0:01
Welcome to the Sales Lead Dog podcast hosted by CRM technology and sales process expert Christopher Smith.
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Talking with sales leaders that have separated themselves from the rest of the pack.
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Listen to find out how the best of the best achieved success with their team and CRM technology.
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And remember, unless you were the lead dog, the view never changes.
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Welcome to sales Lead dog.
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We are doing a special episode of sales lead dog today.
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Like to introduce my guests and let them kind of tell you a little bit about themselves.
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So 1st Art Pugach Art.
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Hey, tell us a little bit about yourself.
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I’m Art Pugach.
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I am the chief technology officer globally for Q Associates.
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We’re a Microsoft partner, been in business for 30 plus years.
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We specialize in the Microsoft Dynamics space, but we also specialize in Microsoft Azure on Microsoft cloud solutions, Enter ID.
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And more recently we’ve been doing a lot of work with Copilot.
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And one of the big things we want to talk today about is Copilot and how we’re seeing how it’s being adopted and how best for our customers and for people that are listening to adopt it.
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That’s great.
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And Maread O’donovan Maread.
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Hello.
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Hello.
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I’m Moreno Donovan, project coordinator here at Q.
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Not just the project coordinator, but a project coordinator.
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Not as illustrious as arts Fabulous and 25 gonna be 2727 years, 27 years shows what I know.
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I’ve been at Q Associates for nearly three years now and it’s been fabulous working at Q.
1:44
I’ve gotten a lot of just corporate experience, but I think just working with people in an industry that I had no knowledge of really before, it’s been great to kind of learn with everybody and, you know, not only create a kind of community for myself.
2:01
So I’ve been really enjoying working at Q And I was going to say, and together Maria and I host also host the Wedding Down podcast.
2:10
That’s part of the the way that Chris and ourselves got together on on this podcast.
2:17
Yep.
2:17
So yeah, thank you for that.
2:19
That was great.
2:20
So really excited about today’s discussion.
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Unless you’ve had your head buried in the sand, all you’re hearing about these days is AI.
2:31
It is topic number one.
2:33
It’s probably that question I get asked about the most.
2:38
And for today’s discussion, what we’re going to focus on is really giving you overview of of what is Microsoft Copilot, which is, you know, I think the leading platform for AI in the marketplace today.
2:52
But also I think more importantly, as a sales leader, what do we need to do to prepare?
2:57
Because it’s not something that you can just jump right into.
3:00
There is a process to doing this the right way.
3:03
And so with that or my first question to you is can you tell us a bit, you know, about what you see coming with Copilot?
3:13
What, what is it today and what do you see coming in the near future when it comes to Microsoft Copilot?
3:19
Well, the biggest thing that I see at the moment with Copilot, you’re talking a little bit about adoption is, you know, I’ve been to a number of seminars, given a number of speeches on this sort of stuff like that.
3:29
And the big question that comes up is why copilot?
3:32
How do I use Copilot?
3:34
People have a little bit of intimidation with Copilot.
3:36
So one of the things that I like to do is I like to sort of demystify it.
3:40
So I’m very big on the demo side of things.
3:42
So one of the things that that I will tend to do and RAID can tell you this is I will write a document in Word or I will use copilot to assist me with writing a document in Word.
3:52
Often times just to thank you to whoever invited us to present abroad to present at this particular show or whatever it is.
3:58
And then I will have copilot.
4:00
Then go ahead and try different styles.
4:01
I’ll have it try it like in a poem.
4:03
I’ll have it try it like John Steinbeck or just Hemingway.
4:06
It’s just how people little things that you can do and how you can expand on it.
4:09
I mean, one of the the biggest things that I’ve said to said to end users is you have to play with it.
4:15
And one of the biggest advantages to Copilot, it’s already built into the products that you use every day.
4:20
So I like to show word outlook teams.
4:22
And if so, as far as like one of the biggest things I’ll say this is that then especially for my end users and we talked to people a lot about is teams.
4:31
One of the biggest things with Copilot is teams is the idea that you can have this note taker with you built into the product.
4:38
You don’t have to have a third party do it.
4:40
It will, it will give you, it’ll, you know, give you the notes on feedback where Raid can tell you.
4:45
She was one of our first adopters on it ’cause she’s our project coordinator that on all these teams calls suddenly all this stuff that she used to have to do manually.
4:52
Suddenly she has a base set of notes that she can then take from the draft from and then alter as needed to provide to the other people that were on the call.
5:01
So that’s like really, you know, really cool use of the technology and it seems to me the best way to show people how to use Copilot is to just show them use cases, show them how you’re using internally.
5:11
The other, the other big thing that comes up in our discussions is security and data and who owns the data.
5:19
And will Microsoft take your data and will know Microsoft will not take your data.
5:23
Your data is your own.
5:24
But that being said, there are things that you can do within your environment.
5:29
If you want to go, you know, copilot whole hog and have copilot analyze.
5:34
Let’s say your data is your, your files, your, you know your information.
5:39
The cleaner the information, the better your security is set up internally.
5:42
The better the the information, the easier it’ll be to train copilot.
5:46
One of the things that I don’t think people necessarily understand is that no matter how good an AI engine is, no matter what the if the data you give it isn’t good, you’ll still get terrible things that come out of it.
5:58
One of the articles I was reading the other day with some of these AI agents, this AI agents at the moment that some of them are getting less accurate over time.
6:07
And I have a feeling the reason why that is.
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And we’re not talking about let’s say copilot for your office.
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We’re talking more like, you know, let’s say if it’s an AI that’s out there specifically on the web, because the data gets more and more muddled.
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And the more muddled the data is, the less accurate the response that you’ll get from it, no matter how good you are with your prompting.
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As far as asking what you’re looking for.
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Hey, we’re taking a quick break to thank you for listening to and supporting the Sales Lead Dog podcast.
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6:46
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6:53
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6:57
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7:04
That’s right, we’re giving it away.
7:06
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7:12
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7:21
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7:26
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7:31
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7:40
And if you’re watching on YouTube, hit that like button and make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes of Sales Lead Dog.
7:49
OK, let’s get back to this episode of the Sales Lead Dog Podcast.
7:54
Lorraine, let’s go back a bit to something Art said.
7:57
You were one of the early adopters at Q.
8:00
What were those early days like for you?
8:03
If you could kind of just say, you know, give us a kind of recount like how you jumped in, what your approach was and then how you leverage your experiences to help grow adoption at Q.
8:16
I think I, I remember it being like somewhat what Art said.
8:20
I’m intimidated by it because I I’ve heard so much about ChatGPT, but then copilot is so new.
8:28
It was initially just pretty much in teams and then it started getting peppered around all the different other programs initially using it.
8:37
I I think I was just, it was just more of a little like a, it allowed me some grace like I didn’t have to like sit there and make sure I was like getting all the notes and like saying wait, wait, wait.
8:50
I always felt so bad, like, oh, sorry, one second.
8:52
What was that?
8:52
Like what time did we want to meet again?
8:54
What time was, you know, who was needed on this?
8:56
You can go back in the copilot and say like, you know, make these bullet points more concise and then tell them to me.
9:02
You can have it like list out what this person was talking about at, you know, this time.
9:08
So I think it just at least to help with the adoption, it made it more, it made it easier to internally give it more of the, you know, a OK, because I am not a technical person, I have no technical experience in doing BC.
9:27
I’ve got, I’ve gone up and done demos and it just kind of shows how useful Copilot is.
9:32
I’ve gotten up and done demos and I’ve never done BC, you know, worked anybody’s data into BC in my life.
9:38
And it’s just, you know, if you type in like, show me a sales invoice, show me an invoice of anything over like 3K or like you can put in a number and then it spits out.
9:48
And if it can’t tell you how to do it, it’ll show you how to do it with links to things and it’ll tell you give you step by step.
9:56
If you can’t find this, this is where this is.
9:58
So I think it it at least helps with kind of telling people like, you know, I’m not compared to Art’s 27 years and and I know 27 years wouldn’t doesn’t necessarily like he’s not been working on I don’t know this newest version of BC, but it at least gives me the confidence to say like, well, this is something that’s an insane tool for anybody that you know, no matter what type of breadth of knowledge or whatever depth they have in the subject matter.
10:32
And in this, I think you would, I’m sorry, go ahead, Dart.
10:35
I said in this case, just just for some clarification, Maria is referring to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
10:41
And so you know, Copilot that is included with a different suite of Dynamics 365 products.
10:47
And because we’re, you know, an ERP/CRM reseller, Microsoft partner, that’s, that’s where a lot of our bread and butter is.
10:53
So we’ve been doing a lot of demos showing people how you can get reports, to get information very easily out of these products now, now that Copilot is integrated with them.
11:02
Yeah.
11:02
And I think it’s important for people to understand Microsoft’s approach is they are weaving Copilot into everything.
11:12
It is, you know, it is the future.
11:16
But I think people need to understand if you are feeling intimidated by it.
11:19
I think one of the things that helped me was really keep it, reminding myself this is a tool.
11:26
Don’t be intimidated by it.
11:27
Jump in and start using it like any other tool that you went into Home Depot and said, hey, that looks kind of cool.
11:32
I’m going to try that it you got to have that same open mind that jump in and start exploring.
11:39
Well, safety is the chainsaw.
11:40
So that’s, you know, make sure you get the proper safety equipment to go along with it.
11:45
Exactly.
11:46
I mean, the one thing that I noticed that no matter how much experience someone has, a lot of people are very uncomfortable writing, especially writing formal business letters.
11:54
And so I know any number of users that we’ve had internally, especially on the sales and marketing team have found it to be so worthwhile.
12:01
You know, ’cause typically speaking, they’ll say, OK, we’re going to give it to art to edit it cause ’cause I’m basically the, the person that just writes it itself.
12:07
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like Co pilot’s suggestions.
12:09
And I’ve actually recently done one of these things in which I came with my own outline.
12:13
And then I had copilot do some fancy it up a little bit.
12:16
I asked people which they liked more.
12:18
They like the copilot one more.
12:19
Little frustrating, a little bit, a little a knock to my ego, but but I get it.
12:23
You know, I mean, look it, it just gives it a little bit of extra to it sometimes, you know, like having an assistant that maybe just really just really good with the font type.
12:30
I mean, one of the other big things I’ve seen is a PowerPoint just from a marketing and marketing of people is that PowerPoint has with Copa for PowerPoint has grown tremendously in the past six months.
12:42
Every time I demo it, there’s a new feature.
12:44
I mean, the the thing I like about it a lot is you can come up with your outline if you have no idea how to use PowerPoint.
12:49
And I’m one of those people.
12:51
I don’t claim to be a PowerPoint expert.
12:53
You can throw, you can throw your outline at a PowerPoint and I’ll then create almost a fairly ready made, you know, create a ready made presentation for you that you can then give to your sales and marketing team.
13:03
They can edit and make changes to and make it look, you know, the way that you know, the way that you need it to look.
13:08
But at least you can get that sort of base draft in place, which is which to me is a real game change saves a lot of time.
13:14
Oh, it saves a huge amount of time.
13:15
I also loved using it as my backstop where I’ll put in prompts saying this is my presentation, for example.
13:24
What am I missing?
13:26
Yeah.
13:26
Like is there a section in here that I should be including that I didn’t consider?
13:32
And like, I’ll ask you like give me 5 other things that I should be consider including in my presentation.
13:38
And it’s to me invaluable in opening my mind because I think we have a tendency to get into ruts in terms of how I think and our thought processes and all that.
13:49
It’s been an incredible tool for opening my mind and, and make and looking at things from different perspectives.
13:55
Well, the way I look at it, it’s like a second set of eyes.
13:57
You know, when you write something, you just go to a colleague.
13:59
And if that colleague isn’t available because they copied, is this making logical sense that I, that I do my argument correctly?
14:04
Is there some way I can improve this?
14:06
What do you think about this?
14:07
And then it will go out there and you’ll, you’ll get some, you’ll get some advice on it.
14:10
Your choice whether to take it or not is with anything.
14:12
But still, it’s, it’s sometimes I think a lot easier for someone to get constructive criticism from a agnostic device than it is from a high.
14:22
Yeah, the ego isn’t is involved when it’s AI versus I’m not going to go ask them for that.
14:28
I’ll just do this myself.
14:31
And kind of like Art said, it just seems like they’ve been changing things.
14:34
I remember we did a copilot briefing in no December in New York and the copilot in the Microsoft Office, and then we just did one in Florida and Fort Lauderdale at the South Florida office.
14:47
And it just seems like there’s always something new that they’re adding.
14:50
So yes, it is.
14:51
You know it not you, you you need to use it like a tool.
14:54
It’s like the exercise that every day you’ve because then they’ve added 12 new things in about a month that you have no idea where you to step because you’ve it’s all now uncharted waters.
15:04
Like, I think definitely just keeping up with like maintenance or not even maintenance, just making sure that you’re using all of the tool to its fullest advantage or at least giving it a shot.
15:17
And there’s only one way to do that.
15:18
You have to jump in and start using it.
15:21
And I’d be, there’s a ton of content coming out all the time with people showing you different ways to use it.
15:27
So, yeah, I think you have to like anything else, it has to become part of your, I think anyone who’s trying to move forward in their career, learning is a huge part of that, that you have to make that part of your daily routine, if not at least a weekly routine.
15:41
Co pilot’s not any different, but it’s one more thing we need to add to our learning funnel to make sure we’re we’re keeping abreast because it is the pace.
15:51
That’s one thing I’d like to talk to you guys about.
15:54
When you look at the pace of AI in terms of the new features that are coming out and all that, what would you compare that to art based on your career?
16:04
Have you seen anything like this?
16:06
I mean, the, the, the interesting thing is, so at one of our last events, we were talking about it and how copilot basically is only about two years old.
16:14
And I mean, you know, certainly I mean, I could see some maybe with some of those, you know, personal assistants like Siri or Alexa or something like that, but really not so much those took, you know, almost a decade.
16:24
Now we’re talking about two years and we’re hitting a pretty decent maturity rate on.
16:28
I’m actually kind of surprised at how fast it’s it’s taken off and how fast it’s developed and adapted.
16:33
I mean, certainly, you know, so it’s you know, I mean, always try to think of Moore’s Law where they say every however many years something double S and this is certainly seems to very much break that, break that, break that rules of that a lot.
16:46
So yeah, I mean, it, it can be a lot.
16:48
But again, you have to, you have to keep up with it.
16:50
You have to look at it every day.
16:51
I mean, if you take a look at things that are going on with example, like I work a lot with security and some of the security tools of AI have come a long way.
16:59
I work with Azure a lot.
17:00
It’s fantastic.
17:01
If you now get certain what one of the earliest cases that I talked about using with Azure was saying, OK, let me try to build some things.
17:08
Let me see if I get them to error out and let me see how well that you know, copilot can then check this and then guide me in the right direction in order for me to to see where it is.
17:17
And it’s amazing how good it got, how fast.
17:20
And you know, to me that’s a that’s, that’s invaluable.
17:24
One other thing I was going to say, just from an admin point of view and for those that use Microsoft 365, there is a Copilot dashboard within Microsoft 365 that shows you a couple things.
17:34
It shows you end user adoption, which I think is very important.
17:37
It shows you which products they’re using it in.
17:39
So you can tell within your organization, you know where the need is most, which is very helpful because maybe not everyone needs, you know, the entire suite of it.
17:47
Maybe people just need it for Teams or something.
17:50
The other thing that that it has, it’s nice.
17:51
It has a lot of links and they’re constantly updated with how to use Copilot.
17:55
One of the best ways that you can do with it do do with Copilot.
17:59
You know, I think that’s something that, you know, that from an admin point of you being able to share that with your end users is invaluable because again, just because you give an end user a new tool doesn’t mean they’re going to use it.
18:08
The key at the end of the day is adoption of it.
18:10
And I think something with Copilot, the more it gets adopted, the more accurate it’ll be, the more useful it’ll be.
18:15
And that’s so that to me, that’s where I look at the future of it is sort of like we have to get people using it in order for it to be as good as it can be.
18:22
Yeah.
18:23
So let’s go back.
18:24
I have a recommendation I’d like to bounce off you guys.
18:27
When we do CRM, and I’m sure your approach is probably pretty similar.
18:30
When you implement business central, you need to find some centers of gravity, some people in the organization that really are going to be those early adopters that can really help Dr.
18:42
momentum create that early momentum and push it forward.
18:46
My personal belief, Co pilot’s the same way.
18:48
So if I’m a sales leader and I’m thinking, hey, I really want to begin leveraging Copilot in our sales, in our selling process and how we engage with our our prospects and our customers, but I need to develop my use cases.
19:04
I’m going to look at those people that you know, because we probably know who they are without of course, right now it’s like who are the three people you would pick?
19:12
People are going to be answered very quick.
19:14
Well, you know exactly those people, right?
19:17
Well, exactly.
19:17
I mean, that was one of the things when we first had got Copilot licenses to test out with, I said, OK, I know the people I want to have use it.
19:23
One of which was Maraid.
19:25
And there are some other ones in the sales and marketing side of things that you know, that the whole idea was to get the people that are going to be using it, the people that are going to be selling it, get them to use it and then to tell people how good it is and how well it works.
19:37
And really not everyone’s adopted it to this point.
19:39
You know, certainly, you know, there are people that will adopt faster.
19:42
But I agree it’s like with with CRM, with any technology, you can’t just throw technology at a problem, you know, especially when it’s a people problem.
19:50
The way I look at it, especially because being, you know, the idea being that you know, it’s, they’re going to be up to the people at the end of the day.
19:57
So like with CRM, I know we talked about this in one of our previous discussions where when CRM first came out in a big way, Microsoft CRM in this case, you had any number of sites that would install the software and that was it.
20:09
And then the end user, like, what do I do with it?
20:11
How am I going to use it?
20:12
Same with any system.
20:13
I mean, you can have a, you could put any great system in, but if you don’t have anyone that you don’t have to buy in, no one’s going to use it.
20:19
And So what I’ve been seeing in a lot of cases with our customers.
20:22
Is you’ll have three or four people say, oh, can we get copilot just so we can test it?
20:26
And that’s, and that’s the way that works.
20:28
And then once you get those three or four people to test it, then suddenly everyone wants it because they start seeing what it can do.
20:35
And because the fact of the matter is we all think everybody’s comfortable with taking notes, everybody’s comfortable with writing, everybody’s comfortable with Excel.
20:42
No, they’re not.
20:43
You find out more and more people, most people just, they might have a covert level with one product, they might know how to use a product, but they might not know everything about it.
20:51
And Copilot helps them to get that additional level in themselves.
20:54
And it actually is a great education tool from that point of view, as you were saying earlier.
20:58
Yeah, it, it’s, I think that’s critical.
21:00
Then one of the things that you can do what we recommend is create some time in your weekly sales meetings.
21:07
You know, just say, hey, we’re going to give 5 minutes at the end.
21:10
Show us something cool you’re doing with Copilot to create that excitement so people begin to see, oh, hey, that is awesome, I need that, I want that.
21:19
And you know, it’s baby steps, but pretty soon you’re going to be getting more people saying, Hey, I just found something really cool I want to show and that’s really helping me.
21:28
And, and through that you begin developing those best practices on, you know, how can we leverage this tool?
21:34
We have to remember it is a tool.
21:37
It’s not going to, it’s not the BL, it’s not going to solve every problem we have.
21:41
But if we really begin engaging with it and experimenting, we can find ways to begin impacting our business.
21:49
And I mean, it’s not, it’s again, like you said, it’s a tool.
21:51
It’s not like it’s coming for everybody’s jobs or it’s going to be taking the place of everybody’s jobs.
21:58
I think one of the points that we’ve tried to hammer out at both of the events that we’ve had the briefings is that it’s not going to take anybody’s job.
22:08
It’s more or less going to show you who’s more effective at their job or who is, you know, using their time in the most effective way because they’re not bogged down with, you know, oh, I got to type up my notes from the meeting.
22:22
You know, they can do this.
22:23
Oh, let me just throw this outline into a PowerPoint and I’ll send, you know, send you something back really quick.
22:28
Like it does kind of allow for that quicker exchange on the outside of the virtual, I guess Microsoft Theater where it’s taking all your data and it’s doing the searching for you rather than you having to go and look for all of the stuff yourself.
22:45
I think that way is a really intense and I think that’s something that is a very good point that Microsoft I believe has been promoting with Copilot.
22:57
Yeah, that’s one thing.
22:58
Like the note taking thing is to me it’s almost like I would call like a table stakes thing that hey, as like for us, we’re both consulting firms, best practices at the end of every meeting we’re going to publish notes on the meeting we just had.
23:11
Well, the reality is some people are way better taking notes than others.
23:16
So what they, the customer experience is it’s inconsistent.
23:19
You know, they’re not getting that same result that we want.
23:24
But if we’re leveraging this tool, it’s a great way to establish that consistency, you know, so it doesn’t matter who the customer is, they’re going to get a similar result because we’re using this tool the same way.
23:35
It’s doing the heavy lifting and doing it at a level that’s acceptable.
23:40
Yeah, it’s interesting.
23:40
You know, I used to provide notes a lot more manually at the end of meetings.
23:43
What I’ve noticed is that people aren’t asking for them as much because they could just look at the copilot notes.
23:48
But certainly, But certainly, yeah, I mean, you know, someone who is a note taker takes a lot of notes.
23:53
It is interesting just sort of that sort of thing going like, oh, OK, this, this maybe gives me 15 more minutes to work on another project, which is, you know, it’s invaluable, especially in the world of IT to get those additional 15 minutes to work on something else that you need to get done.
24:07
And it takes up the whole, you know, I’ve got, oh, let me just even if you don’t take the notes down what I used to do, I would write down any like 1515 if I saw like, or write down the timestamp and then go back and look in the recording.
24:21
Even cutting out all of that ’cause you can look up like what what this person says, ’cause it tracks who’s talking even in the in the calls, ’cause if you’ve got the transcript, you’ve got the record.
24:31
Like it just really is quite and it’s like having a, it’s like having a a 12th man on the field.
24:38
It really is it, it really is.
24:40
Like I remember way back in the day when the whole thing about virtual assistants, like I’m at my little virtual, like before the iPhones, I forget what they even called them.
24:49
Like HP had their one and like it’s all, it’s the future.
24:53
Well, it was a lot of marketing.
24:55
Yeah.
24:55
It was that had very limited impact on anyone’s day-to-day.
25:00
This truly is having an impact on the day-to-day.
25:03
Like I just use it this morning like this again, I, I write emails, but my emails are fairly dry and I wanted to punch up an e-mail.
25:14
I wanted to have some emotion and some impact.
25:16
So I’m like, hey, I compose my e-mail and then I go in and say rewrite this and you know, add whatever, you know, like things that are missing or, or can we make it more punchy and, and blah, blah, blah, way better.
25:32
And I’m not wasting my time trying to wordsmith something for an hour.
25:36
You know, I can do this in 5 minutes and I can move on with my day.
25:39
Well, Speaking of e-mail, just the whole idea, you know, the idea of e-mail conversations in which you can have a long thread of emails or someone asks you, can you deal with this?
25:46
And you’re like, you have to scroll through lines upon lines upon lines upon lines.
25:50
And I just say copilot, just tell me what the important stuff is.
25:53
It’ll come up and it will give you in the paragraph what you need to know.
25:56
And then you can just go on reply to it and give the best answer.
26:00
And it gets more and more accurate over time, which is the other thing I like about it.
26:03
Oh, yeah.
26:04
It’s amazing.
26:04
Taking as far as the summarization.
26:06
Yeah.
26:07
Like in, in CRM and Dynamics 365 sales, for example, if I haven’t viewed an account record in let’s say 2 weeks or a month, it’s been a while since I’ve looked at it.
26:18
There’s a whole bunch of activity in there.
26:19
I don’t have time to go through and read all that stuff.
26:21
I can go in and just do what you said, summarize, give me the summary of what’s, you know, recent activity.
26:28
Boom, I’m done.
26:29
I can review that and I move on to my next, my next task.
26:32
I’m not wasting 30 minutes trying to scroll through and figure out, OK, jeez, I hope I didn’t miss something.
26:39
And that’s what it’s all about.
26:40
I mean, it truly is that that promise of a virtual assistant actually being delivered now with another one of our talks that we had with another guest art.
26:52
I can’t, it was, I can’t, I’m not, I can’t remember which.
26:56
I think it was one of our more recent ones.
26:59
It just it the the way that copilot adds on to things, it just makes it like, what am I like the the question of, oh, what am I missing?
27:08
Like if it’s copilot will just highlight boxes and say, Oh, well, is this relevant?
27:14
Is this relevant and not that somebody who isn’t necessarily experienced or if it’s even relevant to the project, to that account to to the company, what, what have you even it’s just good to have it filled in.
27:27
And I think even with with it just, it just fills.
27:29
It just plugs up the hole like it allows you to kind of go through and see everything from like a top down perspective.
27:37
I suppose you’re not missing anything.
27:39
So let’s go back to data and what are the the things as the first topic of what are the things I need to consider to really begin leveraging copilot across my enterprise?
27:52
And you are you, you alluded to it earlier where what have the data garbage in, garbage out.
27:58
Yeah, exactly.
27:59
So I mean, one of the big things that that you know, we’ve seen, I’m sure people have seen the olden days, it was server sprawl, then it was SharePoint sprawl.
28:05
And a lot of people use SharePoint online with Microsoft 365.
28:09
But you know, a lot of, in a lot of cases, just as built, the data sprawled and you know, you have, you know, files upon files, security is not set correctly and it becomes a pain.
28:19
So if you turn it on right away with in that state, you have some problems because you will prompt to ask for questions and you may get data that’s irrelevant.
28:29
You may get data that’s private that you shouldn’t be able to see, and it becomes a bit of a problem.
28:34
So in order to ground it properly, you need to make sure that first of all, everything’s secured properly.
28:38
Perfect time.
28:39
Before you implement Copop, make sure you secure stuff, everything #1 #2 as far as data governance, if there’s stuff that you really shouldn’t have there, remove it from there.
28:48
I mean, the fact of the matter is a lot of people don’t think about, you know, file expirations, how long you should be keeping data for.
28:53
You know, that’s another time to address it because Copilot will reveal all those leaks, all those areas that you might not be, that you might not have it.
29:01
Now, one of the cool things would be if you could use Copilot in a broader sense to help you find those places.
29:07
But right now, there’s some other third party tools that that’ll help you, that’ll help you do that.
29:12
At some point.
29:12
I wouldn’t be surprised if you could run Copilot.
29:14
It’s like, hey, Copilot, could you take a look at my environment and tell me where my security or tell me where the government tell me where this is gonna have problems if I implement Copilot.
29:23
I mean, there’s another example.
29:24
I was talking with a developer recently and told me there are different AIS or different development tools.
29:30
And what they like using Copilot for is asking copop what prompt should I ask this development tool to get the answer that I need from that development tool.
29:38
And then Copilot will then write the prompt.
29:40
Then they can get the proper answer from the.
29:41
And that to me is really cool in AI, communicating with AI.
29:44
So yeah, that’s something that those are some of my favorite prompts are, you know, like because you do have to train your model too.
29:52
It’s like ask me 20 questions that you need to deliver better result to me based on whatever.
30:01
That’s one of the things that I’ve learned over time, but it helps me prepare my prompts better to know what kind of questions it needs to do a better job.
30:11
Those to me, that’s when you get into that stuff that truly is getting next level and that over time does not take long.
30:18
The the output that we’re getting is it like you were saying earlier?
30:22
It it gets so much better the more you interact with it.
30:25
copilot studio.
30:27
It’s it’s just going there.
30:28
You want to create an agent.
30:29
You just literally go through a bunch of different prompts and tell it what you want to build.
30:33
Now, of course you want to make sure you give it enough detail and you want to make sure you you know, you are as specific as possible what you want to build.
30:39
But it’s amazing how quickly you can build an agent and start playing around and testing with it.
30:43
You can build something under 1/2 hour that you know in the past would have taken weeks, if not months.
30:50
It’s absolutely mind boggling to me.
30:52
And that’s, again, as a sales leader, those are things that you have to be thinking about is if we have this capability, how can we leverage it to improve the customer experience?
31:02
How can we use it to drive more engagement not only with our customers, but our prospects?
31:07
Because we have to remember, not only are we using Copilot, they were using Copilot to get better educated.
31:13
You know, like they, the statistics are, have been like, hey, by the time they engage with you, they’ve completed 80% of their education and their research online, that number is just going to go higher.
31:26
Because now I can leverage Copilot to do a a lot of that heavy lifting of, of trying to figure out what is the best options for me as a customer.
31:35
Well, I mean, it’s just from a customer support of you.
31:37
Like with the CRM system, you can create an agent with Copiled studio that can get you the information a lot quicker and a lot more palatable way to the end user.
31:47
Then maybe if you created a custom report, you know, and it just sort of just, and again, it’s type of thing we’re saying like, if you don’t believe me, go ahead and try it out for yourself and you’ll see what this powerful tool can do.
31:57
It can really do some of this stuff in a very efficient and very intuitive way.
32:01
And that’s one of the things that that I have to say that I do like about it a lot is that it is very intuitive.
32:06
And it’s often times technology isn’t as intuitive, but Co pilots, especially from an AI point of view is very intuitive.
32:12
I’ve said you have to have the best prompts, you have to prompt it properly.
32:15
But you know, once you start prompting it, it’s amazing what it can do and how quickly it can start to fly.
32:20
Oh no, it really is.
32:21
And, and the key is you got to get started.
32:24
Now, what other things should I be doing as a, as a leader considering deploying Copilot throughout my enterprise art, Is there anything else I should be considering End user training, You know, just again, that end user adoption, you said you start with those initial 5 users or so have them start to work with it, work in a real way, give them real world scenarios.
32:43
I mean, to me that’s always the best thing is that, I mean, one of the things I always hated when I was learning were hypotheticals.
32:48
I want to do something practical.
32:50
So I’m also a Microsoft certified trainer.
32:52
So I’m very big on showing demos, very big on letting the students to just go at it and have fun with it.
32:58
As far as I’m concerned, you, you know, you can’t really make any mistakes.
33:01
I mean, it’s not going to let you.
33:02
I mean, you know, it’s, you can one point, don’t get me wrong, in the early days of it, you could ask it saying, Hey, could you decode a password hash?
33:10
And some of these AIS might have done it.
33:12
They won’t do it anymore, thankfully, but still it was scary.
33:14
The fact that it was that powerful a tool.
33:16
My big thing is from an admin point of view is secure your data, make sure your data is clean.
33:21
And that’s not just for SharePoint, that’s for CRM, that’s for ERP data.
33:25
Anything that you’re going to run, run the stuff against.
33:27
Then also think about what data you want to pull out of it and how you want to pull it out.
33:31
What do your end users actually need?
33:32
So it’s certainly a good idea to actually speak to your end users about it, especially that core group that’s using it saying, hey, did this work?
33:39
Did this not work?
33:40
One of the best ways to use this because once you see the way that your end users are doing it, you’re not just saying, oh, here’s technology, use it.
33:46
Oh, here’s technology.
33:47
Your colleagues have done this, this, this and this with.
33:49
They said you might be interested in this, you know, you’ll get more adoption, get more interested in it.
33:53
I mean, you know, and again, from the admin point of view, look at Microsoft 365, look at the dashboards, send the links out to your end user saying, hey, here’s some training on this stuff.
34:02
Take a look at this when you have a chance, feel free to use it.
34:05
And you know, if you have it enabled, hey, there’s a copilot button.
34:08
If you notice an edge, you can use it.
34:10
Just use it on the web first, if you want, we can talk about using it internally because there’s two options with it.
34:15
Or if you even allow it on your your desktop, you might even have a copilot icon on there.
34:20
So someone can just do a quick little test.
34:21
You know, it’s, you know, you know, just any number of things you can do.
34:26
And I, I’m going to reinforce something you said when you’re setting out this training, make it real world.
34:33
Don’t make it hypothetical.
34:35
Make it real world because that allows the users to truly connect with it.
34:39
If you do hypothetical, then you’re asking them to then make the next mental leap to figuring out how I would use this in my day-to-day.
34:47
And often times that’s where people stop.
34:49
Like, yeah, no, I’m not.
34:51
I’m too busy.
34:51
I’m not going to work through that exercise, but if you give it to him ready to eat, this is something I can begin using today to make my life easier, make me better at my job.
35:02
I’m engaged with it and just from an IT perspective, there’s been way too many times where I could say we get stuck in IT splaining and once you get into IT speak, nobody’s interested at all.
35:12
So that’s why you really have to get in real ways with that.
35:14
People actually using, yeah, they just shut down.
35:17
So it’s like having that core group, have them be creative and, and come up and identify those early use cases.
35:24
It’s amazing the momentum you’ll pick up from there and you’ll you’ll start getting more and more and more unique ways to use this tool.
35:34
I think I’ve just been trying to keep or tell myself, and it’s not that you technically need a technology background to like use AI, but I’ve been just trying to keep like an open mind to it or, you know, if it’s not spitting out the answer that I want because I would think it can answer everything and it’ll just say like, you know, we can’t find that we don’t have the ability to do this.
35:57
But regardless, I’ve been trying to use it a lot more in the excels and making PowerPoints and, and I’m again, I grew up in a generation of, you know, our class was OK, you know, everybody go through make your own PowerPoint.
36:11
We were in like the third grade.
36:12
So I’m used to starting from scratch.
36:15
But I think definitely with the addition of copilot into, you know, already my early corporate career, I think it only can go up because it’s always going to be there.
36:27
It’s not like it’s going to go anywhere.
36:30
So I just think it’s keeping an open mind and at least again, trying it using the tool, making sure you’re from a corporate standpoint like you’re people on your side are comfortable with it, with explaining things and how it’s being used at their level.
36:47
That’s a great point, Murray, that I’d love that.
36:51
I’d like to close with one last question for you guys.
36:54
We’re very, it’s two years into this.
36:56
We’re the very early stages.
36:59
Where do you see this going over the next three years?
37:03
Do you have any predictions?
37:05
Well, I mean, I’ll put it this way.
37:06
I don’t think that people are going to be replaced, but I do think that people are going to be using copilot more.
37:12
Those that are resistant to it might have some trouble.
37:15
I mean your change is inevitable.
37:17
I think the pace of change is might be a bit of a problem for some people.
37:23
So my feeling with it’s, it’s only going to get better.
37:25
It’s only going to get more intuitive.
37:27
So my feeling is, is that if you’re thinking about it, play around with it now, start testing with it, keep going with it.
37:34
If you’re looking to put it in your corporate environment at this point, I would say is the point to clean things up and get things ready if you don’t want to do it now, if you do it a year from now and everything’s cleaned up, you’re going to find a fantastic experience.
37:46
You know, again, I, you know, I, I know it’s not the type of thing where AI is going to take over the world.
37:52
I know it’s not going to makes people’s lives miserable, but I think what it’s going to do, it’s going to improve.
37:57
It’s going to improve people’s lives and improve the work.
37:59
My only concern is, is that if AI gets too efficient, like with everything else, we’re only going to be multitasking more.
38:05
But because that’s the whole idea of that technology, it’s supposed to give us more vacation time at the end of the day.
38:09
It seems to give us the same amount of vacation.
38:12
We just are able to do more during the day.
38:14
So I think the biggest thing that I’m going to see with AI is, is that AI will probably help us do even more during the day and be even more efficient.
38:21
And from an IT point of view, I think that’s fantastic because if you take a look at security, if you take a look at the number of bad actors, the number of threats out there, copilot and tools like it are going to help us prevent it.
38:32
Now, admittedly, there are people that will use it for bad things.
38:35
We know that.
38:36
But from a point of view, I see it as I see the good far outweighing the the bad on it.
38:42
And let’s put it this way.
38:43
I mean, you know, we talked about, you know, unfortunately I’ve seen any number of of companies where maybe they haven’t been as high in security as they would be and they bring us an after the fact.
38:53
The nice thing about Copilot AI or Copilot for security is the fact if you have some like that enabled, it’s like having an additional IT person that monitors just for security and it will catch a lot of the stuff that maybe you don’t have time to catch.
39:05
And to me, that’s that’s where I look at it as being just sort of it’s going to help out with technology and security a lot of the future and governance as well.
39:11
There’s a lot of little things in there, but there’s governance.
39:14
That’s also a big thing.
39:14
But I know we didn’t go into that today.
39:16
That’s a whole other conversation.
39:17
It is, it is.
39:19
Thank you.
39:20
That was a great way to wrap up this discussion.
39:21
Art, I appreciate that if people want to reach out and connect with you guys, talk more about AI or the services Q Associates provides, what’s the best way for them to do that?
39:31
Art website is www.qasos.com.
39:35
That’s QUEUEA double soc.com and for those of you that want to hear more of myself, Maraid talking on the podcast, it’s called when in doubt reboot.
39:46
It’s available on Spotify and all the different podcast platforms out there.
39:51
One of the things that we work to do is you work to demystify it, especially on the podcast.
39:55
So if you’re ever interested to listen to an entertaining podcast and with Murray going on it for a little bit about IT stuff, don’t bring some when in doubt reboot.
40:04
You can look, I love that.
40:06
So if you didn’t catch that, no worries.
40:07
You can catch it in our show notes.
40:09
You can get that at impellercrm.com/sales Lead Dog, where you’ll get not only this episode, but all our 150 plus episodes of Sales Lead Dog.
40:18
So be sure to check that out and subscribe so you get all our future episodes as well.
40:22
Art Murray, thank you so much for coming on Sales Lead Dog and welcome to the Sales Lead Dog pack.
40:29
Thank you very much, Chris.
40:31
Thank you, Chris.
40:32
Have a great rest of your day As we end this discussion on sales Lead Dog.
40:38
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40:43
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40:46
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40:56
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