Deploying Teams Rooms and Teams Phone in Finance - podcast episode cover

Deploying Teams Rooms and Teams Phone in Finance

Dec 11, 202434 min
--:--
--:--
Listen in podcast apps:

Episode description

Charles Mason, Head of Digital Workplace at TP ICAP shares insights into the deployment of Microsoft Teams Rooms and Teams Phone, and the impact of Copilot.

  • Selecting and standardizing Teams Rooms equipment across a global office network
  • Complexities of integrating Teams Phone with legacy and trader voice systems in the finance industry
  • TP ICAPs' journey with Copilot, including compliance considerations and how AI is streamlining productivity and innovation
  • Managing fast-paced changes in Microsoft 365 environments whilst ensuring compliance and operational efficiency in the finance industry
  • The future of digital workplace technologies in optimising collaboration and business operations

Thanks to Logitech, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support.

Transcript

Charles Mason: We have these discussions with different business lines and it immediately, as you start to talk about what can be done, you can see the lights going on and these new initiatives and requests start to come out and they can really see the value of it.

Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This is one of my favorite type of shows. It's the perspective from an Enterprise Service Owner. This week we've got Charles Mason who's the Modern Workplace Service Owner at TP ICAP. They're a global brokerage firm, about 28 countries, 63 offices, I think five and a half thousand employees.

And we talk about the challenges of deploying Teams Rooms and Teams Phone in finance and all the complexity there. We talk about the Teams Room journey and how they've chosen the kit they've chosen and why they've chosen the kit they've chosen. The benefits of standardization. Just a really interesting conversation into some of the experience of deploying globally as well.

Many thanks to Charles for taking the time to jump on the podcast and also many thanks to Logitech who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate their support as well. On with the show! Hi everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Excited for this one, another customer perspective. We always like to get the perspective of different organizations on the pod.

It's definitely interesting to hear that and not just the vendor pitch. And this time I've got Charles. Charles and I had a great prep session and coincidently ended up at the same user group last night as well. Um, Charles, would you just like to introduce yourself? 

Charles Mason: Yeah, sure. Hi, everyone. Hi, Tom.

And thanks. Thanks for having me. Um, so yeah, my name's Charles Mason. I'm currently working at TP ICAP, heading up the digital workplace function within TP ICAP globally. Um, and that really includes our Microsoft 365 management, so the email collaboration and Teams, as well as the modern workplace, which is all of our desktop and device management, and then we have some enterprise voice as well, which ties into Teams, and then the AV and meeting room functionality within that, and then we've got a Product and delivery function to help us manage all of those services across that, so it's quite a challenge.

I've been there for about three years, just over three years now. TP ICAP is a, uh, the world's leading global. Uh, Interdealer Broker. Uh, so, uh, also, uh, Energy and Commodities Broking. They're the, the, uh, global leaders. Um, and, uh, yeah, it's essentially a very large broking house. Uh, so, uh, a very large amount of voice broking is still, still done.

And I think we're one of the largest in the world there. Uh, so we're supporting those, uh, Those people in the front office predominantly doing all of that business, and then it's, uh, there's also a lot of technology within that because we're digitalizing the data as well. So, um, behind that we're, we're moving to a more digital and app delivered service.

Uh, and so there's a huge amount of development and technology transformation that's happening in the in the background because the data is, uh, is also very, very important. And it is also an item that we're trying to get the most out of the data that we get across all of those markets. And previously I worked for.

SocGen for about 15 16 years, so Societe Generale. Here, uh, I was, at the end I was managing the EMEA digital workplace services. So more, uh, involved in sort of deploying the centralized strategy coming out of our, uh, Paris. Uh, Paris sort of, um, Center for the for the bank itself and here at TP ICAP. Now I'm a lot more involved in working with my management and peers to deliver that strategy and work on what we're doing.

So I think one of the one of the key topics today that we'll talk about is that deployment of the Microsoft Teams room services and and the evolution. So I started back, um. Uh, at SocGen on the network side, uh, and then, so it was very much Cisco, um, telephony, um, uh, and, um, and core manager and rolling that out, working on the, on the clusters across, uh, EMEA.

And the network interconnectivity, some of the low latency networking that we set up for some of the applications where we need to be close to that market data to try and get some advantage. So that was all very interesting, but then as the voice side moved over into, uh, more into Microsoft, you had that big decision point moving from Cisco to Microsoft and you're in that sort of hybrid world for quite some time.

And so we moved over into that Skype for Business. So that's when we started, um, deploying Skype rooms. And interestingly, we went to, uh, it was at SocGen's uh, offices last night when we, we met at that event. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it was a funny coincidence, lovely offices. Yeah, 

Charles Mason: a complete coincidence. And, um, and that's where at SocGen, We started with our, uh, uh, Skype, uh, rooms.

Uh, and then, uh, you know, as that evolved into Teams, we moved, we had a, a, a big project to move into that new Canary Wharf, uh, office that the, the lovely new office that they moved into, uh, uh, you know, uh, around, uh, 2020. Uh, and that. That's when we moved from sort of Skype into Teams and into Teams Rooms, and then it sort of evolved from there, um, and we had 

Tom Arbuthnot: that was your first journey over from Cisco into the into the Microsoft world 

Charles Mason: into Microsoft.

Yeah, and that's when I moved. That's what I meant to say. Sorry that, uh, yeah. So moving from that networking background, then the voice services themselves moved into more of the digital workplace world within, uh, within SocGen at that time, and that's why then we moved over, and then my role sort of evolved to become more than just that voice side and take on more of the workplace, the digital workplace, and all of those extra functionalities around that, and I've been very lucky To be working in that particular area because the rate of change is huge.

And as we know, with M365, all of the services are changing every day. In fact, just this morning, we had our new Teams chats and channels combined services coming into our tenant, into the preview version of our tenant, which I know a lot of people who've been using other collaboration tools as well are very keen on seeing those that bringing the channels and chat messages to get 

Tom Arbuthnot: it feels more aligned to the way Slack works and Cisco works, which is interesting.

It's kind of like Microsoft kind of capitulating a little bit like, okay, that's how a lot of people work. 

Charles Mason: Yeah, and that's it. They've made those changes to Teams, you know, change that whole engine and now they're adapting it and bringing in good stuff that we've seen elsewhere. So that's, that's a very popular change that we've been waiting for, for some of our development teams who have been collaborating and using those other tools as well.

And maybe that Teams adoption has not been as strong for them. So yeah, that's a real example of it changing. And it just, also it happened for some people earlier this week, and then other people You know, later in the week or even at different, different times. That's what's complicated as well, isn't it?

Tom Arbuthnot: We, so we do, um, I haven't talked about this, but we do a whole change product where we take all the changes out of customer tenants and we review them and we summarize them and push them back into Teams and, and SharePoint and things. And, and it's really interesting because that's one of the things customers often ask is like, how do we know exactly when a change is gonna come or who it's gonna hit?

And you just, you don't get that in the cloud. You get windows and you have to be so on top of it to particularly in your type of environment where change is. Super impactful. I think anything around FinServe, particularly, you know, broking, dealing, like changes can really, you know, affects people and it really matters.

Charles Mason: Yeah, it's a big change and it is, um, one of the changes we had to make for our Copilot adoption as well was to move our office updates into, uh, into a faster channel. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Oh yeah, you've got monthly as opposed to, 

Charles Mason: Yeah, exactly. We've moved into that monthly channel now and that is a challenge because there's so much, especially with all these market data applications in the front office, so many bespoke applications that we use.

That is now, uh, more of a challenge to see that, and we do see some functionality because we're closer to that bleeding edge now, um, you know, we're hit by that a bit more, and it's, you know, you've just got to balance that with the extra functionality that you've got coming in with, um, with some of these other tools, and obviously, um, Copilot is something that we, we need to be, uh, engaged with as well as we look at that and, uh, and try and, uh, You know, develop our Gen AI initiatives internally as well and use these new tools.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. So I definitely want to quiz you on your thoughts on Copilot. But first, let's get into the rooms conversation. So TP ICAP is something like 5, 000 users. I think it's, is it 25, 28 countries? You've got a big global estate to manage there. 

Charles Mason: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. 28. Um, uh, countries, about 60, 60 offices, something like that, I think, and yeah, five and a half thousand, uh, employees, uh, and we have, uh, we have a lot of, uh, mergers and acquisitions, you know, there's been a lot of them going on within, within that business, we, we, uh, or within our, our group, we have several competing sort of business lines that we keep their own identity as well and they're split into different locations. So, um, yeah, it's quite a complex organization and we do have, uh, as everyone, you know, these meeting rooms that we've had set up. We've had our essentially historically Cisco at the exec level interconnecting some of these major locations.

And now, uh, we've been using Teams since, I think, Uh, here at TP ICAP before my time, yeah, they had deployed Skype, so it was a combination of Cisco and Skype, and then moving more into Teams, and then, um, looking at how we could improve that meeting room functionality. So we had to, uh, CVI, um, to interconnect that so we still got that use case and we're just coming to the end now of a project to replace those, uh, that Cisco equipment with, uh, with Teams Room equipment.

And so, initially, Here in London, in our main HQ in Bishopsgate, we moved into a new building at the beginning of 2020, and that was an opportunity to bring in some of that new technology. So that's where we brought in our Crestron. Uh, uh, Teams Room, uh, so that's a Windows Team Room, but a relatively early version of that.

Yep. And we were burnt quite badly a couple of times with these updates, uh, that come out and take out, um, the whole estate, um, of meeting rooms, which is probably about 40 meeting rooms, I think, in, um, in 135 and in a couple of other locations as well. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, and in those days we didn't have the Pro Portal, we didn't have the concept of rings of rollouts, it was very, the messaging at the time from Microsoft was, it'll be fine, and yeah, there were some trip ups like that, definitely.

Charles Mason: Yeah, and it's more, that was a combination of also the operating system updates, the device updates specific to those, to your manufacturer. Yeah. And also, um, the, What were the Teams, uh, you know, the Teams room updates themselves, and that's why it's difficult. Sometimes the display adapter gets updated and that meet that blanks all of your sort of touch screen devices in all the rooms.

So that was a real struggle. I think that's definitely improved on the Windows devices, but one of the lessons that we learned from that is that our setup was still overly complicated. We had a lot of. Extra devices in the loop as well in terms of how we were going to share content into the meetings. If we share content content wirelessly, and then we had auto switches in there to switch between those devices.

Then there was an awful lot of Um, PoE injectors and things like this for, uh, and so a complicated sort of array of equipment. 

Tom Arbuthnot: So all potential points, all potential points of failure, like fantastic when it all works together and it's super slick, but if any one of those falls out of sync, potentially you've got a challenge..

Charles Mason: Yes, exactly. And then you've got a dodgy power connection for something that's The way it's been fitted in the wall, it's not secured in the right way, and then you have to try and track that down and fix it. So our first approach, especially with a distributed, um, environment across all these different countries and different supporting, you know, generally relying on, you know, one or two people in these smaller offices around the world.

We wanted to keep something simple that we could have a level of centralized. Management and support, but also just basic equipment checks that would be relatively easy for those people. So that's why we made the decision to go with Android devices and we went with the Logitech Rally Bar. We looked at a number of different providers.

At the time, and it was really based upon the sort of quality of the camera, um, the ease of setting it up, um, and the functionality that we that we had within the room, ultimately, with the Microsoft front end, the functionality is very similar between all these devices, you just have a bit of switch over around your, you know, the zooming in and framing of people and things like that, as that was evolving.

Um. So yeah, we decided on the Logitech devices and then we invested in that and distributed it and then had a. Essentially with this simple solution where you've just got a bar, a control unit, a Tap IP, connect that to the network, we have to some challenges around opening up the ports and getting the, the right connectivity through our network.

That's always been a struggle and we, we have a, an internal challenge because, uh, time is very important to us being a broking house, so we control all of our NTP. Uh, servers internally.

Tom Arbuthnot: Oh, interesting.

Charles Mason: We don't allow access outside and we always got burnt by the, for instance, the Logitech devices, they default to an Android NTP, uh, uh, external configuration.

And that's sort of like if you don't have that NTP, everything stops and you can't do it. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, because it's using the time for the TLS for the search. So if it can't be accurate, it can't sign in. That's interesting. 

Charles Mason: Exactly. And that's, that was a challenge for us at the beginning, but once we, we got, um, uh, the process of where we needed to change that and change it to our internal NTP, and we had all of our connectivity opened up, um, we hadn't got, we got the packet inspection.

done in, you know, or not done in the right way. Bypass for where we needed it to for those 0365 services, which are many and varied, just to make that, um, that device connect. Then, um, yeah, we're in a position where we can give a simple set of instructions to someone remote who can then plug in that equipment and set it up.

So, that's been very successful, um, and again, coupled with the fact that the ease of use is, is very, very, um, simple for for the people around the world and they can adopt and get into that and use it. So that's been very successful for us. Um, and then we just have. 

Tom Arbuthnot: You just mentioned that the user experience obviously on Android and Teams Rooms is basically the same because Microsoft control the UI, but you looked at different vendors.

How much was the decision about the kind of? Kit and camera and audio quality. And what about manageability ecosystem support? 'cause I, I know you are quite strong on standardization as well. 

Charles Mason: Yeah. And that was the, um, the advantage here was really the commoditization of, of the, of the product so that you can source it easily across all of these different countries. So it's got to have a, yeah, very broad sort of global supply and also with the Logitech devices, we have the select. So you have the select services, but you also have the sync portal. So we, Uh, with the sync portal. So that is the Logitech's, um, own portal to manage the devices. One of the advantages and, uh, is that we can control the firmware versions of those devices, all of the connected devices.

So we have, we have some Logitech schedulers, um, outside the rooms now, uh, in certain of our newer locations where, and then we're using older iVoco and things in some of our other locations. Um. But the, the, the Tap IP, uh, or the tap, uh, which is the, the touchscreen, um, control units and then the Rally Bar themselves, that firmware can be controlled, uh, via, uh, the sync, um, portal.

And that is where, um, we see that, uh, we we're able to control that. And that means that we can, we can control. The actual update waves that we have for our software, as well as having the rings from Microsoft and doing it in that way, we can actually stop it a step ahead of that at the actual Logitech level.

And so we generally. make sure that we're not getting the very latest version that's coming out only in our, in our test rooms. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Do you phase it? Do you have like a test setup, then friends and family, then wider business? What does that look like? 

Charles Mason: Yeah, it is it for us. It's generally just a test unit that we have local to our teams here in London so that we can look at that and test out those new versions.

And then, uh, you know, once we're comfortable with that, we can look at moving. Moving that out. It's not, there isn't a high demand to have that latest version all the time. Um, and you also need to be careful because they're, you know, putting in QR codes and changing that and bringing in their, um, Cortana and taking Cortana away and all of that sort of stuff that they did before.

It changes quite rapidly. Um, so we've also got 

Tom Arbuthnot: One of the banks last night was talking about, um, Bluetooth ban in their environment. And that was immediately tweaked to me because we've just got the, uh, we've got the Bluetooth beaconing and now we've got the proximity audio beaconing as well. And it's things like that, that if you forget how the compliance and the regulation and the control in finance is so different to other verticals where these changes, this could be innocuous to some customers can really matter.

Charles Mason: Yeah, exactly. You've got to be aware of and that's what's so challenging as we spoke about earlier to actually understand what is changing and when it's coming because there's the product management, even of just these these parts of M365, it's an awful lot of work to stay on top of it. Yeah, it's interesting about the noise, you know, people were complaining about that.

So not in our organization, but I was reading about that. Yeah, the high pitch noise that some people can hear and not others, but that's what Cisco had that before, you know, because we had, that's how they were adopting it. But that's another, the drop in use case for the Teams Rooms also, and that's the great advantage with having Outlook on your mobile devices, because we don't have very many laptops at the moment within our organization, so people have generally got their perhaps their mobile phone with them, and they'll have their email on there. But now with the latest versions of Outlook, it's very easy, and Teams, to go into that meeting room, Just join with from the meeting room.

It picks up that Bluetooth beaconing, um, and it's very useful for those ad hoc meetings. Um, so that it's nice and again, a great advantage to have the sort of tie in between those different bits of software, which gives you those excellent use cases for people to go in and use those rooms. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome.

And like, let's talk a bit about voice as well, because that's again, super interesting and super complicated in your world. What does that look like? 

Charles Mason: So, um, within our organization, we have a, um, essentially core manager clusters, so three, uh, regional clusters for core manager, and that links into our trader voice platforms, which are obviously the lifeblood of the business, and we have, um, we have, Again, through acquisition, you know, we've got still a bit of a distributed set of, of trader voice platforms Yeah.

Around the world, but they're predominantly private wires that are connected in directly, uh, into those services. So we, by being the broker, generally, when we are connecting into our counterparties, we are the ones who are, uh, are, are paying a lot for, for all of those costs and that connectivity. So it's very expensive to maintain all of that.

And then the ring down, the enterprise voice piece, at the moment we take that in from our call manager and then we pass that into those, into those trader voice platforms. But in parallel, We've been pushing more and more voice onto Teams, so we're using direct routing. We've got those, um, SBCs. What we're trying to do, we very much are, you know, Cloud first, uh, is our strategy.

So we're looking uh, step by step to move our on-prem infrastructure into the Cloud. So that's why in certain areas we're looking at what we can do to achieve that. And first of all, we're taking out call routing, uh, which is, uh, on now in EMEA and in the U. S. is still on our call manager. Uh, infrastructure itself, but in APAC, where we've recently put in some SBC, still on prem, but we're looking to try and move those into the Cloud.

Um, 

Tom Arbuthnot: And you're managing those, you've chosen to keep those SBCs in house and you're managing them? 

Charles Mason: Yeah, we've got a team, um, Tillan within my team who heads up the enterprise voice services, he is, uh, yeah, he and his team are managing those SBCs internally, and he's managed the simplification of all of our existing call routing.

Again, all the acquisitions and everything mean it's very, very complicated, a lot of unpicking, so they take that Um, and they've moved that to the SBCs now on a country by country basis across APAC. And then we've put in Media Bypass, uh, which has been very, very beneficial for a lot of APAC because it's so distributed.

There's so much latency, uh, because of the WAN connections that are interconnecting all of, all of those countries that the Media Bypass, if we can pass it straight. Straight to the voice gateway in, uh, in the country and go out. We, we've seen significant benefits there and that's really helped us to accelerate the move to, to Teams Voice.

Nice. Um, and we did speak about last night as well with, um, mobile, uh, Teams Mobile, uh, as well. And so Teams Mobile connect, uh, the service in, uh, in the US as well. So we've got some corporate telephony where we're also looking at. That where we've got the Teams telephony as the sort of core, uh, service on that.

So it presents a call both on the, on the telephone itself and on the, uh, on the Teams service. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, so you do that Teams Phone Mobile in the US, that Verizon service into Teams. That's really nice. And you were saying about that, that benefit of having the single compliance story there of, because you can record the, Cellular calls and the Teams calls, they're the same thing in that scenario, essentially.

Charles Mason: Yeah, exactly. It's a new way, a relatively new way of being able to record the mobile telephony. And the benefit is we have Teams recording in place, you know, that we've put in place. We've also got our trader voice recording that's in place. And it's that one license that we use that then, uh, You know, it's relatively seamless.

There are a few challenges the way that it presents the call, um, technology wise into our service, but yeah, we've been successful in in getting those calls recorded, and that's given us an alternative to the mobile recording, which has always been a bit of a challenge for us. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I think it's been a challenge for everybody.

It's one of the things when Teams Phone Mobile came, it switched on a light for me because I remember doing, you know, Lynk and Skype projects in finance, the, the, the, the, the equivalent challenges of recording mobile was always really hard. So if you can bring that together and not just from a cost and two platforms perspective, but from a compliance team perspective of being able to look at the data in the same platform as well.

Charles Mason: Yeah, trying to get everything together into one platform is key, and that's, that's where we've done it with, um, with our ongoing recording. And then, of course, we still have the challenge of historical recordings from lots of different platforms that we're always looking at. New and innovative ways of bringing that data together and making it easier to search and reconstruct our trades, etc.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. And you mentioned Copilot at the start of the conversation. So I'm really interested to see what your thoughts are on that so far, what you've done, because that's, uh, in finance, that's really interesting, I think, because it's both. It's going to be hugely impactful to that vertical and there's lots of data and compliance considerations as well.

Charles Mason: Yeah, absolutely. It is a, it's a, it's a challenge, certainly on the, the, uh, compliance and regulatory side where we've got to, uh, you know, one of the questions there is, uh, where you are. prompting and you're interacting with, uh, with your Gen AI tool with, with Copilot, you know, we need to keep a record of, of, of what's being said, uh, as well as, uh, you know, the output that's, that's being generated and ensuring that everyone is using it responsibly and having the right controls in place is, is very, very important.

So Copilot, um, has been very, uh, Very useful to us, I think, in the first instance, because being an M365 customer, we have, uh, what we call Copilot Web or, you know, the Bing Chat Enterprise. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah. God bless the naming. I spent half my time trying to distinguish between these products. But yeah, they're kind of the web only version, but commercially data protected.

Charles Mason: Yeah. And that's the, that's the key bit, that commercial data protection. So we know that the data there. is not being shared out onto the internet. It's not being learnt and then regurgitated elsewhere and so that we can be confident that people can use it and they can put in data. So you can put in unfortunately the amount of data that you can put in and the sort of size of attachments and things is being being shrunk a bit I think as Microsoft are pushing you to some of the other tools as well.

So that's that's really useful because that's what we've been focusing and We've had some really useful seminars and workshops with Microsoft and it's really useful to get the peer feedback of how they're going. 

Tom Arbuthnot: I'm really surprised on that. How many enterprises are missing that that's now included in their licensing?

Because obviously there's the M365 Copilot which gets the headlines which is $30 per user per month. But there's a lot of value to be had to drive out of that. Copilot web and it's included. It's a great starting point. I think 

Charles Mason: exactly that the starting point is is key because it gets people. You've still got that iterative process and that prompt building process that can be really helpful.

And you've got the entire web to sort of search on and get that information back. Um, so yeah, we have, we've sort of focused a training plan internally to explain a bit more around Gen AI and then look at, um, prompting using that tool initially and then M365 Copilot, uh, yeah, it's, we were not an early adopter, uh, and a lot of the The feedback we get at the moment is from people who have been early adopters who have been using it for a long time.

We picked it up, it went GA I think in February of this year, and we got a few licenses and then we've just been gradually building up our licenses. in a pilot phase, but now we're really focusing on what we can do to sort of drive that adoption and get the value out of the tool itself. And, you know, Microsoft, uh, it's still very, very early days for Copilot and with phase two and the functionality that's coming in with, uh, Uh, with the, I think that the change for it being a team member.

So it's, it's somewhere else that you can sort of rely on and collaborate with as part of your team. Uh, and with all of the agents, plugins and functionality that's coming. It's, it's really unlocking what is clearly more functionality. And the, I would say that working with the business that we've been, uh, with my boss, Andrew Shannon.

Yeah. Uh, who heads up, um, AI for TP ICAP among lots of other things that he's doing as well. Uh, he, uh, and a number of colleagues here on the side of what we've been doing in our normal jobs. So we've been trying to push out, uh, that AI adoption across the business. And it's incredible that we have these discussions with different business lines and it's Immediately as you start to talk about what can be done, you can see the lights going on and these new initiatives and requests start to come out and they can really see the value of it.

So there's, there really is a huge amount that can be done, but it's a challenge to then reorganize our teams, uh, to then be able to sort of provide that Back to the business and get them working. 

Tom Arbuthnot: It's come on to enterprise IT in relatively short time and suddenly like, as you say, with particularly with the agentic stuff, which is still early, but who takes it from business idea to usable application is, is, is, is a skill and a time commit for sure.

Charles Mason: Yeah, and there's a real challenge for us there as well, because, uh, who controls that? If we're, we're empowering our citizen developers here, it's incredible. Now, if you have M36 Copilot with agents, you're getting into Copilot Studio, um, which is the sort of development tool behind that to link into your data and create these, these wonderfully.

quick and swift resolution to sort of productivity within your team. Um, but then who's managing that and you know, who's there, uh, there's going to be a huge amount of those that are created and we've got to put a best practice in place and a center of excellence to try and manage how that's being done and controlled.

Tom Arbuthnot: It's a real tightrope line to walk because you don't obviously want to dissuade that. local innovation and that productivity and that capability. And you don't want to be the IT company or the IT org that's clamping down on stopping them getting work done. But equally, you don't want the wild, wild West in your org of who made what, how's it work, who looks after it, change management, all that fun stuff.

Charles Mason: Yeah, exactly. There's a lot to do. And then there's also when they just need that bit of assistance and help to, yeah, to understand it and, uh, and, you know, how you prioritize who is working on that and making those resources available. So, yeah, you've really got to sort of weigh up these business cases and look at the value that they can get back to the business.

But it's exciting times. There is a lot happening and, uh, and it really just continues to grow, I think. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. Well, Charles, I feel like we could do a whole nother podcast on any of those topics. So maybe if it's okay with you, we'll revisit you again in a bit of time and see how you're getting on with that AI journey because it's really interesting.

Charles Mason: Sure. It's been a pleasure. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Thanks so much, Charles. And yeah, I hope everybody enjoyed it. Any comments, please do leave them below and we'll talk to you all soon. Thanks again, Charles. 

Charles Mason: Thank you. Thanks all. Bye bye.

Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file