Ep 19 - Celebrating our birthday with Copilot Wave 2

It's our birthday today! We've managed to pull together some fantastic guests including Loryan Strant, Caroline Kallin and Tom Morgan to help us celebrate by sharing their thoughts on Copilot Wave 2 so hear what we thought and then a few interviews that we have been able to do.

Great summary post from Sara Fennah on all the useful links for Copilot Wave 2 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sarafennah_did-the-deluge-of-announcements-in-the-wave-activity-7241481645957029888-gyfa?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Transcript

[Kevin 00:19]  

Welcome to the Copilot connection.  

[Zoe 00:22]  

We're here to share with you all the news, insights and capabilities of the Microsoft Copilot ecosystem from across the entire Microsoft stack. I'm Zoe Wilson and I'm an executive at Avanade in our modern work business, an MVP for M365A Regional Director and the Viva Explorer.  

[Kevin 00:40]  

And I'm Kevin McDonnell, MVP, FIFA Explorer and Copilot Strategy and Modern Workplace AI Lead at Avanade. And we'll be releasing these episodes as podcasts and on YouTube with insights from experts from across the community, from Microsoft on all the different areas of Copilot, the impact they can make to you and your organization, what you need to do to prepare for them or start implementing them now, and even very pertinent today on how you can extend them.  

[Zoe 01:10]  

So this week we thought we'd talk about Wave 2 announcements. But before we get into that, it's actually quite a special day today, isn't it Kevin? Because we're actually celebrating one year since our very first Copilot Connection episode.  

[Kevin 01:25]  

Which is really quite scary. And I also feel a little bit like those people on TV that record a few days before Christmas. So they don't have to because it's not really today, but we are publishing it today. So we we have to kind of pretend and I'm hoping it's going to be sunnier on Monday than it is today. But yeah, it's it's strange thinking that this has been going for a year already and and that we've had copilot really there and and part of our lives for quite that long as well.  

[Zoe 01:53]  

Yeah. I mean, I was thinking the other day, I think it's about, I don't know, 15-16 months since I got my copilot license, which is just incredible. And when you think so initially when you think from a product perspective just how much the products has evolved so, so M365 Copilot specifically, but then when you look across that broader ecosystem.  

[Kevin 02:16]  

You say evolved. I mean, it's gone full circle when it comes to the name in that time, hasn't it? Which has been great.  

[Zoe 02:21]  

Yeah, I like that sneaking with two announcements in in early Yeah, there's so there's certainly been a lot of renaming fun over the last year. But when, when we think about why we started this podcast, really it was just because there was so much hype, so much momentum, so much confusion with people not understanding the, the different Co pilots and how they could be used and the value and, and all of those things. So we, I, I can't believe it's been a year since, since our first episode. I still feel like there's a really strong need to help cut through a lot of that hyper marketing confusion, especially when you think about all of the renames and and things like that. But I'm really excited as well to see.  

[Kevin 03:07]  

And and and the functional copilot. So I think helping people to understand what they really are and cutting through some of the marketing from that and, and really get the true value to people and what they they can bring and, and getting people to think ahead as well of what these things are, are becoming as well as what they are now I think has been really important in that year.  

[Zoe 03:28]  

Yeah. And, and I know you'll have heard me say this at work, Kevin, but one of the things that I feel is really important for everybody who works in this space is that we all need to get out of our bubble. So the the one of the things that the Co pilots are driving is this blurring of the lines between the different technology and solution areas. So for those people who predominantly work in the biz app space, they need to start understanding copilot as the experience layer, how this surfaces in things like teams, what that user experience is like, which maybe they've not had to think about in the same way before. Because people typically went to their products to, you know, to work inside dynamics and that kind of thing. For for those of us who come from a modern work background, equally, we need to, you know, we need to have a better understanding and appreciation of the systems that sit outside of of our M365 area and how, how copilot will interact with the data and bring the data back. And yeah, it's, that's like the biggest call to action I've been saying to people, you know, we, we need to, we need to get outside of our primary technology area and, and start to look across the entire stack.  

[Kevin 04:47]  

Yeah. And I think it's, it's also been a year of experimentation. It's, it's working out what works for different people. Not, not just what works, but to be able to get into those different stacks and say, yes, yes, this is something that's worthwhile or no, this is something that we need to invest differently to get the, the benefit from that across those different areas. Exactly as you're, you're kind of saying with those as well. And I think it's also been, it's been great to kind of connect as well as kind of horizontally between different groups going on there vertically as well. There's been more conversations around the value of different areas. It's, it's probably been the, the technology I've seen that's had most resonance with, with kind of more senior leadership. It feels, feels like the kind of thing talked about on the golf course. You know, we need this, we need to make this a value for us as well, which has helped helped bring in other conversations such as governance. Who would have thought that C-Suite would be?  

[Zoe 05:49]  

Yeah, information oversharing. Look at that golf course point. It's really funny actually, because I do think that's where a lot of the early copilot deals were made, to be honest. CEO's talking to each other on the golf course.  

[Kevin 06:00]  

I I was speaking to the CEO, he said he first heard about the golf course. I was like, Oh my gosh, I just run into a stereotype.  

[Zoe 06:06]  

Yeah. But yeah, it's it's a really good point. And you know, I've talked about technology as a business enabler for for years, but in in many organisations IT even recently has been seen just as a cost, a cost centre or an overhead rather than something that enables an organization to drive its business. And one of the biggest changes I've seen in the last year is that business leadership and business sponsorship of the Copilot project, because the value for this, it's not, it's not just an IT product that IT should be running and showing people how to use and make it available. It needs real business leadership to actually drive the behaviours and the changes that we need to see in organisations.  

[Kevin 06:53]  

Yeah. And and just in case those listening are in one of those areas where no, we are still seen as just IT, it is still going on. Sadly. It's chatting to people at Clavday's Bletchley Park who were exactly in that situation and kind of encouraging them to have this conversation about the Co pilots to to kind of build that up and see the business value and and and encouraging people to work out how they speak in different ways about it to get that enabled. Don't go in there talking about all the techie sides to it. Talk about the value it brings to people that will will help from there as well.  

[Zoe 07:29]  

Yeah, so, So what are you looking forward to?  

[Kevin 07:32]  

The other thing I found interesting.  

[Zoe 07:35]  

So I've got a bit of a delay going on there, I think. Yeah, Just a just a quick one, Kevin. What So when when you when you look back at where this journey's gone in the last 12 months, what are you most excited for in the next 12 months?  

[Kevin 07:52]  

I'm trying not to jump too far because we're going to talk about wave 2 in the in a minute. But one of the things I love from that was the fact that they addressed the feedback. So they looked at areas that were not seen as great and I'll talk about those in a minute and brought those forward and improved on those. So what am I looking forward to is them improving on that. And I think in some ways it's been a little disappointing year because kind of all that promise that we have with copilot, it's kind of taken nine months to a year to get to the reality across the board of that. And it's if we look at a lot of what we're talking about with copilot now, it's a huge chunk of that is the same as it was a year ago. So what I'm looking forward to is those new ideas, I think with agents that again, we'll talk about in a minute that extensibility, but also going beyond chat bots. I was just speaking with Caroline Callan and and some interviews that we're going to broadcast shortly on that. And I, I think it's that areas of where you're seeing that integration happen, not just the chat bot, but things like scheduling meetings. It's almost powered by copilot instead of just being chatting to copilot and building prompts. So I'm, I'm really excited to see that integration into the products and also their integration across products, that ability to kind of use copilot to connect different things together. It is going to be huge on there. And I think that's, it's that ongoing evolution and the fact that well, we've got plenty to talk about in these podcasts over the next 6 to 12 months as as well that I'm really looking forward to. How about you?  

[Zoe 09:46]  

So for me, I feel like, you know, the last year has been the year of personal productivity. And this year is the year where we're, we're really going to start to see the reinvention of work start happening. So, you know, when, when we think about kind of, and I think you're right about that fact that it's taken 9, you know, 912 months for us to actually get to that common understanding. But it's because we're so early in this journey. But now I feel like, you know, the, for those early organisations, we've got to a really good point. And I feel like this next year is going to be the year of extensibility and transforming work and business processes and things like that.  

[Kevin 10:37]  

So what about wave 2? Maybe I'm I'm seeing the chat on the side, so you need to drop off camera sex. So I'll I'll talk for a little minutes on there about wave 2 because basically two weeks from when this this episode was is being released, we had copilot wave 2 announced. And what I loved was it was announced by Satya Nadella and Jared Spatera. It show the importance that Microsoft sees of this next wave of there. I was thinking of Mustafa Solomon, who's moved to Microsoft, kind of one of the Co founders of deep mind on there and a great voice when it comes to AI and his book, which I know Zoe, you've you've started reading and I've started listening to on audible called the coming wave. And it was like I see where they're kind of maybe tying these two together. It's that kind of it's going to be this flow of change of there. So I I think there's kind of three, three big areas of announcements that that I saw from the the wave 2 to talk about. One was copilot pages, which was similar to what you were just saying there, Zoe around getting that more collaborative way of working. So for those who haven't seen, it's that ability to run a prompt, but then take the output to that prompt and and put it into a common collaborative area. For those of you who know, yes, it is indeed loop as that common area and there you can work on it with other people and you can still ask for prompts, maybe expand on this area, bring that different collection into that as well. And and then you can, because it's in loop, you can take that into other systems. So it's it's kind of starting in that copilot Biztalk area, moving to a collaborative area. And it was a good symbol of that move towards the collaborative Co pilots. The other big one is copilot agents that I'm sure we'll touch on. And I've been speaking with Laurence Strengths and Tom Morgan and we'll play some of those interviews in a minute. And that's the key area. It's the extension of this extensibility talk that's been going through. It's almost the reality of a lot of that. There's been lots of promise, lots of talk. We've had others on the show talking about that, but it's to me, it's that reflection of where this is going. It wants to be that autonomous agent sitting next to you to help you, whether you're there directly or whether you're working the whether it's kind of working when you're not there doing that intelligence checking. You could have it checking your emails for kind of common threads and prompts and having that surface to you. You can have it running through and looking at documents being created that may be relevant to you and nudging towards those summaries of there. It's things happening to help you, not to replace you. And I'm sure we'll come back to that in a minute. And then the final thing with Wave 2 as well as the agents and copilot pages was we saw a lot of enhancements. I think Jared Spattero talked about 700 enhancements that have come to copilot. We've seen that extension of using GPT 4 O's for the performance and quality of Copilot has increased. I was chatting with Simon Doyle at Bletchley Park and he said he's seen the formatting appear a bit differently and look more impressive and effective since those Wave 2 announcements. We've seen things run a bit quicker, but also we've seen that feedback of the areas. I mentioned this just now, but the, the Excel and PowerPoint, which have always been the kind of weaker areas of Copilot. Now they've seen big increases. So with within Copilot, we've got that narrative builder that can help you. Sorry, within PowerPoint, we've got that narrative builder that can help you build up your presentation in one go using Copilot and AI to kind of construct that, that allow you to tell your story in one go and then bring your branded items into that as well, as well as the kind of dally powered imaging. And then in Excel we've got the full kind of general availability and bringing in things like V look UPS, pivot tables, a lot more power and working with those functions. Plus the advanced analytics where you can ask it to analyse your your data that's there. And basically it's using Python And a bit like VBA you used to record macros. Now you can ask it to build that. It will create a Python script which will analyse your data and then you can work on that. So I see these three key areas of copilot pages, copilot agents and those enhancements and updates that we've seen come through as the the big announcements there, right, Zoe, I hope I've covered enough time. What, what were your thoughts on Wave 2? Did did you enjoy the live announcements?  

[Zoe 15:37]  

Well, unfortunately, Kevin, I, I didn't quite catch the live announcements because I was taking some well deserved holiday and I think at the time we went live, I was either at the side of a pool or eating in Cyprus. I, I, I did follow on with a lot of the news though, because when wave, when, when the wave two event was taking place and immediately afterwards, all social media, all the Internet was just a flurry of announcements and blogs and activity and, and people sharing their views. I think one of the things that, that I've been really pleased to see is the evolution of the product. So not just announcing, I mean, there are shiny new things they've announced as you've just talked through, but it's not just about announcing like the shiny new things that this is going to be able to do, but the fact that they've actually recognised and made some significant improvements. I talked to a lot of people, I've talked to a lot of people over the last few months who said, you know, they don't use copilot in Excel. It's got no value or they they don't find it helpful in PowerPoint. Yeah. And I'm, you know, I'm, I'm really hopeful that with some of these these improvements and the intent from Microsoft that these things will actually become as useful as Copilot in some of the other parts of the stack.  

[Kevin 16:55]  

Yeah, Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's that general improvement. I certainly expected when we heard about this that it was going to be a very marketing heavy event, talking about lots of things that are already been announced from there and kind of packaging them up in a nice shiny way as if they were something new. And I, I think, you know, we had a chunk of that. I'm not going to duck away from that. I think copilot agents, a large chunk of that was renamed plus some some interesting things as well. But I think they also had those meaty new announcements in there that were a a nice surprise as well. So I think it was a really good balance of, of what they put through from there that kind of kept everyone happy. And I know on the techie side, we kind of get fed up with these big marketing announcements when you've told us this already. But but it's important. It gets the attention. It makes people look again. And, and I feel that to me, one of the biggest things about Wave 2 was now's the time to go back and look again at things that maybe you haven't quite built the habit around it. It's not necessarily even with Excel and PowerPoint that people have tried and gone. Yeah, I don't like it. It's it's even where things you've quite liked but haven't necessarily built into your natural flow of doing things. Now's the opportunity to just go and kind of push yourself to try that again and work that into there. I love the Co piloting word because it's it's so natural and integrated now. And that's that is a natural part of my habits within there. I think the one I don't use much that I feel I should because I quite like is copilot on OneNote. I just haven't built the habit around there. And that's another one that I'd love to kind of entice myself back into using that and it's a good opportunity to think about that again.  

[Zoe 18:38]  

Yeah, I think my challenge with Co piloting OneNote was that because I use OneNote really extensively. I think the like you, I haven't built the habit and I think it's because when I when I did try a lot of the things that it was meant to be able to do it, it just wouldn't do. I think it's the app where I've had the most errors to be honest out of all of them. But I definitely will be spending more time in that and and actually Copilot pages I think is going to be a really interesting one as well for that Copilot enhanced collaboration.  

[Kevin 19:12]  

Yeah. And I, I wonder you know, you were both talking about OneNote, whether copilot pages will encourage me into building the habit of using loop a bit more as as well. I've kind of, to me, OneNote is a place I always go to because it's quick and easy. But if I've got that deeper Copilot integration, it might encourage me with Loop a bit more. So we'll certainly think about that again. I think another example, I was looking back at Copilot Studio, I had to do a demo and should I confess this publicly, I'm going to go all in and do it. I kind of built a deck of all the things that I thought Copilot Studio should do and I found it didn't actually do within there. And I actually went back recently and kind of rebuilding that deck and all the things that weren't there are now working on there. So the ability to connect to other things. And this is where I see is now is the opportunity to go back and and look again at things. But should we take a pause there? I think we don't exactly know how this is going to go through because I'm going to go and record and cut some of these. So you might hear my dulcet tones again as I kind of introduce different people, but. We're going to play back some interviews while while Zoe was off sunning and eating too much on holiday. I've managed to record some interviews with some fantastic people in the community. So Zoe, should we play back a few of those now?  

[Zoe 20:35]  

Yeah, I think that's an absolutely fantastic idea. Before we do that, though, I just wanted to say to all of those people who've followed, listened, been being a part of this podcast from the beginning. Thank you. It's been an absolutely fantastic year for both Kevin and I. We've we're alive personally really enjoyed the opportunity to speak to so many of you at events to get all of the the interviews that we've had in previous episodes. You know, we've had fantastic discussions with people about copilot and this journey that we're all on together. So thank you and tell your friends as well. We want more, yeah.  

[Kevin 21:16]  

Tell more people, tell your friends, tell your colleagues, subscribe to us, encourage other people's and and even vote for us in awards. If there happened to be some awards in the UK around the kind of tech community, perhaps there are some some voting going on for that. So do do consider putting some votes in there as well. All right, time to ticking out the.  

[Zoe 21:39]  

Interviews.  

[Kevin 21:41]  

Let's roll Vt. So hello, I'm here with Lauren Strandt. Lauren, do you want to introduce yourself?  

[Loryan 21:49]  

Yes, Lauren Strandt, MVP for.  

[Kevin 21:54]  

It needs no more introduction number of.  

[Loryan 21:56]  

Years yeah, I kind of do a lot of different things as you can tell with the copilot. I also love my swag but yeah I guess up until recently been working at rapid Circle but I don't really know what's. Usually other people introduce me and then my head gets big and explodes so.  

[Kevin 22:15]  

Well, I genuinely don't think you need any introduction. I think you're very well known and done some incredible stuff in there, not just playing around with standing desks as we were just talking about. But today we're, we're talking, obviously yesterday was the announcement around Copilot Wave 2. And here at Copilot Connection, we're going to try and get a few people together to see what their thoughts were. So I'm, I'm going to open this up and say, Lorian, what did you think about Copilot Wave 2?  

[Loryan 22:44]  

Look, I think it's like with all Microsoft announcements, you have to kind of take it with a grain of salt. So there's a lot of, you know, great things about it, but there's also things that we've been promised previously that are now kind of showing up as Wave 2. Like, for example, the the I've got to get the right terminology. The copilot agent in SharePoint, you know, was scheduled for roll out in September anyway. So it kind of like shouldn't almost be in there. But I think things like Copart pages was really good to have that kind of, you know, canvas that you can share with people. And I think for me as a person who loves PowerPoint and who thinks in PowerPoint, the the narrative functionality was incredibly exciting for me. So I think what we're probably seeing is copilot moving more from the informative and slightly assistive to actually being an actual copilot.  

[Kevin 23:47]  

And yeah.  

[Loryan 23:50]  

I think that though the the only and I wouldn't say it's a negative. The The thing is that Copilot is advancing far beyond the pace of the user take up because there'll always be numbers about how many users are using it, but it'll always be, you know, ambiguous numbers. Is it exactly Copilot paid licenses or you know, those kind of things. But it's kind of like when we had Office 2007 come out, we switched to the Ribbon and then we moved forward and then people still weren't up to speed with the Ribbon and the features in Office 2007. And hey, we're already at Office 2013 and starting to move to the cloud and things like that. So I think there's that side of things that we do still have to make sure that we are bringing people along for the journey and keeping them up to speed with it. And the other aspect is also the hallucinations, you know, and validity of the data that it creates. Because one of the things that when I did Copilot workshops for clients, I would show them a PowerPoint slide deck that was 100% hallucination. And it was a prompt that I typed into copilot. Sorry, biz chat, as we're actually now using that term like biz talk biz chat.  

[Kevin 25:10]  

Sorry, that's one for you, Allard Lee. I know you messaged me about biz talk.  

[Loryan 25:15]  

So, yeah, so, you know, I put a prompt in and asked it about the Copilot trial system that I built a while ago, actually over a year ago. And it gave me a really good answer because it pulled it from SharePoint, pulled it from the page that I created to document it. Great. So then I went into code, into PowerPoint and gave it pretty much the same prompt, but added some extra bits saying create a visual of the workflow, you know, use the list to show how many people had actually subscribed, fill out exit surveys, those things. And it created a complete hallucination about a license management system called Copilot. And it was full of aviation themes. So I use that in my workshops to go, hey creating, you know using Copart to create content is great, but you got to check to make sure it's valid.  

[Kevin 26:03]  

That sounds very dangerous in a workshop, because everyone go, that's a really good idea. Could you make that for us? Well, well, well, well, no, no, that's not the point here, but one of the announcements I loved and I love that they said this very clearly that they're now using GPT 4 O and before they haven't. They've always kind of skirted around a little bit on that, but they were very clear on that as a message, clear on that powering higher performance, better quality within there. What I haven't seen the mention is that I know there's the Azure, Azure AI content safety tools, and one of the things built into that is trying to help identify hallucinations. I don't think there was much around kind of improved hallucination detection or did I miss that?  

[Loryan 26:48]  

I don't recall anything on that. And I think, you know, honestly, it's going to be a struggle to be able to fix that in general because I've got a slide that I also also show in the workshops and I actually show it next to Matt Wade's fantastic graphic of.  

[Kevin 27:06]  

The.  

[Loryan 27:07]  

Junk in, junk out thing with credit to him when I presented.  

[Kevin 27:11]  

The show notes if you haven't seen it.  

[Loryan 27:14]  

I also have an image that I put next to it which is basically the same document with a few different like it's 5 instances of the same document in three different locations, modified 4 out of five of them by the same person. The dates are relatively similar.  

[Kevin 27:33]  

The names are like slash, you know_draft_final, or, the Same.  

[Loryan 27:37]  

Name but in a different folder in the same site and so look at this and go.  

[Kevin 27:42]  

How is?  

[Loryan 27:43]  

Cobalt supposed to know which one's the real one because as a human being with context would struggle to know which is the real 1. How will an AI be able to do it? So that's the challenge with hallucinations is if it's dealing with junk data it's going to create a hallucination but it's not the models fault because a human as it would struggle to be able to tell. So how's the AI going to know?  

[Kevin 28:06]  

So going back to my other point then agents and a bit very excited about these. I, I'm going to be cautious here because I know there's, there's some things that are coming out. There's some things that are out now, which seem to be things that are out the day before. And I just had a rename. There's some new stuff coming. But I think along this there is this identic view that would allow things to happen when you're not there, that things will process and trigger and do call AI stuff when you're not there. And this does seem to kind of go against what Co pilot's been which is there at your side helping you, driven by you. So are we, are we seeing a shift in this side?  

[Loryan 28:49]  

I don't think so. I think it was always supposed to be that it's just it we weren't there. Because if you look back at some of the earlier blogs about Copilot and Windows, there was talk about copilot assisting with certain things. Now again, probably still helping the user, but I think it was supposed to go beyond just the, I guess, just the realm of its immediate application and go beyond that in terms. I think I remember saying something and maybe I'm hallucinating here about you know, if you're trying, if you answer a call on Teams, then it pauses Spotify for you, something like that. Again, maybe completely wrong, but it was well, that's The thing is the windows side of things. They were positioning copilot to be. It will help do things for you and be more proactive for you. I kind of like how Cortana was positioned quite some time ago. And so that's The thing is I don't think this is a shift. I think it's just maybe hopefully a delivery delivering on the promise because do you remember the Microsoft Band?  

[Kevin 29:59]  

Yes, the the kind of watch style thing, Yeah.  

[Loryan 30:02]  

So I happened to be in Seattle the day that those launched or what kind of surprise launched. And I remember reading an article that one of the promises was of the band back then was connecting Cortana to Office 365. And what it would be able to do is see that every 10:00 AM, every Monday morning at 10:00 AM, my heart rate elevates. Oh, it's because you've got the sales meeting. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to book in at 9:45. You do a walk around the block that was, and I can't find the the blog article, but I remember because that promise back to 2018 that was like, wow, that's what a copilot would be doing. So I think that is kind of wave 2. And to be honest, we probably won't say it to more like wave 3 or whatever we call it at that point. I think that's where, yeah, where it's doing more things for us. Yeah, that I think that's the natural progression. Because otherwise if it's just interpreting, rewriting, it's not really a copilot. Whereas the whole point about a copilot is using the whole flight analogy as I as the captain should be able to walk and have a nap, or do my university, or do my crosswords and somebody else flies the plane.  

[Kevin 31:16]  

Yeah, so, but I, I, the way I see it with it, especially with the eugenic stuff, is that it's not, it's not necessarily an autopilot. It's not something you click a button, you give it defined rules and it follows those. It's like having someone who works for you that you delegate some of those things to and they have, you don't need to be absolutely explicit of every single rule. The, the more you are, the better that you're going to get it aligned to what you think. But they'll also be able to pick up things themselves and do that. And I'd always loved it with Syntex. You describe ages ago about having a summer intern. You've got a big pile of documents and you say this is a, this is ACV, this is a contract, this is an invoice. I want you to sort those out and that's our way. I see these agentic ones happening, but across a, a range of different scenarios. And I, I love the comment in, in one of the sessions that there was talk about kind of functional Co pilots. They seem to be moving towards agents. So we'll see things like the copilot in there for finance and elements like that effectively being bundles of these agents that act in different ways. And we'll get these kind of pre cans areas coming through. Plus you can then evolve it to your own view as well, which I really like. I think it will terrify some people, but I think it's going to be the how we govern that effectively which will matter. And I hope that steps up quickly well.  

[Loryan 32:44]  

The thing that I guess I really want to see happen, which is kind of the promise that we've had for a long time and we do start seeing in some rudimentary apps, be it, you know, consumer based services or corporate ones. Kind of like what we see with basic thing like Viva Insights saying, hey, the person you're sending this to, you know, isn't, you know, isn't a different time zone. Do you want to delay delivery until then? Things like that where it's gone? Oh, I've connected 2 bits of information, I can suggest an action for you. That's what I want to see. Copilot doing is actually going through our things and saying, hey, you tend to take longer to respond to this message. Would you prefer that when it comes in, I block some time for you to be able to sit there and look and here are the files or the sites that you access in order to respond to this so that I can effectively you can go, right, I'm performing this task and it opens up almost even like on Windows 10, like a new virtual, a new Windows desktop and says, right, cool, here you go work on this now.  

[Kevin 33:56]  

The other big thing that was announced was pages. Did you have any thoughts on Pages?  

[Loryan 34:02]  

I do and it's kind of a bringing the baggage from loop over. I love Loop. I love that these are Loop files, but they did talk about a new container in SharePoint embedded for these SharePoint Copilot pages. I think the challenge is that that management experience and also the API data behind it to be able to build your own management experience, isn't there. So I think from a governance perspective, from an inventory perspective, like I think they've done a lot, but they've missed some of the basic things like if you go into the SharePoint embedded experience and you look at all the containers, you can't sort or filter. Yeah. And like, why not? That seems like a basic UI thing. So I think that's probably the only thing I think, I hope it's something that will be remedied really quickly. But it is good to see them using I guess that whole fluid framework and using loop. Yeah, better.  

[Kevin 35:03]  

And and that's what I took away that I think the detail of how it run terrifies, no, terrifies me, scares me slightly in terms of how that's all going to hook together and the the things going to open up. I, I think more the, where it's looking at us collaborating with AI and, and using Copilot to do that to bring things together. And, and exactly what you said there, making more use of that fluid item to kind of bring atomic bits of content, I think is really interesting. I think this is a great indication of where that should go. I'm 100% with you in terms of they need to back this up with a governance. I saw someone and I've suddenly my brain's gone dead with his surname. But Jamie, it's just put a blog post out about building an intranet in loop as a thought experiment. And I know it's just like that just sounds a governance nightmare from there. But I can see the the kind of logic of tone, how it looks and grouping things together. But that that will become a pain. And I think the same with these copilot pages that to go from being a gimmick to an actual something usable, it needs to have those additional kind of guidance and control built into it, which I think they will do. Might be being optimistic here in a fanboy, but I think that will come and and will help that. But it's always nice to see something new coming up.  

[Loryan 36:29]  

But I think the, the only thing that I'm going back to, but I think probably the first or one of the first points I made about the kind of the acceleration of this is, you know, they talk about having these copilot pages and being able to collaborate with other people on them. I would dare say that the average user doesn't know how to collaborate. So I'm sorry, feel free to, to, to flame me people watching, but you know, many people don't even know how to use SharePoint pages or how to use loop or OneNote or other collaborative canvases. Maybe they know how to collaborate in a Word document. So.  

[Kevin 37:07]  

Even things like track changes and adding comments in Word is not always the natural thing people do. They'll kind of overwrite stuff without telling you and you won't know about it. I, I'm going through with my wife and son on his university application forms and that's exactly the argument I've been having and trying to get them educated on on some of that. So yeah, I, I completely agree. And although I I hope that by moving to loop it kind of becomes a natural way as it does evolve to there, but certainly got some time to get to that point.  

[Loryan 37:37]  

I think the Wave 2 just introduces a much bigger adoption journey for users because it was one thing when it was do a prompt and see what happens and you could get more advanced with your prompts. Now it's different ways of interacting with the AI system that has prompts. So I think that's The thing is it's Copilot was a thing inside existing apps. Now the whole biz chat functionality and also the agents is taking that to a thing where Copilot is its own thing that we need to manage and manage and understand and educate on beyond Copilot in app X. So yeah, because Copilot pages, yes, technically it's loop, but that's in Copilot only, yeah and those kind of things. So yeah, I think the so that.  

[Kevin 38:29]  

The adoption, those Gears of adoption have become very interesting. It's going to be those who are going to go straight for it, those who are not going to change at all. That the probably number of the the difference between those different groups and the the way you move people between that will be absolutely key to organisations over the next few months.  

[Loryan 38:48]  

Yeah. And I hope what we see is maybe a resurgence in spending on adoption for people to actually get this to work, because I think adoption has kind of died off after COVID because everyone's using Teams successfully. So we don't need to do adoption anymore. But I think that's The thing is Copilot presents such a new and unique way of working, like Teams did, that just using a prompt from time to time is not good usage. So yeah, I think people will need to spend more on adoption and look at that again, because we have to look at what's the experience people have, especially if, you know, Copart and PowerPoint creates an amazing slide that you don't know how to modify because you never actually learn how to use PowerPoint properly. Yeah.  

[Kevin 39:39]  

I think that's really true and a a lovely point to finish on there. So thank you very much for your time on that. We'll collate a lot of these together and thank you any any final words.  

[Loryan 39:52]  

No, just yeah, thanks for having me on the show. And it's great to see it continuing to evolve as in Copilot. So still it takes over the world.  

[Kevin 40:01]  

And the show as well. But lovely. Thanks, Laurie.  

[Loryan 40:06]  

Thanks, Kevin.  

[Kevin 40:08]  

And here I have Is it Caroline? Is it Caroline?  

[Tom 40:13]  

Caroline, yes. Or Caroline. I don't.  

[Kevin 40:15]  

Know Caroline, have I have I pronounced.  

[Tom 40:16]  

That we say Caroline, we say Caroline in Sweden and I don't, I don't expect you to do that. There we go. Pick your choice.  

[Kevin 40:25]  

There's a there's a great intro there. Would you like to introduce? Introduce yourself far better than I am on a Friday morning.  

[Tom 40:31]  

Yes, my name is Caroline, Caroline Colleen Colleen, I can't even pronounce my own name and I working within adoption and driver of adoption and change within Microsoft 365 and I recently got my MVP badge within the Microsoft 365 Copilot and team. So I'm super excited.  

[Kevin 40:51]  

And it is fantastic to have more people in that copilot. Gosh, I can't speak today either copilot MVP side as well. It's a lovely group of people who are passionate about copilot, which is why we thought would love to have you on the show today because was it about a week and a half ago they announced copilot Wave 2. So we're trying to gather some some thoughts and opinions on other people and what's what mattered to them, what really resonated. So we're just going to open the floor and say, Caroline, what's what's really caught your eye in the Wave 2 announcements?  

[Tom 41:27]  

Well, first of all, let's start with the basics. I really love that they finally changed the name to Microsoft 365 Copilot instead of copilot for Microsoft 365 that like the longest word ever still coping with the biz chat or the business chat rename, but it will get there. But otherwise I was super excited about.  

[Kevin 41:47]  

Just just very quickly I saw a slide yesterday from someone and they have business chatted M365 Copilot but I realised it was because they had it from when it was. It was called that before and it's all gone full cycle back to that which made me laugh.  

[Tom 42:03]  

I love that, Yeah. But otherwise, I think what really caught my eye was that Excel is finally working. I mean, come on, as a former finance professional, I really like that everybody can be an Excel pro right now. So that is super fun. And I, I tried it a lot and it's really good actually. So that's a a big news for me.  

[Kevin 42:27]  

So with, with the Excel and for those who haven't seen it, I, I think what I've seen is there's a lot of things that people expected to be there. So things like doing pivot tables and V look UPS, that sort of thing. And now kind of native and you can suggest things with that on there. But I was more interested in the, the new bits as well of the advanced analytics. Have you, have you had a chance to look at that at all?  

[Tom 42:50]  

I just done the first preview, just tried like with like a fake table and trying to do something. Because that's the sad part is that I'm not working within finance right now. So I don't have the real life cases. But I I'm hoping that I can work with a customer soon that actually have real life cases so that we can really dig into that deeper.  

[Kevin 43:11]  

Absolutely, that sounds, sounds really good. And I, I love this kind of notion that it's, it's a bit like the VBA used to be, you know, you record something and then it'll pump out some Python now to do that analytics. And if you know a bit about Python, you can go in and tweak that. If you don't, cool, carry on doing what you were doing. So really going to open up a lot of ideas to people, I think.  

[Tom 43:34]  

My only thing that's like bumming me is that when I've been talking to developers, my only brag is that I can speak VBA now. That's not cool anymore. So I need to learn another program, a language. Oh.  

[Kevin 43:48]  

Gosh, copilot for VBA, that's that. That would be something that would be controversial, but very helpful.  

[Tom 43:53]  

That's where we can see the movement from. Formally, we're talking about Copilot. It was OK if this is not a license for everybody at the company, but now it might be. So it's a smart turn to take.  

[Kevin 44:08]  

Interesting thoughts to that one. Yes, I like that. So you're suggesting that by opening up, the ease of that it opens, opens it up to more people being able to to do that as well?  

[Tom 44:19]  

Not exactly the the ones that maybe are scared about prompting or don't know. I think it's difficult and just put up the red flag. No, no, no, there's nothing from me. Then if you just notice small, small buttons like the one that's like also the little pen with the sparkles that you have in themes that helps you, that helps you with your how you're writing. I mean, now we also have the schedule function with the stars in Outlook as well, where you can get copilot to help you schedule a meeting as well. So all these small buttons that comes with Copilot is also very, very helpful, even though you're not a good prompter.  

[Kevin 45:03]  

So, So what about some of the other announcements? I know we were chatting at the beginning and you you haven't had a chance to try out pages yet, but did you, did you have any thoughts about the the impact that can make?  

[Tom 45:14]  

Yes, finally, we can elaborate more and collaborate with our colleagues. I really, really like that. And I also looking forward to getting from the best shots to get like the buttons that says go to PowerPoint, go to Word. So yeah, there's a lot of good features coming up.  

[Kevin 45:34]  

OK, interesting. Yeah. I hadn't kind of it's up on that one, but I think that I love that notion of kind of bringing things together and bringing other people to work on there as well. And I think you're right, it's that starting copilot and evolve into the other platforms naturally as well. I think or sorry, I should say starting biz chat and then evolve into the other platforms. It kind of helps that journey between different places as well, doesn't it?  

[Tom 46:01]  

Yes, and I what I really love about Patriots is that finally we get Loop to get like they're like 50 minutes of fame. They're part of the spotlight because I really love Loop. So I really enjoy that. I had a customer asking will there be like different copilot licenses? Maybe that would be a good idea for Microsoft to have like limited ones, maybe just one Agent 1 and maybe one for frontline workers further on, but we'll see.  

[Kevin 46:32]  

Any any last thoughts on copilot wave 2 or or where you see copilot going now?  

[Tom 46:38]  

We haven't spoke about PowerPoint yet and my God, now finally we can do some really good alterations in PowerPoint when it comes. It helps you narrate the the presentation. That's a super good feature that's been longed for because and also to help that it helps you build a good storyline and that you can ask it what am I missing? So yeah, I really like that.  

[Kevin 47:06]  

What's if you had the chance to have Wave 3, what's what would be the next area you'd love to see them address? And I'm putting you on the spot here. So I hope I've given you enough time to kind of ponder that a little bit.  

[Tom 47:19]  

I'm a fan of the copilot in whiteboard and to get like be able to prompt in whiteboard that would be really helpful.  

[Kevin 47:32]  

I see. So rather than just run the the kind of collate to be able to tweak that a bit with your own prompt on top of that as well.  

[Tom 47:39]  

Excited. Do you like build your own template to start with? I'm having a brainstorming meeting about this. Can you help me with that to just Yeah, instead of the templates that's already there. Otherwise, I mean it's I.  

[Kevin 47:55]  

Hadn't thought about that.  

[Tom 48:00]  

Otherwise, I don't know, but because I'm I'm I dig every every step we take along the way. So I'm still like amazed about the copilot, the wave 2. So maybe we can take another shot about that one when I have like settled all the new things that already arisen.  

[Kevin 48:18]  

Yes, yes. And when when the things that have been announced as being available now actually become available to most people, which was probably my biggest grumble of the announcements so far. We can't always be positive about everything. True. No, but it was fantastic. Well, thank you very much for for that chat and that run through it certainly made me think about a few different things on there. And it's it's one I love these conversations that kind of stirs up different thoughts and different angles from the announcement. So thank you very much. Goodbye speak to you soon. Bye. Hello. And I am now joined by another of our guests, Tom Morgan. Would you like to introduce yourself?  

[Caroline 49:02]  

Hello there, Yeah, hello. My name is Tom and I work as a sort of developer architect talker of things at a company called Cloud Interact in the UKAA.  

[Kevin 49:13]  

Sort of developer, I like that. Is that one who hacks things to pieces and gets it working kind of for?  

[Caroline 49:18]  

I'm holding on to the idea. I still do development most of the time. I talk about development a lot, but yeah, sometimes I even get to do it.  

[Kevin 49:25]  

PowerPoint developer I like.  

[Caroline 49:27]  

That There you go. Yeah.  

[Kevin 49:29]  

And we've got you on today to talk a bit about copilot Wave 2 that was announced recently. And I'm not going to give any lead in, I'm going to kind of let you take it where he wants to go. What's what were your thoughts from the the Wave 2 announcements?  

[Caroline 49:43]  

Yeah, I was a bit worried going into it because there was one thing I really wanted to see and then I was worried it wasn't there and it was so it was interesting. So I listened to the whole thing and I didn't get what I wanted. And I was like, oh, well, this is really interesting, but it's not there. And then I went to look at all the documentation and it turns out it was there. It just wasn't really talked about because I think those announcements aren't really for people like us, right? They're, you know, they're for people who don't pay attention every week to the latest thing that's happening in copilot. So that's.  

[Kevin 50:11]  

Fine, I know, I know. Us Lucky MVPS had kind of an early preview. Were you on that one or you just watched it live?  

[Caroline 50:19]  

I was, I was on that one, but only I was don't tell anyone. I was on another call as well. I was on a customer call. So I was kind of trying to pay attention to both and failing at both. So yeah, I only sort of caught up with it afterwards. And I pinged you afterwards for some sort of clarification on some things. But that's when I started looking at the documentation. And honestly, I don't think I would have found it otherwise if I hadn't gone digging because I hadn't sort of been all the way through that call to find out what was going on. Yeah.  

[Kevin 50:48]  

And and what was it that had you excited to?  

[Caroline 50:51]  

So the big thing ever since ever since build, I've been really excited for what build was called declarative Co pilots, which is the idea that you could take the copilot engine if you like and just use it, carve off a bit of it and say for this very specific use case with this very specific bit of data, do this and do it in this way to solve a particular problem. And I thought that sounded like a great idea that is there. Now that's GA and it's called copilot agents, but also copilot agents is sorry, wait, it's called copilot, it's called a declarative agent and it's all bundled in with copilot agents, which is kind of a renaming, which I get. I think it's a good, I think it's a good idea. I mean, agents is the industry term now, isn't it? For alongside this during today I stuff and, and I think this is, this speaks a little bit to, you know, Microsoft have other other people have caught up to where Microsoft stole that lead, I think. And, and so Microsoft need to react to that honestly. And they have all the tech. It's just how they present it and how they talk about it. So I think copilot agents make sense in this model because when you're doing that comparison around do I use copilot? Do I use something else? Do I use something else? It's that yeah, agents, I get it, agentic behaviour, I get it. And there's something in that as well. And I think we are right at this very start of this journey of understanding and discovering how we can use these agents. So it's very exciting when you think about internal business process apps and stuff like that. And the organization, historically, some of them haven't been brilliant. I mean, like there's this, you know, I've got a, you know, a smartphone, I get to choose the apps, right? And I will choose the apps that, and it's very competitive. I'd like, there's lots of different apps I can choose from. I'll choose the best 1. So designers are very incentivised to make very good apps, good and nice UI, all that kind of stuff. Inside an enterprise, you don't get any choice and IT teams know that. So it's like you're going to, you know, you're going to use our app whether we whether you like it or not, right? So not to completely throw all enterprise devs under the bus because there are some good ones, you know, but you know what I mean? Like it doesn't get the budget, frankly, that it could do right. So, so that's, that's definitely an area of interesting improvement, right? We've got all these kind of things for doing business processes, but also a lot of them in a way they're, they're kind of very CRUD like they're, they're, you know, they're attractions over databases. So they don't always map brilliantly to process flows, business process flows, you know, and so if you have this process you need doing, you might be in five different screens just to get it done. The interesting thing about the Copilot, what Copilot does and the way, if you want to build on Copilot, it forces you to think at the business process level. It forces you to have that business process layer and be like, well, if I'm going to pass this off to Copilot, I need to collect all the information in one go and deal with it. In some ways, I wonder if it's going to force a better process, like a better kind of way of doing business process apps. I don't know, maybe it will, maybe it won't. That's, that's probably a grand ask, but I wonder if it will, because if it's going to come down to whether people demand this, whether people even want it to be the right way to do it. And there's going to be a period of us trying to put it into everything and seeing what works because it's not going to be the right answer for everything either. And, and visual UI is still going to be the the right thing. Yeah.  

[Kevin 54:16]  

But I think that's a that's a really interesting point on there and sort of the business processes. And I think there will be lots of people who just kind of use Co pilots and the the agents behind that to trigger a linear business process as it was before. But I think those who truly succeed will be those who challenge that, who challenge that and push it more towards natural language. I think the kind of more, it sounds very strange saying this, the more traditional agentic approach to things, you know, taking on building out agents that talk to each other and solve tasks by taking different perspectives and bouncing back and forth rather than the the kind of pure extensibility side of things. I think there's a huge potential for that to automate a lot of those processes and rather than kind of dictate the humans along the way to do those approvals, to dictate the personas that can integrate within that, to have those conversations that that you can dictate the boundaries to each of those individual agents and let them work out the outcomes from that will be the people that benefit most from it as well. I know Chris Huntingford's yesterday or day before, I had a lovely picture of kind of the old world with lots of boxes going one to the other and that kind of linear flow. And then he had another one with all these scattered lines all over the place and a cat at the end of it. And I was like, oh, he's saying the old ones. That's.  

[Caroline 55:39]  

Important, right?  

[Kevin 55:41]  

Oh yeah, cats are on the the Internet, obviously, but it. But he was kind of saying that actually what you've now got to work out is there's not going to be a direct route towards a lot of these things. You're kind of defining individual elements almost a bit like the kind of event based architecture that we've talked about with micro services and and determine the rules in in a kind of very atomic way and then let the AI find that route between it to some.  

[Caroline 56:06]  

Degree which will.  

[Kevin 56:08]  

Be chaotic at times, as you say that we'll try things out. Some won't work, but the things that do will be fantastic.  

[Caroline 56:14]  

And it and it's our business is ready for that. Our business is ready to throw their business process into that mixer and be like, here are the inputs, here are the outputs. You figure out the bit in the middle. I feel like that's a some businesses will, but like that's scary for, you know, a lot of businesses that have spent a long time coming up with this business process, but it's a big risk. There's the other thing that's happened, right? If you think back to, you know, when a lot of this business process stuff got put in place go like early 90s maybe these kind of like stand alone applications filling in little bits of business process because no one person knows how the whole company works, that kind of thing. You get these specialist areas, you get it's all in someone's head. That workflow is in someone's head and they got it into a, you know, like a Windows application, like some sort of thing on a database, right? And some of those are still going. But if they're not still going, they've gone from that to web to maybe mobile if you're lucky. But the core business process has stayed the same and, and hopefully it's evolved, hopefully people know what it is. But if not, you've got all those people that back in 1990 say they were, you know, 30 years old. They're approaching retirement now. There's all that skill is walking out the door. So actually it's the right time to maybe mix up the business process a bit because there is that risk that in the institutional knowledge of what makes your business run isn't going to be around for very much longer unless you've codified it.  

[Kevin 57:38]  

Very sadly, I'm going to have to wrap up there because you got me thinking, but we we may come back to you on that of kind of copilot as a business process engine could be a very interesting longer topic. But thank you very much for that and I hope to see you soon.  

[Caroline 57:53]  

Absolutely. Thank you very much.  

[Kevin 57:55]  

Cheers, bye.