AI Copilot Podcast: Dow Exec Details Copilot Productivity Gains, Future Use Cases
Welcome to the AI Copilot Podcast, analyzing the latest AI Copilot and agent developments from Microsoft and its partners, delving into customer use cases, and exploring how AI plus the Cloud helps customers reimagine their business. In this episode, Tom Smith speaks with Brandon Toyzan, enterprise architect at Dow, about his company’s use of Microsoft Copilot.
This episode is sponsored by Community Summit North America, the largest independent gathering of the Microsoft Business Applications ecosystem, taking place Oct. 13-17, 2024, in San Antonio, Texas. Register today to connect with thousands of users across the Microsoft business applications ecosystem at the for user, by user event.
Highlights
Copilot Starting Point (00:45)
Dow has been using Copilot since April 2023; the company is part of Microsoft’s Early Access Program and Compass Research Program. Toyzan’s role involves evaluating employee experience related to technology, as well as modern workspaces. He began working with Dow’s data team to understand what an AI assistant would look like; Copilot fit into those discussions.
The Data Priority (03:20)
Data and data quality remains a top priority. In this regard, the issue of duplicate data and using AI to detect duplicate files are important to consider. It would be optimal if Teams or Copilot could identify duplicate files for users.
Data security is also a major priority. “You can’t ask Copilot to give you something you don’t have access to; we’ve been fairly satisfied with our results on that.” Dow will continue to test and validate that point to ensure its needs are being met.
He notes that Dow needs to be careful that no data, especially its intellectual property, gets into the public domain or into the public cloud. Its key question to Microsoft was: How do we keep our data in a container we trust?
Use Cases (07:44)
Dow had already been a user of AI to automate some processes. Examples of functions that Copilot can manage include putting images into a PowerPoint presentation. “Those are quality-of-life things that improve someone’s job,” Toyzan says.
Toyzan was collaborating with a co-worker on a technical paper one day and his co-worker began typing ideas they were discussing into Copilot; they co-created a passable first draft with Copilot. That took 30 minutes; it would have taken four hours in the old model; freeing up that time has big benefits. “Finding a four-hour block on my calendar is near impossible,” he says.
A research and development colleague has shared that she’s saving hours through the use of Copilot.
Futures (14:42)
Toyzan hopes to see more deployment in the field where employees could locate a document they need from their phone. Copilot enables less experienced employees to quickly find documents that detail a pump schematic, for example.
Dow has thousands of office workers using Copilot. The company needs to figure out how to make field professionals and those that are performing functions, such as manufacturing chemicals and adjusting pipelines, become more efficient through the use of Copilots.
Dow is looking at “the whole suite of Microsoft Copilot tooling.” Sales Copilot has “tons of potential,” while the company’s developers have had good early feedback on GitHub Copilot. The company has been testing Security Copilot which can provide a single pane of glass to manage across all the different management and security apps, which has been a longstanding goal for many companies. “AI Copilot looks to start enabling that journey a little bit faster,” he says.
Toyzan said what employees need is a single bot acting as a front end that can pull data from various back-end systems, rather than requiring employees to have one bot per system.
Previous episodes:
- Less Email and Meeting Time, More Co-Creation
- IBM, Microsoft Build AI Experiences Zones
- Microsoft Delivers Sweeping Set of Agents, Copilots Embedded in Core Apps
