Anthony Woodruff: The same principle applies with organizations getting Copilot to reason over all of that data to come up with a scenario to give you data to make a decision. It just makes it so much quicker to get everything done and to execute faster.
Tom Arbuthnot: Hi and welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week we have Anthony Woodruff who's Senior Technical Program Manager on the CAPE team at Microsoft. We get into what the CAPE team do, if Anthony has actually got a CAPE, and also get into a lot of conversation around Copilot and the real world use cases.
Really great conversation, hope you enjoy it. Many thanks to Anthony and also many thanks to AVI SPL who are the sponsor of the podcast. Really appreciate their support of Empowering Cloud. On with the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. I can't believe this is the first time we've had Anthony on the podcast.
This is ridiculous. Um, uh, Anthony, do you want to just introduce yourself and, uh, give us a little bit about what your current role is in, in, uh, history and life?
Anthony Woodruff: Awesome. Yeah, Tom. Firstly, thanks for having me. As you say, I can't believe it's the first time either. I think you've been asking me for a long time, right?
Yeah. Various different things have always got in the way. But yeah, pleasure to be here. I'm Anthony Woodruff. I'm a Technical Program Manager at Microsoft. I've been here for five years. Um, which is just, just flies by. Um, it's, it's absolutely insane.
Tom Arbuthnot: I can remember you joining, like that feels like crazy.
Anthony Woodruff: I know, right? It's, it's mad. Um, it's been a really cool journey to get where I am now. And, um, it's, you know, it's never a dull moment. Um, so yeah, so I'm part of the M365 CAPE team, uh, which is the Microsoft 365 Customer and Partner Ecosystem Team. So, um, very much I spend All day talking about Teams, um, so, uh, my group deal with, uh, with the customer health escalations and quality team.
So we work with a lot of our strategic customers. We, um, help them deploy, uh, you know, Teams, new features. We deal with escalations. Um, we write a lot of playbooks, uh, and, and.
Tom Arbuthnot: Is that across GeoTeams? Is that a UK team? How does that work?
Anthony Woodruff: Yeah, across GeoTeams. Yep, so, um, I've got colleagues from, uh, obviously in Seattle, uh, California.
Yeah. I've got some in the Midwest, uh, you know, even, um, sort of New York as well. But we are a global team. Uh, we have a mix of technical program managers. We have customer experience, PMs, uh, as well, who work on a lot of extensibility and, and sort of plugins and everything for, for Teams. Uh, we also have ecosystem PMs as well, who, uh, work with, uh, all of the, uh, partners, uh, helping get the apps into Teams.
And we also have some PMs as well called Toll PMs, which is our Teams as an operating layer. And they again get down into working on all the extensibility and connectors and all of that really cool stuff. And the beauty of our team and the roles that we perform is we're all complementary to each other.
Um, we, uh, you know, Work with customers that have, you know, intent to deploy Teams have already deployed it and you know, it's fair to say when I literally joined this team as COVID started, it was absolutely mad.
Tom Arbuthnot: Suddenly everybody had the intent to deploy Teams at massive scale very quickly.
Anthony Woodruff: Yeah, and that link in Skype for Business thing was, um, you know, we were migrating away from that, right?
Um, like you, I've got a huge, you know, background in unified comms and communications. I've been in comms for, well, since when did I start as an apprentice? 2005 for a large telco, um, and, you know, did the whole Microsoft Certified Master Program, which again, feels like a distant memory away now. Um, so yeah, eat, sleep and breathe, unified comms, converged comms, you know, intelligent comms, whatever we want to call it this week, right?
So, uh, it's, yeah, it's, uh, it's always, uh, an exciting space, um, and something I get quite a lot of joy out of seeing people use.
Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Do you get a cape in the CAPE team? Surely they must give you
Anthony Woodruff: Well they were handing them out, um, at the, uh, as end of year prizes. I don't think I've ever seen one. Um,
Tom Arbuthnot: but I feel like you can't have that team acronym and not have a cape.
I know, right? You got to turn up on calls like with it waving behind you.
Anthony Woodruff: I think there used to be a one drive cape going around somewhere with the cape.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, there's been a few actually, I think I'm sure Laurie had a Teams purple one at one of the events as well.
Anthony Woodruff: Yeah, no, they, uh, they, we haven't got one yet.
We'll see. We'll see what, uh, when I go to Seattle in, um, in September, we'll see whether they've got any out there. Um, I'll, I'll try and go grab a photo wearing one. And, you know,
Tom Arbuthnot: cool. So your, your history is in, yeah, you said you, uh, ex Big Telco that we both know, obviously, and, um, Like you've done a lot of voice and UC, is your part of CAPE more around phone and voice or does it vary?
Anthony Woodruff: We do. So, so yeah, my part of the, my part of the CAPE team in that sort of, um, customer health team, we do all things Teams. So, you know, you can see behind me, I've got lots of different Teams devices here and Clippy's hidden here. Um, in the blur, but yeah, we, we'll do everything from. Chat, you know, calling meetings and devices and, uh, you know, our new AI workloads as well now, uh, Teams Premium, uh, you know, we'll, it's very much, uh, broad, uh, skill set you, you have, um, and a lot of depth in those as well, right?
So, uh, I can literally go from call to call to call talking about multiple different things, um, as we go.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's a huge product. Like, I mean, we try and cover everything and you end up, you end up pulled into the wider M365 conversation, obviously, particularly with Copilot, particularly with compliance and governance.
Um, but premium is super interesting as well, because even that sku, I think it's 11 kind of major feature areas if you count them out of like, and they're all quite deep, you know, knowing, The premium webinar features inside out is different to knowing the security features inside out is different to knowing the the branding features inside out.
So there's quite a lot.
Anthony Woodruff: Absolutely. And it changes, you know, regularly, right? I mean, I can go away on holiday and I can come back and I now use AI to summarize it for me. But previously, you know, you're catching up on all the things that have changed because, you know, as you know, by the nature of evergreen, everything is.
Constantly evolving all of the time. We're taking feedback. I mean, one of the important parts of our team here at Microsoft is to take feedback, right? Um, and, and, and feed that back into, you know, the product managers to, to help with product decisions, right? It's a, it's a very varied, but quite a privileged role at the same time for, for what, you know, what we do because we get to hear that feedback, you know.
Straight out from the
Tom Arbuthnot: customer. Like there's nothing, nothing can beat that. And the, the, the contextual of understanding the feedback, I think obviously all software companies try and do surveys and things, but there's something about living with the customer and being like, ah, I knew, I now understand why you're driving for this feature or this use case or that use case.
And then there's a different skill to being able to articulate that. Back to product people of like, no, not this, this, because of this, because of this, because of this, like it's really important
Anthony Woodruff: and some of the, the, the highest value from my perspective work that we, that we do in this team is when we work with complex organizations, right?
Um, big and small is deploying and being on the journey with them as they're going through everything and then coming out the other side and then doing a review or even as we're sort of going along and going, Oh, Oh, hang on a minute. There's some feedback that, you know, they give you feedback in the moment, right?
Um, and learning that whole journey because you've worked in, in, in this space, you know, longer than I have, right? Around previously, we would just get that ISO file with that list of static features on and you'd, you'd roll that cumulative update on and you'd, you'd know what, what was, what was changing effectively.
Um, whereas, whereas now with the nature of the cloud, it's, it's, you know, that roadmap is constantly changing. There's new UI that appears, there's things that, um, you know, we deprecate and remove. Um, and it is such a mindset shift for everybody. Um, you know, I went, I, I went to an event, uh, back last year, um, and, uh, I felt actually really old because there was some folks there that had never seen a server.
They'd never installed a Windows operating system. They'd never got one of those ISO files or those MSDN disks that you and I will remember, um, because they were cloud natives. And, and there is, it's such a mindset shift, such a change, you know, and, and even back in those early days with, with, um, Conversations of, I don't want to move my comms to the cloud.
Why would I want to do that? Right? And here we are, right? We're, it's a hugely successful platform, um, you know, and it's, it's, I feel very privileged to work in this team and with what we do and also to go to events and see slides that we've crafted. Being, you know, used in various different presentations because our whole purpose as well is to get playbooks out there to, you know, bring feature A, feature B, C and D together to make it a scenario and a story that everybody can consume.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it is so, so fast paced, but you say it's nice. It's one of those products that impacts customers. I've said it right back to the OTS days and Link days. Like you're bringing something new to the organization. You're bringing new capabilities, new, new experiences. You're enabling new ways of working. I always thought it was much more satisfying than working on, you know, AD or SQL or Exchange, which are all pivotal to everything working right.
Any of those break, the world ends. But like the users see Teams and they get to experience these new capabilities.
Anthony Woodruff: I was going to say, how many times did you have fun with a SQL backend back in the day? Falling over, right? Yeah, exactly.
Tom Arbuthnot: Fabric. I don't want to see fabric ever again.
Anthony Woodruff: Many a time watching that rehydrate back in the day.
But, you know, you're right. All of those workloads are really important. They are foundational to everything that we, you know, run on top of, um, but there is nothing for me. It sounds really sad if I'm if I'm sat in a coffee shop and I hear Teams ringing in the corner there. Um, there's somebody else using it.
I go. Yeah, I can see the job sat.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, isn't it? Isn't it a funny thing that now? Everybody understands what it is like, like you always have to do, or I always have to do the, you know, uh, Skype for business. Oh its like Skype consumer for enterprises. Like, and it was very, very big orgs knew it, but nobody else knew it.
But now I'd like every Teams is common vernacular with everybody. Everybody knows what you work on, uh, and, and the, the product. And like, I find a lot of times, not all the capabilities though, because it's such a, you know, big product there, but, oh yeah, we use that. It's like, we use it for chat. It does so much more.
Anthony Woodruff: It's, it's built upon all those other workloads underneath, right? Um, and you know, the bit, the bit I love about it, and you know, I live in it, right, is, is just being able to, you know, pop out an app now, being able, and continuing that, in that sort of Teams as an operating layer, that flow all day, right? Um, and it is, it's, it's really good.
One of the best things for the pop out is this curve monitor. I've got right. I invested being able to have multiple windows of Teams open now. Yeah, means I'm just in my flow all the time and I can just go for context switch from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 and you know if you think before I was the MSN messenger generation right when I closed that down, that was it.
The message was gone, right? And now we've got that there. Um, yeah, and it's persistent and I can get back to it. It's, it's, you know, I can wake up the following day and I know what I've got, right? I mean, yeah, I've got to do. I mean, we, we spoke, you know, I mentioned on a podcast I was on on Friday. Um, around how AI and Copilot and is that complimentary assistant now there that you know when I have a week off and I come back I can immediately launch Teams.
I can click the Copilot button and I can write my prompt saying, Hey, I've been away for a week. Give me blah blah blah and it's all there and I and my. Effective time is, is like this now because I'm, you know, I've got all of that information there with the power of the graph, which is, you know, really, really cool.
And, and, and it has a lot more, um, opportunity ahead of it as well.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I think, uh, obviously AI is going to be a huge deal for everybody on some timeline, but I feel like Teams is at the cutting edge in the sense of it's all your real time information, obviously meeting summaries, Huge, huge immediate use case that everybody seems to get, which is nice.
Um, but the chat and channel use cases and also using Copilot as a surface to start my day, it obviously reaches into graph, as you say, so it's non Copilot, non Teams items as well, it can get to your other bits and pieces. Um, how do you find that, like digging into that day to day, what are your kind of Copilot use cases?
Anthony Woodruff: My Copilot use cases, uh, are probably the ones I use on a day to day basis is, um, catching me up from stuff I've missed overnight, So as you can imagine, um, worldwide team, there's so many people posting new things, blah, blah, blah. And I have to come in in the morning. Um, and I used to need a really strong coffee before Copilot because, um, I would have to, exactly, exactly,
Tom Arbuthnot: scroll back up and start going down.
Like 70 percent of it is pointless, but the 30 percent you need to know where the 30 percent is.
Anthony Woodruff: And being able to have Copilot there now to summarize that for me is really key. Other ones as well is being added into a group chat. And being like, hang on a minute, there's, there's reams and reams and reams of this stuff and just saying, hey, Copilot, can you, can you summarize this for me?
Right. The summarization is really good. The, um, using it in meetings, you know, we use it all day every day. I no longer have to sit here writing notes anymore. Um, yeah, I do take the, you know, the odd note from time to time, uh, on sort of my one note of key things that I've signed myself up to typically, uh, or, you know, things I need to remember or someone shares a really cool link.
Yeah. Um, but you know, leveraging, leveraging that and also, um, using Copilot to search knowledge management across the org, right? That, you know, those files that are out there, being able to, if I'm hearing a new acronym on a call, I can say to Copilot, Hey Copilot, can you tell me what this is please? Um, because, you know, Microsoft's full of acronyms.
I've used at least six, seven on this podcast already, right? Um, you know, CAPE and various different other things. Yeah. Uh, and because it is just consistently, um, you know, changing as, as everything evolves. Right. And I think we, people have this mindset of. AI is there to, you know, cause massive disruption and put some, you know, and I view it as it's there to help you be more effective, right?
The power of the prompt that you put into it is the most important thing. Focusing on the outcome you need. You know, I ask it to summarize things in tables for me just because I consume data that way. Um, you know, and it's, it's amazingly clever at Helping you focus on, as I said, the outcome you need rather than you having to build an, you know, build an outcome as you go.
Right? Um, yeah. How many times do we sit and search on keyword and the like? Now it will just go and reason over that and give me what's important. I still obviously,
Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, I heard an amazing use case. You just touched on there, which is, um, I was talking to a customer for the pod actually. And they said one of the killer ones is new employee.
Like they come into the business and they come in and If, if you're lucky and it's an org that uses Teams and channels, at least some of the history is there. Um, but either way they can search all the, all the documents, all the history, they can get up to speed, like you say acronyms, that kind of stuff.
Um, it's amazingly powerful for someone new to the org.
Anthony Woodruff: As you say, I mean, every organization I've joined apart from this one, um, onboarding was, was tough, right? Especially when you transition to new Teams as well.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah, even, even new Teams within Microsoft. I mean, it's again, massive org, like how one team works is not how another team works.
They're still new in terms of culture and process.
Anthony Woodruff: Yeah, and the rhythm of business, as you say, changes from every org you go to. Um, and you will always go through that, that, um, that phase of change and, you know, feeling slightly uncomfortable when you when you do that, right? And a lot of it is just getting comfortable with, I need to get all this information because you have an expectation in yourself of, oh, I've got to know all this now, I have to know it now, right?
Um, and being able to leverage AI to help you, you know, summarize that, point you in the right direction is, is, is really important. But also, the bit that excites me most about this is the extensibility part of it, right? Being able to connect into other systems and, you know, reason over that with, you know, an LLM, yeah?
Um, you know, there's some, a lot of my colleagues in the, the CXPM org and, and, uh, the, you know, the toll PMs and, and in the EPMs, they work with a lot of our partners. To bring those apps, bring those plug ins into the, into, you know, the, the, the Teams ecosystem, um, so that I can just, I can start talking to Copilot and say, Hey, can you go and access this system, please?
And pull me the latest data. And that's, that's powerful.
Tom Arbuthnot: It's kind of like a new interface, isn't it? Like a chat centric interface, but the beauty of it is it's not as hard as it used to be to integrate into those systems, particularly if they've got. You know, they've typically products these days were pretty good in IT.
There tends to be backend API, front end. Like if, if the, if the product or system is architected like that, your CRM your shipping app, whatever it may be, Copilot can interrogate that almost like it's at the, at the UI, but then you've got this awesome AI. Interpretation Intelligence to understand what you're trying to ask and the data coming back and it can manipulate, you know, which bit of that data is going to answer the question is I've seen some stuff.
More around the context into use cases where it's been like agents have to dip into all these different systems. Can we streamline it for them so they can just ask a question that has the order shipped?
Anthony Woodruff: And you mentioned the agent one there as an example, right? I mean, being able to give them all that intelligence to save them 20 clicks for click to click to click to click.
You know, being able to say, hey, can you give me an update on this? You know, why did the, why did the order fail to ship? Or, you know, if I think of my old life, right? Why, why did the engineer fail to arrive to site, right? Being able to. Get that end to end flow and it improves the everything for the customer, but it also improves it for the person that's that's giving that message too.
And I don't know about you, but every website I seem to be going on now if I'm buying something, there's a new AI assistant that pops up. Right. Um, and it seems to be getting, um, you know, more and more prevalent in the ecosystem. Um, and it's quite exciting, right? I mean, this, this is a fundamental shift in, in, in what we're, you know, we've been used to for, for forever, right?
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's, it's, it's so exciting. And it'll be, it'll impact different, different industries at different paces, different use cases, but it feels like it's, you know, You know, people that are slightly less excited about the change. It's like, you wouldn't not give your employees laptops or mobiles or the internet, like, like, like it would be mental to, to be like, Oh, you're not allowed to search things on the internet, but this role, you have to, you know, you can't do that.
So same, same, same principle, obviously there's security and safety and data consider all those good things, but like. It's like you're tying someone's, you know, one, one hand behind their back in terms of what they can do if you take that extra capabilities away from them.
Anthony Woodruff: Yeah. And when you've used Copilot, you know, using every day, the, the, the responses that I get back, of course, I'm, I'm reasoning over myself to make sure that they're accurate and they're what I want.
It's a tool, right? It's a tool. Exactly. It's a tool. Um, and it's there to empower you to, to be more effective, right? I mean, I, I've used, and I use this one quite a lot of, My daughter, my daughter is neurodiverse, my oldest, um, and when I give her technology, she's all over it, right? She's had a laptop since she was seven.
She's just, yeah, loves Minecraft.
Tom Arbuthnot: Not a surprise in your house.
Anthony Woodruff: But given, giving her the ability to talk to Copilot on, you know, on a phone and whatever, some of the things she does with it and the things she asks it, I, I, Would never dream of asking in the app and the output you get are really good, um, and if, you know, mentioned I was the MSN messenger generation, you know, all that stuff for my kids now and yours and beyond, right?
Is it's, it's a very exciting place to be of AI can help you learn a skill.
Tom Arbuthnot: I'm so excited. I'm so excited for edu because essentially you can have like one to one tutoring with infinity patience. Infinity knowledge, uh, and like adaptable to the way of like how you work. I've been using it with my 10 year old while she's doing homework and it's just like explaining this in a different way.
Like, like, like give me some examples. It's like, it's like, uh, again, we're relatively at the beginning of this journey, but it can't not again, massively impact edu for the positive, which is I can turn up and learn pretty much whatever I want at my own pace. I know that like Khan Academy doing some really cool stuff, indexing all their content.
Like again, content's got to be good. Like all the, all the good AI stuff applies, but the upside in, in edu and the kind of, um, The democratization of that, because obviously if you, if you, if you had the money, you could have a personal tutor, right? That, that's a, that's an unfair advantage that someone from a certain country or amount of money has levels it all out.
Hopefully, you know, accessible to everybody in a, in a really exciting way.
Anthony Woodruff: Yeah. And I mean, Khan Academy is a great example, right? We showcased that at Build, I think it was, um, at one of our recent events. And talking to some of my daughter's teachers, right, being able to leverage those smaller language models to create a lesson plan and the like, it takes a lot of the admin away from them, um, because, you know, I feel for teachers, right?
I know they're in the UK, they're all off right now, uh, hopefully having a well earned break, but being able to leverage AI to help with the admin, to give a lesson plan. You use the tutor one there as a great example, right? And also to use AI in the flip of, especially in universities and the like, leveraging it to see, you know, plagiarism.
Right, because we give these tools out there, um, and, you know, it's been around for quite a while, some of these tools that are out there to analyze that sort of thing. Um, but, you know, EDU is a hugely, uh, amazing space for this, and even some of the things we're doing in Teams in the EDU space that my colleague Mike Tholfson is aware of all the time.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, Mike's great with the content. YouTube updates stuff, he is on it.
Anthony Woodruff: Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's such a. Such an exciting time. Um, and you know, just for helping people progress, right?
Tom Arbuthnot: It's really
exciting. It's nice to see the positive impacts it can have.
Anthony Woodruff: And a lot of it is just getting, a lot of it is just being curious and trying it.
Right. Um, you know, not being scared of it, just give it a go. Right. You know, especially with, with Copilot adoption and change management.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I think something that I'm not, I'm finding when I talk to organizations that they're not really understanding as well is they've got the core Copilot in pretty much every SKU now with commercial data
protection.
Like, like, like obviously M365 Copilot is where it really starts to unlock some of the extra cleverness, particularly in Teams, Outlook, you know, Yeah. Excel, et cetera. But there's a lot you can do to get on the journey with just the web based Copilot and start learning some things. And it's already there.
Like, because it, cause you know, the M365 Copilot is a commercial consideration. We're buying a new license that you've got to test out. I'm like, you can get tons of value with what's in the box. Like start there and step up to M365 when the time's right.
Anthony Woodruff: 100%. Yeah, exactly. And, um, you know, that, Seeing that Copilot introduced, you know, it was Bing Chat and then it rebranded to Copilot, right, to bring everything under one brand.
Um, you know, I use it all the time for search. I literally use it all the time for search. Or to, if I've got a huge block of text, um, I think I used this on the example on Friday, right? One of my friends, when they get, you know, send these massive text messages. And just being able to give that to the AI to reason over and summarize for me, um, you know, it helps me, um, and helps them, um, to, to communicate because sometimes it can be, you know, I mean, I'm guilty of writing long messages like we all are, right?
Funny enough, somebody was saying, I saw it on one of my colleagues notes the other day. Especially with the MSN, MSN Messenger generation, we were used to hello, enter. How are you? Enter. Are you okay? Enter, right? That's quite overwhelming for some people, right? Um, and then we moved to text messages and it was, I've got my two.
Tom Arbuthnot: Also the, um, the no hello
thing around, uh, inter messaging of like, don't. Don't say hello and then leave me hanging. Like, give me the entire context. I can reply. But again, a lot of people found that impolite. They're like, well, no, I don't want to just bombard you. So there's some cultural, cultural norms and cultural change there around how do we efficiently work with each other?
Anthony Woodruff: Yeah. And it's, it's, it's also knowing that everybody's different and how they want to communicate and how they, um, yeah. And again, all of this AI, all of this, you know, all this work that we're doing, um, effectively gives us the tools that will work with us, how we want to work, right You mentioned around some of the stuff we're doing in Office with, you know, having copilots in Excel and PowerPoint and everything, right?
You know, there's an amazing opportunity there, you know, and it will continue as we, you know, add more and more capability to those. Just make life easier to produce those PowerPoints, right? I think I used, I wowed my daughters one day when I said, Hey, um, can you go and produce me a PowerPoint on elephants, please?
Because that was one of their favorite animals. And just watching it build it all, they're like, Daddy, wow! And I said, yeah. I said, years ago, I said, we would have had to do this. Yeah. Line by line, right? And again, I felt really old. Dragging it all into the right place, but just being able to,
Tom Arbuthnot: And again, it's unlocking tools as well because we've all got this Office suite that is amazingly powerful that's developed over, you know, 10 15 years and all of us use about 5 percent of it because like, like, like, you know, nobody knows, nobody, there's probably somebody out there but who knows how to use Word very well and PowerPoint very well and Excel very well.
So the fact that you can say in English what you're trying to achieve and Copilot can service the capabilities is again, really exciting.
Anthony Woodruff: Yeah, I mean, you know, you'll remember the Microsoft Office, the Microsoft Office specialist certifications that we used to do, right? I mean, you know, what did I start on?
The ECDL, the European Computer Driving License, do you remember that? Oh, yeah, I had to do that at school back in the day, which was, you know, how to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the like. And my brain wanted me to be an engineer at that point, rather than, you know, learning how to do those in depth. But, The, you're right, is the tools are becoming more intelligent, they're becoming more accessible for people, um, because accessibility is something that's really important to, to me and, and, you know, us as a, as a company at Microsoft, um, and, you know, if I think at school, right, you do show and tell, right?
If you've now got this Copilot technology where somebody can sit there going, I need to write a presentation about elephants, and I need to talk about this, blah, blah, and it just produces it, you can learn so much more in that time rather than, you know, Oh, I need to go away and spend a week doing it.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, you're spending time on the actual content as opposed to the
tool and the creation.
Anthony Woodruff: Exactly. And the same principle applies with organizations. Getting Copilot to reason over all of that data, to come up with a scenario, or to give you data to make a decision, it just makes it so much quicker to get everything done and to execute faster.
Um, and you know, that's something obviously that, you know, we as an organization continue to build on. Those touch points are across everything in the suite, right? Being on a meeting. I just want to make decisions quicker. If you're away, I want to follow a meeting, right? It's all these things that are getting better and better as every day goes on.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, that's what
excites me about being focused on Teams is that Teams is, again, they're The essential part of this journey, it's going to affect everything, but like comms, collaboration, meetings, chat, but there's just so much potential for AI to improve our experience there. It's really exciting.
Anthony Woodruff: Yeah, across all the different touch points, right?
So whether you're on the, whether you're on the mobile or the cell or you're on your PC or Mac, or even these things behind me, right? Yeah, I spoke about this a little bit on another podcast on Friday around. I'm super excited about what we're doing here, right? Having the, um, you know, rolling the your voice print, you know, optionally and Copilot knowing you're in the room, right?
When you start talking for the for the notes and the like some of the
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah the team Copilot scenarios, a whole nother thing coming later this year as well, where it's like we're moving from this kind of. Phase one was your personal assistant and phase two is this more agent multiplayer model. I'm so again, you imagine like that, that need to help, uh, help a team work together across their meetings and their project, i.e. their channels and chat and files like an AI agent, a team copilot that can span all those areas, can create project plans, can make do this, can kind of prompt you on Like nobody's taking this action, like those kind of things, it's going to be really, really exciting.
Anthony Woodruff: And in the nature of what we do, I mean, the, the, the technology layers is there as, as an assistant, you know, we, we use it quite, I've used it quite a lot. It's my personal assistant and you've, you've used it there. We context switch so many times during the day with every meeting we go on with every tab we open up in a in Edge or whatever you're using and your mind just switches all the time, right?
Having an assistant to go back and say, Oh, I'm back on this thread now. Can you just catch me up and where we are? Blah, blah, blah it's just it's game changing. Um, and it's, it's super, super, um, you know, helpful for, for, you know, modern life, right? Um, it's, it's really cool.
Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. So you, so conclusion, you've got to know all the Teams in your role on Anthony and all of Copilot basically.
That's, that's, that's FY25 for you.
Anthony Woodruff: Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Um, yeah, it's, it's, it's staying ahead of, of, of, of, the curve all the time right in this role, and it is really exciting.
You know, I do. I do love this job. Um, and you know, as we were sort of saying before we came on, August is normally quiet.
It's not this year,
Tom Arbuthnot: no, no, the
pace has kept going because because the innovation is going, the adoption is going so.
And obviously we've got big events coming
Anthony Woodruff: up later in the year with Ignite and the like, right? Looking
forward
to those. Chicago? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully I will be there all being well.
Um, and it's just, it's just, yeah, the pace of, the pace of change is, is just continual. Um, and, uh, yeah.
Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. I'm not
going to let you go this long before not coming on the pod again. I know, now you've, you've, uh, you've officially been on. That's it, right? That's good to know. That's it.
Anthony Woodruff: I'm really, I'm really pleased to be here.
Um, because as I said, this has been a long time coming. You've been asking me for quite a while.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, well, I appreciate everything
you do in the community. You know, you're super engaged with everybody. You're on all the bits and pieces. You obviously, you know, uh, Commsverse and all the events and stuff. It's, uh, I appreciate you being so accessible.
Anthony Woodruff: Yeah. And, and, and for those that, you know, don't know me and, and, you know, see me at those events, come up and say hello, right. Come and give, come and give me feedback, right. Good and bad. Um, you know, some of the greatest learning opportunities that I have and, and that, that, you know, we have when I feed it back is, is, is that.
Um, you know, because we, we have to design software for everybody. Right? Um, yeah, exactly. Right. And, and, you know, the, there are scenarios that you and the community will, will hit that we haven't seen yet, or that I haven't seen, or that my team haven't seen. Um, and that's what helps us, um, feed into things like those playbooks.
You know, you've seen the device deployment playbook. We worked on that one. Um, yeah, there's, there's a multitude of those, uh, playbooks on, um, the Teams Academy page. Um, aka.ms/teamsacademy if people want to go have a look there. Um, that, you know, just helps you with those questions rather than raising a support ticket or rather than having to, to hunt for ages.
We've, we've built a lot of those assets and you can, you know, they're free to use.
Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, thanks, mate. Thanks for coming on the pod and appreciate catching up and yeah, we'll talk soon.
Anthony Woodruff: Absolutely. Take care. Cheers, Tom.