The Catalyst by Softchoice

Bonus: The Catalyst gets clear on Microsoft Generative AI – Adopt & Sustain

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What if your team's full potential lay in the hands of an AI assistant that could learn from you, adapt to your needs, and streamline your daily operations? How do you sustain momentum through initial adoption to ongoing optimization? This concern is the focus of the final episode of this miniseries about Microsoft Generative AI.  Kayla Thorpe, Senior Manager for Workplace AI Consulting, and host Braeden Banks delve into the crucial final stages of Softchoice's Microsoft Copilot adoption journey: 'Adopt & Sustain.' Kayla shares her experience and practical tips on how to engage teams, overcome obstacles, and foster a culture that not only embraces but thrives on innovative technology.  

Featuring: Kayla Thorpe, Senior Manager for Workplace AI Consulting 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 miniseries hosted by Softchoice's Brayden 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. On today's episode, we ask how do you drive and sustain co pilot adoption?

Braeden:

If you build it, they will come. It's a great way to look at building a baseball diamond for ghosts. It's not so great for leaders on the path to co pilot adoption. The important question here isn't just whether they'll come, but whether they'll stay. In our journey together, we've navigated the planning and building stages of a co pilot program. And now we're touching down in the crucial adoption. So what does it take to get people to use this? How do you handle setbacks and how do you set yourself up for steady, sustainable, and successful adoption? To unlock the answers to these questions, we're speaking to Kayla Thorpe, senior manager for workplace AI consulting at Softchoice. Okayla leads initiatives focused on integrating artificial intelligence into workplace environments and not only will she share some best practices, she'll also walk us through our own experience adopting Copilot and SoftChoice as part of Microsoft's Early Access program. Okayla, thank you for joining us. Given our recent experience, what makes Copilot different from any other technology adoption like say, uh, Teams replacing Skype for Business?

Kayla:

Yeah, well, first and foremost, Copilot for Microsoft 365 isn't just another tool that we can use for, like, a specific function. It's really like having an AI assistant. So, I like to use the analogy of, imagine if you were actually hiring a new assistant to come alongside you in your actual role, and you are hiring an assistant to take over some of these daily tasks. You'd first have to teach that assistant how you work. You'd need to teach the assistant what things you do on a day to day basis, what you need support with. And then you have to teach that assistant how you like to have things done. And Copilot is designed to learn from your preferences, from your feedback, from your behaviors, and kind of adapt to your needs. So, Because of all of that, we're finding and we know that Copilot requires quite a bit more personalization and also a more proactive approach to how we're learning and using it in our organization. So we're finding that a unique approach to user adoption and user enablement is is really important. We're having the most success with.

Braeden:

That makes sense. Kind of teased up the next question I was like, why can't people just learn how to use Copilot say on YouTube or ask Copilot itself?

Kayla:

Great question and there are a ton of great videos online YouTube and otherwise about Copilot There's a lot of micro learning or short learning opportunities out there But again, they aren't tailored to your specific needs or preferences And they're not tailored to a specific user persona. So they're kind of generalized. You can sure go learn how to use Copilot and Outlook, for example, with email drafting and things like that. But most of the content you're going to find online are those general tips that a lot of people are getting benefit from, and they're not tailored to your specific needs or your specific persona. And using Copilot is an ideal because. Copilot isn't designed to teach you how to do something. If we use coding, for example, Copilot isn't there to teach you how to code, but rather to assist you with coding tasks or generate some code for you based on the criteria you sent. So it's not a great tool to use itself if you really want to learn and get really great with using Copilot. And what we found both in our own internal user study and with, with a lot of our early customers is. That in order to truly adopt Copilot as a user or within our organization, we want to drive people to this Copilot first mentality, and that really comes when you have learning opportunities that are really tailored to your specific use cases. I think we're also finding that really great learning for Copilot, great enablement, really takes into account a specific user's individual needs, but also their level of expertise, how they work day to day. Do they have previous experience with maybe GPT tools out there? So finding out kind of where a user is. today and making sure that the learning opportunities are tailored to those users needs are one of the more effective ways to get some of that learning to happen.

Braeden:

Right. And as that learning is taking place, what are the biggest obstacles we've seen to co pilot adoption from that people standpoint?

Kayla:

Another great question. So when we think about obstacles to any change initiative and Copilot for M365 is no exception, there's always some resistance to change that we need to take into account. And we need to consider with any change initiative, no matter how positive we see this, if we're rolling something out to the whole organization, no matter how positive I personally think it is, or how positive the change is. Like any new piece of technology, some people are going to be reluctant to that. You know, humans are humans. We crave and often thrive in routine. And any change can be a disruption to that. Some people might even see Copilot as a threat to their autonomy or the way that they're currently working today. So we always want to take that resistance into account. There's also, and it's kind of a human tendency, that there can be this lack of trust that can creep up with any new change, especially technology changes. And Copilot's no exception to that either. So we've got some kind of trust concerns or is what we're doing accurate? Is it reliable? Can I rely on the outputs as Copilot is generating things for me? Can I rely on that? Generative AI responses. And then we do see some doubts around security and privacy. And the third thing I'll say here is there's often a skill gap with a lot of folks, and this is with any technology change. Um, I read an article not too long ago about. A theory that the people who are going to be most successful in using things like Copilot for M365 are writers or journalists or other people in that industry because they already understand the power of language and they understand what language can do and kind of language models. And I don't know that we have any data to support that, but you think Copilot is a new skill that requires some writing skills to really get. Good at and work with Co Pilot alongside you day in and day out. And so a lot of people might have gaps in those areas. And so some of the things we're doing is teaching people how to prompt and how to write great sentences so that they're getting the best output back from Co Pilot.

Braeden:

It reminds me of our colleague, Angela Cope from the Demand Generation team kind of put it like, yeah, it's almost like a new skill in terms of, it's not quite coding, but it's kind of like blending writing with code. It's brand new to about everybody. And it kind of tees up the next question I had here, which was when Organizations are running up against fears or doubts about things like job displacement, irrelevance, or disruption in an AI assisted workplace. How do we recommend approaching helping those people over the obstacles there?

Kayla:

Yeah, great question. And this is one that we hear and see a lot about in news and social media and all of those places right now, too. And it's a question that I get on a regular basis, and I think for any organization, large or small, who's rolling out Copilot to their users, I think the most important thing that we can always do is communicate clearly, communicate often, and communicate honestly about what they're doing. The purpose and the intent of why we're implementing Copilot and what we hope to achieve with that implementation, but also the benefits and to remind people that Copilot is a phenomenal tool. Here's what we hope to achieve out of it. But also it's not a replacement for things like creativity and human intellect. It certainly isn't going to replace our empathetic approach to certain things. So it's not a replacement for those things. very human capabilities of being creative and innovative, but it's really rather a tool that can help augment their capabilities or augment some of the work that they're already doing. So communicate often, communicate honestly, and communicate clearly to all of the users at any level in the organization.

Braeden:

So you alluded to this a little bit before, but we were at Softchoice, one of the first companies in the world to So we're going to talk about how to apply Copilot in an actual real working environment, and you had a lot to do with that as part of Microsoft's early access program. Can you tell us a little bit about how that went and anything surprising that came out of it, or that we've learned that listeners can apply to their own Copilot adoption?

Kayla:

Yeah, we learned a lot. Oh my gosh, we learned so much. So a couple of different big areas here, but first understanding our own user experience and how our own internal Softchoice users were interacting with Copilot, what they were finding and learning has really shaped Our recommendations on how we're enabling our customers, users with Copilot. So we've been able to take all of our own learnings, all of our own findings and very quickly apply them to our approach with our customers. And again, that kind of lends itself to some of that innovation and change and how we're delivering change management projects to our customers. So it's actually really revolutionized our overall approach to change management. And so we ourselves have innovated and evolved as a result of our early access program. One huge takeaway that I can't say that I was surprised by, but one huge takeaway that we learned that we've been able to take forward with our customers is that viral adoption happens so rapidly with Copilot for Microsoft 365 because of the user collaboration. So we found a lot of success. in getting other users to adopt Copilot and really develop that Copilot first mentality because of user collaboration and peer to peer learning. So one person in our Center of Excellence sharing a, look what I did with Copilot, is really encouraging other people to go out and try the same thing. So there's lots of really creative ideas coming out. And I can even share personally that I feel a little bit of, I'll call it exciting peer pressure because when I see somebody, another internal person posting a look what I did with co pilot in our center of excellence and our success stories, I immediately think, Oh my gosh, I should be doing that too. Or it's a little reminder of, Hey, I still have co pilot. I should be using that more in my day to day. So that was one huge takeaway. We also learned a lot about how important it is to leverage our existing collaboration tools to foster learning and user enablement for Copilot. So what I mean, there is we at Softchoice are using Microsoft Teams. For our center of excellence, and that has been wildly helpful. It's one central place. We don't have to use an intranet or build out creative SharePoint sites. You sure can, but we certainly don't have to. And so we're really leveraging our existing collaboration tools of teams and our intranet and things like that to get messaging out there and to foster a really great culture of learning. And we're advising many of our customers and other organizations to do the same thing. We're seeing a lot of that adoption just happening faster and more easier because of the excitement, but also because of just user to user interaction and sharing with each other of, Something cool that, that I discovered or something cool you discovered any of that stuff. Yeah.

Braeden:

Yeah. So, I mean, my next question here, how do you know your adoption plan is working? And it sounds like that's, that's almost it, right? It's like you see the evidence of that viral adoption happening live in your, your office hours or as people are using the tool and sharing what they've learned. Right. Um, are there any other signs?

Kayla:

Yeah, absolutely. So we can certainly see that Copilot is being adopted at Softchoice, for example, because people are talking about it and they're energized and it's all over our intranet and we're talking about all of our great customer successes with Copilot. But there are a couple of key ways in adoption and change management that we always want to try to determine whether or not our adoption efforts are working. And first and foremost, if we can get data, we'd love the data. If we have access to data, I want to use it. I want to take a peek at it and analyze it and see what's actually happening. So tracking adoption metrics for Copilot utilization is one key thing that we absolutely want to do. We're advising all of our customers to do the same. That will tell us about our active users. Now, If we have 100 percent utilization in the co pilot adoption metrics or utilization metrics, we can probably assume our adoption is going well and we've been effective, but it's pretty unlikely that we actually achieve 100 percent adoption rates. And so then what I love to do is take a look at the data and identify if there are. user groups or specific users who do have lower utilization. And then let's go talk to those users and find out why, find out why maybe Copilot isn't something they're using day in and day out. If they're having issues, it might even be a technical issue that they're having that we want to try to address. And then we also know with user adoption trends typically in the past that we might see, let's say 60 percent adoption monthly, One month, two, we jump up to 80 percent adoption rate, and then over time, we can expect that adoption rate to taper off. Maybe there's a lot of excitement right now, but three to six months from now, we see that our utilization of Copilot licenses has declined down to maybe the 40 or 50 percent range. I want to go find out why, and one of the best ways to do that is to talk to our users. So we're going to look at the data, but then we need to dig a little bit deeper and see if we can determine why a particular adoption effort might not be as effective as another effort. Was that group of people properly communicated to? Did they, did they even know that they got co pilot license? Did they get access to learning opportunities? Did they attend self led learning opportunities? Or were they able to attend something like Office Hours or Champions? And if they only got one approach to learning, let's try the other approach with them. Let's also go capture some of their feedback and find out maybe why Copilot isn't something they're using every day. I'm not sure if I mentioned this earlier, but adoption with Copilot feels a lot more agile than our traditional approach to adoption and change management methodologies in the past that I do feel like we're being more agile with our adoption approach and maybe pivoting when certain things aren't working for one group or another. We may need to tailor it to a specific group of users and then throughout the project, but especially in the early stages, we really need to rely on user feedback. So we need to set up mechanisms to capture the feedback. We need to analyze that feedback and then define if there are gaps or remediation. So surveys. focus groups, feedback out of champion sessions. If there is even something like a sentiment analysis during a training or during a facilitated learning session that will help us understand if our adoption plan is working and we can take all of that feedback. Determine where we maybe need to put in some new effort or revisit some efforts we've done before to remediate some of that.

Braeden:

Yeah, no, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. You've covered quite a bit of this, I think already, but as we know, you know, our sort of recommended flight path for co pilot, the final step we call sustain. And it's all about how do you build and keep that momentum going after six months, after 12 months and so on, because co pilot is. Nobody has really had that full experience. So we're kind of learning as we go. Right. In your experience so far, is there a secret sauce? Is there some tips or tricks keeping up with the feedback and revisiting those users who don't necessarily show the adoption you're looking for?

Kayla:

Absolutely. And the question here is how do we maintain the momentum? So if we've had a successful pilot or we've had a successful wave one rollout of maybe a hundred licenses, How do we keep that momentum going and make sure that we're realizing the full benefit of our co pilot implementation. And one key way that I think we, we all, and I I'd recommend this to all of our customers as well, is to make sure that we continue. With user feedback and success stories. So at Softchoice, we have a channel in our center of excellence called success stories, and I actually heard an idea from someone else for a prompt fail channel, which sounds really fun as well, but our channel of success stories does really keep people engaged having those ongoing office hours sessions where you're rotating in new champions as you continue to roll out waves of licenses. Maybe we have 20 champions. on board. They're doing great. They're leading champions sessions. They're leading facilitated learning sessions. They're getting feedback. They're helping people when they can. And then as we roll out the next wave, we want to sort of filter in some of those new people because it's sort of that networking map of, you know, Braden, you and I might know each other, but if you happen to deliver a facilitated learning session as a champion down the road, you're reaching a bunch of people that I would maybe never even have contact with in my day So Rotating in new folks into our champions initiatives. continuing to monitor and get that user feedback. We can't just ask for feedback at the beginning and never again down the road. We want to check in 12 months. And of course, if we're rolling out more waves of licenses, we want to always continue with ongoing training or learning opportunities. Doing a big splash of learning engagement in the beginning of a project or change initiative is always great. But what we have a tendency to do is three, six, nine, 12 months from now, the training is no longer a hot topic. We're not talking about it in our team meetings, and maybe we're not even posting updated or relevant content. So we can't let that learning opportunities slide. We want to maintain those. I also think that we can relaunch our champions for second or third or fourth wave rollouts. And again, I think that's been wildly successful because we're reinforcing learning then with all of those folks over and over and over again. Even if you're a power user, you've signed up to be a champion every time you attend an office hour or you attend a facilitated learning session. You're also relearning, getting ideas from other folks, and it reinforces or just reinvigorates your excitement and your general kind of engagement with Copilot. Continuing some of the momentum that we've already started with great user feedback, great success stories, keep the learning opportunities going, rotate in champions, make stakeholder sponsor engagement and executive engagement and buy in and all of that. But we can also keep it really simple. And that is just to keep talking about co pilot, keep the opportunities going, bring it up in leadership calls, maybe do some later stage communication, trickle down messaging, just keep the engagement going and make sure that we continue with that peer to peer or viral adoption opportunity.

Braeden:

Excellent. Just want to, uh, you know, thank you for this great conversation. We hope to have another conversation again soon.

Kayla:

Yeah, thanks for having me. It's a lot of fun. I will happily talk about Copilot for M365 any day, but I'll also talk about adoption and change management anytime. So happy to be here and thanks for having me.

Braeden:

Thank you so much. Kayla reminds us that adopting Copilot is not a one off event, but an ongoing journey of discovery and improvement. It requires a clear vision, decisive leadership, and most crucially, the collective effort of everyone in the organization. From the champions and super users to executive leaders, this is a team sport where every player's input and active participation drive the organization toward achieving its goals. This collaborative approach ensures that Copilot doesn't just fit seamlessly into your daily workflows but also grows and adapts in tandem with your evolving business needs and challenges. Thank you for listening to The Catalyst Gets Clear on Copilot Adoption, a mini series brought to you by Softchoice. If you're wondering where to start with Copilot for Microsoft 365, don't hesitate to reach out for guidance on planning your own flight path. Until we meet again, I'm Braden Banks, wishing you all the best on your journey to generative AI in the workplace.

Aaron:

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.