Unlocking AI value with Microsoft Copilot | Future Ready with Bechtle

Unlocking AI value with Microsoft Copilot  | Future Ready with Bechtle

Artificial intelligence is evolving faster than most organisations can keep up with. But while many businesses are experimenting with AI tools, far fewer are successfully turning that experimentation into meaningful business value.

In this episode of Future Ready with Bechtle, host Stephen Harley is joined by Nico Charritton, Director of AI Business Solutions for UK & Ireland SMB at Microsoft, to explore how organisations can move from AI curiosity to real operational transformation.

In this episode, we cover:
The evolution of generative AI from experimentation into business automation
The key differences between Copilot Chat and Microsoft 365 Copilot
The growing challenge of “shadow AI” inside organisations
Balancing AI innovation with governance, security and compliance
The importance of data readiness before scaling AI initiatives
Leadership, culture and change management during AI transformation
The rise of AI agents and workflow automation across organisations
Microsoft’s vision of the “Frontier Firm” and digital colleagues
Using AI to unlock growth, creativity and innovation across teams
Identifying practical AI use cases that deliver measurable business value

👉 Watch the full episode to explore how organisations can successfully adopt AI and unlock long-term business value:
https://youtu.be/Lj1j4f1mUnY

👉 Learn more about Microsoft AI and Copilot solutions with Bechtle UK:
https://www.bechtle.com/gb/bechtle-library/bechtle-pillars/services

👉 Interested in speaking with Bechtle UK about AI adoption, governance or Microsoft Copilot?
https://www.bechtle.com/de-en/help-centre

#FutureReady #BechtleUK #ArtificialIntelligence #MicrosoftCopilot #AITransformation #GenerativeAI #DigitalTransformation #CIO #ITLeadership #FutureOfWork

The Bechtle Future Ready Podcast explores how technology is transforming the way we work. Hosted by Bechtle UK, each episode features thought leaders and innovators discussing digital transformation, cybersecurity, sustainability, and the modern workplace.

Discover insights and strategies to help your business stay agile, connected, and ready for what’s next.

🎧 Subscribe now and get future ready with Bechtle UK.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm Steve Harley, and today on Future Ready with Beckla, I'll be sitting down with Nico Charitan, Microsoft's Director of AI and Business Solutions for UK and I. We're going to be speaking about the challenges that businesses face in adopting generative AI technologies. We're going to be discussing the differences between Microsoft's co-pilot chat and co-pilot for Microsoft 365. We're also going to be discussing the mindset shifts that business leaders need to make in order to capture the value and promise of AI in their organisations. I found it a really fascinating discussion. I'm sure that you will too. Welcome to Future Ready with Beckler. I'm Steve Harley, and I'm joined today by Nico Charitan, Microsoft's Director of AI Business Solutions for UK and Ireland. Welcome, Nico. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Thank you for having me. Very well.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Brilliant. Well, we're here to talk today about AI and Microsoft's Copilot, which we're moving into wave free now. The momentum's been unreal. What's that been like? Incredible.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

Yeah, definitely. This technology since Generative AI showed up with Chat GPT. We've seen an amazing adoption of this technology and the fastest technology adoption in history, which is incredible. And I feel like we went from that moment where it was a bit of a novelty when people started to think, oh, this is amazing. I can get all these answers, but still hallucinated. So it was more of a gimmicky thing. We went through a phase of habit building because the models evolved, the quality of the output improved, and people started to embrace it in everyday life. And now we are getting into a phase where it's becoming agentic. So it's taking action and gets things done. That is super exciting because actual promise of AI is coming to fruition.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

I definitely, you know, if you look at the tools that have, you know, Microsoft have brought to market and others, but but the power of them is just unreal. What's that been like trying to kind of map out and navigate that go-to-market journey? What does the portfolio look like today for Microsoft?

SPEAKER_01 2:11

Yeah, it's uh it's it's been a journey. It's been a journey. We've been through a lot of change, but I feel like we have now a really good solid portfolio with mainly two offerings that are very clear. The first one is Copilot Chat. That is the one that is embedded into Microsoft 365 solutions today. So if you have one, you get these at no additional cost. This is more of a conversational AI. You can ask questions, browse the internet, gives you answers, but it's with that enterprise grade security, and it gets to interact with the documents that you're working on, which is fantastic. Now that's the entry point, I would say. And it's a great tool for learning, uh learning how to prompt and how to interact with AI. But then the real powerhouse is Microsoft 365 Copilot, where you get the full power of a tool that really gets to know you, understands your context, your data, everything that you have access to, and the way you do things to really take action on your behalf and give you something very polished. And that is that is the one that has uh additional licensing, but uh is the one that unlocks the full power of AI.

SPEAKER_00 3:15

It's really uh it's a really powerful tool, uh co-pilot with Microsoft 365. That that uh ability to be able to interact with your own data and ask it questions and it understands your context really does you know change the way that you utilize it. Um where do you see um organizations, um particularly SMEs and then the mid-market, in terms of uh adoption on that journey? Because you've got chat that's delivering out that AI literacy piece, but but but what's that uptake been like for uh for the the the full fat version, as it were?

SPEAKER_01 3:50

So, firstly, the adoption of AI is is kind of it's very interesting because a lot of businesses go through that intentionally, but a lot of AI adoption is happening unintentionally. And that shadow AI, it's a real thing. It's a real thing. When we look at Copilot, I kind of disclose numbers specifically, but the adoption of chat is really, really strong. Um, we see that our offering is AI for work, and this is a big differentiator, right? Um and and then we start to see those projects starting to come along with the paid version because very quickly you hit a wall once you get the habit built into working with this assistant that gives you a lot of information and gets things for you, you want to explore what's next. And and that is when you say, like, can can this tool actually do something extra for me? And that's when you get you you need more. And there are lots of differences between chat and pay that make it very rich and people seek.

SPEAKER_00 4:51

So, Nico, there's I think it's fair to say that there is uh a level of of confusion around you know the difference between copilot chat and copilot for Microsoft 365. What are the fundamental differences and and when do people choose one over the other?

SPEAKER_01 5:07

There are a few things that are that are different between the two. Firstly, is work IQ is a critical thing because we have in Microsoft 365 copilot a way to uh get compiler to know you, know your data, know your files, know the people you work with, know your context, the projects you're involved in, has access to your chats, your emails, and everything that you have within your business to make a lot more sense. So it is the context of the data and uh who you are, how you work, and the skills, access to skills and tools to get things done. Then you have the elements of the agents when copilot gets to take action on your behalf. So instead of just getting a summary of a document that you're reading, you get to actually ask copilot to produce a full analysis model for you in Excel, and you can give copilot the agency to go and start playing with that Excel file, creating the formulas, creating the pivot tables, creating the graphs and charts and different tasks and so on, give you whatever analysis insights has found. But at the end of that task, you have a full working document that you can use. It has it because it has the formulas, it has everything in it. And that's the same in PowerPoint, same in Words, same very powerful agency capabilities. You have out-of-the-box agents like researcher and analyst. They can take hours off your hands by going to the web and documents that you have within your business to pull together a lot of insights and packaging things up. And when you start to see these agentic capabilities in action, you start wondering how I can tap into these to automate automate a workflow. And and Copilot, the paid version of Copilot has that built-in agentic platform. So you can start building things with workflow or agent builder or app builder and copilot studio as well. So you can customize where these agents get information from, the type of responses they give, and you can start using it for answering HR questions or helping you with specific um process that you go through every week, etc. Um, and and finally the model choice. The fact that you have access to the latest technology from different AI labs to pick from, that's also something that users tend to love because you see these models taking advantage from each other.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

Yeah. So I mean, I I think the I suppose the the big thing that I'm I'm really interested in is how businesses are actually going to extract the value from it. Because you you speak a lot a bit about that that habit forming and that learning and that AI literacy, where we're talking about chat and understanding, you know, how do I prompt? How do I get a get a better result out? And then you've got that tool set we've co-pilot, Microsoft 365 co-pilot, um, where you've you you you you've kind of got to extract that value for the business. You know, how do we get that through to the bottom line? You know, that that feels like a challenge for businesses at the moment.

SPEAKER_01 8:09

Yeah, absolutely. And we see a lot of businesses, there are there are every business is different in the way they approach AI. Every project is different. It's very heterogeneous. But there are some patterns and we see where they become a blocker or a bottleneck, and it depends on where you are in the journey. The first VCs, those are in the early stages. They the business leaders understand that they need to do something with AI, they want to do something with AI, but they're overwhelmed with the information. They don't know where to start. So they're failing at that AI strategy, and that results in user-led BYO AI, shadow AI, and it's non-compliant, puts a lot of risk into businesses, and we get in the news all the time things that leak out unintendedly. The second pattern is where you have some people that jumped into the AI bandwagon, they started throwing uh projects at the tech, they love the tech, they got very passionate about it, and they hit a roadblock when they try to scale some of those experiments they've been working on because they quickly realize that their data is not in order, that the security is not what needs to be, the compliance is a big question mark. So they really quickly get to the point where, like, hey, we're not ready for it. And and they need to go back and that stalls the project. And then the third pattern that I see a lot is when those things have been done, maybe the business leaders have a strategy, they have been working on the compliance and security aspects of it. They didn't focus on the people, they didn't focus on the culture. And that is where the tools are there, they are very excited, but adoption is very low and it's not cutting through. And they start wondering what happened, and they underestimate that changed management in their people.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

That's really interesting. A lot of uh I've done some research in the background as part of some of my studies for my MBA course. And a lot of what I found when when you speak to to small businesses is that that that there is that loop, that there's that requirement for leadership to um make it make sense first so that people can understand what it is for, what's the purpose, why are we doing this, and how are we going to apply it so that they can kind of align what they do to generating that value. And then that's an interpretation piece then by by the organization, that's that cultural change. You know, what does it mean here? How do I utilize that? And then that kind of goes into that experimentation and that readiness and that development. And and what I've seen is that it that's that's a loop. And I think there's a there's a big uh there's a tendency to to look within the industry. We go, all right, well, we we do we have an AI strategy and then we we we fix governance and then we we'll do some training, and then everyone will adopt AI and we'll all get value. But that's not what's happening because this technology is changing so much. Are you seeing that as well?

SPEAKER_01 10:59

100% and I we're seeding waves. So this is why I usually recommend that they build a strategy that is firstly based on outcomes. What do you want to achieve? So, what do you want technology for, right? Do you want to reduce the backlog of uh service, customer service support tickets? Do you want to improve the accuracy of your forecasting? Do you want to uh speed up the delivery of those quotes to your customers on the projects that you are servicing? So all of those things need to be put at the top. It is a business strategy that uses AI to get there. That's the first thing. But at the same time, as you say, it's like a multifaceted approach to this strategy because you need to be thinking about that strategy top-down with vision, what do you want to achieve, leadership sponsorship. You have to have, you know, those measures of success. But at the same time, in parallel, you need to have that data and security, those projects that you've been postponing for years, that your IT leader were telling you, hey, we need to figure out this, and it was not a real problem. Now AI gives access to that information. You need to you need to bump those projects up and actually get them done. Yeah. And then you need to spackle all that, you know, culture piece. How do we get AI, entry-level AI, to the hands of our employees? Uh, this is where compiler chart comes in. You know, it's safe, secure, it doesn't tap into all this knowledge yet, but it helps them get that habit building, that prompt mastering, and all of that stuff. And then the experimentation that you talked about, once you have all of these things, or in parallel, I would say, start small. Understand what are the use cases by function, by role that you could tap into to realize value quickly. And this is where you you really see that people get excited because they identify the challenge, they fixed it or they solved it, they improved it with AI, and that triggers their imagination on oh my god, we can do all of this now, and that spreads out. So start small, try fast, and scale quickly.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

I mean, I recognize so much of what you say there, Nico. When you're when you're talking about the um the data and the the preparation for the technology, I mean, how many organizations took a Microsoft uh uh file server and dumped the data into SharePoint Online and didn't didn't know of the none of the compliance and none of the revisiting. We see that when we start to look at Copilot and all of a sudden, because it's powerful, because it can understand so much more and it's easier to surface something that's overshared, there's that compliance piece that people need to go through first. Yeah. And certainly we see that as a stage. But we also see people perhaps hesitant around which technology to adopt and when, um, particularly in a field that's moving so fast. And and we look at you know the the rise of Amthropic and and and and the announcement recently of Microsoft co-work. How's Microsoft approaching that? What's the message to people and leaders? You know, should they uh there's a temptation to weigh? Is that the right thing?

SPEAKER_01 14:06

Um, well, our strategy is very clear. We see in the market we have these AI labs that are leapfrogging each other with the latest innovations in their models, right? For us, the strategy is clear is multi-model is the way to go. We are a platform, and the way our engineering team has structured co-pilot is very smart because it operates independently of the model, which gives us the ability to switch models on the day. For example, the last model that OpenAI released to market, copilot embraced that model on the same day. And because of that, now we can also switch to different vendors. And now the multi-model strategy gives you choice. And this is one of the key differentiations of Microsoft 365, right? Um, copilot, the paid version of it. It gives you that model choice, but not only do you have the model choice because you know different different AI labs will have the advantage at a given time, we also can experiment with some extra features because we have multi-models. So we just launched um, for example, critique and counsel to two experiences within the researcher agents, where you get one of the models, OpenAI's model, running the research, and Claude from Anthropic challenging that research and trying to validate to make sure that it's sound. And the outputs based on on what you get are much better. I mean, are the best of their kind because there's different. Or you can trigger both models to give the research at the same time and compare side by side and and get, you know, what's the best of both and the human making a decision based on all the information available. And you don't need to be switching from one to the other. So that strategy of multimodal, that's where Microsoft goes. But at the same time, we have the element of we are a platform that you're using to run your business. So we are embedding all of this within the portfolio from Microsoft 365, the Office apps, you have Dynamics 365, Power Platform. It is embedded on everything that you already have natively, which gives you the ability to do things in the flow of work. You're not switching from one to the other, copy-pasting, downloading things. And that simplicity is going to become even more visible as you get the autonomy of those agents coming to life. And the third piece, and very important as well, is that enterprise creates security and governance and responsibility that you would expect from Microsoft, right? We are making sure that whatever copilot has access to is related to what the user has access to. So we have that uh level of permission and regularity. So you won't see the information you're not meant to see. Um, and also keeping the information of your business within the boundaries of your business. Very important, right? We see a lot of information leaking because employees are using consumer applications for getting work done. And that's something that with Microsoft 365 compiler and compiler chat, even you get that level of protection that your information is still within the boundaries of your tenant, your environment.

SPEAKER_00 17:11

That's really, really uh interesting there. You're talking about that change and that that that kind of sub agent, that multi-model approach. Um obviously the industry uh is awash with conversations about agentic AI and how that's going to change the structure of organizations. Um, I was really interested in uh the release of Agent 365 uh and the announcements there. Um how does Microsoft see that organization in the future? I think you call it the frontier firm.

SPEAKER_01 17:45

Yeah, so we see a lot of um this journey going into a place where the users that are spending a lot of time today doing things and tasks um on some of the artifacts like office documents and and the likes, they will become more strategic in the way they direct agents to get work done. So humans will be focusing on value tasks while agents will handle the process or the execution of some of those tasks, which is really interesting. Now, when we start looking at these, you have a lot of personalized agents created by the user or created uh out of the box for the user. And then you also have the process-oriented um agents that are coming into orchestrating multiple functions to get some output done on behalf of the company, not a user. All of those things will expand, right? We will be in a business that is full of digital colleagues or agents that are operating different tasks. And you'll have to govern that. As today, an IT organization is governing the people, and you have the identities for those people, the permissions for those people, what do they have access to, what do they know about the organization, what is the what is the tooling that they can use to execute different tasks? The same thing will happen with agents. And this is where Agent 365, soon to be released, comes to life, where you have a single pane of glass, a registry of all your agents, and you can govern them, you can monitor them, you can see the security aspects of it, and and gives you that confidence that things are not going out of control, and you have a single pane of glass for everything.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

I mean, that's that's a real shift that we're facing. Organizations being both um human and digital colleagues, as it were, and the management of those agents is is a is a huge change. Um, I think there's a there's a challenge that we I still don't think lots of businesses and organizations have have have got the handle of getting the most out of humans, let alone digital. So having tools like Agent 365 to be able to start that journey of understanding what their organization looks like and how they can manage it becomes really, really important. Uh if you were advising a CIO or a CEO today, what is the most important shift that people need to make uh in their mindset and their approach to make sure that they're going to you know realize the advantages of tools like Copilot and other AI technologies and drive value for their companies?

SPEAKER_01 20:23

I think specifically for adoption, firstly, you need to understand that you have a heterogeneous workforce. And there's research actually that talks about the different ways that different generations are using it. You have the boomers using it only if it is embedded within things that they trust. You have millennials being very pragmatic with it and expecting answers, so very much a you know finding information, retrieval. Um, you have millennials that are a lot more um used to planning things with agents, uh, but very task-oriented, and then you have generations uh after that, Gen Z and so on, that they are using as a life coach essentially. They do everything with AI first and different mentality. So understanding that you have to influence humans, that change management is critical. Right? So, how do you put in place a journey for them to understand the technology, to get used to um understanding what the technology can do for them, how to embrace it, what are the outputs that you're expecting? That vision we talked about before, super important because there is a real fear that AI will take my job instead of AI will remove the drudgery of my daily work so I can focus on value-added tasks. Like I see a lot of companies that started earlier in the journey trying to get the ROI by cutting costs and replacing humans. And arguably they're coming back into the oh, we failed because we should have thought about this differently. We should unlock growth, creativity, innovation with the use of AI to maintain our teams, but grow as a business exponentially. And this is where we see the benefit. But you need to have that vision, you need to have that clarity, and you need to bring people on a journey. Yeah. Change management is critical. How to use it, motivate them, show them, help them understand how to unpack use cases and what are the tools and empower people with the right tools. And that's another thing that is critical, right? Because you have the people at the top have a vision, but the people at the bottom are the ones that know what are the things that are time wasters where the bottlenecks are. So when you give them the tools with copilot or even low-code or no code, like copilot studio, that gives them the ability to create workload automation and and boost the productivity. And while in the end user productivity space, you might get a 10, 20% productivity gains, which is amazing. When you see the 10x return, it's when you automate a workflow and you redesign, you reshape that business process. You absolutely change the way you interact with your customers. You know, you you bend the curve at innovation and that's super rich.

SPEAKER_00 23:22

Yeah. When you change the business model. Absolutely. And that and that's the the the potential here, isn't it? Absolutely. But you've got to bring the people along along with you.

SPEAKER_01 23:29

100%. Because usually what you have is the automation of a workflow, it is um is going across people, right? I always think about that, the doorman replacement analogy, right? You you hire a consultant to tell you, hey, how can I cut costs? And in you're running a hotel, and they might say, you know what, fire the doorman and replace it for an automated door that opens. And suddenly you minimize the value of that human to opening a door. Well, that person is not just doing that, it's customer experience, is giving you status as a brand, is giving you security. There are so many other things that that person does by open but by opening the door. So it's a misconcept of how can I cut the full cost of this. So you need to be cautious with that. However, there are scenarios where it is very obvious, right? Support tickets or time spent on specific things, answering queries, very repetitive tasks. That's where a lot of businesses are starting, right? And and that that makes a lot of sense because there is a very clear cut.

SPEAKER_00 24:37

Fantastic. Um Nico, I could speak for another hour with you about AI adoption and the challenges that we see in the market. Um, but but sadly, we're gonna run out run out of time. Um, I just want to thank you very much for sharing your insights. It's been really, really good fun having you here. Um, and uh and I wish you all the best and uh and thank you for joining us here on uh Future Ready with Beckla. Thank you so much.