As tech providers such as Microsoft enhance their capabilities and products, they will impact business processes and technology skills, and influence other tech providers to reshape their product and service offerings. Microsoft recently organised briefing sessions in Sydney and Singapore, to present their future roadmap, with a focus on their AI capabilities.
Ecosystm Advisors Achim Granzen, Peter Carr, and Tim Sheedy provide insights on Microsoft’s recent announcements and messaging.
Click here to download Ecosystm VendorSphere: Microsoft’s AI Vision – Initiatives & Impact
Ecosystm Question: What are your thoughts on Microsoft Copilot?
Tim Sheedy. The future of GenAI will not be about single LLMs getting bigger and better – it will be about the use of multiple large and small language models working together to solve specific challenges. It is wasteful to use a large and complex LLM to solve a problem that is simpler. Getting these models to work together will be key to solving industry and use case specific business and customer challenges in the future. Microsoft is already doing this with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Achim Granzen. Microsoft’s Copilot – a shrink-wrapped GenAI tool based on OpenAI – has become a mainstream product. Microsoft has made it available to their enterprise clients in multiple ways: for personal productivity in Microsoft 365, for enterprise applications in Dynamics 365, for developers in Github and Copilot Studio, and to partners to integrate Copilot into their applications suites (E.g. Amdocs’ Customer Engagement Platform).
Ecosystm Question: How, in your opinion, is the Microsoft Copilot a game changer?
Microsoft’s Customer Copyright Commitment, initially launched as Copilot Copyright Commitment, is the true game changer.
Achim Granzen. It safeguards Copilot users from potential copyright infringement lawsuits related to data used for algorithm training or output results. In November 2023, Microsoft expanded its scope to cover commercial usage of their OpenAI interface as well.
This move not only protects commercial clients using Microsoft’s GenAI products but also extends to any GenAI solutions built by their clients. This initiative significantly reduces a key risk associated with GenAI adoption, outlined in the product terms and conditions.
However, compliance with a set of Required Mitigations and Codes of Conduct is necessary for clients to benefit from this commitment, aligning with responsible AI guidelines and best practices.
Ecosystm Question: Where will organisations need most help on their AI journeys?
Peter Carr. Unfortunately, there is no playbook for AI.
- The path to integrating AI into business strategies and operations lacks a one-size-fits-all guide. Organisations will have to navigate uncharted territories for the time being. This means experimenting with AI applications and learning from successes and failures. This exploratory approach is crucial for leveraging AI’s potential while adapting to unique organisational challenges and opportunities. So, companies that are better at agile innovation will do better in the short term.
- The effectiveness of AI is deeply tied to the availability and quality of connected data. AI systems require extensive datasets to learn and make informed decisions. Ensuring data is accessible, clean, and integrated is fundamental for AI to accurately analyse trends, predict outcomes, and drive intelligent automation across various applications.
Ecosystm Question: What advice would you give organisations adopting AI?
Tim Sheedy. It is all about opportunities and responsibility.
- There is a strong need for responsible AI – at a global level, at a country level, at an industry level and at an organisational level. Microsoft (and other AI leaders) are helping to create responsible AI systems that are fair, reliable, safe, private, secure, and inclusive. There is still a long way to go, but these capabilities do not completely indemnify users of AI. They still have a responsibility to set guardrails in their own businesses about the use and opportunities for AI.
- AI and hybrid work are often discussed as different trends in the market, with different solution sets. But in reality, they are deeply linked. AI can help enhance and improve hybrid work in businesses – and is a great opportunity to demonstrate the value of AI and tools such as Copilot.
Ecosystm Question: What should Microsoft focus on?
Tim Sheedy. Microsoft faces a challenge in educating the market about adopting AI, especially Copilot. They need to educate business, IT, and AI users on embracing AI effectively. Additionally, they must educate existing partners and find new AI partners to drive change in their client base. Success in the race for knowledge workers requires not only being first but also helping users maximise solutions. Customers have limited visibility of Copilot’s capabilities, today. Improving customer upskilling and enhancing tools to prompt users to leverage capabilities will contribute to Microsoft’s (or their competitors’) success in dominating the AI tool market.
Peter Carr. Grassroots businesses form the economic foundation of the Asia Pacific economies. Typically, these businesses do not engage with global SIs (GSIs), which drive Microsoft’s new service offerings. This leads to an adoption gap in the sector that could benefit most from operational efficiencies. To bridge this gap, Microsoft must empower non-GSI partners and managed service providers (MSPs) at the local and regional levels. They won’t achieve their goal of democratising AI, unless they do. Microsoft has the potential to advance AI technology while ensuring fair and widespread adoption.
Earlier in the year, Microsoft unveiled its vision for Copilot, a digital companion that aims to provide a unified user experience across Bing, Edge, Microsoft 365, and Windows. This vision includes a consistent user experience. The rollout began with Windows in September and expanded to Microsoft 365 Copilot for enterprise customers this month.
Many organisations across Asia Pacific will soon face the question on whether to invest in Microsoft 365 Copilot – despite its current limitations in supporting all regional languages. Copilot is currently supported in English (US, GB, AU, CA, IN), Japanese, and Chinese Simplified. Microsoft plans to support more languages such as Arabic, Chinese Traditional, Korean and Thai over the first half of 2024. There are still several languages used across Asia Pacific that will not be supported until at least the second half of 2024 or later.
Access to Microsoft 365 Copilot comes with certain prerequisites. Organisations need to have either a Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 license and an Azure Active Directory account. F3 licenses do not currently have access to 365 Copilot. For E3 license holders the cost per user for adding Copilot would nearly double – so it is a significant extra spend and will need to deliver measurable and tangible benefits and a strong business case. It is doubtful whether most organisations will be able to justify this extra spend.
However, Copilot has the potential to significantly enhance the productivity of knowledge workers, saving them many hours each week, with hundreds of use cases already emerging for different industries and user profiles. Microsoft is offering a plethora of information on how to best adopt, deploy, and use Copilot. The key focus when building a business case should revolve around how knowledge workers will use this extra time.
Maximising Copilot Integration: Steps to Drive Adoption and Enhance Productivity
Identifying use cases, building the business proposal, and securing funding for Copilot is only half the battle. Driving the change and ensuring all relevant employees use the new processes will be significantly harder. Consider how employees currently use their productivity tools compared to 15 years ago, with many still relying on the same features and capabilities in their Office suites as they did in earlier versions. In cases where new features were embraced, it typically occurred because knowledge workers didn’t have to make any additional efforts to incorporate them, such as the auto-type ahead functions in email or the seamless integration of Teams calls.
The ability of your organisation to seamlessly integrate Copilot into daily workflows, optimising productivity and efficiency while harnessing AI-generated data and insights for decision-making will be of paramount importance. It will be equally important to be watchful to mitigate potential risks associated with an over-reliance on AI without sufficient oversight.
Implementing Copilot will require some essential steps:
- Training and onboarding. Provide comprehensive training to employees on how to use Copilot’s features within Microsoft 365 applications.
- Integration into daily tasks. Encourage employees to use Copilot for drafting emails, documents, and generating meeting notes to familiarise them with its capabilities.
- Customisation. Tailor Copilot’s settings and suggestions to align with company-specific needs and workflows.
- Automation. Create bots, templates, integrations, and other automation functions for multiple use cases. For example, when users first log onto their PC, they could get a summary of missed emails, chats – without the need to request it.
- Feedback loop. Implement a feedback mechanism to monitor how Copilot is used and to make adjustments based on user experiences.
- Evaluating effectiveness. Gauge how Copilot’s features are enhancing productivity regularly and adjust usage strategies accordingly. Focus on the increased productivity – what knowledge workers now achieve with the time made available by Copilot.
Changing the behaviours of knowledge workers can be challenging – particularly for basic processes that they have been using for years or even decades. Knowledge of use cases and opportunities for Copilot will not just filter across the organisation. Implementing formal training and educational programs and backing them up with refresher courses is important to ensure compliance and productivity gains.
It seems for many employees, the benefits of working from home or even adopting a hybrid model are a thing of the past. Employees are returning to the grind of long commutes and losing hours in transit. What is driving this shift in sentiment? CEOs, who once rooted for remote work, have undergone a change of heart – many say that remote work hampers their ability to innovate.
That may not be the real reason, however. There is a good chance that the CEO and/or other managers feel they have lost control or visibility over their employees. Returning to a more traditional management approach, where everyone is within direct sight, might seem like a simpler solution.
The Myths of Workplace Innovation
I find it ironic that organisations say they want employees to come into the office because they cannot innovate at the same rate. What the last few years have demonstrated – and quite conclusively – is that employees can innovate wherever they are, if they are driven to it and have the right tools. So, organisations need to evaluate whether they have innovated on and evolved their hybrid and remote work solutions effectively, to continue to support hybrid work – and innovation.
What is confusing about this stance that many organisations are taking, is that when an organisation has multiple offices, they are effectively a hybrid business – they have had people working from different locations, but have never felt the need to get all their staff together for 3-5 days every week for organisation-wide innovation that is suddenly so important today.
The CEO of a tech research firm once said – the office used to be considered the place to get together to use the tools we need to innovate; but the reality is that the office is just one of the tools that businesses have, to drive their organisation forward. Ironically, this same CEO has recently called everyone back into the office 3 days a week!
Is Remote Work the Next Step in Employee Rights?
It has become clear that remote and hybrid work is the next step in employees getting greater rights. Many organisations fought against the five-day work weeks, claiming they wouldn’t make as much money as they did when employees worked whenever they were told. They fought against the 40-hour work week (in France some fought against the 35-hour work week!) They fight against the introduction of new public holidays, against increases to the minimum wages, against paid parental leave.
Some industries, companies, unions, and countries are looking to (or already have) formalised hybrid and remote work in their policies and regulations. More unions and businesses will do this – and employees will have choice.
People will have the option to work for an employer who wants their employees to come into the office – or work for someone else. And this will depend on preferences and working styles – some employees enjoy the time spent away from home and like the social nature of office environments. But many also like the extra time, money, and flexibility that remote work allows.
There might be many reasons why leadership teams would want employees to come into the office – and establishing and maintaining a common corporate culture would be a leading reason. But what they need to do is stop pretending it is about “innovation”. Innovation is possible while working remotely, as it is when working from separate offices or even different floors within the same building.
Evolving Employee Experience & Collaboration Needs
Organisations today face a challenge – and it is not the inability to innovate in a hybrid work environment! It is in their ability to deliver the employee experience that their employees want. This is more challenging now because there are more preferences, options, and technologies available. But it is established that organisations need to continue to evolve their employee experience.
Technology does and will continue to play an important role in keeping our employees connected and productive. AI – such as Microsoft Copilot – will continue to improve our productivity. But the management needs to evolve with the technology. If the senior management feels that connecting people will help to solve the current growth challenges in the business, then it becomes the role of managers to better connect people – not just teams in offices, but virtual teams across the entire organisation.
Organisations that have focused their energies on connecting their employees better, regardless of their location (such as REA in Australia), find that productivity and innovation rates are better than when people are physically together. What do they do differently?
- Managers find their roles have moved from supporting individual employees to connecting employees
- Documentation of progress and challenges means that everyone knows where to focus their energies
- Managed virtual (and in-person) meetings mean that everyone has a voice and gets to contribute (not the loudest, most talkative or most senior person)
Remote and hybrid workers are often well-positioned to come up with new and innovative ideas. Senior management can encourage innovation and risk-taking by creating a safe environment for employees to share their ideas and by providing them with the resources they need to develop and implement their ideas. Sometimes these resources are in an office – but they don’t have to be. Manufacturers are quickly moving to complete digital development, prototyping, and testing of their new and improved products and services. Digital is often faster, better, and more innovative than physical – but employees need to be allowed to embrace these new platforms and tools to drive better organisational and customer outcomes.
What the pandemic has taught us is that people are good at solving problems; they are good at innovating irrespective of whether their managers are watching or not.
The first impact of the pandemic and the disruption it caused, was organisations scrambling to empower their remote employees. Over the last 2 years, significant investments have been made on collaboration platforms and tools. Now organisations are having to work towards making these workplaces truly hybrid where organisations have to ensure that all employees get the same experience, irrespective of where they choose to work from.
In 2022, organisations will continue to invest in building the Digital Workplace and address the associated technology, people, and process challenges.
Read on to find out what Ecosystm Analysts, Audrey William, Tim Sheedy and Venu Reddy think will be the key trends for the Digital Workplace in 2022.
Click here to download Ecosystm Predicts: The Top 5 Trends for the Digital Workplace in 2022 as PDF
One of the main questions that I have faced over the past week, since I wrote the Ecosystm Insight – Welcome to the Great Bounce Forward – is “How is this different to the “New Normal”? Many have commented that the concept of the Great Bounce Forward is more descriptive and more positive than the term “New Normal” – but I believe they are different, and require different strategies and mindsets.
This is a brief summary of some of the major differences between the New Normal and the Great Bounce Forward. I look forward with excitement and some trepidation towards this future. One where business success will be dictated not only by our customer obsession, but also the ability of our business to pivot, shift, change and adapt.
I can’t tell you what will happen in the future – a green revolution? Another pandemic? A major war? A global recession? Market hypergrowth? All the people living life in peace? Imagine that…
What I can tell you is what your organisation needs to do to be able to meet all of these challenges head-on and set yourself up for success. And to me, that won’t look like the new normal. There is nothing normal about these business capabilities at all.