¶ Rolling Out M365 Copilot
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the AI Agent and Copilot Podcast, where I get a chance to sit down with executives over Microsoft other leaders in the industry talk about the opportunities, the impact, and the outcomes possible with AI. Uh today I am thrilled to be joined uh by Eric Newell, who is the CEO of Stone Ridge. Hey Eric.
Hey, John. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. So great to see you again. And um, gang, so you know, uh, Eric is um uh gonna be one of the presenters at the AI Agent and Copilot Summit running March 17 to 19 at the Torrey Pines Hilton. Um and uh Eric is a um uh well golly Eric's Eric Big presence at Community Summit North America, big presence in the community through Stone Ridge and and so much more. And thrilled that uh Eric will be leading a session in the M three sixty five.
work IQ um masterclass. And uh Eric, your session is titled Executive's Guide to Rolling Out M three sixty five Copilot. It's gonna be uh uh running on March eighteenth from one forty to two ten PM And uh maybe take a step up and back real quick and kind of fill folks in a little bit on what they're gonna be able to learn in that session.
Yeah, I'm really excited to share this session with the with the audience. It's really going to be about like how do you effectively get this wheel turning in your organization to start to use AI as an organization.
A lot of companies have people within their organizations who are messing around with Chat GPT over here and Claude over here and Grok over here or whatever, but like actually coming up with a plan where you can work together on here's our AI policy and here's what we should be using and here's how we secure it and here's how we actually start to make it productive.
It seems like a lot of people want to skip those steps and go to just like AI is just like, you know, you throw something in the microwave and two minutes later it comes out and it's all cooked and ready for you to eat. It's like it's not that simple. So that's really what I want to share as part of the session is like Okay, AI is incredibly powerful. It can do many, many things, but you need to just make sure that you're set up to take advantage of it.
And that you built some organizational capacity to do it. You know, it's like all things, it's change, right? So change takes some time to adapt.
¶ Building Secure AI Strategies
Well, and and there's such a um a cultural leap that happens, right? When uh when you start to utilize AI in productive ways within the context of of how your business runs, how people do their day jobs, right, that kind of thing. To your earlier point too, a lot of times there is kind of dipping toes in water kind of stuff, right? Hey, I'm gonna I'm gonna try Chat GPT for this, I'm gonna try Claude for that.
I'm going to try copilot for this or what have you. So I I really like the learning objectives that Eric put into the context of his session in the masterclass. Because it starts to build some strategic structure and uh some policy and process into that approach of guiding your organization through utilizing some of these systems. Um, Eric, I also think
Uh, you know, you do your AI executive briefings with a lot of Stone Ridge customers and such. I'm sure some of the learnings and and that type of thing that you do in those sessions will come to life through uh through your session at the event. Yeah, that's been a lot of fun. So for any of our clients, I'll do ninety minutes or I'll generally be on site.
and talk to them, uh talk to their executive leadership team about AI. And I spend a lot of time actually just grounding everybody in what AI is, what large language models are. Uh and then what Microsoft's tools are in this space and what they do and how they can help make you more productive. But then I tend to spend the last
half hour last section talking about, okay, here are some things you gotta worry about from security standpoint. Like here here's how you should write an AI policy. Here's how you should like get this figured out and I've learned a lot from those conversations about what some clients are doing and what many clients are not doing, which many of them don't have an AI policy. They don't really have
any kind of restrictions on w how people should use it or shouldn't use it. And I think that's a really important stance to take as a company to let folks know on how you should or shouldn't use it. And so I want to help make sure that clients have a good opportunity to understand that and that they can communicate that in an effective way that makes sense and resonates with their team and is not just some boilerplate legal language too.
Yeah, it's a great way to say it. The other thing I think is interesting about it is um, you know Bye. The thing that most folks when they're early in their process with AI really don't understand or don't have really a grasp on is the governance and access control to the data that those agents um or or kind of pre-built copilots or what have you.
are accessing. And that issue is of course about policy, right? And setting the right policies and that type of thing. But then it's also the enforcement of those policies and the important influ um uh and making sure that that governance is actually enforced. Because boy, the the worst thing, one of the worst things that can happen is all of a sudden you're accessing data that should not be accessed, right? If it's IP or or
uh PII information or or those sorts of things. Um, and really starting with, hey, strategically, what are we trying to do? What are the policies we want to put in place around these things?
Um, and then what is some of the governance that goes into the data that can be accessed? Um, that feels to me at least where we're kind of at that level of maturity now in some of the systems where it's less about playing it and dip your toes in the water and a little bit more about, hey, if we're going to put this stuff into production, we better make sure there's guard.
Yeah, I talk a lot about protecting your d data from outsiders but also from insiders. And there's kind of two different ways to solve those things. And the biggest you know, red flag is just people putting confidential information into prompt engines which then are can be used to train the model. So
That's kind of one of the first things I try to impress upon them. Like you need to have a policy that says you can't go out to Claude and say, here's our secret sauce for our company. What do you think? Uh there it's gonna use that to train the model. So there's that side of it, but then the insider is you also just gotta be careful. Like I can't send, you know, my payroll clerk uh here's everyone's payroll in the company.
uh access everyone. Yeah. And all of a sudden now that's discoverable internally. So those like two kind of examples are very
¶ Event Expectations and Wrap-up
get their attention and go, okay, yeah, I need to have some kind of security plan here. Here, here. Um, well, um, Eric, any other any other bits that you're excited about for uh for getting out to San Diego there from March seventeenth to the nineteenth for the event?
Yeah, I'm really looking forward to the event and and learning a lot while I'm out there as well too. But for my session, yeah, I just hope people bring questions. I hope to have a good productive conversation throughout if you have questions about how they should roll it out or
sample policies, things like that. I wanna educate them on things they can do that way. And then hopefully we'll have a lot of conversation afterwards as well too. And And there's so much to learn and the beauty of it is so many people are interested in it and wanting to make this a suc a success that it does drive a lot of attention.
There you go. Great way to say it, uh, Eric and um gang uh me, Eric, 750 plus of uh of our friends here in business technology leadership roles, the gang over at Microsoft, some amazing partners and more. All coming together there in uh in San Diego from March 17th to the 19th at the Hilton Torrey Pines for the AI Agent and Copilot Summit. Again, uh Eric Session, Executives Guide to Rolling Out M365 Copilot, be taking place.
uh in the M365 and work IQ masterclass from 140 to 210. Eric will be the first speaker in the masterclass that afternoon. So um be sure to to tune in and uh and Bring your questions, right? Like Eric said as you come into that session. Um, Eric, thanks so much for being a part of the program. Thanks so much for all you do uh uh with me and the rest of the community here through your role at Stonebridge.
Yeah, thank you, John. Thanks for the opportunity. I appreciate it. Awesome, everybody. All right. Thanks for tuning in, and uh, we'll see you in San Diego. Adios, everybody.