Today on our Tech for Business podcast,
Kyle, our president and CEO and Todd,
our COO and CISO are joining us to discuss Microsoft Co-Pilot.
Just correct me if I'm wrong.
It is February 2024,
so that means that Co-Pilot recently rolled out for enterprise customers.
This is fairly new. We're listening to this in the future.
We're going to have more information and more use on it.
But I wanted to start instead of a question,
have a little trivia question for you.
In my research about Co-Pilot,
I found a survey that Microsoft did about how people plan to use AI.
I was going to ask,
I'll give you a multiple choice question and I want you to guess what
the number one use for AI is.
Your options are analytical tasks,
summarizing meetings and action items,
finding information or answers, or creative work.
What do you think people plan to use AI for?
Yeah. I was going to clarify,
this is what AI will do,
not what I'll do because AI did all over my normal human being work.
Yes.
What do you think people?
Again, it's what people plan to use it for,
probably not actually what they'll end up using it for.
I would say creative would be the number one answer.
I was going to say that too,
but I was thinking really in my head what makes sense is,
it'll do all the analytical work and then it'll free humans up to do creative.
I want to go with analytical.
Thanks. The number four is actually creative.
People again planning,
they might actually use it for creative,
but they don't really think about that for their top use.
Number three was analytical.
Again, something maybe they're not thinking of.
The number one that people are planning to use AI for
was finding information and answers,
which makes sense.
It does. I thought it was too obvious.
You've seen Google for years.
Yes. That's the thing.
When we're coming from Google,
what do we use AI for?
I guess we're going to use it as a search engine,
which is maybe not.
There's nothing that doesn't search for you on the background.
Yes.
The creative one does make a lot of sense.
I think I saw a news article the other day where they were using
the LLM to do it and they were like,
create a spaceman with a knitted motorcycle helmet,
blah, blah, blah, and then it did.
I was like, wow.
How did you even think of those things?
I'm not the creative, I'm more the analytical guy.
I can't imagine how I can do those kinds of things,
but that's amazing.
I know. Oh, yeah.
It's quite a long way.
My first question based off of that is,
how is AI and specifically co-pilot transforming our day-to-day work?
How is it transforming the workload?
I'll start real briefly.
CIT, since it really did just come out,
we did it in a very limited rollout for ourselves.
It's been very experimental with us.
I think everybody's probably using it a little bit differently.
If everybody, it is a fairly small sample size for us in particular.
The things that I find it to be the most beneficial for
is getting me started on things.
For example, the way the toolset works is,
if you open up Word,
the very first thing you do is you get a co-pilot prompt.
If you type in,
please create a blog post regarding the benefits of AI and LLM.
It'll create an entire blog post for you.
Now, I'd highly recommend you review it and read it,
but it'll give you a heck of a great start.
Then it'll say, it allows you to get into more detail.
You can highlight any sentence, any paragraph,
and then you can tell co-pilot to do anything.
Please write this like I'm a third grader.
Please revise this to say whatever,
and it will do it. It's pretty remarkable.
Of course, it does this for emails and all kinds of other stuff too.
The first thing that I found that it was incredibly beneficial for
was getting me started.
Yeah. I think for those reasons,
and also I think it's kind of that,
1,000 Golden BBs versus a silver bullet.
It's got a lot of little things that it does throughout the day side that are,
augmentatively, I think are very powerful when you combine all the little savings along it.
It's the little self-taught set side of it adds to it,
I think the integrations with teams and just the meeting notes and the agenda,
and the additional prompt stuff on it.
Some of it just the traditional chat,
GBT chat, the search thing that your survey said.
Just to say, give me some resources for me and find me this information.
I've used it more recently side to help locate
document sides within my ecosystem for me side of it.
So between shared docs,
different Excel files, different things of those things.
So losing track of where,
what was that when I say that file is and
those kind of things to help me locate those and it's done a nice job of
holding the relevant files together and give me the quick reference sides of it.
So just all those throughout the day,
if you think of all the little minutes that starts to save and the aggregate side of it,
I really like it.
I can easily see where it gets to.
There's a little bit of AI crack going on where you just start to say,
I'm not going to want to get rid of this.
I mean, it's going to be something I want to hang on to because you take a step backwards.
I mean, I could see easily how it's going to get people very hooked as a part of the one close to utilize it.
I'm hooked on it already too.
Teams is probably where I use it more than anywhere else.
So you can have it do transcriptions of meetings and whatnot.
It'll create the summary for you, action items, et cetera.
So I've used it for that.
And I've used it for a bunch of little things.
I have a lot of conversations that happen throughout a week.
And you can go back into Co-Pilot and ask it to do things for you.
So for example, I had shared out a news article with somebody and then I couldn't remember who I shared it with.
And so I asked Co-Pilot to go find it and it did.
And it gave me every URL I saved and sent over the last week, which was incredibly useful for me too.
So just little things that you're like, I don't know if that would be helpful.
It is. I don't know how you go back.
Yeah, for sure. So it's obviously changing the way people are working and kind of automating those little pieces of their day.
Do you think that it's that all of this AI is going to change the skills of the workforce?
Yeah, I think it was definitely a will.
I, you know, again, it's utilizing how you use any tool side of it.
You just kind of change your job process to adapt to utilize those tools to ultimately get more productive side of it.
I know of like initial studies and again, this is not an exact number and I don't want to recall.
I mean, the numbers of like 40% productivity gain and those things are thrown around on there.
And I can see how those numbers start to rise very quickly.
If as an augmentative tool for any part of work process side of it, again, all those little things add up to tremendous productivity gains,
which then changes your work processes and to doing other things.
You know, it does free you up for other more creative and other, you know, whether it's person to person interactions, other sides of it.
There's there's time savings there for sure.
And I think it's going to, you know, how you use that tool and getting trained, how to use that tool and delivering it to your workforce in a consumable way to allow them to engage and use it to see those productivity gains.
I think is where a lot of this is going to go in Microsoft's done it with prompts, you know, they'll do the prompt.
They have designed prompts in the co-pilot to kind of give you suggestive, you know, ways to interact with the co-pilot engine.
And as Todd mentioned, when you go into word, it just immediately is there prompting you to say, how can I help?
It does it in Outlook and those other things that will prompt you in teams to say, hey, I can help, you know, so that Microsoft's prompting to kind of train us as the workforce a little bit,
how to utilize it to get to get those. But I think as you get into the corporate data sets and deal with more verticalizations in each market,
you're going to see a lot more design around those prompts and trade your workforce of how to use it like any other tool to that's more civic to your workforce.
Yeah, the easiest analogy I'd make is is the skill that people have developed, googling things, right?
And you've gotten so good at it is now the clinics of the world, right?
That's how I search for information.
I Google it. And I think co-pilot will be very similar.
You're already seen it.
Well, it doesn't have to be co-pilot.
But I think the AI general, especially in its current gen AI form, is that's what you're going to see is the skill sets are going to change because of it.
Again, I've only dabbled in the analytics aspect of it, but there is great integration into Excel as well, where it'll help you do trend spotting, right?
So if you go, please analyze the spreadsheet and tell me any trends that are coming up, it will do that,
which automatically starts your brain thinking in different ways, right?
You didn't anticipate not having to dig through it and creating formulas and starting to find trends on your own.
It'll spit it out and all of a sudden you're on to the next task.
So yes, it will change.
I also have been reading a lot of articles as of late, why they're saying the economy is starting to pick up again.
And yet you're seeing all these layoffs in the tech industry and kind of going, why?
And some of the articles I'm reading are saying things such as AI is one of the biggest drivers.
And there's two reasons behind AI.
One is it's a forced multiplier.
But part two is they were saying that a lot of companies are trying to free up their funds so they can afford to pay for AI,
whether that's servers, people, tools like Microsoft, etc.
So we'll see.
But it is interesting if that's true, that that naturally forces you to have to adopt the tools and start to work differently than you ever did before and find efficiencies elsewhere.
Yeah, that's so interesting.
I've heard that come up before about AI and, you know, is it going to expand the workforce or is it going to cut down on it?
So that'll be interesting to see in years to come.
So we are really enjoying co-pilot and how it's integrating and other AI tools that we use.
How do you decide if it is right for your business?
And then if it is, how do you prepare for that integration?
I think like anything, I think you have to start with a pilot group.
You got to do some initial, you know, sampling to kind of again understand like Todd mentioned earlier,
like where we started with a small sampling group side of it, just to start to get a feel for the potential areas where it can improve your business side with it.
And it won't be, you know, immediately clearly, I'm going to start using it like we were just talking through things start to become clear.
And then you have a better idea of some of the ROI of who in your organization would benefit from those tools,
which starts to address, say, you know, the $30 a month, you know, license fee for it.
You know, do you get $30 plus of productivity?
Most places, that's probably not a hard justification.
I mean, you're going to buy, like I said, five minutes a day over a course of a month.
You're going to cover. I mean, you don't need a lot of efficiency gains to gain it, but you've got to be able to measure it, of course,
and just try to measure their productivity side of it in long term. Does it avoid you?
You know, does it hold off hiring another FTE, you know, to do certain work as your business continues to grow?
You know, those then start to manifest into bigger ROIs because one person can handle a little more workload without overstressing them.
You know, so it's all, you know, each business is going to have to make that call for themselves.
But I, you know, the second part of your questions, I will, we've been recommending is to because the
co-pilot has access to everything you have access to as a licensed user, you need to do some review of where you have access or your users have access to.
There may be SharePoint libraries or, you know, other areas or shares that were done from people's OneDrive that do have company or corporate sensitive information.
The co-pilot would have access to that. So when you're doing, you know, inter-kind interaction with that, that could be presented back in a response.
So it's a good time to do a permissions review in a group review of all your, you know, your documents and library sides of it before you do an organizational life.
So a lot of times we've been advocating the initial users are probably more at the leadership level of the organization that would tend to probably have access to more sensitive.
And they're probably more likely to have an idea of the potential use cases within their organizations as well at the higher level versus just, you know,
giving it to your entire workforce and say, well, here you go. You know, that approach probably is not going to work for a lot of orgs.
I think they're going to want to be a little more strategic with the users and their use cases to realize they are at least initially.
Yeah, I'm going to put on my security hat real briefly. I can't help it, right? But Kyle covered a ton of ground that makes perfect sense.
There are a couple of different versions of co-pilot too.
And this will tend into a little bit of the privacy aspect too is the $30 a month version is the one that does not use any of your corporate data to train the AI model.
So I would highly recommend most organizations go down that path because you never know what your users are going to do.
But along those the lines of reviewing your security, your permissions, etc.
You should be doing that anyway. And you should do it at least once a year.
But the reason why I brought it up is I don't want anybody to think that that's an IT problem.
That's not that's an everybody problem.
So your IT department tends to be and your security group tends to be the custodian of that.
So essentially what they're doing is you as the user are the owner of your data, whether you're in accounting HR, you're in the C suite.
It doesn't matter. It's your data. You own it. You created it.
You're responsible for who has access to it.
Now, if you can tell your IT department, I want accounting to have access to this and HR to that.
They can make sure that those permissions are correct, but it's up to you to make those decisions and those calls.
So that's an everybody problem.
The only other thing that I would say in regards to the how do you get started?
It is still very, very new.
And so you're starting to see this.
We're actually doing a webinar very, very soon ourselves.
But that would be a good place to start to is what is the tool?
What does it look like? What are all the areas that it can help?
And that would be a great place to go.
OK, now I got concepts so I can figure out who my pilot group is.
But I agree with Kyle, the small pilot group really helps you get things figured out and allows you to start to build your ROI around it.
I guess I'll leave it at that. But I think those are great ways to start.
I think it does make a ton of sense and we can go from there.
But it is a new technology and it's extremely exciting.
I can tell you the grounds swell at CIT is very, very high.
People want the tool. Please can I have it?
And I'm like, wow, we're not quite ready yet.
So as we're going through our security reviews and permissions, all that type of stuff,
it's you do need to do all of your dotting your eyes and crossing your T's before you roll it out to everyone.
As you were talking, I started thinking about we had a podcast on cybersecurity insurance and compliance.
So what do you see changing or being added to those things as AI becomes more of integrated into businesses of all sizes?
Yeah, I was talking with the prospect.
Yeah, it is. I mean, I was talking to a prospect last week and one of the first things he said is,
can you help me draft an AI policy?
And I was like, yeah, yeah, so you should write.
I mean, the reality is, is most likely almost everybody in your organization probably has done.
Somebody has been dabbling with open AI or chat, UPT at this point.
And that one is open and it is using all that data to train the model.
So you should probably have an idea of who's doing it.
What are they doing? What is the output of that?
Do they have guidelines or bumpers from the bullying analogy so they know where to stay within the lines?
Is a great place to start.
That's where I'd start.
But then there is going to be a lot of stuff that comes behind it.
When you start looking at laws and whatnot, they will be coming, but they're a little bit behind.
And technology does tend to do this where technology is a bit ahead of the laws and then the laws quickly scramble to figure it out.
And then, of course, they become a little overzealous in their first pass on things as well.
But those things are coming.
Insurance, TBD.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think for sure is that it's going to come to those being prepared for it.
Yeah, we had a podcast just recently where we got into insurances kind of getting into some of the regulations.
And they're great at doing the analytics part, right?
So they know what's going on within the world.
They see the data leakage, which is one of the concerns about having your data being leaked out into the Internet.
And they'll know what that costs.
They'll have all that details for you.
So they'll be the first ones that you'll see that will impact every organization.
Regulations will hit some health care finance, et cetera.
But eventually, insurance will be the ones that come down on everybody.
Yeah, I think that for sure is going to be the attractive nature of using the chat GPT,
that from the OpenAI website, those free for use are personal subscription versions that are, again, in the public learning module side of that,
getting that corporate sense of data, whether you're going to Gemini and Google or using Xs.
Any of those AI engine sites that are not corporate enterprise side of it,
I think you're going to get a lot of guidance and regulatory side of it to say,
you cannot use those, or you're going to have to do a lot of IT filtering to block those within the actual business themselves to create conditional blocks
and make sure people are clear guidelines on that, but that's fine for your home use, but do not use that in the company.
And I think even true of your personal stuff into the company side, don't do that probably either.
I mean, you're going to put your personal data now into the corporate space.
So there's a, you know, you're going to need to create some silos of where you use those,
these learning modules and these engines that you're training, because it is being trained.
It is learning as it goes through it.
That's the big power side of it, it's aware of the roles of the people that it's working with.
So it knows my role and those Todd's roles and those areas roles within our organization.
It knows, you know, responsibility takes that account and it's learning as we're giving it prompts back.
You know, when Todd says, I like to write in this form that it remembers those things.
You know, I tell it every single time it does learn and start to adapt to that.
That's the power of it.
It's learning, but it may learn something you don't want it to learn.
I remember it's, that's a nice concern comes in.
Yeah, we're a lot more transparent than we think we are.
As we're chatting, I'm starting to get my brains around, you know, I wanted to go back and say,
how do we, how do we prove value and stuff like that, which makes me naturally go, what's next?
And I'll be honest with you, I'm not the creative individual that's going to go,
hey, I can see this new thing pop up from the next gen of AI.
I don't know what those are just yet.
Although I think it's going to be incredibly exciting.
In the short term, I think there's still a lot of opportunity on there.
So we didn't dive too terribly far into this, but just kind of an example is
being in the IT industry, you can start to do things such as building your AI to build
knowledge basis.
So as you're starting to see how come I'm always having problems with my VPN connection,
the tool set can kind of create the answers for you, potentially get into things that help you
do self-service to resolve those types of things.
And then again, staying in the IT world, seeing how it's going to impact application development
in the near future is going to be very interesting too.
As you start to see, there's a terminology in the app dev world called low code development.
In theory, this could help supplement that, right?
Because it can do a lot of the code generation for you.
And then you would just do your little tweaks and changes to it.
So I think there's a lot of opportunity from what exists already, but you will see a lot
of really cool stuff to come in the future as well.
Yeah, I think it's just the rate of development, the rate that allows you to again, exponentially
increase output.
That's what it does.
So I mean, it helps increase output and that's it's core deliverable in its current form and
what's being delivered and the new products that continue to come out as gets better.
I'll put will go up.
There's a part of this that has this Microsoft Copilot Studio site into it that we're just
beginning to explore side of it that allows you to build your own custom prompts for your
organization as well as connect to your own custom data sets sides of it.
So now you start to get into, again, your corporate data side of it, whether it's your ERP system,
your CRM, those other area sides of it, but being able to have it assist with that data
and being able to make sense of all that data side of it to pull relevant response and information
back.
I mean, these things just start to make your mind go, wow, we're just at the start.
I mean, so there's just so many cool things that are coming and you're seeing pretty much
every line of business outside of your Copilot, they're introducing their own AI components
into their product lines as well to allow you to do similar function sides of it, whether
they call them bots or whatever they want to turn on, but quick ways that used to be
workflows or macros or all these little things that these things have been around for a while
in certain forms, but now you're putting a much more effective use on it where it can take it
way, way further and be way more automated than it ever was to really get those high output
gains coming out of it.
Yeah, and these are all great fun things, but again, I'm the Debbie Downer, so I'm going to throw in
a little the dark side of the world.
When Kyle mentioned, you're seeing these in other tools.
And unfortunately, you're starting to see that come up in the cyber attack world as well as
they're starting to use AI to generate phishing simulations, although not simulations, they're
just phishing attacks.
But where I was going to go with it is on the flip side, there are a lot of security
companies out there that are using AI to help go against that as well.
So they're building better simulations, which is going to give you better training,
which is going to make your employees more paranoid.
And they're going to report everything that's phishing, which is a win in my book.
But you are seeing it on the bad side too.
So quickly developing malicious attacks, quickly developing phishing attacks, etc.
We are seeing that as well.
We've talked and it's been a while, but there is going to be a point where we're going to see AI
as going to be what it needs to defend against AI.
And the human just isn't going to be fast enough to respond in the future when it comes to those
types of attacks.
And that's probably another podcast.
Yeah, yeah, just telemetry of all that data.
You really need it.
I mean, there's just, again, like anything else you were AI really shines.
Obviously, it's because of just the sheer amount of data we all have that are, you know, that's
accessible to us, but we just can't, you know, we can't.
It takes a long time for us to process and aggregate it, or, you know, something that in
the machine learning model sides of it can do incredibly fast.
And that just gives you those answers so much quicker.
And the cybersecurity side, we can do telemetry of all the data and all the data points that
you need to analyze to determine that you are actually under attack, or that you have a threat
actor in your environment side of it.
It's, it's, it's, you need it for these things nowadays, because again, they're using those
things to get in there.
And there's too many points that humans just not going to spot it.
And unfortunately, you know, these attacks happen 24 seven, so you need a defender 24
seven and people have to sleep too.
So there's, you know, giving the relevant decision side of that is where, you know, it
definitely is moving towards where the, you have the work and the analysis being powered
by those AI engine side of it, feeding good relevant quick decision information to, to
to a human, you know, is, is where they're measuring all the productivity powers and
where they're touting on all the analysis of the organizations that are going to thrive
going forward are the ones that know how to use AI augmentedly in their business.
You know, it's not necessarily replacement.
It's augmentative.
And I was just going to address, you know, an area point about job layoffs and some of
those other things.
Again, any technology shift is you go through those sides of it.
There's going to be a whole slew of new job creations on the other side.
So that's always the challenge on these things.
It's the unfortunate side where certain jobs are eliminated, but new roles are created,
you know, and then ultimately there's waves of, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the
waves of, you know, even more jobs ultimately being created, but it does require, you know,
certain people, certain skills to be retrained and move through those things, which is painful
when you deal with these organizations shift, but it is, it is upon us and starting.
So I think that's now is the time to start looking at these and learning how to utilize
these or develop new skills that are around the augmentative use of the AI or development
of those tools or new ways to leverage it.
There's also certain areas where I think we're always thrive outside of AI, anything that's
you know, physical service based sides of it.
I mean, in AI is not going to come fix your air conditioner unit and AI is not going to
put a new roof on your house or do your, you know, I don't want an AI cut my hair either.
I mean, I don't think there's a lot of things that just aren't going to certainly be affected
by this.
How will that even work?
Yeah.
While you were talking, I did decide that I did come up with a great idea of what you
can have your AI do for in the future.
And I was thinking about the new Apple vision is that what the call the goggles?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, vision pro.
So when that when that shrinks down in one of the newer versions, you're going to see
this go on to the golf courses.
You're going to have your little personal caddy will be in your sunglasses, right?
You'll use AI that says, Hey, the wind's blowing at eight miles per hour to the southeast.
Your ball's going to spin like this.
Perfect.
You're going to use AI for your caddy.
Yeah, I jumped out bad.
I suck at golf.
Wow.
You should really quit golf.
I think you're right.
But the career trainer that comes out of that too.
Look at all the golf things we can do.
I'm waiting for Clippy to come back.
Do you guys remember Clippy?
I remember the little AI.
Clippy back is the new co-pilot mascot for nostalgia purposes.
We would have given poor Clippy a purpose.
They never had a warm welcome.
Maybe we'll see him come back.
Maybe he'll make a reception.
Shout out to Microsoft.
Make Clippy your co-pilot.
Shout out to Clippy.
Yeah, and since it's a personal co-pilot, I got to be able to tailor him so I can change
his avatar whenever I need to.
Yes.
Put a little hat on him.
I love it.
On that note, I think we're excited.
We're cautiously optimistic and we're looking forward to maybe Clippy in the future.
Thank you, Kyle and Todd for joining us today.
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If you have a question or topic or want to know more about co-pilot or AI, please reach out to us at infoatcit-net.com
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