The Catalyst by Softchoice

Bonus: The Catalyst gets clear on Microsoft Generative AI – Implementation

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How do you integrate Microsoft Generative AI into the everyday workflow of your organization without making a mess of it? That's the question that drives the third episode in this miniseries, which focuses on the 'Implement' phase of the Copilot Adoption Journey with guest Craig McQueen, Vice President of AI Solutions at Softchoice. Craig shares his expertise on how to introduce Microsoft 365 Copilot in your organization, starting with a single group, tailoring the experience, and validating its value before scaling further. The conversation reveals how a gradual, careful implementation can lead to profound organizational transformation and set the stage for broader adoption. 

Featuring: Craig McQueen, Vice President of AI Solutions at Softchoice

The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology.

Aaron:

Over the last year, we've seen huge anticipation for Microsoft 365 Copilot, and it's finally here. For most organizations, the question isn't whether to adopt, but how and how fast. Early adopters stand to gain the most, but moving ahead without a plan comes at its own risks. You're listening to The Catalyst Gets Clear on Copilot Adoption, a mini series hosted by Softchoice's Braden Banks. From building a business case, to getting security, rollout, and adoption right, we're going to help leaders like you chart your best path forward. It starts right here, right now. On today's episode, we ask, how do you implement Copilot the right way?

Braeden:

The Great Wall of China was built one brick at a time. The cumulative effort of generations of workers layering bricks eventually leaving behind a 13, 000 mile architectural marvel we know today. The same applies to a big technology project. You probably don't have time to wait generations, but the last thing you want is to scale up before you're ready. And it's no different with Microsoft 365 Copilot. The mantra here should be as straightforward as it is profound. Start small. Meaningful change happens step by step, group by group. And that's why I'm speaking today with Craig McQueen as vice president of AI solutions at Softchoice, Craig knows a thing or two about leading innovation projects, whether that's for our customers or within Softchoice. He's also a pro when it comes to helping organizations turn those big lofty goals into pragmatic plans of approach. And today he's going to share with us the best way to start small. And scale steadily with Copilot. Hello again, Craig, and welcome to the show. In this episode, we're going to talk a little bit more about the implementation phase of the Copilot adoption journey. Can you share with us a little bit about what that means from your perspective? And what's at stake for organizations who may be considering just buying a thousand licenses and turning them on? Sure. And good to be with you, Braeden.

Craig:

For me, Copilot is about transforming the way that people work. And so organizations have an opportunity to increase the productivity and quality of the work they do. And if you think about it, you never get both. It's usually opposing each other. But co pilot means that you may be able to improve both the productivity and quality of the way people work. Now, because it's changing the way that people work. It's going to be different for your different parts of your company. And so you wouldn't want to deploy it the same way across the entire organization, because people work differently. It's important to pick a focused group that you want to start with and deciding with this group, we understand how we want them to be able to work differently. Therefore having better business results and then designing the implementation for that particular group. Okay. And then on to the next one, and on to the next one.

Braeden:

So what I think I'm hearing is that it's less about starting small and kind of dabbling or experimenting, and more about identifying a specific focused group of individuals. Yeah,

Craig:

that's right. I am advocating start with a subset of your organization, but don't underestimate the effort that you should be putting in to get the results that Copilot has for the potential, because it is changing the way people work. Even if it's just 50 people, you need to make sure you have the executive sponsorship and give people the time and space to be able to learn how to use the product and therefore be able to work with more efficiency and with higher quality.

Braeden:

As an organization goes about the process of planning for such a pilot project, how should they go about, from what you've seen, selecting those initial groups and those individuals who should be first to get their hands on this?

Craig:

Yeah, I think there's a number of considerations. Because it is about change, you want to make sure you get a good success for the first initiative. And therefore, what part of your organization might be more open to change? It could be, you know, they're feeling enough pain that if there's a promise of doing things differently and making their jobs easier, there's, there's that. Or, There might be some very eager people who, like salespeople, hey, if this helps me achieve my quota or exceed my quota, I can gain from it. So think about, all right, well, which group has a lot of pain that might be solved or might gain from it? Then you want a really strong executive stakeholder. Because, again, this is change, it needs to have the leadership who believes that, yes, this is something that can help the organization. And with that forward looking executive stakeholder, there'll be much more success in helping getting it through to the organization in a purposeful way. With respect to, you know, those that might be resistant to change, as we talked about already. The first initiative, you want to make sure that you've got as much as possible, the people that are going to move it forward. But imagine it's your second initiative. It might be good to start including those that are resistant to change because that's going to weigh down your organization anyway. This is a way for us to test, are there people that aren't going to move or not? And if they aren't, well, maybe there's something that we need to do different, uh, in those situations.

Braeden:

I wonder now if you could just describe, you know, in a high level, step by step way, how Soft Choice went about designing our own pilot project, or just generally speaking, steps that you'd recommend.

Craig:

Sure. There's a couple ways to look at it. No matter what, someone in your organization is using generative AI right now. So they're probably using chat GPT. So let's find them, because you don't necessarily want them to use chat GPT or any publicly available large language model. You want to shift it. To something that's just within your organization. And so you can have the dual goal of shifting people off of public LLM to one that's just private to your organization, but also capturing those bright spots. People that, that really are leaders. And that's somewhat of what we did at Softchoice was found out, well, who, who was already talking about generative AI and using it within their group. And using that as initial part for a pilot now within soft choice, because of the nature of our business, and we are a technology company, we did want to test different departments, so we didn't go with a single department. We went with. Three to four departments to understand how might they work differently. We found the bright spots within them and made sure that they were part of the pilot. And then for each of those groups, we understood what are the metrics that would be different. So for example, our learning and development group is often inundated with requests for all kinds of material. We have over 500 salespeople and we sell a lot of stuff and the learning and development group are constrained on people. So they looked like a really good pilot group. And you know what, here's the results they were able to achieve in one month, what they used to do in three months. So that avoided the cost of hiring a subcontractor and we were able to get the materials to our sales field two months sooner. And so it's not just avoiding costs. But by getting materials out to their sales field, that is a potential revenue gain too.

Braeden:

How do we know when we're ready to scale out of the pilot project? Is that something that comes through the initial design of the whole process? Or is there sort of a set of signs or indicators that, hey, this pilot is ready for prime time across the organization?

Craig:

Yeah, and I wouldn't, I wouldn't even necessarily consider it pilot and scale. I would consider it, which groups do we want to transform the way they work first? And where do we go to next? If it was your sales organization, hey, we're going to transform the way sales works, increasing the productivity and the quality of the work that they do. And here's the, the four month project plan on how we're going to do that. The same time you can decide it. Well, where, which group might be next or which set of groups might be next. So it's not necessarily deciding when to scale it's which groups have an urgent need to improve productivity and quality. And where do we feel we could get traction? And then you can lay out, as you can picture a transformation roadmap of how you take your entire company over a period of 18 months and And transform the different business functions using generative AI and co pilot.

Braeden:

Right, because you mentioned something interesting that I wanted to go back to about a group that's perhaps already embarked on some kind of transformation project that might be multiple years in, in progress. There's a potential for co pilot and generative AI to disrupt projects like that or, or, or add too much on top of those kinds of things.

Craig:

Yeah. So no matter what, it will be disruptive and it, it can be a positive disruption because what you're asking people to do. is incorporate something extra into their week. People need to learn and practice how to use the technology. The only way you're going to get the benefit is if you carve out time for the training and actual application. I've never run into a single company where the employees say, I'm so bored. I wish somebody would give me something else to do. No, uh, people are taxed with too much to do. And you know, the, sort of the irony is this can make people's lives easier. But you need to take the time in between to put that extra effort in to learn how to use the product, share best practices among groups, and to finally get to the place where you're able to operate with it more effectively.

Braeden:

Is there anything that we learned during our My own internal user study that would change if you know if you had to start again and reverse the clock. Was there anything that we learned that would change our approach? Great question, Braeden.

Craig:

You know, we were part of the earlier Dapr program and we wanted to move quickly to understand the process. How best to use the licenses that we acquired as part of the early docker program. So we moved pretty quickly specifically for that set of licenses. What we're currently doing is, well, what does it mean for the larger organization? So I'm not sure whether it's a do differently, but it's a choice an organizational have to make, which is, okay, do we want to understand the big picture for our company and wait until we have that in place? Or do we want to just. Start and learn with with a smaller group. We're now doing what is the what does it mean for the global organization? And how do we do that transformation roadmap? I think it's it's really important to have executives on board and We didn't target executives So I there's interest from our CFO or CEO or head of sales and we didn't include them in the user groups at all I think if we did it differently We would include a couple of executives because as, as a, as a user persona, they need to be treated a bit differently. We'd give them licenses, a bit of training material, but we find it needs to be pretty more specialized for the C suite.

Braeden:

And, you know, I mean, I think we've been prepared psychologically for the capabilities coming in, you know, with generative AI, but was there anything that, like, sort of blew us away that we weren't expecting in terms of positive results?

Craig:

Even personally, I continue to be extremely impressed with what generative AI produces, like the quality that it can produce is just amazing. And so that's why we saw some significant boost in productivity and quality. I think what people haven't. really explored or realized yet, is how generative AI can be used as a coach. So let me give an example. With Co Pilot, people talk about Microsoft Teams, and they always say how great the summarization is, and listing the action items. And it is really good, like, it's just unbelievable. But here's what else you can do. You can ask Copilot, how could I have made that meeting better? What should I have done differently? Who spoke the most? What was the tone of the meeting? And imagining that Copilot is also your coach, you get really interesting insights.

Braeden:

How would we advise an organization on continuously adopting and optimizing on all of these new tools? There's a huge stack of Copilot technology. Is this kind of an ongoing process?

Craig:

Absolutely, and when we work with customers to help them with their deployment. It's so important to build out the plan, but then it's important to decide how will you sustain. So just like I might start a new diet program, first week is great, second week not so good, third week I regress to what I was like before. Organizations are the same way. Hey, they'll be on board, they'll be using Copilot, and it's a huge risk that they'll regress to working the way they did before. So it's really important to have ongoing measurement of active use, which you can do. And if you see a drop in adoption or use, then you can have an intervention, such as additional training or understanding why they Aren't using it. That's really important so that you continue to get the ROI. And then Braeden, as you, you're hinting at a little bit as well, technology is going to evolve and there's going to be more embedded, which is absolutely right. This will continue to evolve at an exponential pace. So by having, um, a center of excellence and ongoing. community of people that use it, you can distribute and share out those best practices and updates to the features and functionality as they evolve.

Braeden:

Is that center of excellence generally going to be comprising those early adopters, those enthusiasts, or is there a more deliberate approach to kind of deciding whom in your organization is going to fill those COE roles?

Craig:

Probably a mix. So there's probably a few people just like at Soft Choice who have AI in their job title. And, and so we, we, uh, both have people focused internally and, and for customers, so they can provide the structure and definition of the center of excellence, and then there, there are, as we know, people who are just eager to participate. And they're really good to then fulfill and really run with a lot of the initiatives within that structure put in. Placed by the people who have it as part of their formal job responsibilities.

Braeden:

Another question I had was you kind of alluded to this earlier, which was my software. So of course we live and breathe this technology space, right? We were aware of Copilot coming early on. We were part of the early adopter program with Microsoft, but is it advisable from your perspective to adjust for the level of just basic education on what this technology is? Anecdotally people I know working in other kinds of organizations, they lagging a little bit in terms of their. Awareness of generative AI and, and, and what co pilot can offer them. Is there any kind of gauging that should happen when you're, when you're doing this sort of implement phase around that?

Craig:

Yeah, people, organizations sometimes get hung up. Well, should we buy the M365 co pilot licenses or not? And go through an exercise of business casing and planning, which you need to do. At the same time, there's no reason. Every person in an organization can learn what generative AI is, and even utilizing prompt engineering by itself, whether it's with business level of chat GPT, or Microsoft has windows Copilot, which allows you to do prompt engineering without the office suite. There's no reason people can't start with that right now to really understand what does it mean to do prompt engineering. and work with a large language model. They'll get business benefits out of that. And that just gets them even more ready for M365 Copilot.

Braeden:

Thank you so much, Craig, for joining us today and continuing our amazing and ongoing conversations around this new world of AI and work. For those listening who are, you know, in the process of planning or in the middle of proceeding forward with their Copilot strategy, what would you like them to think about and do next?

Craig:

Every day that goes by that you're not using generative AI in your organization is a lost opportunity. Your competitors may be gaining that opportunity. So I just like to underscore make an informed decision of yes, we are going to start an initiative to see how we're going to use co pilot or other forms of generative AI in our organization, or we have other, other priorities, but make it a conscious decision. And then I'd say if you're. You know, a CIO or head of it, who is going to be your line of business partner to really start moving it within your organization. And I think that's the second most important thing to do is whether it's human resources or head of sales or head of marketing, finding that line of business who is really going to be a good champion on figuring out how to do this and then get started. Certainly Softchoice has been counseling a lot of customers on. What should that plan look like? Even right to the point of drawing out on a schedule. So should you be interested in any specifics of how it applies and how you can plan for your organization, our experts are trained up on how to do that.

Braeden:

Well, Craig, thanks once again for joining us here on the Catalyst podcast. I look forward to talking with you again. Uh, good to be with you again,

Craig:

Braeden. And somehow I feel this won't be the last AI conversation we have.

Braeden:

Craig shared a solid blueprint for any organization looking at co pilot adoption. Start with a single group, tailor the experience, prove its value, and then, and only then, move on to the next one. This methodical approach allows you to test, fine tune, and gather useful feedback about how your people use co pilot capabilities, from the lenses of productivity and performance, to permissions and security. It's a strategy designed to unearth potential issues early, Ensuring a smooth and effective adoption process. Well, that's it for today, uh, but don't miss our next episode where we'll guide you through the final stages of the Copilot journey, adopt and sustain. Until then, I'm your host, Braeden Banks.

Aaron:

for listening. We help our customers navigate the whole Copilot journey with a proven consulting framework, secure implementation experience, and deep certification in Microsoft technology. We know Microsoft better than anyone. Every Copilot needs a navigator. Softchoice is yours. Visit Softchoice. com slash Microsoft dash Copilot to learn how we can help you unleash the potential in your people and technology with Copilot.