AI Copilot Podcast: Microsoft Ignite Highlights with Volt Technologies’ Mason Whitaker

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 Mason Whitaker, President of Volt Technologies, a Microsoft partner with a Business Central focus. The pair discuss the opening of Microsoft Ignite, which featured a wide range of agent and Copilot developments.

This episode is sponsored by the AI Copilot Summit NA, taking place March 17-19, 2025 in San Diego, California.

Highlights

Copilot Control Center (02:23)

Microsoft announced the Copilot control center as well as Copilot Analytics as two key ways to manage this technology and calculate ROI on it. “This is just going to show leaders where they’re actually getting the impact from implementing tools like Copilot,” Whitaker states.

Meeting Customer Needs (03:37)

Microsoft’s vision for AI is aligning with its customers’ needs, Whitaker says. During the event, one customer, BlackRock, explained that essentially every employee will have this technology and is expected to use Copilot technology to get to an output quicker. Dow, a material science company, is using Copilot agent technology in its supply chain.

Agent Opportunities (06:31)

The end-to-end process of managing a supply chain is one area with a great opportunity to introduce agents to make things more autonomous and create repeatability where things are managed within a single solution, Whitaker suggests. Although there are some barriers to entry, customers in the cloud are “ready for this in terms of security and data.”