's not Don't just deploy it to one department. And also make sure to deploy it to different levels across the organizations. right Managers, senior executives will have slightly different experience than folks that are maybe on the front line and different areas across the org. So you know having a diverse, maybe pilot deployment is important.
00:15:01
Speaker
um driving down and understanding, again, those those' business outcomes with those there's metrics and KPIs underneath it. And then really a strong adoption ah program. like When you think about it, it's we're changing the way we work. right and where you know In many cases, like if you're really super busy working on something, you almost go into a autopilot. right you just It's automatic mode. I don't need to think about it. I know if I do these 12 things, I can get an outcome. And so it's kind of hard to change. Here's a tool that's going to help me do so a task 5%, 10%, 20% faster, potentially, or even more.
00:15:42
Speaker
and But I do need to take a minute, slow down, think about using that tool or that technology to then drive forward. So i yeah having a consistent adoption program that is maybe repeatable, right? It's not just a one-time adoption program, but every week, every month for for a period of time, just driving home that ah transformation and and helping people see that benefit I think is super important.
00:16:08
Speaker
i Would love to spend a lot of time on what is the people side or the end user side of that adoption ah story. um So from the organization standpoint, when they're looking at starting something like this, what do you see or what would you suggest as far as building out a structured pilot program? you know It's important to to drive into some of those business outcomes, right? So again, we talked about the the people side of it, you know having a diverse pilot group.
00:16:38
Speaker
um Pick one or two key outcomes that folks are doing, something that's not maybe overly complex, right something that's manageable that can be done in a reasonable amount of time. You don't want to try to do a ah business process that's more you know boil the ocean type scenario, where you've got many stages and steps that have to be investigated.
00:17:00
Speaker
and thought through about how you might leverage Copilot in those workflows. So pick a manageable outcome and make sure you celebrate that success. right If you're able to leverage Copilot to maybe double, triple the time it takes to get something done or remove friction or improve customer experience, it really does start to sell itself to to folks. right I have been using Copilot for probably a year and a half now. And it took me a little while right to see the benefit, to have that kind of aha moment. ah But I'll tell you what, now, like that's my go-to tool. like That's the first thing I do is I go in and I talk to Copilot. I ask to you know how I might do something or get it to almost be a research assistant to go pull in typekin insights and information to help me
00:17:49
Speaker
work through a problem. um And so now it's just become second nature. It's it's my go-to tool and in many cases. But it took a little while. but Even me, I'm an early adopter on technology, typically. And you know it's like you said like I said before, like if you fall into your old habits. It's like, look, I've got a deadline. I know how to do this. Maybe it's painful, but I'm going to go do it that way because I got to get it done. right So it it is it is a people change at the end of the day.
00:18:16
Speaker
yeah i had the unique advantage of sitting behind you in a conference room when you had a copilot or copilot license and i hadn't had one yet or sorry i i didn't have mine yet um watching you get to use it i was so excited for when i got to but i i struggled absolutely the same way ah it's the the amount of no learning what it can do over time and the you know i look at it and have to imagine well what can this do well you know And that's the interesting thing, too, because it's it is so powerful, and it's not like a ah bullet list of specific commands that you do. It's it's a conversation you're having with an application, right? and And having this dialogue in kind of more of a human fashion, right? It's like you and I having this conversation right now,
00:19:04
Speaker
where you're having kind of a similar conversation with co-pilots like, hey, I need to go do the following in preparation for a meeting with mike my my manager on a topic, right? You're defining the goals, the objectives, and having that natural conversation at first kind of feels a little weird, right? And so it takes a little muscle to learn and to build up the the ability to really almost be like If you think about it, you're almost becoming a manager right and delegating some tasks with clarity to this agent, to this co-pilot to basically help you get those things done. So it's yeah, it's interesting. But it it it's a change, right? And that's yeah will sometimes hate change. Yeah. It's a far cry from the growing ah application menus to then the contextual application menus to now I can just talk to it. And it starts doing what I want it to.
00:19:55
Speaker
Um, you brought up a really interesting point when it comes to an organization that's looking at setting up their structured pilot program specifically in identifying a process and following that. Um, I think that, you know, traditionally when I look at a technology migration very much in the team space, it was you look at, okay, what happens when we turn this on for.
00:20:17
Speaker
everyone. And there's the typical you know journey of, well, what is what are they going to need to learn? How do we get them started preparing them with those materials? um When you look at a copilot pilot, are you actually starting with individual persona and use case and focusing in on that, as opposed to say turning it on and doing a broad level, here's what the tool is and how it works. It depends, right? It it depends on the history and the ah comfort of adoption and change within an organization. um If the organization has historically had good patterns of adoption and change on on leading edge type technologies,
00:20:58
Speaker
you can definitely deploy it on a more broadly more broader scale. And in that context, you're going to focus in on really driving the benefits and the impact of sort of the out of the box experiences. You're in a Teams meeting, you've got the transcript going on, the AI notes and the to-dos and the tasks being created. You've got the ability to go into co-pilot and almost use it as like a brainstorming research assistant tool, or in Word, assembling a document or in PowerPoint, putting together slides, et cetera.
00:21:28
Speaker
So it is definitely you're you're going to get a benefit out of the box during it that way. um But you also want to make sure that your teams are early adopt like they're willing to go through those transformations. um If you've had some struggles and so you know in in organizations or in different departments and teams where they're not comfortable with change and early adoption of tech, then it does require a little bit of finding maybe those one or two leads in each of those departments. That becomes maybe your initial target.
00:21:58
Speaker
to get them to kind of start to feel the tools, give you some immediate feedback of what might need to be tweaked and changed. And then you can actually build your adoption journeys targeted to those nuances of those departments. So it depends. I mean, I think there's no there's really no right or wrong answer, but you've got to look at some history and and of the organization in some cases.
00:22:18
Speaker
I love that approach, too, for the going back to what we were talking about earlier, as far as access to information and the the data estate, um identifying those early personas and those early users is a great opportunity to find, you know, where are where's this persona missing data?
00:22:36
Speaker
Where are they not getting the information that they may need and tying that early pilot into sort of an ongoing technical readiness component?
Latest Copilot Features and Enhancements
00:22:44
Speaker
You know, it's, it's one thing to kind of make sure, do we have file permission set up how we expect them or and is everyone in the sites they should be in, but identifying where you need to open it up. That's a fantastic way of, of identifying something that you would have never had configured before.
00:23:00
Speaker
Agreed. So I know we spent a lot of time discussing how organizations are getting started. And again, something you mentioned earlier on and then a little bit afterwards was the ongoing recent changes to the platform. So could you spend some time to tell us about ah the Wave 2 announcements? Yeah, some really exciting stuff that just got announced the other day. um you know When you kind of look at the product, right it is evolving very quickly. The industry is is definitely evolving fast and and continuing to innovate and drive more more features and capabilities. um So of course we're doing similar inside of Copilot and driving that journey. So a couple things that were announced that I think are are pretty transformational are
00:23:45
Speaker
what we call copilot pages. And this is a unique way for you to go into copilot. And, you know, again, i I think I mentioned I use it a little bit sometimes as a brainstorming tool. And so, you know, I go into copilot, maybe I'll copy paste some of that data to a Word doc, and I'll continue to go back and forth.
00:24:02
Speaker
Well, now right from Copilot, I can go in and hit Edit and Page, and it brings up, a in essence, a loop page that will bring that data in. And then I can continue to go back and forth with Copilot to flush out my thoughts and ideas. And where the exciting piece is, is then suddenly I get to a point where I'm like, you know what? I need some collaboration. And now I get to bring in a team of folks by sharing that page and having collaborative Copilot conversations with that data set and other individuals.
00:24:30
Speaker
um So now we're extending kind of this personal co-pilot experience now into areas where you get that collaboration component. right So now I bring from a blank slate to something I was brainstorming on to now a team collaboration in a matter of you know potentially minutes and and hours, depending on how quick I need to get that done. um So that's definitely one that's gotten me excited. and i so I'm going to start using that shortly.
00:24:53
Speaker
Yeah, I can't wait to have that one. i That was the most exciting announcement to me was being able to, because I'm using CoPilot now with you know people that I'm on a Teams call with. And I'm, you know hey, we can jump over here and we can start doing this, or let me ask it and find out something that we're working on. So the idea of being able to just have that assistant that collaborates with us, so exciting.
00:25:16
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's super helpful. um We announced that Excel is now GA, and we've added a ton of improvements into that product now. And I think a lot of folks will be super excited. We've also included the ability to do more advanced analytics. And so now you can weave in Python into that journey and use Copilot to help you build the Python to then work against that large data set. um So that's definitely an exciting piece. And then PowerPoint's been an interesting one. i've I've been in the habit of going in and into Word and building out these sort of outlines, kind of thinking through my content of what I want to present in PowerPoint. And we now have what's called a narrative builder right inside of PowerPoint where you basically, in real time, kind of in a loop page format,
00:26:01
Speaker
edit and build an outline. And you can actually use Copilot to help you build the outline and you know say, hey, I want to do a presentation on the following. Copilot will start sketching that out. And then you can go in and move and edit and tweak. And what's nice is that when you can then submit that to Copilot and PowerPoint it's going to review the outline, build out your presentation, and you could also link it to like a document image library. So maybe you've got company branding and image and assets, and now it's going to reference all of those resources to potentially pull into your PowerPoint. um So having that narrative builder, instead of me doing an outline in Word and then pointing co-pilot to the Word doc, I can just do it naturally right from PowerPoints. That's exciting.
00:26:42
Speaker
And then I think the most impactful one is agents, right? And the ability to, you know, as you get comfortable with the out of the box experience, you're going to start moving into more deeper business process things. And you're going to see situations where there's a repetitive process. You're like, oh, I do this thing every week or whatever. That's an agent conversation.
00:27:04
Speaker
and where I can just go to Copa and go, hey, I need you to do the following. And it's got a process mapped out, action items, things that may you know may need to be converted or whatever the LLM is doing for you on your behalf. And at the end of the day, you get the results. right And so to be able to build out those agents to go do tasks for you, um I think is super
Conclusion and Next Episode Teaser
00:27:22
Speaker
exciting. And I can't wait for the builder to show up in the next couple of weeks.
00:27:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's going to be incredible to start adding, you know, actions into these when especially when you start with the focusing on the process, you know, how is this transforming a process and you're able to pass off to co pilot. And from there, please go do these things and come back and wait for this and um and Incredible changes awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us for this part of the conversation We will be continuing the conversation. We started to get into it the people in process transformation so really excited to dig into the the user side of Adoption and stay tuned by following us on the Apple podcast Spotify and YouTube music Also don't forget to check out Olivia's exclusive co-pilot technical readiness assessment workshop offer at alithia.com forward slash tech ready.