AI for Business with BCN

How's BCN's Copilot Pilot Going?

• BCN

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 20:50

In this conversation, the BCN team discusses their experience with Microsoft 365 Copilot and its impact on their day-to-day work.  They dig deeper into it's benefits, such as improved productivity, increased focus during meetings and time savings especially when used in conjunction with Microsoft Teams.

The team emphasises the importance of training  to ensure success with Copilot and its regular new features, while providing advice for businesses embarking on the Copilot journey. Advice which includes starting with a pilot group and leveraging prompt engineering techniques. 

Takeaways

  • Microsoft 365 Copilot offers numerous benefits, including improved productivity, streamlined communication, and time savings.
  • Use cases for Copilot include transcribing meeting notes, generating follow-up emails, and analysing customer feedback.
  • Training and adoption management are crucial for successful implementation of Copilot.
  • Continuous improvement and new features are regularly introduced to enhance the capabilities of Copilot.
  • Businesses should start with a pilot group and leverage prompt engineering techniques to maximise the value of Copilot.

Thanks for listening!

Connect with us on LinkedIn or visit our website.

Peter:

Hello and welcome to today's podcast. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Mark, Tom, and Harry, all from the BCN team, and we're going to be discussing how Copilot has been working for us as a business, how we're finding it, what the impact is to our day-to-day jobs and the benefits, and hopefully drive more awareness through our experience and giving you ideas and ways of how this new technology can further your business. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me today. I think let's start with introductions first. Mark, why don't you introduce yourself to our audience?

Mark Rotheram:

Yeah, thanks, Pete. Matt Rotherhood, Chief Technology Officer at BCM and the person responsible for the co-pilot pilot.

Peter:

Excellent. Thanks, Mark. Harry, why don't you go next?

SPEAKER_01:

Uh yep, Harry, um, head of automation and efficiency at BCM.

Peter:

Excellent. Thanks, Harry. And last but not least, Tom.

SPEAKER_03:

Hi, T. I'm Tom Ferber. I'm a senior product manager here at BCM, looking after our healthcare products.

Peter:

Excellent. Welcome, gentlemen. Thanks for joining us on today's conversation. So it's all about our experience in evaluating the new Microsoft 365 co-pilot that was launched earlier this year. Some exciting changes in the world as we know it. And we thought we'd share some of our experience with our clients and the wider audience that will hopefully give you some insight into how this technology can help benefit your business and improve the efficiencies on your day-to-day job. So, Mark, why don't you give us a quick overview in terms of how you've found it thus far?

Mark Rotheram:

Yeah, thanks, Peter. So we started the pilot, I think, the same day that Microsoft released the license with three of us getting the license and basically starting the ball rolling. Since then, what we've done across BCN is look for curious and hungry technologists within the company, which aren't that hard to find. So we've been looking for champions effectively across each team to get on the pilot and to basically figure out what's going to make it tick for each of their respective areas, with a goal of feeding back into a broader business case where we're going to effectively get the licenses that make the right difference to our business. So we're now up to about 28 people on the pilot, and uh it's going really well. We do have the benefit of analytics from the pilot that Microsoft gives us, and we can see that everybody is using the license now. And it is quite interesting to see that the vast majority of the usage is around the Teams application. It's quite interesting that that's the one that's got the center of mass, followed by Word and PowerPoint, and then finally Outlook. So we have got a bit of a broad brush approach covering marketing, sales, product, developers, consultants to try and get that kind of breadth across the pilot. But yeah, so far the feedback's been really good. I think one of the best nuggets of feedback I got was I'm willing to take a pay cut to keep my co-pilot's license. So, you know, it's definitely hit the right mark with some of our staff that are really seeing productivity gains and a release almost from too much work in some cases to being able to manage things better. So um generally really good. And yeah, it's moving in the right direction.

Peter:

Excellent. Yeah, I mean, just talking from a sales perspective, I know I've been the guinea pig, the fortunate guinea pig in the sales team, so to speak, to get my hands on it. And it it has certainly been a real game changer for me. You touched on the team's integration, and the highlight for me on that is that I can be more present, so to speak, in calls. I'm not focused on taking notes. I can actually sit back and really engage with the people I'm talking to to get a deeper understanding around what they are actually talking about and have co-pilot articulate and take those notes for me, which is great as a referencing point post the meeting. And obviously, with the integration with the rest of the Microsoft products, it's a fantastic streamlined approach for generating a follow-up email off the back of that meeting, you know, summarizing the action points, then progressing it to a formal proposal, which I used quite recently for an RFP that we were invited to. You know, it was off the back of a meeting. I needed to generate a proposal articulating our approach, the service offering, how we were going to essentially deliver on the client's needs, which co-pilot really helped me with. I think it's important to say that obviously I didn't get co-pilot to write it uh verbatim and just sent it off to the client. It didn't need a bit of polishing and obviously tweaking and changing, but it gave me a great starting point and reference point, which I know saved me days throughout the process. And um I've actually got a presentation for that proposal coming up next week, and I've been able to convert that into a fantastic PowerPoint presentation, which, you know, again, with my limited expertise on some of these products, has really saved me a wealth of time. So I'm enthused, and I I gather from the rest of the people we're speaking to, they're enthused. You know, I think we're really only scratching the surface in terms of what this can do, but it definitely is a massive time save, and I can see why some people might be willing to sacrifice their salary for this because it certainly allows you to do more with less. It'll be interesting, obviously, to talk more about how you guys are finding it in each of your roles. Harry, why don't you tell us a little more how you and and your team are finding it? What has been the benefit so far?

SPEAKER_01:

I think we've we've mentioned it. I think the Teams Meeting one is absolutely a huge one. We have quite a lot of calls at BCN, you know, internal and also with customers. And I mean, I had three days off Thursday, Friday last week, Monday this week, and I came back in. Every single call that I'd been invited to that I could have joined wasn't there, obviously, but I've got summaries, I've got meeting notes, I've got everything that you would kind of already have taken if you're in that call. So great for that kind of thing, great for uh catching up in those areas. Meeting notes in general. You've mentioned customer calls. If you're set on a customer call and you need to follow up and you need to refer back to something, we've actually started using loop as well to keep track of those, which also links into tasks and planner and things in the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem. So it all comes together very nicely and it's really quite easy to do to track you know everyday workload, but also what you've done to reference back to it. There are a couple of other bits that I've kind of used generated and copilot in terms of the power platform as well. So we've been doing some internal power automate development and using copilot to effectively give you a nice summary of what's inside a flow. Documentation is not always great on some of those things because they almost document themselves when you look at them. But you know, getting summaries and getting an idea of what's happening within that flow from the Power Automate Copilot is has been really useful as well. And it really kind of gives an insight into what's happening. Um, and for somebody else who's not actually done the development on that, that's a really powerful tool. So I think there's a number of areas where it is really good. You mentioned customer proposals as well, being able to refer back to notes and previous proposals for similar things, really useful pieces. You know, I only really contribute to these things, but it it's very much being able to put things in the right format, the right headings, refer back to it from a previous one that you've already curated, it's it's ideal. It's really kind of automated the way that we do a lot of things. So absolutely love it.

Peter:

Yeah, no, game change on that front. And uh, as you say, I think being able to surface data quickly uh and efficiently has been a key feature for me because that is one of the biggest struggles I I find is finding the information that I actually want and when, and having co-pilot to ask that question to go and find me that without me actually having to go and rummage through multiple locations, definitely is a game changer. And as you say, responding to emails as well, being able to say to co-pilot, you know, are there any emails that I still need to respond to today? Because we still live in a world where email is still, it would seem, the number one way of communicating. That's great. Thanks for sharing your insight there, Harry. That's super useful. I think Tom, why don't you share your thoughts with us? How have you found it? Thanks.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, echo a couple of the points yourself and Harry have have said there, really. I mean, in terms of my role, it's all about understanding customer pain points, right, and translating those pains into opportunities where we can use our tech to help customers with their day-to-day tasks. So the main way I've been using uh copilot so far has been, just as you have said, it's it's transcribing and summarizing those notes from those customer discovery calls that we're having on a regular basis to really understand their role, the pains they've got, how they're currently using our product, but also to get feedback on the new features, ideas, and prototypes that we've got in the pipeline to make sure this is something that they're going to use and it's going to provide value to our customers. So, yeah, the biggest, biggest benefit for me in terms of having Copilot take care of those meeting notes, it's really enabled me to properly listen in during those customer calls. So, you know, before copilot, you know, I think to ask questions at the same time trying to listen to what the customer was saying, trying to take notes of the key points, all the while thinking about the next good question to ask. Doing all that simultaneously is quite a challenge. So the risks I was finding, you know, I'd miss a piece of crucial information the customer was telling me, or after the call, I'd quite often realize I'd not ask something, not having to worry about taking notes, it's enabled me to be really present in the calls, ask better questions, and yeah, really make the most of each customer interaction, which is hugely powerful for what I'm working on. So yeah, great experience so far. The next logical step for me is how can we use it to actually analyze all that feedback we're getting to help define and prioritize things for the product roadmap. So I've already talked about all the customer notes we've got in terms of discovery calls, and we get a bunch of support there's TK, it's feature requests that come in via the sales team as well as market insight in terms of what our competitors are doing. So yeah, one area I'm really interested in putting it through its paces is can it help do that sort of analytical heavy lifting across multiple different disparate data sources, particularly on that quantitative side, if if you can do that, and that's gonna save me hours and hours.

Peter:

I think we can all agree definitely gonna bring about some positive change in all of our working lives because ultimately what we need more of is time and and having this tool to work more efficiently and get what we need to get done quicker gives us back that time, which is great. So Mark, obviously you touched on, you know, you've sort of been the the spearhead of this trial and and overseeing it. You've obviously also had some first hand experience in in working on it. What's your thoughts on it thus far?

Mark Rotheram:

Yeah, it's really interesting being at the front of this because we're getting to witness quite a lot of Microsoft change through this kind of process. There's a lot of new features dropping from Copilot weekly that we're getting visibility of, and being able to pull those through and use them and actually see the difference they're making. I think one great example is something we've we've all talked about, which is using copilot in customer calls. At the beginning of our pilot, when we wanted to use copilot, it was very evident we have to ask customer, say, look, we're going to record this, we're going to create a transcript. And it can be a bit intrusive. One of the things we found with recent updates is we can turn copilot on in a mode that retains no transcript or recording or anything after the call's ended, which helps break down some of the barriers that were potentially there with people being worried that this could be a recorded conversation. So seeing the rate of change and the new features come through and Microsoft listening to feature demand that it appears to other pilot groups as well is really interesting. A couple of other observations, you know, the power of co-pilot is quite vast. We've spent a lot of time here looking at what it does in Teams. And I know Peter you've gone from Teams to Word to PowerPoint, but there's a real art, and this is one of the things that the pilot group are starting to get their head around. There's an art in prompt engineering and the ability to say, actually, I'm going to try something that I probably have never tried before. And things like I want to summarize information from two files and create a new point of view on that file. You know, you would never really have thought about doing that before. So a lot of what we've seen in the pilots up to now is what you've done previously better. And what we're now starting to get into is all right, what's the art of the possible of what I can do now I've got this super powerful large language co-pilot brain sat in the middle of my Office 365 ecosystem? I'm quite excited about the use cases that appear out of that kind of enablement of new capabilities that we're not really tapped into yet. A lot of the people we put on the pilot use the out-of-the-box prompts, which are brilliant. But the value is really in the next layer down on understanding, right, how do I really craft a prompt that gives us a good output? And if you imagine a good set of requirements ends up in a good project, a good set of prompting requirements ends up in a good output as well. So there's definitely some really interesting things that we're learning as we go through this pilot phase. One of the things we have learned is that if you don't do a little bit of training and adoption management, people won't use it. You know, we had an example where we gave a co-pilot license out to someone and didn't tell them just to see what would happen. And nothing happened. They didn't realise it was there. It just sat in the background and did nothing. As soon as we explained, click that button, you know, a couple of days later, and this is what it can do, away they go. So, you know, you can't just turn this thing on and hope for the best. There's got to be a bit of communication strategy onboarding, management of change strategy to make this thing tick.

Peter:

Absolutely. I saw that for myself. Truth be told, you know, yes, there are a few simple out-of-the-box features, which I guess one would say makes logic sense to use it in that way, but I very quickly came to realize that in order to get the full use of it, I needed some guidance and pointing in the right direction. And I guess that's really where BCN can add value and help businesses on this journey, right? And I know we've talked about the co-pilot readiness assessment that we've sort of formulated to help businesses on that. But I think it's really, really important that if you want to leverage this technology and the service to its full potential and really get a return on your investment, because these licenses aren't cheap. You need to get someone in to come and help you, whether it be BCN or another partner, but you definitely need uh a Microsoft partner to help you on that journey and get you started. Um I know we're working on a few training programs as well to help staff and clients with further adoption. Can you share a little more around that, Mark? I know you've been involved with Johan and the team.

Mark Rotheram:

Yeah, so we we're looking at different avenues for our internal pilot to become more successful. We've done simple things that you'd expect. You know, we've got a team site, FAQ, collaborative area for everyone on the pilots who can ask questions, and as new features drop, we're doing something very similar to what our productivity accelerator service does, which is educating. You know, it's the here are new features. By the way, did you know that you can now do a co-pilot meeting without recording it? Here's how to do it. Did you know what co-pilot chat is and how to prompt against different things? Ask what your boss has asked you to do in last week, all those kind of great things. So we're looking at the kind of how do you get a pilot group working? Then how do you get adoption continuously rolling through a company over time and keeping on top of the changes with our productivity accelerator approach? But then we are looking at dedicated, you know, almost classroom style training where we'll get everybody on the pilot around the table with somebody that knows their end-to-end capability of the co-pilot ecosystem and walk through it all, you know, and make sure that we're not missing anything. Everyone gets a really solid baseline of understanding and some practical use of it as well. So we're kind of taking a very soft approach from one perspective, and our teams kind of having that kind of group together, a bit of a proactive approach in what's new, did you know this is something that we found really useful? And then looking at a more structured approach as we expand it out the pilot into more teams.

Peter:

Great. And I guess some advice or part on words for the audience, if if we've got businesses out there that are looking to embark on this journey, maybe Harry, one for you. What should the businesses consider before embarking on this journey to ensure they get the most out of any sort of co-pilot pilot, so to speak?

SPEAKER_01:

So I think I think Mark's hit the nail on the head in terms of the things we're doing, in terms of you set a pilot group, keep small, make sure that you've you're coordinating that with your users to start with, and roll these things out as you know you become comfortable with them as a business. You've got to take the adoption curve and you've got to go with that because, like you've said, they're not cheap licenses, but they are extremely useful if put into the right forums, into the right people. Another thing I would recommend just looking at what's out there on the internet as well in terms of prompt engineering. There's a lot out there that will help people kind of guide based on experiences that other people have had. One that I think me and Mark spoke about in the last couple of weeks was explain it to me like I'm five years old. So it doesn't matter what it is, something extremely technical, something that you might not have come across before, or it's you know, it's a document that you're not aware of. Ask it for a summary and then ask it to explain like you're five years old. And you will get a very nice layman's terms explanation of what's in that document. Just little things like that that you'll use over and over again. Have that as part of a forum, a centralized hub feedback for everybody to kind of share ideas and move things that way because you know it's ever expanding, things are always being added, and the earlier you get on that adoption curve, the more you're gonna see the value grow. So as Microsoft are releasing things, they are all becoming available, and obviously, we're all looking forward to some of the future aspects we're gonna come out of this because we've seen the way Chat GPT is going, it's all coming into the enterprise, it's the same thing.

Peter:

So thanks, Harry. Tom, some parting thoughts based on your experience and what you've seen uh so far.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, I mean, I think as I mentioned, I feel like I'm just scratching the surface, and I think one of the key bits for me is really understanding the out of the possible. So I think that's where the knowledge uh comes in. Perfect example. The thing Harry mentioned there about prompting it with tell me in the language that a five-year-old could understand. I'd never thought of that, but that's a great tip that I'll I'll make a note of and I'll be sure to use. So yeah, I think it's it's just understanding how other people are using it, where the happy success is, and then that'll hopefully inspire me to understand how I can get more value out of it in my day to day work.

Peter:

Excellent. Yeah, so true. I think it's so important as businesses. We definitely need to work together, closer together, communicate and share thoughts and ideas because that's definitely how one can. Best leverage the functionality of these tools. Excellent. Well, gentlemen, I thank you so much for your time. It was obviously a super useful and a pleasure having you here today again. Word for the audience: obviously, we've been talking a lot about Copilot over the past few weeks. If you don't know already, there's a wealth of information on our website. If you want to know more around the products and services that we provide and how we can help you on this exciting journey on adopting AI and automation services into your business, don't hesitate to get in touch with us. We look forward to seeing you next time on our podcast series. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Thanks again. Cheers. Thanks, Pete.

SPEAKER_03:

Cheers, Pete.

Peter:

Cheers.