What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Telecom/5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
AI Excellence in Silicon Valley: Microsoft's Role in Community and Innovation
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Unlock the secrets of how Microsoft is leading the charge in making AI accessible to everyone with our special guest, Ashley, a data and AI evangelist straight from the heart of Silicon Valley. Discover Microsoft's groundbreaking efforts to empower small and medium-sized businesses through tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot. Ashley sheds light on the pivotal role of Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus in driving innovation and supporting the local community. Tune in to understand how these initiatives are not just about technology but about creating equitable access and addressing unique challenges faced by businesses of all sizes.
Experience the revolutionary changes AI brings to email management and business operations. Through engaging stories and real-world applications, learn how Microsoft Copilot 365 is transforming productivity, from streamlining email tasks to enhancing efficiency in large enterprises. Hear firsthand accounts of how AI solutions from partners like GitHub and ServiceNow are making a tangible difference across industries. We’ll also dive into the capabilities of platforms like Azure AI Studio, which are enabling seamless AI integration, improving customer service, and reducing operational costs. Don't miss out on these valuable insights into the future of AI in business.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everyone, fascinating chat today. I'm excited to dive into a conversation about how Microsoft is not just leading the charge with AI, but making it more accessible for everyone, from individuals to businesses alike. With Silicon Valley local legend Ashley, how are you?
Speaker 2:Fantastic, Evan. Thanks for having me on. Super excited to have a dialogue.
Speaker 1:As am I. And why don't we start with some introductions to yourself, your journey to Microsoft and a little bit about your mission?
Speaker 2:You bet. So I live in the Bay Area between the San Francisco and the Silicon Valley corridor, and I've been here for a long time, even before Microsoft, and I have a currently at Microsoft and currently the data and AI evangelist, which gives me a unique title that allows me to engage with all types of customers, from small business all the way up to the largest enterprises, and, being here in Silicon Valley, it gives us a unique opportunity to really get the leading edge futuristic view of how our customers really want to use AI, and so it becomes an exciting opportunity to just really get in deep understand where the industries are going and then be able to apply our technologies to support their needs.
Speaker 1:Fantastic and you know many of us think as Microsoft being at the mothership in Redmond, washington, but of course, microsoft a huge and enduring presence in Silicon Valley. Maybe talk about that and the overall vision for the use of AI of technology.
Speaker 2:It's also the hotspot of VC activities, mergers, acquisitions great amount of change takes place here.
Speaker 2:So having a campus in Silicon Valley and Mountain View is really critical to our strategy, and supporting the local community is just as important.
Speaker 2:So one of my other roles at Microsoft is I help support the sponsorship we have with a local nonprofit organization. It's called the Association of Corporate Growth, and the Silicon Valley chapter is here, and I happen to also be the president of the board for that Silicon Valley chapter. So what that does. It gives myself, but also the company, a unique view into the needs of companies, executives and the organization of companies, executives and the organization. As part of giving back to the community, we get a chance to really help foster community, foster networking, foster thought leadership, and for me it's a selfish way to really understand the ins and outs of what's going on within the organizations that we support. So, between our technology expertise and our community involvement, I feel like we have a really good pulse on the industry and you know our vision is to help democratize AI to all levels. So I'm super excited to talk to you about that more today, but at a high level. That's kind of what we do in Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1:Wow, what an amazing point of view and perspective. I love the idea of democratizing AI. I go back multiple decades, sadly, as far as using Microsoft tools, and many tools required certifications and training, all kinds of enablement in the enterprise, and that became almost a career in and of itself. That became almost a career in and of itself. But you know, maybe talk about the idea, the vision, of a person or a company with fewer technical skills taking advantage of AI and the new Microsoft tools like Copilot.
Speaker 2:You bet you know, I think, as far as our conversation I'd love to kind of there are two types of conversations. There's a conversation with large enterprise customers and they have unique requirements and they also scale in a different way, but they also have better you know, more resources to help do those unique use cases. And you bring up a great point, evan. What about the other community, the SMB, the small business, the medium-sized company, and how do we help them, the small business, the medium-sized company, and how do we help them? Even talking with you, I'm sure you see the same thing that I do. I do a lot of speeches, a lot of conversations, and we have a tendency to talk about the big, sexy, fantastic use cases around healthcare or medical research or finance with the larger scale companies, but I've discovered there's not as much conversation about how to help the local businesses. Have you seen the same thing in these conversations with people?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think there's sort of a new digital divide. It's now skill sets and knowledge and training and know-how and you know, and it's still not easy to create a really great report or a really great presentation. It can be done, but it requires a lot of training and some unique, let's say, learning. And I think with these new tools, small business owners can do things that they typically just couldn't do, wouldn't do or had to hire a consultant maybe to help them with. So what a sea change for those small business owners out there.
Speaker 2:You're hitting on. The most important factor is it's becoming more self-service. In the history of our deployment of technology, we oftentimes make it think it's so complicated, you have to hire experts, but what Microsoft has done, we actually have a unique advantage because so many of the companies out there use Microsoft suites of products Microsoft 365, word, powerpoint, teams, you name it and so, as a result, what we've done at Microsoft is we've prepackaged AI in a box as part of Microsoft 365. And when talking with companies that have fewer resources and even large enterprises, by packaging it all together, it makes it so much easier to roll out because there's a really at Microsoft.
Speaker 2:Security is job one, privacy is job one, ethics and AI is job one, privacy is job one, ethics and AI is job one. And it's really tough. A lot of small business owners, and in the mid market especially, they're a little nervous about the risks that they might take on if they deploy AI as it relates to security, privacy, ethics, privacy, ethics and so by putting all of that together in a prepackaged format through Microsoft 365 Copilot, we're able to really help the smaller businesses deploy and roll it out with no fear of missing out on something super important. And then there's also a human element that I'll dive into in just a second. You can see how that could really help span the adoption of the technology through all sectors of the community right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it's a total game changer and I think it's almost the easy button that you saw in those ads all those years ago, adding an easy button to the full Microsoft 365 suite, and it's also getting easier just from a system standpoint. You have AI, also getting easier just from a, you know, system standpoint. You have AI PCs that out of the box, you know, you turn it on and it just works with Copilot. There's no fumbling around for third-party applications or trying to figure out how to configure or set up. You know AI on a new machine that's purpose built you, you know, purpose-designed for AI and co-pilots. So really great. When those PC upgrade cycles hit the marketplace, it's going to be a big year for the AI PC as well.
Speaker 2:You know and Evan, you're hitting on. A really important point is we oftentimes don't talk about the human element of adoption for new technologies. I always have a personal story I like to tell, because this new AI revolution is. It's not new for us to launch a new technology trend. I love talking about emails.
Speaker 2:If you think back before the Internet came out the idea of having emails, nobody really had email systems. It wasn't until the mid nineties where AOL and Yahoo and Hotmail we all had a Hotmail account and we started to learn how to use a new technology. But in my company back then it was really tough to get the team to get the people to actually start using it, because we were used to making phone calls and meeting customers in person and it felt like it was an impersonal way of interacting with customers. But you can only imagine, the sooner that you could jump on to the email revolution, the faster your productivity increased. And so we're kind of in the same window here.
Speaker 2:Different technology, but the same concept is true how do you help the individual employees benefit immediately from the technology? So for AI and Copilot through Microsoft, suddenly you have the ability to just give it to everybody in your company and they can start figuring out how to use it on their own. And as they start to dive in on a personal level, they start to see the benefits and the value that comes from it, and so the adoption helps fuel the industry, and the industry gives back with its technology. It's kind of a give and take, and I think we're on the cusp of that with Microsoft Copilot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, really great point. It's so funny you mentioned email with the revolution of Microsoft Teams. We're all doing video, we're doing messaging, we're collaborating and document sharing and yet we can't get away from email. We're all overwhelmed with email and there hasn't been really a revolution or a big step change in email management forever. So the idea of an intelligent layer on top of your email that can filter and sort and search and prioritize and summarize that it's so exciting for us, business users and small business owners. And it's not just. Let's not leave out the big software companies, big companies that, of course, microsoft works with as well.
Speaker 2:You know how are you partnering with those, you know big companies, you know, to companies to get AI to the masses. Yeah, it's a fun experience because larger enterprises cover the entire gamut of adoption. So our largest customers, where they have tens of thousands of employees, they are rolling out Microsoft Copilot to their employees because they have the same issue I just mentioned, that people need to be comfortable with the technology to really start leveraging the value of the technology. So our largest customers are rolling out Microsoft Copilot 365. They're doing Copilot for sales, for service and for finance, just so their employees can start seeing the benefit and the value of being able to consolidate, sort and summarize emails.
Speaker 2:I have a personal story again where I had to miss a team's meeting because I had to take my doggo to the vet and I missed the entire meeting and it was something I should have been Alan.
Speaker 2:So when I came back to the office I hit a co-pilot summary of the meeting and I literally got a quick understanding of the theme who spoke, what the themes were, what the outcomes were, and I was able to ask what my tasks were, and it summarized three items that I was expected to kind of follow up on, and so my manager was so surprised when I immediately followed up with all that information because he had forgotten that I could summarize the team meeting. So he thought he was going to have to meet with me personally, explain what I had missed, ask for the information. But by summarizing it on Teams, I was able to take action, send it over. Everything was able to move forward much quicker. So, to your point, even our large enterprise companies, microsoft included, we're using Copilot for our own individual needs to help accelerate adoption and success. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:Oh, totally Really exciting times. And it's not just Microsoft working alone. I think you are partnering with other organizations, sister organizations like GitHub to bring AI to more people, Azure AI Studio to make AI accessible across industries and across developer teams. I mean, you're involved in all of that.
Speaker 2:You're right. That's a great segue to talk more about, like you said earlier, the enterprise adoption, because our largest customers are leveraging our Azure platform, as well as GitHub, to help accelerate their own development of their own products. So you can imagine all the benefits we're talking about for AI, our largest customers want to integrate that same AI technology into their products, so that I haven't met one person yet that really enjoys interfacing with an online bot. The bots have a conversational element, but they usually end up hitting a roadblock and you end up talking to a live human anyway. So it's like ah, and with the new copilot capabilities, you can imagine our largest customers are going to incorporate and have already taken the same technology from Azure OpenAI corporate and have already taken the same technology from Azure OpenAI.
Speaker 2:We also have a model as a service on Azure where we bring in third-party large language models, small language models, and we encapsulate them inside the Azure framework. So you have security, you have privacy, you have ethics of AI all packaged on Azure. So whether you're rolling out something for your own company or you're building something that you will incorporate into your own products, it's really safe to understand that the technologies are available inside of Azure and you can pull them in and just incorporate them into your own solution, and that really helps the enterprise organizations more quickly leverage the value of AI and bring it directly to their customers as part of their own products.
Speaker 1:Yeah, fantastic opportunity, and it really is today that this is all being realized. This isn't like a tomorrow story. You know you're seeing use cases like sales modeling and forecasting and automating customer service in an intelligent way, Even content creation generation, something I do every day. You know businesses are really streamlining operations, improving decision making. But what else? What else are you seeing out in the field?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we got some really good customer examples. One of my favorite one is ServiceNow, who's a huge company that's been partnering with Microsoft and working. They have their own large language models that they've been using inside their company for years and now, with the adoption of these other LLMs, they've been very creative in leveraging Azure to help pull in the AI components that I just mentioned and you mentioned, but AI Studio, where you can custom wrap your AI solutions to fit your unique needs. You can pick model as a service. So every large language model and every small language model has a unique value proposition that it brings to certain use cases and certain verticals. So they're doing an excellent job at picking and choosing the correct model for the correct need and they layer that into their platform.
Speaker 2:And ServiceNow has basically a service and support platform so companies can actually do ticketing and process change management and you can imagine, as some of the stories I just layered in around email consolidation and teams, you could put that technology into a service platform.
Speaker 2:You're in the position to solve customer problems faster. So if somebody opens a service ticket related to your product and you pull that service request into the system and then you have your call agent, using Copilot in the background to help answer them. Pulling in historical facts about previous faults resolution techniques for the issue at hand, you get what we call mean time to resolve is suddenly shortened. And there are two benefits to that. The customer is satisfied because they get to the problem faster and it gets fixed faster. And then, from the company perspective, operational costs drop, because the sooner you can drop a resolve in a ticket, you can move on to the next one, and that's actually one of the best use cases for any company to first use whether you're in a small business or a large enterprise is how to help improve customer service and streamline the effectiveness of that process.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's fantastic and it seems the key for me is really just to get started. Whether you're an executive or an individual contributor in a large company or you're a business owner, I mean you don't want to be left behind and you don't want to just read the headlines and the trade press about what's happening. You want to get hands-on. And the beauty of Copilot is it's just so easy to try and experiment with. But how would you recommend folks or companies get started?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's the big question I always have in other sessions is all this technology is fascinating. It sounds a little complex. How do I really jump on? I don't want to be left. I'm being told by the industries that if I wait and I don't get involved I'm going to be left behind.
Speaker 2:So by democratizing the adoption, through Microsoft Copilot, we have Copilot for salespeople, copilot for service and Copilot for finance that are uniquely centered on that. So it's just an added license on top of your existing subscription. So for any business, you just layer it on and let your people start using it. Business, you just layer it on and let your people start using it. And to help with that, we're actually we are actually rolling out an educational series on all the various co-pilots that are available. And we're partnering with the Association of Corporate Growth that I spoke about earlier and we're rolling out a whole series between now and December to really educate everybody on every, every component of these co-pilot solutions.
Speaker 2:And we do have a fantastic series or episode in that series where we talk about doing the custom co-pilot. So if there is a company that's much further along and they're ready to build out a custom version, then we have that capability in one of the episodes as well. So it'll be a really good way for people that are listening in now to really just kind of listen in, learn quickly on how to adopt the technology. But the trick, as you mentioned, evan, is it's okay to get started. You don't have to be perfect, and it's going to take some time for your own employees to figure out how to use the technology. So the sooner you let them have access to it, the sooner they'll start discovering new ways of leveraging it for their own benefit, that's fantastic.
Speaker 1:I think the exciting part is we're just getting started as an industry, as users and customers. I think we're in the first or second inning of a very long ballgame. Having said that, you have just an amazing roadmap. What are some of the key trends future trends that we should be watching for?
Speaker 2:You bet. Yeah, it's really about what first thing is. We talked about race prepackaging it to just make it easy to use. I mean, most of us are probably using some form of technology in our personal lives, so it's like adapting it and adopting it to the small business and the mid-market is fantastic. You know what's really coming up.
Speaker 2:As I mentioned, I refer to model as a service. That goes into the concept. You've heard many people have been hearing about agents and the ability to really fine tune the AI model to fit the use case. We have these. We're learning now how to take the technologies that are available and then really fine tune them to fit specific areas. So you do an excellent job at redefining the health care industry. Well, ai is going to be a huge part of fitting into that.
Speaker 2:Manufacturing retail there's going to be new ways to interact conversationally. Retail there's going to be new ways to interact conversationally. So when you're looking to buy something literally in a store, you can have your app open and you'll be able to have a conversation with it and it'll help guide you through the store so you can buy your next purchase and you can have your cart with you. You can imagine if you're having a dialogue with your personal AI assistant on your phone. As you're shopping at Home Depot, you're picking up all the major elements of your project. You don't know where something is. You can ask what row can I find the toolkit that I need for so-and-so? It'll guide you around, it'll add it to your shopping cart and then by the time you leave the store, it's already been purchased on the online app. So it's like these are things that really simplify your personal life, and there's going to be massive abilities to accelerate that inside the business world as well.
Speaker 1:Oh, so exciting. Can't wait to see some of those realized. So how can folks get started? What are some of the next steps after today's chat? I know there's so many different resources within Microsoft. Where would you suggest people go next within Microsoft? Where would you suggest people go next?
Speaker 2:You bet. Well, they certainly could reach out to me personally. Microsoft's a big company, so navigating the machine can sometimes be time-consuming and I'm happy to point you in the right spot. I can also point you to the ACGorg website where you can actually sign up for these classes and there'll be an opportunity to go and listen in on each of the episodes around Copilot. And especially if you're a larger enterprise and you're looking to really leverage Azure, you can reach out to your local account teams. And if you don't have somebody that you know, reach out to me, I can help plug you in.
Speaker 2:Oh, and there's also a Microsoft event page. You can, depending where you are in the country or in the world. The Microsoft event page does a nice job pinpointing areas of the country where we're rolling out additional episodes around AI. We have a huge roadshow that's kicking off worldwide that you'll start seeing different events where we're bringing in our senior executives to talk about the use of the product. So I would say those are kind of the three areas. Reach out to me, leverage the workshops that we're rolling out as part of educational series and then reach out to your local Microsoft team or Microsoft partner and they can help point you in the right direction.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, it's really exciting. With so much innovation happening right now, it's just a wonderful time to get started and explore how AI can benefit you. Thanks so much for the insight and the update actually Really really fascinating stuff.
Speaker 2:My pleasure. Thanks for having me and hope to see you on a future episode.
Speaker 1:Thanks Will do Take care everyone. Thanks for watching and listening.