The Future of Modern Work: Navigating AI with Microsoft Co-Pilot

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Narrator

Welcome to Navigating Forward. Brought to you by Light Consulting, where we explore the ever evolving world of technology, data and the incredible potential for artificial intelligence. Our experts come together with the brightest minds in AI and technology, discovering the stories behind the latest advancements across industries. Our mission to guide you through the rapidly changing landscape of tech, demystifying complex concepts and showcasing the opportunities that lie ahead.

Join us as we uncover what your business needs to do now to prepare for what's coming next. This is navigating forward.

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Kevin Scott

Hi everybody. My name is Kevin Scott. I am a senior director here at Launch Consulting leading our management consulting studio. And I'm excited to be talking today with Chris Echelmeier about the intersection of AI, Microsoft Copilot, and even employee experience. So welcome, Chris. Do you want to introduce yourself?

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Chris Echelmeier

Thanks. Yeah. Because I come here, I work at Microsoft in this role, focused on employee experience. We call our role a global black belt. And I kind of sit in between our, sales teams working with our largest customers, our engineering teams who build and support the solutions, and kind of our go to market teams to to try to bring some of that voice of customer back and help out, help us all figure this out as it evolves.

00;01;41;01 - 00;02;11;21

Kevin Scott

Well, Chris, I'll, I'll kick us off with our kind of first introduction. With AI, it's really been increasingly in the last year or two, becoming a key player in reshaping our modern workplace, specifically transforming how we work and interact with technology daily. One of the standout tools is, I know you're aware in, in the Microsoft space as Copilot, which has been really making a significant impact on productivity and employee satisfaction.

00;02;11;23 - 00;02;41;03

Kevin Scott

And in fact, one of the stats here that I have from doing research is that at least 70% of Copilot users today report increased productivity, and 73 are saying that they're completing tasks faster with this help. So my first question to kick us off is, is that given these really impressive stats, how do you see AI and particularly tools like Microsoft Copilot fundamentally change the way that we're working and experiencing our job?

00;02;41;04 - 00;03;10;01

Chris Echelmeier

Yeah, it's a good question. It's interesting. First in the, the speed with which this is this has come to everybody in small and large companies. So so it began with, easy things like summarizing a meeting so I don't have to attend the meeting. Or maybe I joined it late in summarizing. So we saw little gains like that that add up to those statistics you said.

00;03;10;03 - 00;03;39;28

Chris Echelmeier

Like going beyond just summarizing meetings, but really helping, people in different kinds of roles do their job far more effectively. Right? And freeing up some of the, I it's maybe an overuse word, but freeing up some of the drudgery of of work. Right. The task staffs, the preparation stuff. All that recap. So helping you to synthesize a ton of information that would take hours, maybe days sometimes.

00;03;40;00 - 00;04;08;15

Chris Echelmeier

And doing that in minutes. So it's really cool to see that evolve, inside of customers. And when I say that evolve, it's an evolving from these individual use cases, like it's saving somebody time from a meeting to now, looking at a sales organization or looking at an R&D organization and empowering that broader org to do things differently.

00;04;08;17 - 00;04;39;11

Kevin Scott

Great. And I love the word drudgery. I think it's so vivid. And it really emphasizes how mundane some of the tasks that we all do in our everyday lives. So to to start to peel back some of the layers of this onion, as I continues to really reshape our work culture. It's important to start with why and why organizations invest and are continually making AI, a part of their business strategy.

00;04;39;14 - 00;05;04;26

Kevin Scott

And in understanding these business outcomes, we often aim to achieve how we measure value. So my next question is dress. How can organizations effectively communicate the benefits of AI to their teams? Address concerns about AI even replacing humans and their roles, and fostering a culture of AI adoption?

00;05;05;02 - 00;05;29;16

Chris Echelmeier

That's a great question. It's an that. It's a big one. What we what we've seen as a best practice at, at some of our, our customers who have adopted copilot, kind of at scale early on is, we've seen a shift in how leaders talk with employees about gen AI, about this, and about the impact on work.

00;05;29;19 - 00;05;54;15

Chris Echelmeier

So and a lot of companies, leaders might send an email communication from the CEO once a month or once a quarter, and they may have quarterly town halls. So, like the cadence of communicating with leaders is pretty infrequent, and they tend to be pretty meaty communications. We're seeing that that change now. And they're using a tool called the engage here.

00;05;54;18 - 00;06;20;28

Chris Echelmeier

That, you know, think of it as an internal social network, but it's really focused on culture and communications. And so when leaders use that, we're seeing that cadence be weekly. So your CEO can have a weekly conversation with employees, and employees can reply back. And, and the teams that are managing copilot rollout get really great data on how employees are engaging around this new capability.

00;06;20;28 - 00;06;46;14

Chris Echelmeier

And they see experts answering questions. So that kind of thing like like re re, thinking how communications are done is the first thing. And it also fosters trust in leadership and trust in the fact that we're rolling AI because you're you're able to course correct communications weekly if you think about it. Right. So you get great feedback and you can see that this didn't land very well.

00;06;46;22 - 00;07;27;17

Chris Echelmeier

We need to to change a little bit of the narrative with employees next week and make sure they understand this key point. And so that kind of thing is, is like evolving. So it's a you're dating copilot, but you're also evolving how you do comms, how you think about communities inside of the organization and, and rolling out things like that as far as mitigating the AI, the human roles, I think it's a fear that a lot of employees have that we haven't really seen, because most companies we've seen that the communication that they say is, you know, the goal for, for having this tool internally is not to lay off employees.

00;07;27;17 - 00;07;55;20

Chris Echelmeier

It's to grow market share and to help us, our company, do better. Help us all do better. And and back to the thriving conversation. Help you as an employee thrive. And that means if you thrive, we're going to do better as an organization. And so again, part of those communications, I haven't seen people directly say this isn't going to take your job, but but they're focusing on the real positive things that we see coming out of it.

00;07;55;22 - 00;07;57;20

Chris Echelmeier

And take the drudgery out of work.

00;07;57;20 - 00;08;30;04

Kevin Scott

Right. We can hear and watch, really relate to the importance of culture and communications up front with any transformation like this. As we went through a pretty big pivot last year to become an AI first digital consulting transformation organization, and we ourselves invested in internal organizational change management, where we really were focused on defining that change story and arming that with our leaders to be very consistent and intense.

00;08;30;04 - 00;08;31;12

Kevin Scott

Right to really sounds awesome.

00;08;31;12 - 00;08;54;05

Chris Echelmeier

From the from. Yeah. And you know, culture is a big is a, you know, big sort of loaded word sometimes. But and the thing that we're seeing that's become really important is for, for companies to have this culture of, you know, Microsoft, we talk about growth mindset all the time. And that's one of our, our big cultural pillars, it's growth mindset.

00;08;54;08 - 00;09;20;00

Chris Echelmeier

The DNI being a diverse, inclusive organization because that matters when we're building software and solutions for the whole world. And that's kind of woven into our mission. Right. But I'm seeing that adopted at other companies. Sometimes they call it a learning culture. We want to be a learning culture. But what what we're essentially saying is, if you're going to, you know, step back and say, like copilot is only a year old, right?

00;09;20;02 - 00;09;40;03

Chris Echelmeier

It is Gen I think is at at most companies, not very old. We have a lot to learn about how to use it, and it's going to be an ongoing learning. If then and so that continual learning, that's the kind of culture that companies need to really foster, enable to sort of fail, learn and then scale the solution.

00;09;40;03 - 00;09;48;22

Chris Echelmeier

Right. So that's where you guys come into play in helping leaders to kind of understand that narrative. You know, how to drive that.

00;09;48;24 - 00;10;00;21

Kevin Scott

So yeah, yeah, yeah. You mentioned you described it as a growth mindset learning mindset. I've also a big yes mindset.

00;10;00;24 - 00;10;02;23

Chris Echelmeier

That great curiosity right.

00;10;02;25 - 00;10;32;13

Kevin Scott

Oftentimes with transformation and and new technologies like this, there's oftentimes some of the squishy benefits of like oh this is going to help automate tasks or things like that. But really getting to measurement, which is really important to, higher level leaders within Oregon measuring the impact. And I on the workplace does go beyond productivity and employee perception, playing into their crucial roles.

00;10;32;15 - 00;10;46;21

Kevin Scott

Chris, how how do you see AI influencing employee morale and engagement, and especially in ensuring that employees are engaged but not overloaded? You mentioned the word thrive and just hear a bit more about that.

00;10;46;23 - 00;11;15;20

Chris Echelmeier

Yeah, that that whole concept of thriving that we've really baked into our, you know, our, our sort of HR organization or people organization at Microsoft talks about thriving a lot externally and internally. And again, that's being both empowered and having the energy right to do meaningful work. So when we look at that, if you think about what what gen I can do, what copilot can do for employees, first off, it's going to give you time back.

00;11;15;20 - 00;11;42;28

Chris Echelmeier

And we'll talk about some case studies that we've heard already where where we're seeing hours per week giving back that that time giving back could be less. Had not having to work as late on a Friday afternoon. It could be not having to catch up on weekends. Hopefully it could just be, you're far more happier about the work you do because the the low level task stuff, the research stuff is done for you.

00;11;43;01 - 00;12;04;26

Chris Echelmeier

But all of that, that's, you know, when you think about what gen I can do for an individual, it should point to those pillars of, you know, being empowered, being much more invested in your work, having the energy because you're not back to back in meetings all day long. You don't have to attend all the meetings that you're not in, because you can have copilot summarize those.

00;12;04;26 - 00;12;19;27

Chris Echelmeier

Right. So those kinds of things we know all can support that notion of being a thriving employee. And we know thriving employees produce more. They they're more effective. They're higher performers. They do better. So we try to understand what makes them thrive.

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Kevin Scott

Right? Yeah.

00;12;21;09 - 00;12;24;19

Chris Echelmeier

Measuring that through surveys and through behavioral analytics.

00;12;24;19 - 00;12;54;04

Kevin Scott

Speaking from my own experience, I know, doing tasks faster, doing more tasks and saving time is one of the key things, one of the bigger values that I feel that kind of comes with that is the quality of the work that I'm able to do in the space for which I have the ability to do more innovative thinking and more strategic aspects to, a quick baseline that I already know exists as opposed.

00;12;54;06 - 00;12;55;10

Kevin Scott

Right, right.

00;12;55;12 - 00;13;19;03

Chris Echelmeier

Yeah. That's a that's a huge, huge thing. Began the the individual benefits are, are really tangible to, to people, you know, individuals using copilot freeing up time and all of this. But the real scale benefits start to happen when you can look at an entire org or an entire department and make that and the whole department sort of produce more.

00;13;19;03 - 00;13;42;19

Chris Echelmeier

I mean, you can measure this to right? You can measure it from surveys, you can measure it from behavioral analytics, and you can measure it from business outcomes like improving sales or, giving salaries. I think we had one customer that said their salaries are able to make like 40% more calls, outbound calls per week, because they're freed up from some of the low level stuff.

00;13;42;19 - 00;13;51;19

Chris Echelmeier

And if they're making more calls per week, they're hopefully going to sell more and do better as individuals. But the org will do better to right?

00;13;51;21 - 00;14;05;27

Kevin Scott

Yeah, that's pretty powerful. And it's, kind of aggregating those bottom up KPIs like an individual's time savings and more, looking at a top down a really, what does this mean for either the top or the bottom line?

00;14;06;03 - 00;14;37;12

Chris Echelmeier

I think from we talk about, departments, entire departments doing better. An example would be, we have R&D departments that I work a lot in health care. So I have biotech companies where there are teams are able to measurably, increase their sales. Oh, they're sorry. R&D cycles. And, and the hope is they're going to be able to get drug to the market faster, know, like lifesaving therapies for sellers.

00;14;37;12 - 00;15;10;29

Chris Echelmeier

We have some really into sellers and easiest to measure because you can measure how much they sell. You can measure how many outbound calls they make. If that's what it is. Many chief revenue officer is will know that the the value to the company of an hour of a seller's time in front of a customer. So if your sellers are spending, you know, 20 hours a week of their 40 hour a week, more or less in front of a customer, and they can add two more hours to that.

00;15;11;01 - 00;15;41;02

Chris Echelmeier

Theoretically, they can say, this is how much that's worth. So we have a customer, lumen. And they're they're research that they showed was, if you think about a complex sales cycle, complex customer, like we both talk to complex organizations with complex solutions that work, we're working with them on. It typically takes at lumen a seller for hours to do research for, a bigger customer, a meeting, a customer event, probably more than four hours.

00;15;41;02 - 00;16;05;16

Chris Echelmeier

If you're talking like an executive meeting because you want to research the executives and all of this, that was a lot of time spent in the evenings and weekends doing that work. They're telling us that it takes 15 minutes to do that now. So looking across, you know, their CRM, looking across, ServiceNow, looking across websites, all sorts of areas, they can get that report put into a PowerPoint to share with the team.

00;16;05;21 - 00;16;33;21

Chris Echelmeier

So everyone's aligned for that call on Monday morning or whatever that is. They calculated that four hours per seller back each week is $50 million over 12 months for their 3000 person sales org. So think of that now at every department, at a company, right in the kinds of things that they're trying to do. That's what's exciting to hear about is some of these some of these real measurable impact case studies.

00;16;33;23 - 00;16;55;27

Chris Echelmeier

And we're seeing them, we're seeing them like daily and weekly. Now it's the, the cadence of this is really increased from six months ago, where it was a lot of experimentation on how to use copilot. It was a lot of focus on how do I use it to summarize a meeting, how do I do this? Now we're getting really advanced use cases, like I am meeting with the CEO of a company next week.

00;16;55;27 - 00;17;12;00

Chris Echelmeier

I want to know everything about, you know, all the speeches that CEO gave last week or last year. I want to know, all the initiatives there are people, strategy, plan. I can get all of that data in a report in minutes. So it's fascinating to see that.

00;17;12;06 - 00;17;32;16

Kevin Scott

Yeah. You spoke at the beginning about how I was so good at just easy and kind of generic, like one size fits all type of use cases. And now it's getting to be such educated that it helps it in a sellers world so much different than a research and developer or a designer.

00;17;32;18 - 00;18;13;17

Chris Echelmeier

Yeah. It's interesting. Like from from R&D and like product engineering teams and people building things, just, decreasing the amount of status meetings that have to happen to keep everybody abreast of what's going on. So you can have copilot do a lot of that for you. So fewer people have to attend some of those status meetings. And you can everyone can remain on the same page, but then also doing the research like the, the, the recording, the, the drudgery of that kind of job, and getting everybody aligned so that the meetings that they are having are productive meetings where they're making decisions rather than just informing everybody on what's going on.

00;18;13;17 - 00;18;40;07

Chris Echelmeier

So you take that drudgery out and allow the researchers to do the research right. That is really simple stuff, but it's super powerful at scale. You know, across some of the bio farmers I work with have thousands of employees doing research, and they're all using copilot when they all start to figure this out, like that sort of cumulative, you know, net effect, almost like a network effect of of everyone doing this becomes really powerful.

00;18;40;10 - 00;19;08;21

Chris Echelmeier

And I think we don't know what's going to happen there. Right. So, so, there's a lot of open questions about how this is going to change an organization. So if you're a leader of an organization and this is really happening, that sales example of four hours a week, you might actually look at your sales org and say, maybe I can cross-train some teams now to deliver better service to customers because they've freed up some time and they can start to learn other parts of solutions.

00;19;08;21 - 00;19;21;21

Chris Echelmeier

And I can be a better organization for my customers. Or my researchers can work together across the organization faster and deliver a more comprehensive product. Right?

00;19;21;23 - 00;19;51;08

Kevin Scott

Yeah. And I think that's a good transition into skilling. And as I becomes more integrated in our daily work processes, there is this shift of new skills that we're all needing to to start to learn in and uplevel in each day. What strategies, can organizations in your eyes adopt to foster that growth mindset or learning mindset to be more AI ready.

00;19;51;11 - 00;20;26;09

Chris Echelmeier

Right. Yeah. It's interesting, you know, when when we started working with copilot, I think a lot of the initial focus was on how to use copilot, like how to how to write better prompts. And there was a lot of training on that. And, and where we've evolved to is, is this understanding that, yes, you need to learn how to use it itself, but there are there are skills that, that, everyday employees that who maybe aren't even managers, they need to understand, like one of them we've seen is like being able to think like a manager and understand the power of delegation.

00;20;26;09 - 00;20;48;22

Chris Echelmeier

Because when you, you know, as a manager of your delegating work, that's one thing. But if you're if you're an individual doing research, delegating work to copilot, is a skill set that people don't always have. So just understanding like how to think like a manager, training and cultural shift and skilling around growth mindset is another one that we've seen.

00;20;48;22 - 00;21;13;29

Chris Echelmeier

Like what does that actually mean in practice? And that might be internal training that a company produces and shares internally because it's about their culture. Right? So we're seeing those kinds of things. And then there's there's all these other soft skills that, that I think a lot of employees are going to have to learn. And so if you're like, even if you're doing data entry, copilot takes a lot of that work away.

00;21;14;01 - 00;21;32;07

Chris Echelmeier

You may now start to start to do more analysis with that data, because Copilot has taken a lot of that, the raw entry stuff. And maybe does some of that for you. So that skill for that person doing data entry might be you need to become more of a data driven person and understand how to do a little bit more.

00;21;32;07 - 00;21;42;04

Chris Echelmeier

That's a great thing for that person, because they're going to hopefully have better skills and maybe have a better job prospects and sort of future prospects, and we're seeing that everywhere.

00;21;42;11 - 00;22;06;12

Kevin Scott

Yeah. Last year there was, one of the Work trend Index researchers that was released by Microsoft, had an article about it. It was named Will I Fix Work? And it was one of the, in one of the findings, it talked about the main skills that would be needed over the years to come. And the two that I really grab emotional intelligence and analytical judgment.

00;22;06;12 - 00;22;37;08

Kevin Scott

And they're kind of like being in the game where emotional intelligence is, well, when do I have the human side of me take over and not default? Yeah. And then the analytical judgment skills, the opposite. It's when should I lean on using AI as opposed to just using human judgment.  

00;22;26;17 - 00;22;57;17

Chris Echelmeier

Yeah. It's interesting. And and that that oracle, that whole work trend index site, there's a it's part of a site called Work Lab where we share a lot of research that we do. and I think it's a, it's, you know, I cannot underscore it like enough right now. What we, what we know today about how this, you know, like, what's needed to make AI successful and all of the things you have to do around people and culture and, and skilling and growth, what we know today is going to change probably six months or a year from now.

00;22;57;19 - 00;23;17;01

Chris Echelmeier

It used to be we looked five years out. What kind of skills are we going to need as an organization to be successful, knowing as an org that we might move into this market or that these shifts in our, in our, industry are happening now. We're looking six months out, one year out to see these kinds of changes.

00;23;17;01 - 00;23;41;12

Chris Echelmeier

So, so the the challenge I think we've seen at customers is it's really hard to understand. You know, you talk about these skills like emotional intelligence. they can be codified like in your job profile. They're certainly probably in people's LinkedIn profiles. but it's really hard for companies to have an inventory of like, like where are these skills in my organization?

00;23;41;12 - 00;24;00;23

Chris Echelmeier

Do I need to hire or externally? Do I need to train people? Which people have these in the organization. So that's a that's a challenge that that companies have always tried to solve for. But it's become increasingly more important with the advent of this massive change called called AI.

00;24;00;26 - 00;24;28;20

Kevin Scott

That's happening broader than skills. We've we've defined it as one of our capabilities being in performance management. And it's helping organizations really have a strategy and a purposeful vision and measurement of how and what competencies or skills they want to invest in. And then even down to the point of what do we use to manage that inventory of skills, seeing those gaps.

00;24;28;23 - 00;24;37;17

Kevin Scott

and then make more intentional investments into up skilling or up leveling, different competencies for different groups.

00;24;37;21 - 00;25;02;01

Chris Echelmeier

Yeah, yeah. And this is where the partnership between launch and Microsoft makes sense because we have a, we have a, tool or a it's a, it's a solution built on top of Veeva called Skills in Veeva. It leverages different parts of the Veeva stack. One of the big ones is if you're learning Azure's these insights to help you understand, like, where are my skills in my network at work?

00;25;02;04 - 00;25;31;23

Chris Echelmeier

But if you think about that, the skills still live. Probably in an HR system like a workday or a successfactors, training is done through an LMS and so you have all of these different systems where skills live. But for for a lot of employees, I mean, me included, when we started doing work on skills in Veeva, I, of course went to my employee profile internally and looked at it, and I had not updated skills of mine in like eight years.

00;25;31;25 - 00;25;56;28

Chris Echelmeier

So they were they were pretty funny because it was like going back in time and looking at what I was working on eight years ago. The the thing that we are doing now is, is leveraging the Microsoft Graph. So, you know, all of the work you do every day, all of the sort of concepts and keywords that you're doing, the graph is now looking at that and saying, it looks like you're doing a lot of work around these three skills, and they're not in your profile.

00;25;56;28 - 00;26;14;25

Chris Echelmeier

Would you like to add those to your profile? Now you have to help wire that up for a customer. But the technology, the way it works is it nudges me and says, hey, Chris, looks like you're doing a lot of work on analytical thinking. and which is it? Like, how proficient are you? Would you like to add it to your profile?

00;26;15;02 - 00;26;38;27

Chris Echelmeier

Here are some suggested courses to learn some more about this. And so that's at the individual level. But again leaders can look at that at scale and say where do I have that analytic analytical thinking skill set in my org. And I see it, it's in these three departments. I need to figure out a way to connect these three departments that are really good at it, with these other departments that are not so good at it.

00;26;39;01 - 00;26;55;29

Chris Echelmeier

Right? So that's the kind of, the kind of things that we're trying to enable. Again, the technology to support it, you have to do some work not only to kind of wire it up, but also to build that into the mindset and the kind of the way that the organization operates.

00;26;56;05 - 00;27;32;27

Kevin Scott

Yeah. At at launch, and I had mentioned the term AI ready, last year, we were really intentional in defining need for different competencies, in terms of using AI and fluency and competency and application were the three key ones. And we purposely really built four different modules that that focus on building on each of those blocks. And we had a measurement in the form of a quiz or a loose exam at the end of it to really just ensure that that knowledge and comprehension was, was captured.

00;27;32;27 - 00;27;43;28

Kevin Scott

So, so learning these soft skills in AI of itself can become a formal learning and development initiative. within our expectations too, that we see.

00;27;44;00 - 00;28;11;01

Chris Echelmeier

Yeah. And we, we actually have, all AI Academy that we use internally at our customers have access to it. There's gonna be a bunch of announcements over the next few weeks about that, like so customers of copilot are going to get this AI Academy. Now, the lot of training content. It's up to you as an organization on on you know how to focus it in on the right employees and, and how to sort of marry that AI academy content to your culture and to what you're doing.

00;28;11;01 - 00;28;22;10

Chris Echelmeier

But it's it's really fascinating to see all of this is pretty much in that new stuff that that has happened in the last year of sort of copilot.

00;28;22;13 - 00;28;53;19

Kevin Scott

Yeah. So fast, in the blink of an eye. Well, well, Chris, we covered a number of different topics around this intersection of, of AI, Microsoft Copilot and, and the evolving landscape of employee experience. from cultural shifts to measurement and skilling. What's maybe one final takeaway that you'd like to, to share in terms of, some of your thinking with how you speak and prioritize topics with your clients?

00;28;53;21 - 00;29;14;19

Chris Echelmeier

Yeah. I mean, I'll give you a maybe just a couple. the first one I think is just sort of underscore this whole conversation. This is what we're talking about here is a whole new way of working. It involves both software and people. So it's not just rolling out the technology and sending out a training class. It is a cultural shift.

00;29;14;21 - 00;29;36;20

Chris Echelmeier

Right? And that's really what it is at the end of the day. But then if you think about that, the customers that have been successful are the ones that have top down exact support for this. They have a plan and they actually talk about, KPIs and, and measures of success beyond just it's save this many hours.

00;29;36;23 - 00;30;05;22

Chris Echelmeier

So they're looking at this many hours are saved. I know the value of, of an hour for a sales person. They bring in, you know, $400 of revenue per hour. If I can give them four hours back a week, potentially, that's 1600 bucks. a week added to our bottom line, to our sales growth by having that kind of, of a plan and a KPI and working backwards from that KPI to understand how are we going to achieve this.

00;30;05;25 - 00;30;31;16

Chris Echelmeier

So I've seen customers even use like Viva goals to manage that. As an example. But having that plan and then part of that plan needs to have kind of a culture and communications strategy because, culture needs to shift to a more of a growth mindset culture. And again, communications needs to be sped up. I mean, the pace of work is speeding up the pace of change is speeding up.

00;30;31;18 - 00;30;43;09

Chris Echelmeier

You can't do that with the old way of communicating quarterly or monthly, right? This is a weekly fast feedback type of conversation that we we like to enable for our customers.

00;30;43;09 - 00;31;11;02

Kevin Scott

Yeah. And that's that's no that's no small order. I know that with launch in Microsoft, we both share, the ability to do things like workshops and out of the possible accelerator programs. That really helps work with those cross-functional leaders in a collaborative manner to look at different roles and jobs to be done, to really find those best use cases where I can support.

00;31;11;04 - 00;31;36;11

Kevin Scott

but while that may even also seem daunting, my advice is always just to simply begin with a conversation or what we call discovery conversations, which is simply just getting the ball rolling by. Talking about this is where we are at today. This is where we think we want to go tomorrow. And these are some of the constraints and the timelines and the broader business goals that we want to accomplish.

00;31;36;13 - 00;31;39;26

Kevin Scott

It's pretty simple. It it's with just a conversation like that. Yeah.

00;31;40;00 - 00;32;09;10

Chris Echelmeier

Exactly. Yeah. I think, you know, workshop can can seem like there's a lot of work to be done to prep for that. So prior to what we might talk about as a workshop or an exact briefing or something like that, having a conversation together one. Right. But bring the right leaders who have the right goals and outcomes that they want to see from this, so that we can start there rather than starting at the bottom and trying to work our way upwards, you know, in sort of fishing around.

00;32;09;17 - 00;32;27;09

Chris Echelmeier

So starting from that outcome that you want and think of it that way, and then you can start to say, okay, here are the things that we need to do and maybe the order that we need to talk about them in order for you to realize that goal. And that's a easy hour or two conversation to have as a discussion, as you say.

00;32;27;10 - 00;32;46;29

Kevin Scott

Well, Chris, thanks. Thanks so much for your time and, and over these last few weeks that I've gotten to know you. It's been a really pleasure, having so much in common and such similar thoughts about how these transformations are not just technology, but really people and process related as well. So it's been a pleasure and thanks so much.

00;32;46;29 - 00;32;57;20

Chris Echelmeier

Yeah, it's been it's been a total pleasure. And I'm super excited to start bringing you into some of my customers and having these conversations. So I see a ton of value in this partnership. Thanks a lot. We're ready.

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