Rohit Panedka With Microsoft

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program, the accelerated degree program for working professionals looking to advance their career and enhance their leadership skills. And now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, CSU’s executive MBA program. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on the land of business radio, we have Rohit Panedka and he is the end product and Atlanta site lead for Microsoft. Welcome.

Rohit Panedka: Thank you. Lee. So great to be here. I remember we talked about some of these things last year. Thanks for having me again.

Lee Kantor: Oh, well, I’m excited to get caught up. And for folks who don’t remember last year, can you share a little bit about your work at Microsoft here in Atlanta?

Rohit Panedka: Yes, I’m a partner and general manager here at Microsoft Atlanta. I lead our presence here in Microsoft Atlanta. We have engineers that build our core products, which is M365 now, you know, largely focusing on Copilot, our AI work, our intelligent cloud. We have our Azure products dynamics products security. We also have our sales folks and customer solution architects. So the whole breadth and gamut of what Microsoft does, we have a presence here in Atlanta. We are here to serve our customers that are here locally. We are here for our diverse talent pool here locally, but also to serve the community, our diverse and vibrant community here in Atlanta. So very glad to be here and the community has been great and good to us as well.

Lee Kantor: Now, every year I think it was last year we talked about this same work trend index that you all put out. Is there anything in this year’s report that you’d like to share?

Rohit Panedka: Yeah, certainly. Uh, just to give a little bit of context. Uh, Work Trend Index is a global survey that we do, uh, largely focused more recently on, uh, how, you know, AI at work is being used and how the, you know, workplaces are adopting AI as a tool. And last year, you know, I was relatively new tool in the workplace. So we wanted to see how many people use such tools and how they’ve applied it across their work. And this year, we took a more critical look at how business leaders have planned to apply AI to more of their operations and what they could be. Um, you know what that could mean to their work, but also to the, you know, experiences of their employees as a part of a global survey. We also asked 500 specific business leaders and knowledge workers here in Atlanta for their thoughts. And, you know, we have a pretty good snapshot of where Atlanta stands in this moment. And the biggest takeaway we found here in Atlanta is 84% of the business leaders say that 2025 will be the year that they will use AI strategies to address their operations, specifically to improve productivity. And that is the biggest takeaway that we’re seeing, Lee, from our initial findings.

Lee Kantor: Now in your career? Um, a lot of times when there’s a disruption like AI historically, uh, it’s been I, I remember kind of a slower uptake, you know, kind of gradually than suddenly, but with AI, it seems like it’s suddenly then suddenly, um, how do you feel about the embrace of AI amongst whether it’s the worker themselves, maybe they were first to get in and start playing around with it. But now leadership is, like you said, looking at ways for AI to fill that productivity gap.

Rohit Panedka: Yeah, I think you’re spot on. When we looked at the report last year, you might recall, uh, we were seeing that, uh, workers were bringing AI on their own into the workplace. And the theme remains the same, which is the fact that, uh, workers are feeling, uh, compressed. Uh, you know, that’s the reality today, right? Um, you know, leaders are demanding more productivity. Uh, but workers are feeling more compressed to do the work that’s already on their plate. In fact, uh, within the Atlanta workforce itself, uh, more than three fourths, uh, almost three fourths of the work workers feel like, uh, they don’t have enough time to do the work that’s already on their plate. So that’s the dichotomy that we’re dealing with, right? You know, our leaders want more productivity for all the right reasons. I mean, obviously we in Atlanta want to lead the, you know, economic landscape. We want the greatest productivity here. Uh, our workers want to do a great job, but they feel compressed. Um, so that theme still exists. But the good news now is that, uh, leaders do want to use the tools that are now available in the form of AI to solve that problem. I think that’s the real sort of, uh, I would say opportunity. Right. Uh, there’s, there’s intent to solve that problem, so. And do it the right way. I think that’s the opportunity. We are in the crossroads of opportunity that we are here now.

Lee Kantor: What is if there is a right way, what is the wrong way? What is the right way and a wrong way look like to you?

Rohit Panedka: Yeah. I think the, you know, the wrong way is not, uh, you know, employees bringing some of these tools on their own, uh, without the knowledge of their, uh, you know, employers and their IT departments, uh, trying to do their work with the use of unauthorized tools and AI capabilities, trying to, uh, plug them into their, you know, data, uh, expose their data outside of their, you know, uh, secure environment, uh, that could expose their, you know, trade secrets and, you know, uh, do do harm to their business. The right way to do that is, you know, ensure that the organization itself has an AI strategy and, uh, make sure that, uh, the employees are brought along the journey of, uh, implementing, uh, the AI strategy, the the first step, I would say, is making sure that, uh, every employee gets comfortable with the use of AI for their own workflows. What that means is, uh, you know, one other really important step that, uh, you know, stood out for me was, uh, and this probably we all relate to every employee today, on an average, gets interrupted, uh, every two minutes by meetings, emails, other things. That’s about 275 times a day that they get interrupted. So how do we make their, you know, individual workflows? Uh, easy. So this is with everybody having a personal assistant like, you know, the Microsoft copilot. So being able to summarize your meetings, being able able to summarize your word documents, being able to draft your emails. So everybody having their own personal assistant to do their work uh, much easier, you know, remove the drudgery of work. The second layer of this is, you know, introducing, uh, teams to work with AI agents.

Rohit Panedka: So this is where, uh, collective workflows could be automated. So, for example, let’s say a team is used to working with, uh, insights and reports that the whole team uses to come up with the next project or idea, or build project plans together to work on the next product. These are things that, uh, AI agents can do for the teams such that removing some of the, uh, you know, um, I would say the burden on the team to kind of come together, you know, lengthy meetings and workshops and things like that, which the agent can do in the background. And it can be doing this 24 over seven. Uh, you know, when the teams are, you know, you know, sleeping and, you know, taking care of their life and spending time with their families. The agent could be working in the background doing all of these workflow stuff. Uh, while the teams can come back and do the creative work. Right. That is where the integration of AI into those kinds of workflows will make the team’s productivity enhance. But also the happiness index of the teams goes up. I think that is where that is the right way to do things right, which is bring AI agents into these business workflows and automate them, where the teams can spend most of their time on the creative and the core value addition part of the the business. That’s the next, uh, you know, uh, you know, I would say the area where we can deploy AI, uh, the right way.

Lee Kantor: Now, what do you tell that employee who might be fearful? And when you start listing all of these tasks that an AI agent can do, and they start thinking in their head, that’s what I do. Um, how do you kind of either help them prepare for this inevitability or, um, or just get retrained into some other area that will make them less easily to be displaced?

Rohit Panedka: Yeah. You know, this is this is a fair, uh, you know, fear with any, uh, new technology that, uh, does come into play, right? I mean, with anything new, there is a little bit of skepticism. Uh, you know, this goes back to when computers were introduced, uh, people, you know, did fear what happens to their data entry jobs or, uh, you know, when the internet was introduced as well, there were quite a few roles that were fearful of elimination. But what’s really happened is, uh, there’s been a proliferation of other jobs that have come in place of that. You know, there’s been proliferation of, uh, sysadmin jobs. There’s been a proliferation of cloud architects. There’s been a proliferation of, uh, you know, network administration, security jobs, right? Because of the proliferation of, you know, compute, uh, heavy jobs and technology jobs. So it’s the same thing with AI. Uh, there will be a proliferation of jobs that require specializing in training the AI models specializing in, you know, uh, creating, uh, infrastructure that, uh, you know, and models that, uh, need, uh, you know, uh, the technology expertise to build these AI, uh, tooling.

Rohit Panedka: There’s also a need for people that know how to manage, uh, AI heavy organizations as well. The organization structures will also get upended when we introduce these AI agents to work with humans as well. So how do you manage such organizations? Uh, you know, how do we manage organizations where we have both humans and agents working together to create outcomes for an organization? All of these are net new concepts that we’ll have to learn, uh, to, to deploy and make sure that, uh, they, they, uh, perform as expected. These will all create new opportunities and new jobs. Uh, so, yes, there’s an element of learning. There’s an element of skilling, reskilling and upskilling that has to happen with anything new. But it’s not that it’s going to necessarily eliminate jobs or it’s a zero sum game. It’s more of a, you know, we’ve got to move towards those new opportunities and new jobs. That’s definitely a need. The way work is done, the kind of jobs that are needed to do those kinds of jobs will definitely change.

Lee Kantor: It’s just historically, though, it’s been like a blue collar or maybe the the lower paid people in the organizations were the ones being displaced. And now with AI, it seems like it’s moving up the ladder in terms of white collar. And, you know, now coders can be replaced, even lawyers. Or they’re talking about replacing a lot of medical professionals can be replaced by AI. This is a different group of people who aren’t usually the ones that get displaced by a disruption like this. And it seems to me that a lot of organizations are now looking a lot more like tech companies, where it just takes fewer people to execute what it used to take lots of people to execute.

Rohit Panedka: Yeah, I think I mean, that’s a that’s a good observation. But we also have to recognize that, uh, there’s a lot of problem sets that are unsolved as well. Right? I mean, one of the other important stat that, uh, we did, you know, glean even last year and even this year is that, uh, you know, there is a, um, you know, consistent lack of talent or there is a consistent need for intelligence on demand, uh, especially human intelligence on demand that needs to be augmented, that needs to be complemented. Uh, I does solve that. Um, you know, in the, in the form of, uh, ability to compute large problem sets, uh, ability to compute very large problems and things like that. So think and put that in context of still unsolved problems, like in healthcare in the field of, uh, diagnostics, in the field of cancer research, in the field of, uh, you know, climate change, uh, you know, in the field of, uh, you know, agricultural problems, growing needs of, uh, you know, humanity at large. I think those are still problems unsolved and new fields of engineering, biomedicine, uh, you know, even creative fields and arts are continuing to grow. So, you know, I believe that, uh, that’s where, uh, you know, human potential is going to continue to shift. Uh, so to your point, uh, I think there is tremendous opportunity for talent to shift into those spaces as well as, uh, we get this, uh, you know, intelligence opportunity filled.

Lee Kantor: So where in your mind is the low hanging fruit for an organization to really, um, kind of lean into this opportunity with AI.

Rohit Panedka: You know? So there is really no barrier to entry, you know, uh, if you if you start working with Microsoft today, you could just go to, uh, copilot Microsoft.com. And if you are a Microsoft customer with any sort of license, you could get access to Copilot chat. And copilot chat gives you access to, uh, you know, copilot uh, to, to start working with copilot, you also get access to what is called as agent builder, where a user can start building agents, start experimenting with, you know, small workflows. Now, if you want to do more complex, uh, agent building or, uh, you want to start working with very contextual data. Then you have to obviously get into paid licenses. Uh, and then you have, uh, you know, capabilities like Microsoft Copilot studio, where you can, uh, build more complex, uh, agents that, you know, uh, you can automate more complex, uh, you know, business processes and things like that. But you can start with simple, uh, workflows at user level, uh, you know, workflows and start, uh, improving their individual workflows. So start with getting your, uh, employee experiences better, their drudgery out of their work, getting them comfortable with the use of AI. One stat to remember is leaders are more familiar with AI today than the employees.

Rohit Panedka: So, uh, I think, you know, from from the stats, it looks like seven out of ten, uh, leaders are more familiar with, uh, in Atlanta or more familiar with AI against four out of every Very ten employees. So let’s get our employees also more familiar with AI. And the barrier to entry is very low. Let’s get them, you know familiar with copilot chat. Get them to use it on a daily basis. This is a very secure environment. Uh, you know, it’s it’s within the boundaries of your own data. And then, um, get them to start building, you know, agents, then start integrating your workflows, uh, into, uh, you know, with, with copilot studio like capabilities. That’s when you start getting, uh, your teams, you know, uh, larger teams integrated with agents. That’s when you start transforming your organizations to be more AI ready. But start with your employees getting more familiar and comfortable with AI. And this goes back to your question, Lee. How do we get employees more comfortable, right, with the AI and not, uh, view it as a fearful thing? You know, we have to, uh, get everybody comfortable with the idea that this is a tool for good and, uh, higher productivity and greater experience.

Lee Kantor: So if they have, uh, Microsoft licenses, is this something that I can offer to my employees and say, hey, there’s learnings like, or is that something that there’s additional fees for learnings or is there kind of free opportunity to learn or at least get my feet wet from an employee standpoint of learning about AI through Microsoft and from a strategic standpoint of my leaders want to, um, you know, get some help and get some expertise from somebody in Microsoft to get their thoughts on the best way to roll something like this out. Are there people to talk to there?

Rohit Panedka: Yes. So if you’re a you know, if you’re a large commercial business, obviously you’re going to have your account team that can connect with you. But if you’re a small business, you know, we have help and learning sites that have a lot of, uh, you know, resources for you. We have a small business customer advisory boards that we recently launched. This was a very recent launch that you can reach out to if you’re working through a partner of ours. We have partner programs that get that are also enabled with the same materials. We have AI adoption kits that are available on the same, uh, you know, Microsoft websites. We also have, uh, you know, uh, programs where, uh, these are paid programs, but, uh, they are called Pro Direct and Business Assist. Uh, we also have on our support.microsoft.com, which are also free landing pages where you can go and you can look by based on your use cases. Uh, we can, uh, support you. So the use cases could be you’re trying to create a hub for your team, or you’re trying to create, share and create and share documents with your customers. We also have very free, uh, resources like getting more done with your with with AI as your companion as an example. That is a ten minute course. Uh, if you if you’re pressed for time just to get started. Uh, so there’s a lot of resources, uh, for, for small businesses. So, you know, try those out. And some of these programs that I mentioned, uh, you know, like, we have a business advisor program that actually you can speak to somebody, uh, human, uh, basically that can walk you through these things. We also have programs where, uh, we do reach out to customers. Uh, if they’ve made an attempt to reach us out, we proactively reach out, especially if they bought a Co pilot license and they’re struggling to start. We reach out ourselves and give them a hand. Uh, it’s called welcome to copilot. We help get them started if they don’t know how to where to start.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there a story you can share? Maybe a small business success story of somebody who, um, hadn’t been using AI and then started using Microsoft’s AI in order to, you know, get to a new level or to improve their productivity.

Rohit Panedka: Yeah, there’s a few, actually, uh, you know, there’s a story of a solo founder that actually, uh, started a staffing firm, um, and, uh, they used, uh, you know, you know, our copilot, uh, capabilities to actually, uh, streamline a lot of the, you know, resume sorting, uh, helping their, uh, clients build resumes, uh, you know, keyword, uh, targeting those kinds of things. Uh, so that thus eliminating a lot of the, uh, you know, uh, the human powered, uh, pieces of the work, and then that actually helped them, uh, in their own words, about $2 million in, um, profitability increase. There was another construction group, another 5%, 5% start up company. Again, a small business that said that they boosted revenue, sorry, operating margin by about 20% by using AI across their operations. So basically, uh, using it for, uh, market research. Uh, a lot of their, um, research was done by, you know, uh, human effort that they were able to redeploy for other activities. They did a lot of the research through, uh, copilot, research assistant. Uh, another one was another entrepreneur who basically skipped hiring an expensive CFO but made do with their, you know, financial staff by using, uh, expertise through, uh, you know, uh, copilot for, for financial, uh, you know, um, capabilities. So these are all, uh, you know, stories within the small business solopreneur kind of, uh, uh, examples.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. The impact is real. It’s not going anywhere.

Rohit Panedka: No it’s not. It’s not. Look, you know, uh, on the other hand, you know, I will say this, right? There’s a there’s a real reason why we, uh, kept the name as copilot. Right? It’s, uh, you are still the pilot, right? You are still in control. Uh, you set the tone, you set the direction. You still have to validate the work, right? And, uh, there is an element of continuing to validate the work and training, uh, through your validation. So, uh, that’s also something to be confident about. Like you, you’re still in control, right? So there’s no to. Goes back to the point of fear, right? You you still control the narrative and you still control the outcomes.

Lee Kantor: Well, if somebody wants to get a hold of that work trend index report or connect with that, uh, Microsoft’s AI community, is there a website or what’s the best way to connect?

Rohit Panedka: Yeah. So it’s aka Dot Ms.. Slash. Uh, 2025 is the work trend index and for the customer advisory board. Uh.

Lee Kantor: Let me just ask your I.

Rohit Panedka: That’s right. That’s what I’m doing right now. Um, let me follow up with you on that one.

Lee Kantor: But is there if they went to is there kind of a central Microsoft Atlanta website they can go to, to Support.microsoft.com?

Rohit Panedka: Yeah.

Lee Kantor: And then they can get uh, that’ll go to if they can search for the Atlanta folks. And then from there they can probably get that community.

Rohit Panedka: Yeah. Customer advisory board.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. Good stuff. Well, Rohit, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Rohit Panedka: Thank you so much, Lee. And you are too.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.d