The Copilot Connection

Ep 22 - Unpacking Microsoft Ignite

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With Zoe stuffed full of deep pan pizza and Kevin trying to recover from the remote FOMO, we discuss the key takeaways from Microsoft Ignite 2024  focusing on the latest Copilot updates, the role of agents, integration and alignment at Microsoft, security updates, and more. We explore the significance of the Prompt Gallery and the evolution of Copilot Studio, emphasising the importance of collaboration and automation in modern workplaces.

Key Takeaways:

  • Security has become a major focus for Microsoft.
  • The Ignite conference had a significant turnout with over 20,000 attendees.
  • Agents are a popular topic, with many mentions during the conference.
  • Integration between Microsoft products is improving, making workflows smoother.
  • The Copilot Prompt Gallery allows for better user engagement and prompt sharing.
  • The evolution of Copilot Studio is enabling deeper connection between low code and code first.
  • There are new features that enhance governance capabilities.
  • The keynote atmosphere was noted to be less energetic compared to previous years.


Key links

Kevin McDonnell (00:08)
Welcome to the Copilot Connection.

Zoe Wilson (00:12)
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 Avanade in our modern work business, an MVP for M365, a regional director and a Beaver Explorer.

Kevin McDonnell (00:29)
Hello, I'm Kevin McDonald. I'm an MVP, Viva Explorer and Copilot strategy and modern workplace AI leader Avanade. We'll be releasing episodes as podcasts and on YouTube with insights from experts from the community and Microsoft, what the different areas of Copilot are, the impact they can make to you and your organization, and what you need to do to start preparing for them now, and even how you can extend them.

Zoe Wilson (00:57)
So as you probably know, there was quite a big event that took place last week.

Kevin McDonnell (01:05)
What's what was that? I had cubs. We had a lovely time on the trampoline. I've had a few meetings. I don't know about anything else.

Zoe Wilson (01:09)
Hahaha

Yeah, well, hopefully our listeners were aware that last week was Microsoft Ignite in Chicago. And from a co-pilot perspective, it was an absolute fire hose of information.

Kevin McDonnell (01:28)
And I love you. It's a way I sadly couldn't go to it. But you were over there and send me a picture of the fantastic co-pilot stands that had the massive co-pilot logos. in between, there was a pillar that had the word fire hose written on it, which I thought was just very, very symbolic of it.

Zoe Wilson (01:49)
Yeah, absolutely. And it was funny because when I was walking around the Expo Hall, there were quite a lot of pillars that had that fire hose logo on them. think it must have, they must have had like the, you know, the fire outlet things in quite a lot of them. But just the positioning of that on the co-pilot stand was perfect.

Kevin McDonnell (01:57)
Hahaha

I think it was Adam Harmett who noticed and commented on LinkedIn as well, didn't he? So what?

Zoe Wilson (02:13)
Yeah, what did he say? said the fire hose has been piped directly from Redmond to Chicago.

Kevin McDonnell (02:19)
That's right. Which is probably not ideal, as I know, and I hope everyone who's in Seattle is all safe, because I know there was some pretty horrendous weather going on over there as well. So probably could have blown all that way from from that.

Zoe Wilson (02:34)
Yeah, I mean it was interesting because obviously there were a lot of people from Redmond, from Microsoft who were at the event. there was quite a bit of chatter about the impacts of the storm and

Kevin McDonnell (02:43)
Mm.

it's blow your camera off as well.

Zoe Wilson (02:51)
Yeah, I was blowing my camera off. What on earth is going on there? Hang on.

Kevin McDonnell (02:54)
I'll let you sort out. what we're planning to do today is maybe Zoe in a sec could just talk about, know, some of the feel from the conference, what it felt like being on the conference floor, you know, what sort of chatter was going on there. And then we'll do a bit of a dive into some of the copilot news or probably, as I like to call it, the Ignite news, as most of the actual news was coming.

was about copilot. think there was 260 mentions of copilot in the Book of News. There was, I think it was about 57 or 70 something PCs that mentioned agents within the Book of News on there. And quite excitingly, there was only actually three renames that I could see.

I'm wondering, Zoe, if we pause this now and redo this, bring your camera on. The joys are not doing it live.

Zoe Wilson (03:56)
Yeah, because it, it

Kevin McDonnell (04:01)
OK, I think we are back after some fun and games with Zoe's camera, so we'll splice this together nicely. And I think Zoe, was just about to ask you a little bit more about how, know, what was the feel for the conference? We covered some of the fire hose, but how did it feel being there?

Zoe Wilson (04:19)
So I was lucky enough to be at Ignite in Seattle last year, which was only the second big Microsoft event that was in person, like a proper conference after the pandemic. And not, not.

Kevin McDonnell (04:31)
Had you done Ignite before that? Have you done Mini before?

Zoe Wilson (04:34)
No, not before the pandemic and the year before last they did that kind of weird hybrid one didn't they where rather than having it like a proper conference set up they had it was just one big open space and lots of people complained about the background noise and the atmosphere. So first of all this was much more akin to the pre-pandemic ones from what other people were saying. It was a lot bigger, there were 10,000 attendees.

Kevin McDonnell (04:39)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Zoe Wilson (04:59)
I think in total it was over 20,000 people that were there, including all of the Microsoft people, all of the support staff, the event staff. So in terms.

Kevin McDonnell (05:08)
It's sorry, hang on. There were 10,000 attendees, but then another 10,000 like support staff and Microsoft people. Wow.

Zoe Wilson (05:14)
Yeah, so I mean, I, yeah, I heard, I'm not sure how accurate this was, but I heard that it was as many as 24,000, which doesn't feel right to me. But essentially it was three conferences that were in one because they ran the Ignite tech track. Then they had the, what was usually inspired. So they had the partner track. And then there was also the CIO summit, which was a about 500.

Kevin McDonnell (05:24)
Mm.

Zoe Wilson (05:44)
CIOs from some of the top enterprise organizations as well. So there were three different events taking place and two different expert halls because there was an expert hall for what they called the executive connections, which was aligned to the CIO summit. Then they had the big expert hall, which is where that co-pilot stand was. And that was, that was huge. It was absolutely massive. I mean, the lines for lunch were just unreal. And on one of the days I didn't even get lunch

Kevin McDonnell (05:45)
Okay.

Zoe Wilson (06:14)
because I was in a client meeting. well, the lines were too long before the client meeting. And then by the time I came out, all the food had gone. So the scale of it was just incredible. I think I was doing over 20,000 steps every day just walking around because of the size of it. So that was good. I mean, it was good to see so many people from across the community, know, people.

that we all know from kind of the MEP circuit, lots of people that I didn't know as well. And, you know, everybody was, I think, really, really enthused, really excited. There was some interesting feedback about the keynote, actually. think, you know, I've...

Kevin McDonnell (06:56)
I was gonna say you you got to go to the keynote and front row.

Zoe Wilson (07:00)
Yeah, yeah. So I was, because we won the Partner of the Year awards, I was lucky enough to get literally front row. Yeah. I mean, so I did get front row billed last year as well. So I've got some good pictures of Satio on stage from different angles at a couple of these events now, but I'm in the queue to get in the keynote as well. That was just absolutely insane.

Kevin McDonnell (07:08)
That was purely me trying to prompt you to say that, sorry.

Zoe Wilson (07:27)
there were different groups of people who got different sections near the front. So the MVPs and regional directors had an area. yeah, yeah, yeah. So there was a section near the front reserved for MVPs and RDs. And then there were featured partner seats, there were partner of the year winner seats. But they prompted everyone to get in the queue at like 6.30 in the morning. And you know me, I'm not a morning person.

Kevin McDonnell (07:35)
really? What, for the keynotes? that's quite nice.

Zoe Wilson (07:54)
And I think I got there at like seven o'clock and there were particularly the MVP queue, there were tons of people there already.

Kevin McDonnell (08:03)
Interesting. Wow. And sorry, seven o'clock and the keynote was at nine? At eight. Okay. So there was a good hour of sitting around and gosh.

Zoe Wilson (08:04)
Yeah.

No, the keynote started at eight. Yeah.

Yeah, but it was interesting because the keynote at Ignite last year, the room, they had a big stage at the front and then the room was very long going backwards and they had screens at various positions, like moving from the front to the back so that if you were near the back you could still see the camera.

but this time they had a different layout. So the room was still long, but it was long and wide and they had three different stages. So the main stage in the middle that we were sat in front of, which is where Sati was. And then when they switched between speakers in the keynote, they had a stage off to the right and a stage off to the left and they had screens. So as they turned off the lights on one stage, it moved to another. And if you were at the other end of the room, you could see it on camera. So it was a really interesting layout, but I...

Kevin McDonnell (08:42)
They're right.

Very interesting.

Zoe Wilson (09:03)
thought that the atmosphere in the keynote felt quite flat. And it got to a point, particularly after Satio and some of the other people were speaking, where lots of people were just looking at their phones, which was, you know, was, from an atmosphere perspective, it was really different to the one last year.

Kevin McDonnell (09:06)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Which is weird, because I don't think it was particularly any less exciting of a keynote content. know our good friend Sarah Fenner was kind of messaging going, is there anyone in the audience? It's very quiet. But it kind of, I thought it felt a pretty good, exciting keynote. I don't know if it was the, I'm trying to find a polite way of saying this, especially given present company, but the more senior leadership and more serious people who were there that maybe don't whoop and holler enough. Maybe we need to build up the MVPs for next year to.

Zoe Wilson (09:30)
Hahaha

Yeah, I mean, yeah, so I was in a few chats with MVP's who were there and I think they were all saying the same, to be honest. thought that, so Sati's section was great. I think one of the things that people found frustrating and where it started to lose interest was that some of the speakers who came on afterwards basically repeated what Sati said, maybe with one more, you know, one slide that went the next level down in terms of detail, but they didn't bring anything or much.

Kevin McDonnell (09:49)
to add some whooping and hollering.

Yeah.

Mm.

Yeah.

Zoe Wilson (10:19)
new. Yeah, so it was an interesting dynamic. But that aside, mean, the keynote announcements, I thought there was some good stuff in there. And I know we'll come on to talk about that in a sec. But the general buzz around the conference, the busyness of the expo hall, you know, seeing everybody kind of queuing to talk to all of the different people who were hosting stands was good.

Kevin McDonnell (10:19)
new announcements or yeah.

Zoe Wilson (10:45)
They had a much bigger presence from the different solution areas and product groups than obviously it's a bigger conference than last year, but you know, they had like huge areas that had kind of, you know, all of the modern work stands and the biz apps and security and like a whole section on how to prompt with copilot and

community area and a place where you could play with the co-pilot PCs and things like that. So it was really interactive as well.

Kevin McDonnell (11:16)
That's pretty cool. I don't know. Last week, I wasn't feeling like I missed out that much and I wasn't feeling that jealous, but you're making me feel gutted as well. I'm living slightly on heading over to ESPC the weekend and I know you're not heading there, so I'll get my slight revenge at that point, which should be fun. P.S. because yeah. Yeah, I know. P.S. as I know you listen, Moraine.

Zoe Wilson (11:24)
Yeah.

Well yeah, so you had FOMO last week, I'll have FOMO next week.

Kevin McDonnell (11:46)
I hope you do now have your passport. Don't leave anything else behind on there. Or just leave that in there for him.

Zoe Wilson (11:48)
Yeah, so how many people do we know who've set off traveling to international conferences without their passport or where their passport is exit? No, yeah, what didn't Mark Reckley once try to travel with a passport that had expired or didn't have enough time on it?

Kevin McDonnell (11:58)
Just moraine. Just moraine a few times, I think.

yes.

Yes, that's true. Yeah, I forgot about Mark as well. We'll find out if he listens.

Zoe Wilson (12:12)
Hahaha

Kevin McDonnell (12:15)
Yes, we have a few. Right. We should probably get on to some of the main content. If you haven't seen it, the place to start for all of this is always, always, always the book of news on there. And I don't know, I'm a bit of an addict when it comes to the Ignite book of news within this and kind of comparing what's been talked about and what comes through. And I think one one thing I noticed from this one

is it goes straight into the first one is about AI and agents and SharePoints within their kind of its front and center. And if you know, if I flip down a bit, we can see that it's copilot and copilot and M365. So it is very much the big area of focus.

Zoe Wilson (13:03)
Yeah, I think, I mean, if you just click on the table of contents, but, but another top, right. think one of the things that's super interesting to me is when you look at the modern work section, I think there are only two. If you scroll, scroll down, I think there were only two updates. So they all of the, all of the really great stuff that's happening across M365 co-pilot and SharePoint and all of these other things is being rolled up into that AI at work.

where we also see all of the agents and the stuff that goes across business applications and across the Azure AI stack.

Kevin McDonnell (13:42)
Yeah, a lot of this. think it's interesting, just think about this. You know, noticed when we were chatting before this that Power Platform was down the bottom, but also seeing security that's there as well, quite far down in that list of contents that's that has come through to it was it was one of the things the big items was to talk about security in the

keynotes but then looking at this list it's it's quite far down there too which is a little surprising.

And have a feeling Zoe has frozen again. Are you back with us Zoe?

Kevin McDonnell (14:27)
OK, hopefully this is third time lucky with no more tech ones. We have actually, I'm going to be honest, had a bit of a pause. So those watching video may notice some slight changes of kind of angle of light and angle of camera. But we'll kick on. think Zoe, you probably missed me talking about this, but I saying it's it was a bit interesting that kind of from the keynote, security has been a big thing for Microsoft. But in the book of news, it's still quite far down.

lot of different items, but it doesn't feel like about the same priority that the kind of exciting AI copilot stuff at the top had.

Zoe Wilson (15:03)
Yeah, I mean, I think it's fairly clear where Microsoft's priority is with the fact that they've rolled so much into that kind of initial AI section. At least security got quite a few updates versus modern work and power platform that had like two and one respectively.

Kevin McDonnell (15:19)
Yeah, yeah, that is true. So do go and we'll put the link to the book of news into the show notes. So do you go and have a look through there? And what I what I loved this time is not only do they put links to the blogs, but direct links to the actual sessions that are taking place at Ignite. So it's a really good reference point to jump to say, I want to find out more about this. You can jump into those particular sessions that are there from that as well.

Now, had to pause and work out what day. Yesterday, in fact, we recorded our very first co-pilot fireside chat, supported by Empowering Cloud. The aim of that is to not be recorded. So you have to be there live to kind of enjoy it and take part. And we talked about some themes. So we're going to try and cover similar sorts of stories, but maybe dig into a little bit more of the detail on that and not get quite so distracted by questions as we did.

yesterday. But the first theme I think we spoke about there was agents, because they seemed a fairly popular topic of conversation that came through from Ignite, wasn't it?

Zoe Wilson (16:28)
Yeah, I mean, did you count how many times they actually used the word agents versus copilot and get to the view that copilot won slightly?

Kevin McDonnell (16:35)
Yeah, I think this is when your sounds kicked out earlier. We had I think it was 260 mentions of copilot, 57 mentions of agents within the the book of news and just the three renames, which was which was nice, I think slightly slightly better.

Zoe Wilson (16:58)
Yeah, so what were you counting as the renames?

Kevin McDonnell (17:02)
So anywhere in the book of news where it said formally known as I basically search for formally and that that told me that there'd been a rename on from there. So might have missed some actually.

Zoe Wilson (17:10)
Yeah. So, so yeah, I was just going to say, wasn't it, was it the copilot SDK we talked about yesterday where, where you were saying you think that was the bot framework or if I got that wrong, the agent SDK, that's it. Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin McDonnell (17:22)
That's true. The agent SDK, which we'll come into in a minute. Yeah, that wasn't quite a rename, but yeah, kind of was as well.

Zoe Wilson (17:30)
That's why I asked that question because I do wonder how many things have evolved. Maybe not a rename, but like a rebrand and similar to Power Virtual Agents becoming Co-Pilot Studio.

Kevin McDonnell (17:37)
Yes.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's that is true. I'll give that one. But I think with agents, what I've noticed and what I love and you talked about that agent SDK, which we'll get back to in a minute. But we've now we've kind of had for a while, I've been talking a bit about this with agents with clients and things that you've got this kind of end user focus where end users can build agents, you've got this power user that can create agents and then you've got specialists.

But before, you know, we heard from the wave to we talked about the show before you've got those SharePoint agents where people can click, click a few documents from within there and create an agent based on that content and that knowledge. Now we've also got and if I'd been quicker there, I would have the share button all ready to go. But Copilot Actions, I think, also comes into this where you've got that ability to.

almost say when these things happen, then do this. So, for example, gather monthly newsletter updates or develop a customer brief. I think I mentioned this on the far side chat. This is something that every every day you can time it or every time you have a meeting with a client three hours beforehand, go back and send me a message to say that here's here's the conversations you've had with a client previously.

Here's what's happening based on your CRM to what's happening there. And you can all do this with very nice natural language and simple ways of doing this. This isn't designed for someone who has to learn lots of different prompts or learn the kind of power basically co-pilot studio way of doing things like here, catch up, summarize my emails related to employee benefits in the last week. It's a

bit like I can't move as you or someone else, you know, it's almost like Outlook rules, but supercharged. Yeah, not on acid. That's that's very different things on there. And I think it's this end user capability with these things that are agents that are going to be really interesting from there.

Zoe Wilson (19:36)
Supercharged.

Hahaha

Yeah. And if we think about that in terms of a theme, this is almost that personal productivity automation and that theme of automation was quite persistent as well. For those who are watching on video as well, you can see at the bottom of this article, which we will put in the show notes, there's a bit of information about co-pilot pages as well. I know we talked about this on the fireside chat, but one of the things that I found really interesting was some of the

Kevin McDonnell (19:54)
Mm-hmm.

Zoe Wilson (20:18)
changes or upgrades that they're announcing to copilot pages, which I mean here is talking about being able to create more powerful artifacts within that. I really feel like this is going to play such a key role in that move from me using copilot as an individual to that more multiplayer collaboration where I could use a copilot and create.

something that I can edit in pages and then share that with you and you can use copilot to iterate on it. And it truly starts to become that, that team copilot except not in teams. Formerly known as facilitator agent, formerly known as team copilot.

Kevin McDonnell (20:54)
Yeah. Small T. Small T.

Yes, that's true. One thing I love from here, and I haven't had a chance to look at this session, but that that prompts Copilot to create everything from interactive flow charts. I've had a few people say this is why can't Copilot draw diagrams for me? You we have that ability to create images, but I haven't seen anything within Copilot that will draw diagrams. And so this flow chart, I think, would be really interesting.

I haven't really seen many generative AI tools that there is one out there on the market. I genuinely forgotten the name from there. But I'll be really intrigued to see that. was just scrolling through. I haven't seen them actually show that at all. No, I don't think they do in here. But I will check that copilot page's session, see if there's more information on that ability to create diagrams. Because to me, if I can get copilot.

to say, I want to draw this system connected to this system with this there and it will just go and do it, I will be so happy. That'll be amazing.

Zoe Wilson (22:06)
Yeah, no, I agree with that. then, I mean, coming back to the theme of agents, again, further down this article, it talks about some of the out of the box agents that Microsoft are providing. So I know I mentioned facilitator agent, but essentially that was announced earlier in the year as team co-pilot, but that's been renamed. But they also introduced things like the self-service agent and the project manager agent.

Kevin McDonnell (22:18)
Yeah, good show.

Zoe Wilson (22:31)
as well as collaboration with some of the partner organizations who create line of business systems as well. again, thinking, Microsoft are really thinking about how to make it easier for people to use these tools in the flow of work integrated into the data that they need.

Kevin McDonnell (22:31)
Hmm.

I was just getting distracted because I know my former employer CPS do a lot with project management and some people have kind of said, we're going to do away with project managers. No, no, we're going to allow project managers to do what they're good at, which is kind of marshaling people and kind of putting things in place rather than what they end up doing, which is nagging people. And for years we were looking to build a nag bot and I'm looking at this thinking.

Zoe Wilson (23:09)
Hahaha

Kevin McDonnell (23:14)
actually, Nagbot would be quite easy to do now. You could build an automated agent to say, anyone who hasn't done their timesheet, keep hassling them, hassling them until they've done it. And that would just make life so much easier and less stressful for a lot of people as well. So, yeah, that will be intriguing on there. I was also intrigued by this one, the employee self-service agents. I think that ability to kind of answer those common questions.

I'm really intrigued and I think actually I just realized I've missed it, I think, but there was going to be a Viva session on this within the tech community in the Viva area. They were going to do a deep dive into the self-service agent. So I will try to remember to put the link to the show in the show notes to that as well. I think we talked about it the last episode very briefly on there.

Zoe Wilson (24:04)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you look at that use case, that is one of the most common use cases that people were developing custom copilots to solve for over the last year or 18 months. So it's not a surprise really that Microsoft have targeted that as one of the first kind of out of the box agents that they release.

But again, just staying in that agent space, one of the other announcements that I thought was really interesting was the ability to interact with agents inside the office apps as well. So if you're in Word or PowerPoint, being able to use agents with the co-pilot sidebar, I don't know whether it's going to be the same experiences in BizChat, but again, just giving people more surface areas through which they can start to interact with.

Kevin McDonnell (24:40)
Yeah, good show.

Zoe Wilson (24:58)
their agents.

Kevin McDonnell (25:01)
Yeah, no, it'd be really interesting. We'll just see if that was on here. But no, I think we had the question yesterday as to whether it was the case. And I did find the link and it definitely is coming. So we hadn't just made that up or seen it anywhere earlier than we should, which is very good. Now, I think with agents, you know, we talked a lot about there about the out of the box ones from Microsoft, that ability to kind of create agents in SharePoint.

But then the next story is then what you can do with the Copilot Studio. And I love these agents in SharePoint because when they were first announced and you can do that, you can actually go and edit those over into Copilot Studio. So where I talked a few minutes ago about that end user to power user to specialist, suddenly that hop between end user to power user becomes possible. You're not talking about recreating things. You can extend those agents into Copilot Studio or

Of course, you could start on its own within Copilot Studio as the place to, as it says there, to build agents. Now, we've had a few questions, including yesterday, about is Copilot Studio ready? Can it do all the things that you want it to do? And I think we can honestly say when it first came out earlier this year, there were lots of things that were kind of promised that didn't quite work or worked occasionally and then rolled back and things. I really feel now it's got to a good stable point.

But you still kind of find some limitations. And I think many of those are kind of document sizes. You can't control the way you chunk up documents and connect those at the moment. But from Ignite, they've said there's going to be a lot more tuning capabilities in terms of how you connect to that knowledge. So I think that ability to go in there. And I'm sure it's not going to be the full.

I can go into Azure AI search and it's all including the license. I can do exactly what I want as a data scientist would. But I think we'll see that extension to that to kind of focus a little bit more on the ways you want those documents to be pulled apart. So I think that will start to close some of the gaps that we do see between that sort of power user and specialist capabilities, which will be good in there. And also that, you know, bringing...

Zoe Wilson (27:17)
Yeah, I think, I think, I think that's really interesting as well, because one of the things that we've seen quite a lot of the last year is this real tension between those people who are coming from that kind of low code or even kind of dev in the M365 context, people coming from that space who are looking at how to use this to do things like extending M365 copilot versus those who come from more of a data and AI background where

Kevin McDonnell (27:30)
Thank

Zoe Wilson (27:47)
You know, they've been using the Azure AI Studio and there's this real tension between which tool is the right one for the job and you know, what, what's kind of good enough. And I think from a data and AI perspective, there was very much this strong belief that the Azure AI Studio was kind of the, the best or only tool of choice. But what we're starting to see is more people embracing Co-Pilot Studio and being able to leverage things like Power Automate.

on the back end of it to start to do some of those things that you can with the more advanced tooling as well. being seeing some of these new features, I think is really promising in that direction.

Kevin McDonnell (28:24)
And I know Yannick Riekman's, I know did it, Louisa Fries, he's done it a few times about a Fusion developer. And to me, this is what comes into it. And that second point there, it's not just you could do it here or here. You can blend those things together so you can have people building out that as your AI search and have that directly within Copilot Studio so that more specialists can work on that component and people can work on the kind of core, easier parts of it as well. And I think we'll start to see more of that of the

Zoe Wilson (28:30)
Hmm.

Kevin McDonnell (28:53)
specialist building those blocks that can be easily brought through Copilot Studio as well. So putting in that expertise where you need it as well. And I know you mentioned this yesterday as well, the sort of multimodal capability. So bringing voice into the Copilot Studio, bringing what's called images, image analysis, and being able to sort of summarise those as well, which is fantastic.

Zoe Wilson (29:04)
Yeah.

images.

Kevin McDonnell (29:20)
again from this kind of capability, this agent's SDK, which appears to mostly be bot framework, is within there as well. And again, joking aside, this then starts to blur the lines of where you have people who want to get into that code world of deploying things, can actually do the things they're doing in Copilot Studio and link those together. I again think there will be a little bit of kind of shaking out of this of what the reality is.

Zoe Wilson (29:26)
Hahaha

Kevin McDonnell (29:48)
I know that people will be coming to consultants and going, but what should I use when? There's going to be some working it out and it's almost actually, which way are you more comfortable with? Start there and you can extend either direction on there, which is never fun.

Zoe Wilson (30:01)
Yeah, if, if, no, but if you, if you think about that journey that you talked about from that kind of citizen developer, like end user through to low code, you can see here that, that it's talking about enabling continuity from that co-pilot studio scenario through to code first scenarios.

Kevin McDonnell (30:20)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think I've mentioned this in previous loads. It shows it's code first, not pro code anymore. I've noticed this kind of shift in marketing speak there. So keep keep an eye out for that one.

Zoe Wilson (30:33)
Yeah, I mean, I guess low code has been established for long enough now that it is actually pro code. It's just a different way of doing it, isn't it?

Kevin McDonnell (30:43)
I like that. there's one to sniff the showroom. But yeah, I agree. Or we could call that code second, you know, maybe.

Zoe Wilson (30:52)
Yeah, we don't want our local friends to feel like second-class citizens, so let's not go with that one.

Kevin McDonnell (30:56)
Yeah, sorry for listening. One thing you did talk about Zoe, I think, when you came back from Ignite was that kind of alignment now as well. So we talked there about that kind of end user to low codes to code first or to power user and specialist.

But I think this is kind of indicative of actually Microsoft working better together. And that's something you noted that you saw a few other areas as well.

Zoe Wilson (31:27)
Yeah, definitely. think when you look at the keynote and you see Sasha talking about the different layers that we've got, we've got copilot as the experience layer, then we've got the copilot devices, and then we've got the copilot and AI stack. And what's starting to become more apparent is that these things are all playing more nicely together from the top to the bottom of the stack.

And for me, one of the key themes that I took away from Ignite was around integration. The fact that things are talking to each other more easily. The fact that you can now integrate Snowflake and Dataverse or Databricks and Dataverse natively without having to hack that together yourself to get them to talk to each other. Yeah, it was just that theme of integration. And actually, if we think about this in terms of the GEN.AI maturity,

Kevin McDonnell (31:59)
Hmm.

Zoe Wilson (32:20)
It feels like these are all really fundamental building blocks and foundations that we need to get in place at the bottom so that from an enterprise perspective, we can start to build solutions that.

reach through all of the different layers of the stack so that we can surface things in that copilot experience layer that use all of these other components, whether they're Microsoft or third party. And all of this is necessary for us to be able to actually really drive proper transformation at scale, which I think is what this is like the next one to two years of this transformation journey that we're on this platform shift.

Kevin McDonnell (33:00)
Yeah, absolutely. So I was looking distracted there because I thought I had a link about the integrating snowflake and data first. But the one I've got there is wrong. I'll have to put that into the show notes properly later. But yeah, I think it's absolutely right. And I know one of the things we kind of found from the MVP summit, I was about to last year, but no, this year was was it felt like everyone was kind of moving in different directions or at different paces and.

To me, what I got from Ignite is it feels like there's a big step change in that that people are working together within Microsoft and that will be seen in the products as well, which was really, really, really good. And I think very welcome. I think they have certainly heard that from MVPs and partners and customers and reacting to that, which is really nice on that. I've got a quick note and I'll be honest, I don't think we're going to spend long on it, but there's copilot's everywhere. And I think there was.

Zoe Wilson (33:47)
Yes, yeah.

That's not really a surprise.

Kevin McDonnell (33:57)
You know, that's not a new thing. But I think we did see a bit more of a kind of co-pilot in the admin area. was there was various ones of that of kind of that in the M365 admin as well as the Azure co-pilots and things like that. They've been talked about before, but there's some more details on those. And I think they've become a bit more powerful and more sustainable. So I don't think we need to talk about co-pilots everywhere too much. But I thought that that was certainly something that jumped out to me a little bit as well.

Zoe Wilson (34:03)
Hmm.

Yeah. And then, so, so, yeah, that, that jumps out. think another thing that jumps out was the focus on security, which was, it was a key theme throughout, much of the keynote and a lot of the updates. and I'm probably going to mess up the ordering of some of the stuff you've got ready, because I think there are two key ones for me. There's the purview DLP. yeah, so that one's in the right place. Purview DLP.

with some of the next-gen security and governance capabilities around Co-Pilot. The other one that I thought was really interesting was them including SharePoint Advanced Management capabilities in the Co-Pilot license as well. Because for me, I know a lot of organizations have felt that they needed something like SAM to be able to properly govern their content and drive Co-Pilot adoption.

But they didn't, what the issue with SharePoint Advanced Management is that when you license it, you have to license your entire tenant. So if you've got a hundred thousand users, even though it's only $2 per user per month, that's a significant cost. for me, Microsoft putting the SAM capabilities into the Co-Pilot license is significant and really gives up, you know, it gives people like us an opportunity to really help clients manage this and scale safely.

Kevin McDonnell (35:25)
Hmm.

Yeah, and it's funny you mentioned scales exactly what I going to say that put people off initially was the scale. Sorry, those watching on screen, my machine went slow and I finally got to sharing the purview stuff. I think also with SAM now there's a lot more scale of capability in the fact you can kind of restrict a few sites or choose a few sites rather than doing one or the other as well will kind of fit in there. So I think it becomes a lot more appealing.

Zoe Wilson (35:51)
Mmm.

Kevin McDonnell (36:15)
I have to be honest, that's one of the sessions I'm looking forward to at ESPC next week is to dig into that because I've I saw it when it first came out and I kind of went, this is nice, but I can't I can't see this being ready yet. It feels a lot closer now and I want to go and check and see how that compares with some of the third party offerings as well and see how close that's that has got to. But yeah, definitely, definitely interesting from that.

Zoe Wilson (36:36)
Yeah, I do have to say I am, I love the name. Go bring that screen back up. Yeah, the you stop sharing. So I'm going to get this wrong if you're not sharing the slide, but I am, I do love the rename of the Microsoft purview AI hub to data security posture management for AI. I was, yeah, I was chatting.

Kevin McDonnell (36:43)
knew that was gonna happen so I stopped.

you

yes, another Rename.

DSPM AI, DSPM 4 AI, yeah.

Zoe Wilson (37:05)
chatting with a security colleague a couple of weeks ago who was telling me about this rename and we were just laughing because it rolls off the tongue.

Kevin McDonnell (37:14)
I have to say security people do love their posture management. I'm kind of thinking that in like 30, 40 years time, they are not going to be hunchbacks at all. They're going to have very rigid, well stood from that with all the posturing that they do. So, yeah, that'd be fantastic.

Zoe Wilson (37:25)
Hahaha

I'm going to tell some of our security friends that you think they posture.

Kevin McDonnell (37:36)
I'm to be looking for anyone slouching now on that side.

Now, the next one I've got in the notes is interesting because it's always good to kind of cover what's happened at Ignite. But there's also times you go, hang on, there's something missing. And it's quite it's quite nice kind of doing this afterwards, you know, with a few days since you've been back and things and it's digested there. And I was going through and going, hang on, we talked a couple of weeks ago, there was an article from The Verge about renaming Copilot in Windows as Windows Intelligence.

There was nothing about that Ignite and there was nothing about Copilot and Windows either. And I thought, well, that definitely feels like a bit of a gap, a bit of an area where they haven't necessarily talked about something. It was talking about Windows 365 and there was the new, was it the Windows 365 link? I think that that's kind of small device that you can go and connect to the cloud, but not much about Copilot, which is always a bit of a shock.

Zoe Wilson (38:39)
Yeah, that was interesting actually. So I know this is slightly off topic for a co-pilot podcast, but that Windows device. So first of all, we're seeing this move back to dumb terminals after pushing everything into the cloud. And then second, with the edge computing, like edge servers that you can get, we're moving back to one-prem as well.

Kevin McDonnell (38:53)
Yeah.

Zoe Wilson (39:06)
It really felt like we've had this, like everything old is new again type moment with some of that.

Kevin McDonnell (39:14)
But yes, it feels like you're almost going in two directions at once. And is that is what you're kind of saying, because you've got those kind of dumb terminals that's going there, where it's all cloud based. And then you've got the kind of copilot plus PC, which is what I was going to kind of mention from there. They're almost pushing both directions at the same time. So having said they're kind of neatly aligned, they're kind of not as well.

Zoe Wilson (39:37)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that's so that this is purely from a Windows perspective. So from a Windows perspective, we're going like high tech with the devices with the processing chips and GPU to be able to support that on device processing and use AI things more efficiently. So that, you know, that's all super exciting.

But then with the new Windows link device, we're also going back to dumb terminals, which is something that they used to have in offices before the pandemic. And what we've seen is this push to remote working and everyone kind of going off, like issuing laptops and devices again. And now with the of virtualization with Windows, Microsoft virtualization with Windows desktop, now we're going back to.

Kevin McDonnell (40:00)
Hmm.

Yeah, exactly.

Zoe Wilson (40:25)
like native dumb terminals. there's some pretty cool stuff about it. But then with the, like with the, can't remember what they were called, because we didn't look at this with it not being copilot, but with those like servers on the edge that you they had like, that you could manage through Azure Arc. just made me think, you know, we've just spent all of these years getting people into the cloud and now we're giving them on-prem again.

Kevin McDonnell (40:27)
Mmm.

Yeah, and I think it was, what's it, Azure Local, isn't it? There was the kind of rename of the Azure Arc. Actually, no, sorry, sorry, I need to rephrase that because it's still Azure Arc, but there's kind of, yeah, it's still Azure Local. I think there was a vague rename and re-wiggling. There's my official phrase for it around that as well.

Zoe Wilson (40:53)
Hmm, yeah that's the one.

It's managed by Azure Archaeome.

Kevin McDonnell (41:18)
But yeah, I did like I know I had on the screen a second ago and talking about that kind of copilot plus PC again, talking about this cutting edge local AI tools. allowing developers to build locally and use those local, I suppose, copilot models, but really those gen AI models such as five three and using the MP use on the machine, allowing developers to do more with that.

I haven't really seen much yet come out of that. I it talks about here of McAfee's deep fake detector and Adobe Premiere Pro and Liquitex and dot Vista. Not not ones that sort of jump out at me as that's making me want to buy a copilot plus PC. But obviously there is some movement starting to happen there and I think it would be interesting to watch that. I think now, you know, I know we talk about Ignite not being the developer.

side of things, but this certainly feels like very much something there for the developers.

Zoe Wilson (42:18)
Yeah, I don't think that split's necessarily true anymore. mean, I know we talked, at least I think with all of the retakes, at least I think we talked earlier about the fact that Ignite was this combination of the technical track, the partner track, the CIO track. And in that technical track, there was definitely a huge amount for.

Kevin McDonnell (42:27)
You

Yeah. Yeah.

Zoe Wilson (42:38)
developers. So it does feel like Build and Ignite, the appeal that they've got and the target audiences have almost merged and instead of having two very distinct conferences, there's an overlap in terms of what they're doing and who they're targeting.

Kevin McDonnell (42:55)
Yeah. Yeah. I'm pausing because I think it's a lot about agents. And obviously we had a lot of questions in the far side chats. Sorry for those who weren't there and keep thinking we go on about it too much, but it's fresh in the mind. There was a lot of that kind of how do we develop agents? How do we build agents that feels developery? I also know that some from Microsoft who I was chatting to was like, they just weren't enough developers there for me. So they.

Maybe maybe it's context and how you feel about death and the work there as to whether is still that blends. But I do agree. I think there is that kind of mixture happening between the two as well.

Zoe Wilson (43:36)
Yeah, and maybe I was just with a lot of Debbie people.

Kevin McDonnell (43:40)
I try not to name any names, especially ones that like playing Dungeons and Dragons, if you are listening. Moving on quickly, quickly from that one, a kind of interesting news and kind of nice to see it still there is Microsoft Places. And some of you may be thinking, why are you talking about places that's not copilot? Well, of course, everything has copilot in there. So there was a lot around the coordination and the use of

things further down here, the use of copilot to have that discussion, things like the Intelliframe in Teams rooms, that facilitator agent in meetings that will fit into their that ability with copilot to integrate to kind of summarize the occupancy and the utilization and how people are doing things with that. So I think it's really good. I've loved some of the things coming with places. So good to see that moving on a bit.

Zoe Wilson (44:32)
Yeah.

Yeah and from a co-pilot perspective I think one of the things that I liked was being able to get recommendations on the best days to be in the office.

Kevin McDonnell (44:45)
Yes. Zoe, Zoe, you mean, do you mean never? I'm not quite sure what I've hit on there.

Zoe Wilson (44:47)
Because for people like me who have a very long commute. Yeah, cheering. That cheering agreed with you, never.

Kevin McDonnell (45:03)
Okay, I need to work out where that's coming from. Excellent.

I have no idea where that cheering noise is coming from, but lovely to hear that. are having fun with the technical joys of things today. I probably should cut this out, but I'm sure if you listen to this, I haven't and have left it in. One last thing I think is probably worth talking about is the prompt gallery.

And you may be asking, what is the Prom Gallery? Aha, we have one of the other renames that has come in. So the artist formerly known as Copilot Lab, which we've spoken about recently on the show, got very confusing with Copilot Labs, as brought in by Mr. Suleyman, is now no longer Copilot Lab. It is now the Copilot Prom Gallery. I kind of like that name, it's a little bit longer, but I think it does make sense, to be honest. I'm fairly happy with this rename.

But this isn't just a rename as well. Yeah.

Zoe Wilson (46:10)
Yeah, explains what it is. Yeah, it explains what it is. It's fairly meaningful. And to be honest, when working with clients, most of them have created custom versions of these for themselves before this was actually available. And they typically call them from galleries or prompt libraries. So I think it does exactly what it says on the tin.

Kevin McDonnell (46:30)
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And I think what has changed now is before it was a load of prompts you could use. They were quite nice, but kind of limited. Now, and I think this is live now, I'm fairly sure I saw, you can share those prompts, you can save your own within there, you can have organisational level ones. There's a lot more control around what you can do with those. And I think they'll become a lot more valuable. And I'm really

I haven't actually tried this, I'm kind of hoping that you can put some longer prompts in there, because I know most of the ones that were originally one was geared to working well with M365 and generally shorter. But because they were in there, they knew what they doing. Now you can kind of build out some longer ones. And I know I've seen some amazing ones that allow you to it kind of ask you a set of questions. You create that initial prompt and then it kind of directs you. So like building up your your goals for the year, it will kind of say looking all this information.

ask me some questions about this and then build up a recommendation for me. So it's not just that fire once and get a response back. You can use that context history. And I'm hoping we'll start the organization to really dig into this very well.

Zoe Wilson (47:41)
Yeah agreed, I mean for me as well it's not just about those conversational prompts or prompts that prompt co-pilots who engage with you to get more information which do work well but actually chaining prompts together as well and that's something I'd really like to see come into this where you can almost have like threads of prompts that you might want to use together.

Kevin McDonnell (48:05)
Yeah, that's interesting one. Yeah, I can't deny it here.

You're not meant to say things that make me think because I pause far too much for an audio podcast. And for those not listening, you know, I'm especially alertly if you're listening. Yes, I am do my great happy looking up to the top right thinking and getting an idea at that point. But yeah, I think we've covered a lot of news. Have we covered everything? No, we haven't. But go to ignite.microsoft.com. We'll share the book of news links in there. Go and watch some of the sessions. Please.

Let us know what you found interesting. Let us know what jumped out. What have we missed from talking about? What can we shout at Zoe? Because she was there. She should have seen everything, but I don't think you did particularly. So let us know what we should go back and watch as well.

Zoe Wilson (48:54)
Yeah, definitely do that. think, Kevin, you probably watched more sessions than me. Because like I said at the start, the scale of it was so big. was, and there were so many people there that for me, actually the value is the networking and the conversations. So tell me what we need to go watch.

Kevin McDonnell (49:11)
Yeah, absolutely agree. But I think we'll probably wrap up there. So if you want to hear more then, know, A, please, if this is your first time listening, please, please, please, please, please subscribe to us. Follow us on all the socials, LinkedIn, X or Twitter. Subscribe to us on YouTube. We are even because we're one of the cool kids on Blue Sky now as well. So do go and follow us there. Tell your colleagues, tell your clients, tell your friends.

Even tell your parents, because everyone's intrigued by copilot.

Zoe Wilson (49:45)
Thank you very much for listening. Until next time, look forward to speaking to you soon.

Kevin McDonnell (49:51)
Thanks a lot. Bye bye.

Zoe Wilson (49:52)
Bye.