HITT- Understanding Microsoft Copilot and AI Integration- Oct 15, 2024

This HITT delves into Microsoft Copilot, an AI assistant designed to enhance productivity within Microsoft applications by integrating large language models with client data. Industry experts discuss the slow initial adoption of Copilot due to data centralization challenges and the need for organizations to understand their specific problems. As Microsoft rolls out new features in Copilot, the focus shifts to improving data readiness and security measures. The conversation highlights the importance of a structured approach to AI integration, particularly for mid-market and small enterprises, and emphasizes the need for effective prompting and training. Ultimately, the video underscores the significance of engaging with C-level executives to address business challenges and streamline AI implementation.

Introduction to Microsoft Copilot

Today’s high intensity tech training focuses on Microsoft Copilot, the AI companion and assistant for work, which combines the power of large language models with your clients’ data in Microsoft apps to uplevel skills, unleash creativity, and unlock productivity.

Today, we’ll explore the opportunities available from Microsoft Copilot as businesses look to implement and support it. We’re joined by Telarus VP of Advanced Solutions for Cloud, Koby Phillips, along with two of the industry’s experts from Managed Solutions, CEO Sean Farrell and director of performance marketing, Martin Wojnar. Koby and all, welcome back to our Tuesday call. How are you doing today?

We are doing great or I am. I can’t really I shouldn’t probably speak for Sean. I think he can speak for himself.

Sean, how are you doing?

I’m good. I’m actually, excited. After we finish this, I get to go up and up to the mountains and do some, we’ll call it, shoulder season stuff in between skiing and and just coming out of fishing. So I’m gonna go up there and do some work on our house. I’m excited to get on the road.

Well, that sounds like a fun, fun time. Much different than what I’m gonna be doing. So, I’ll be leaving rainy, Chicago to head down to sunny Florida for our AI summit, that we’re hosting on Thursday.

So How’s it going?

Have you heard anything down there? Is it everybody been doing okay?

And where you guys are at?

Yeah. Everything that we’ve heard, every everything seems to be in order. I mean, I I still think there’s a lot of work to be done.

Just the unfortunate things that happened back to back, down there. But, from every report we’ve gotten from, like, the hotel and everything, it seems like, it’s it’s getting better. But I I certainly don’t wanna speak to it. I wasn’t there, and I can only imagine what everybody that was there went through.

Understanding Copilot’s Market Impact

So, I would probably say it’s it’s probably still a lot of, work to do for to get everything back in order. Guys, we’re here to talk about Copilot, Microsoft. We have one of the industry’s best in Sean Farrell, who is the CEO of Manus Solutions. Sean, one of the things that’s always been, amazing to me when it comes to you guys is the relationship you have with Microsoft, the pulse you have on everything there.

And so when Copilot hit and came out, that was something that I really wanted to grab you and have you come on and say, you know, what what are you seeing opportune like, the opportunities that are emerging, not only directly, but in the ones that can pile on top of the just the need for Copilot and the and the thirst for AI overall?

Yeah. I mean so I think I I think Microsoft and, again, you know, we’re we were so invested companies, and I say companies, all the ecosystems that had Office three sixty five and, you know, common tools like Teams and SharePoint and all these products that we had in Microsoft when Microsoft announced Copilot and, you know, the the idea of AI and, you know, kinda based on chat GPT and these learning language models. Everybody wanted to understand what it was, and there was a lot of anticipation, you know, because Microsoft talked about it, talked about it, and then they released it. And that was, oh gosh, let’s say going on two years ago now, Kobe.

So it was it’s something that’s been out there in market. We’re seeing it come in what they call waves. You know, wave two was just launched last week. But, ultimately, you know, I think Microsoft’s initial thought was let’s build this into what we call our productivity platform.

So things like Office and SharePoint and things like PowerPoint and and Teams and help companies and just their human beings. The users become more productive on a daily basis.

So that was kind of the the onset of Copilot from the beginning, and it’s definitely grown some legs from from, from there with, you know, products like Azure. And there’s some other Copilot named products within Microsoft we can talk about. But, really, at the core, it was really meant to help users and productivity, not necessarily connecting apps from the outside and connecting data, but really just use the Microsoft tools you own today.

Microsoft always seems to be, pretty smart on the way they they try to make sure all the products stay.

You know, we’ll call it closed source as much as possible. All of our stuff stays together. The more you use our stuff, the better off you’ll be.

Challenges in Copilot Adoption

What are you seeing as far as adoption rate? And then what are some of the challenges that implement Copilot if they’re if they’re not staffed and skilled in order to do so?

Like, what are some of the biggest, hurdles that you’ve seen organizations to have to overcome?

Yeah. Adoption was slow. There’s no question about it.

You know, it was so this lead up to Copilot was, you know, we’ve gotta move our data.

When you think about it, data is gold. I mean, in companies, your intellectual property you build is gold. So we’ve gotta move it to these, you know, clouds, wherever you wanna move it. Public clouds like Microsoft Azure. We’ve gotta get things centralized on, you know, SharePoint.

And then with Copilot, again, to be able to essentially as as, like, the easiest way to describe AI is be able to ask something, a question about something or a query or in the AI world, a prompt. You’ve gotta be able to have your data in a centralized place, hence Office three sixty five. The problem was most organizations came into Copilot and said to themselves, hey. You know, you over there give Copilot a try.

Let’s add it to your Office three sixty five SKU, or the CEO wanted to take a look at it. And, you know, I I called it the wild west at first. Everybody was playing around with it. But if you don’t know what the problem is at the top you’re trying to solve, whether it’s in your line of business, the business leader, it really is hard for it to take off inside of an organization.

So we saw a lot of that. And then ultimately is kinda, we always say, the third leg of the stool. If you can’t understand maybe what the ROI is, you know, what what AI is gonna bring or copilot or or how it’s gonna impact the human beings in the organization.

These things really don’t get going. So it was slow adoption at first, and I think I don’t know how many people know that wave two came out last week, which really helps with adoption.

It really has helped move the needle for people in Copilot. But the people that we talked to, Kobe, and, again, this is, I guess, counterintuitive with what we’ve been doing for a long time, are really now the executive leaders in organizations. History that I’ve ever seen where, you know, we can walk into a CEO’s office, a CFO, and actually have a a business conversation with them about, you know, how AI or automation or one of these tools is gonna bring, you know, value to their business. So they’re welcoming us, at this point in time. So those are the people, your line of business people, directors of HR and sales and marketing, I mean, those are the people who understand the business problems and will likely adopt some of the AI strategies.

Wave Two Features and Enhancements

Yeah. You know what’s really interesting? I’m gonna I’m gonna come back to two points. Hey.

I want you don’t don’t let me forget. I want you to break down the highlights of what wave two is for advisors. Just give them a couple of key points that they can go drop into conversations with people. The other thing too that you’re saying there is the ability to bridge what yours what the cell that you’re talking about has really been happening with our advisor community, but more in that CX space.

Right?

Which is the other place where AI has just really been hitting on for a number of years. But what this is now becoming a bridge or a to go from, like, a CX conversation into more data readiness cloud and all of that. What I heard you basically say is the same conversation that most organizations struggle with, finding the right use case for it. The second piece of it is no matter how great the technology is, if it’s not if the data that they’re relying on isn’t good or quality or there’s some hiccups, it’s gonna cause a lot of problems.

So data readiness is gonna be step one. In particular with Copilot, what I heard also heard you say one of the major challenges is if all the data’s in a Microsoft platform, Azure or SharePoint, etcetera, you it’s great. But if they have other data streams or other places, then it could be a challenge. Has wave two or is there any fix to that, Sean?

Or what is what can organizations do to to remedy that issue?

Yeah. So I agree, though, the CX side. And people ask me all the time, where did where did you see it really kinda Copilot specific takeoff? And, Koby, it’s right.

I mean, Teams was it. I mean, transcribing phone calls, and we see it and I say Microsoft Teams, when we’re on video or or conference calls or, you know, non video calls, as long as you have recording turned on like we have another UC and CX systems, ultimately, we can get transcription and then Copilot within the Microsoft Teams platform can kinda look at it and go, you know, look at user sentiment, see how calls are going, you know, help us get to understanding what happened very quickly. But once Copilot took off in the business, you know, across other platforms like PowerPoint and Office, we also saw, you know, companies trying to figure out where to adopt it, as part of the what we called wave one.

So wave two actually is kind of not to say adds two new features to Copilot, but, ultimately, there’s some other tools that I don’t know that a lot of people understand or know about, which is one called Copilot Studio.

And the best way I can describe that is just like it sounds a studio. It’s where the movie gets produced. It’s where all the workflows when you have when you ask something a question, a chatbot, something like that, workflows or prompts happen in the background. So Copilot Studio is where you get to create those workflows, that automation. There’s a product called Microsoft Power Platform that helps with that. And so you really gotta get out there and be able to talk about Copilot Studio and how we, as partners, can come in and help create that script, if you will, to create the movie. And then the other big piece that they’ve added to is Microsoft Azure OpenAI.

And what I mean by that in simple terms is that Azure, the cloud with Microsoft, it’s connected to hundreds and hundreds and now thousands of apps, Salesforce, UC systems, third party homegrown apps. And if you imagine back to what I said originally, being able to connect data, if Copilot and the Microsoft, you know, chatbots that are out there are connected to all our data sources now, could be whatever apps we’re using, and we can query that or prompt it, we’ve really got an opportunity to build AI. So that’s all really part of wave two that’s just coming out, to really enhance what I think Copilot did just for Office three sixty five.

Use Cases and Benefits of Copilot

Yeah. So, like, I just have this visual in my head of all of these connected dots and lines going in the Microsoft universe, all of these things. And then Copilot being that button you hit, and now it just meshes everything altogether, and it can pull it back, back in. With that, you know, Sean, some of the projects you’ve worked on, you’ve talked about the the audience has changed a bit from being more like CIO to every other executive and on down the chain with organizations.

What are some of the major, like, use cases you’ve seen be solved, and what some of the major benefits that you’re seeing that Copilot, like, brings to bear for organizations?

Yeah. I mean, I’ve got it seen. So, topical examples, really fun ones that I’ve seen more recently. So universities, you know, across the spectrum, you know, out here in California, we have the UC systems, for example.

So, you know, we got a nice call looking at how students and universities are trying to get information, whether it be about how to get a student loan, how do I go to a a baseball game, how do I ultimately navigate essentially my way around the school system. So a lot of those that data and, you know, essentially, where to get tickets or how it’s done are housed in different applications, databases. And, ultimately, in a lot of cases for the school systems, they were housed in Salesforce, the CRM tool. So what we did is went in there and helped build a chatbot, essentially, that was connected back to those data sources.

So what was, you know, people answering the phones and the information department for students, you know, became now something that you could get online, and it could point you in the right direction to automate everything from getting tickets to, you know, figuring out how to apply for a student loan or what your, you know, your holidays were as the school system, you know, came up for, I guess, new semesters. So we’ve seen fun ones like that in in, you know, health care. We’re seeing some stuff where I don’t know if people are also familiar with the product out there where you know, imagine walking through an airport and you’re walking down the the pathway and and there’s cameras all over around a screen.

That kind of stuff called syntax from Microsoft can pick up on you and figure out you know, tell you, hey. Your flight’s gonna be at this time. Here’s what you need to know for the day. Here’s the weather where you’re going, things like that.

And part of that is automation driven. You know, AI is not just AI. There’s a lot of automation in the background, and part of it is just the fact that it recognizes who you are. So we’re seeing fun solutions like that, and, you know, the list goes on from predictive health care solutions, to I mean, probably the big one and the biggest change I think we’re gonna see in our lives, Kobe, is all this data that’s finally available to us and available to these, you know, big public cloud providers, you know, and Chad GPT.

Think about health care and be able you know, and us being able to look at what’s happening. I mean, that is gonna be a big change in our lives with this not only predictive health care, but really helping with what we’re, you know, doctor solving problems. We’re seeing a lot of that right now, collaboration across doctors all over the US.

Security Considerations for Copilot

So I’m gonna grab some questions out of the chat. Doug, let me step on his toes and do this.

Alright. Let’s talk about the security side of Copilot. Right? So one of the biggest, reasons, I I think, stat I read, forty eight percent of organizations are still banning all AI right now because of the, inadvertent leaked data that goes back out. You put sensitive data out into a LLM, and guess what? It’s out there. How is Copilot and what does Copilot do, if anything, to help secure that environment, more effectively for organizations?

Yeah. So, I mean, again, the the terms and conditions you read about with Microsoft Copilot, you know, the sort of safe use of of, you know, how data is used in your organization. If you read all about it, it’ll tell you. They’re very conscious of the fact that whether it be, you know, you creating something like a story or a, you know, a a something you’re writing, Microsoft watches out for that. But, ultimately, to to think about it like this, like you said, there’s this whole ecosystem of Microsoft. Any data that they list that lives in your organization, whether it’s in Azure, whether it’s on premise for you, but it’s, you know, it’s accessed via your Microsoft credentials, let’s say, active directory or what’s called now EntraID or EntraID.

Before that data is allowed to either be pulled into your organization from the public Internet or another company or another app or, frankly, leave your organization, there is a product called the Microsoft Graph that ultimately is looking at data in and data out and ultimately telling the data that it’s allowed to do what it needs to do.

On top of that, and don’t get me wrong, there are Microsoft tools, defenders, the the security product. There are other tools that are out there from a data protection perspective.

Those apps also play a role in what data gets in and outside of your organization. So I will tell you, there’s we have a, like, kind of the six c’s as we call it. One of the c’s in getting to AI is called comply.

Data Cleansing and Compliance Processes

So cleanse, comply. It’s just a process we take companies through. And believe it or not and this was something that kinda caught me off guard when we first started doing this two years ago. You can quickly comb through your data with some common tools that you own within Microsoft, believe it or not, on your tenant. Or from the outside that’ll tell you what files are shared, how they’re being used, what become, like, more, you know, dangerous. You know, I’ll give you an example of a payroll file had once been shared within an organization amongst, you know, OneDrive or SharePoint, it’ll find those kind of things and say, let’s unshare or make it so it’s not available. So you can go through compliance pretty quick, or I should say, probably not compliance, but you should go through the exercise pretty quick to be able to start then pulling information from your data.

The Impact of AI on Organizational Awareness

Kinda more just like an awareness exercise, and then you can cleanse it from there, then can get into compliance, build it out. These are all major steps for everybody listening that organizations aren’t necessarily aware of. And the the pressure that AI is creating on on all of these executives, c level to CEO, and that’s why that’s why the audience is there to be met with because they’re all feeling like this is one of the biggest technology revolutions to hit. We had cloud twenty years ago.

Not everyone was affected by that. It seemingly, like, this is definitely a wider net of people being affected by AI, and that’s why we continually talk about it. The opportunity and I’ll grab this question from Scott.

Make sure I clarify it here for you, Scott. So thanks for the discussion. I’d like to expect, I expect that many of the apps for Copilot you’re discussing will be typically provided as part of a, of a solution provider by ISVs.

Engaging with Managed Service Providers

Where do you see the opportunity and entry point for TSDs?

Essentially, this conversation to to get into it. A lot of these, in my opinion and and Sean, jump in if I if I get off track here in your in your observation.

But, ultimately, you can get paid from it by engaging with, with an MSP like Managed Solutions that can come in, help do the assessment, get everything cleansed, get everything ready, including the license piece of it, if they haven’t already got it. Then come in and do the management and support of it. So the biggest opportunity here is, again, lack of skill set, lack of resources for organizations that are trying to go and incorporate this, and they simply don’t have the processes or the people in line to do it. Sean, you mentioned that six stage approach that managed solutions takes, to, getting ready for AI.

Challenges in AI Adoption for Organizations

Most organizations that I’m aware of don’t really have any stage or approach to it. I have been surprised here and there, but this is still something that’s moved so quickly. Organizations are trying to get their footing around it, and that and lies the major opportunity.

Yep. Yeah. It was, you know, again, what we found right off the bat was that, you know, organizations, especially in the IT departments, CIOs, CXOs, down through, they just didn’t understand.

They wanted to learn more about the technology and the tools rather than look at what the business needed from a a an AI or automation perspective, which was super interesting to see. So we went out and started thinking about it and going, well, you know, I saw a lot of questions come through in the in the, call here. How do and what do we need to do to go into, you know, organizations and help them? So we we kinda thought about it in different buckets and, you know, the six c’s as part of it. But the first one was, like you said earlier, Kobe, it was, you know, securing, cleansing, making sure the data was good and the data integrity was good, so so it wasn’t leaving and going to the wrong places.

Enhancing Productivity with Microsoft 365 and Copilot

The second piece we created was and, again, I think one of these questions came up was, let’s get users more productive in the Microsoft three sixty five ecosystem. So one of the things that we’re doing is worth, you know, kind of attaching Copilot onto, you know, your everyday tools like Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, all those other things, is that people are you know, we’re we’re working within departments. I I highly recommend going into a line of business, a sales department, an HR department.

You know, recent example we have with an HR department was they had a whole employee handbook, and they said it was crazy because they were hiring more and more HR staff. And it was becoming just challenging taking all the calls from people, doing how many PTO days do I get and, you know, what’s going on with our COVID policy. And so we just put the handbook into SharePoint, and you can put it in any, document management platform like a Dropbox. And we were able to build out through Copilot and what’s called Copilot Studio, the ability for people to go in and ask questions of that and get answers back quickly. But so get Microsoft three sixty five more productive. And, frankly, the more adoption you get across those licenses to the question about how do we make money, you know, operating those SKUs, the more back end revenue companies like Managed Solution get to pay you guys as partners.

Integration of Copilot with Various Applications

And then from there, it it took off. And then, you know, now it’s all about Copilot but connected to other apps, and those apps can be anything that’s out there. Homegrown apps, you know, stuff like like I said earlier, Salesforce, Oracle, big databases, SAP, NetSuite.

All of those things can come together.

So we’re seeing a lot more of that now. But the six c’s methodology, Kobe, was just a simple, you know, idea to make sure that everybody was going through the process from, you know, cleanse, connect, comply, compute, you know, you know, all the way through, you know, questioning the chatbot.

So chatbot Hit us with the six c’s because we’ve had a couple of people ask for it.

So what are the exact six c’s, Sean?

I can, send you that. It’s on if you well, it’s on our website too, but, I can send you that under our AI pages.

Alright.

But on the six c’s in in particular order, I was looking for it a second.

Like, I wanna see if you know it off the top of your head. It’s a challenge.

I think it was, like, compute, comply, if I can remember the rest. Compute, comply no. Cleanse, compute, comply, collect, cleanse, condition, comply, compute, and connect.

So, you know, collecting the data together, cleansing the data like we talked about, conditioning the data. Remember, when you prompt an AI, prompting is questioning. Like, what are you asking? If you guys are out there playing with Bing or Copilot, you’re probably going, I asked that a question.

It didn’t give me the right answer. That’s what they talk about with prompting. You have to learn how to prompt and teach, your team how to prompt things the right way. So condition, comply, which goes back to making sure the data is accessible, compute, you know, start asking questions of it and then connect it connect it to other apps.

So that’s our six c’s. And we right there that you get we can we put on our website. You guys can send out to your customers.

Importance of Prompt Engineering in AI

Yeah. We’ll actually have an example of some prompt engineering at the AI summit coming up down in Florida and then the one in California. These are shameless plugs, by the way. I have no problem throwing those out there.

But it is important. I mean, I’ve seen, you know, there’s there’s, bumper or stickers and all this kind of stuff. Right? My favorite sticker on a technology ever is tell me the thing you didn’t click on, for, like, cybersecurity guys.

This one’s gonna be prompt matters. Right? Like, you get like, what you put in and how you ask it. You can get a few different answers by just changing a word or two in in how you, connect in.

But, again, it all starts back with that data, data readiness.

Doug, how we doing on time?

Alright.

A couple more questions on on the Microsoft stack. So I again, I wanna highlight the opportunity for the advisors on the call. Guys, if you haven’t picked up on it, Sean and his team, know Microsoft inside now. Now the big opportunity you have is a lot of organizations are obviously utilizing this, but most of them aren’t utilizing it to the full effect.

So even if you got a company that’s already in Azure or already kinda using Copilot, the talk track can be as simple as, like, hey. Are you have you taken have you looked at wave two? Just the fact that that just came out a week ago, it’s topical, something you can bring up, and they go, oh, I’m not sure that is. Well, if it’s something you wanna explore or there’s some other peep a couple of new updates to that, We just wanna make sure that you’re always utilizing the applications you’re paying for to their fullest.

Understanding Organizational Structures for AI Projects

We might have a solution to come in and and help with that. Organizations are generally broken down into three buckets when they look at these type of projects and relationships. There’s in source. That means they do everything internal, and there’s no opportunity for us.

We gotta get them to co source, where at least they’ll wanna collaborate with an organization like Sean’s and many others in the portfolio, or outsource where they simply hand everything over and say, please do this for us and make sure that everything works all the same all the time.

If we can get organizations to those two key points, the efficiency driven once they’re in an environment with expertise and and resources really does make a lot of difference. Especially, Sean, would you agree that mid market, small enterprise, those are the guys that have the most needs for this? I we highlighted that in the tech trends report. It’s something we’ve been hitting on for several years now. That’s the most, needed area for for companies like Managed Solutions. Is that accurate?

Targeting Mid-Market Companies for AI Solutions

Yeah. Not to mention I mean, it’s funny. I was sitting in front of a bunch of c of seventy CEOs last week, you know, hundred person to a thousand person companies. When you think about it, for us in the channel, it’s they’re they’re more accessible. So we can actually get to the people, the CEOs, the CXO, like this, you know, CFO who wanna talk about AI and Copilot or just an AI in general.

So we are seeing that as a good market to target. You know, one of the things that I mean, I I I and I’ve I’ve heard that there’s challenges at times trying to get AI into the organization. I’ve heard that if you talk about it from the Copilot lens, you know, you might lose a bit there because people have sort of touched on Copilot. They’ve said, I put it into my organization.

It didn’t work. But if you we kinda took it one step further and said, you know, what if I could help you build an AI strategy within two weeks? So we started building out Microsoft and or AI non Microsoft offerings, which, we were sending out to CEOs with email campaigns and doing phone calls, and that was what worked really well. So I would say target a higher level in the business, and, ultimately, you know, Microsoft tools will do the work, but that’s where I would start higher level, talk to the CEO, have your talk track, and you should do fine.

Hey.

Good question here from David. And then there was one other one. I’m gonna actually go up to this data breach question really quick.

Addressing Data Breach Responsibilities

This was probably gonna be fun for you to for you to answer on the spot.

As far as the demarcation point of responsibility. Right?

You you know, managed solutions come in, helps deploy Copilot. There is a data breach.

Where does fault generally lies? Is that on the is that something the customer or is that a shared responsibility with you guys at that point? How does that work?

That’s a loaded question as well. It is. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a that’s a great I mean, again, so you you have a lot of tools within the data’s you know, we’ll call it the the the databases that live inside of Azure or whatever you’re connected to.

So, I mean, there’s so many security tools out there, guys. So if you guys, so if you’re sitting inside of Microsoft Azure and and that’s where your data is being pulled from within Copilot, then you’re gonna have things like Defender for Cloud. If you’re connecting to other datasets from the outside in, you’ve got not only your we’ll call it your firewalls and, you know, your, data loss prevention tools, and they don’t have to be Microsoft and application protection tools. But I think it depends on how the tools are put out there, ultimately, how they’re configured as they call it, what kind of conditional access policies are in place.

And then, ultimately, all the other basic things like MFA, are those things working right? So it kinda becomes a lot of, you know, who did what. But I will tell you, which is super interesting in the security realm, and I didn’t know this would dovetail into that.

In Copilot or or sorry. In Microsoft Defender now, if there is a data breach and you’re using Microsoft tools, I can literally, through the chatbot, ask the question, where did the data breach stem from? And Copilot will go in there and go through, you know, where the IP address was from, how it got into the firewall, and then tell you through Defender for Endpoint, and Copilot how it happened. So, you know, people ask me all the time, is that gonna take over security and how we do things as security analysts?

And my answer is the brain works there’s two things the brain does. It emotionally, you know, works on things, and it rationally works on things. But emotions get in our way very quickly when we’re making a decision. So if AI or things like security, if AI can help rationalize what’s going on in the security realm, and then we can make as human beings in the security world an emotional quick decision on what to do, I think it’s gonna help us.

The Role of AI in Enhancing Security

But, that technology in itself, Copilot, might help us get to the source of how that breach came in.

Yeah. I think, again, it’s just the whole idea behind AI is to make humans more efficient. Right? And to make things go faster, take take advantage of all of the, all of the the things that have been created. Again, data, data is the new oil. I think Forbes dropped that several years ago now. It’s becoming, even more and more relevant as, like, the technology continues to improve.

Sean, what would you say if you gave advice to advisers on just how to start a simple conversation, and any any particular words of wisdom as we conclude our, time here today?

Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I would say go upstream from the c e the CIOs. I would also say to the CIOs that you are talking to in the IT leadership, you know, what are the business challenges you’re trying to solve?

If you don’t understand the procedural stuff, the processes, things you you don’t have to say AI. Things you wanna automate, you’re gonna struggle with the AI conversation. So I would either encourage IT leadership to understand what it is they’re trying to solve for the, you know, we’ll call it executive leadership in companies. Or if you go to the CEO or CXO, CFO types, I would encourage you to talk to them about, tell me you know, set up a program is what I would do.

You know, you know, for the CEO, it’s a two hour session with the CFO. Tell me more about your day to day business, how the procedural stuff works, how the processes come to come to bear. So it doesn’t have to always be I wanna help you with AI. It can be what do you do in your business that causes challenges.

Understanding Business Processes for AI Implementation

And to spend another day, two to four hours, with different lines of business leaders, sales, you know, people, and, marketing people, and try to understand their business and understand, again, where there’s gaps in the process.

AI is not about just artificial intelligence pulling data. It’s really about automating something inside of the organization. So that’s where I would start.

Okay.

I also just guys, I dropped in the, six c’s. I found it on Sean’s website. I’m not gonna say that I’m I’m great at multitasking, but I only had a couple more questions left, so I wanted to drop those in. I know or I also seen that there are some use cases and things like that.

We’ll do some research and making sure and get those out. That looks like the link might have been broken. Thank you for ever, attempted to drop that in. We’ll we’ll get that cleaned up.

Future Use Cases for AI Across Industries

There’s gonna be tons of use cases on AI across the board for multiple suppliers that’ll be available until there’s university as well.

I’m earning. I failed when I did the guest hosting thing, man. I didn’t hit the commercial Not at all. Trying to make up. I noticed you guys went to Graham again for guest host and not me. I understand it.

I’m trying to make up for it.

It. He he paid us.

He literally paid us five hundred dollars to host last week.

Keep that hair off camera, though. Right? I mean, that guy’s amazing. So, I hope this has been informational. I’m gonna just kinda put a quick bow on this for our advisers. Guys, the AI conversations there. Even, you know, Sean just talked about attacking the c level conversation.

Strategies for IT Engagement

If you’re trying to help your IT directors or other guys look good, just simply say, hey. What’s your organization looking to do for AI? I have some resources that can help create a road map and and not only, like, come in with ideas, but insights on best use cases, how to implement it, how to govern it, how to secure it, and help them push that all the the conversation up and get you into those different pieces of the room if necessary. Right? So we talk a lot about all the different wide stretching organization pieces that are coming into this. This is a great perception changing, play if you’ve traditionally sold network or UCaaS. You’ve heard me say that on these calls before.

This is also if you’re mostly focused in UCaaS or contact center type players. This is a great bridge to pull those up. Hey. What’s what are you doing with all the data that’s being created from these call recordings, from all of this stuff?

How are you analyzing? How are you putting it into play to get better? What are some other tools that we can implement and pull that through? So you guys will hear more from the educational side of that from the Telarus team and resources, myself, Sam.

Team Support and Resources

We mentioned Graham and Jason, along with our amazing engineers and solutions architects are all here to help support you. Sean, I know we’re about to wrap up our segment. I really appreciate all the insight information. For any questions we didn’t get to, Doug, we’ll make sure we’ll get them in after the fact and conclude our time here with you guys today.

So much appreciate it.

Thanks, guys. Absolutely.