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

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio. Brought to you by On pay. Atlanta’s new standard in payroll. 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, Onpay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio we have Rohit Panedka with Microsoft. Welcome.

Rohit Panedka: Thank you Lee. Great to be here.

Lee Kantor: I am so excited to dig into this new report, the Work Trend Index that, uh, the folks at Microsoft and LinkedIn have put together. But before we get into that, can you just tell us a little bit about your work or Microsoft’s work here in Atlanta?

Rohit Panedka: Certainly. So I am the site leader here for Microsoft Atlanta, and I represent a great legacy of engineers that are building our M365 products, Azure products, all the ones that you’re probably familiar with, our listeners are familiar with. We also have a good presence of our sales and customer solution architects that engage with customers closely to help them adopt our technology and get the business transformation benefits that they’re looking for. User experience, you know, transformation. Yeah, that’s the that’s our presence here in Atlanta. We do pretty much everything that happens in our headquarters in Redmond, here in Atlanta for our customers, close in near to us in this region.

Lee Kantor: So what kind of Microsoft resources are available for the small to mid-size business owner? How do you interact with that community?

Rohit Panedka: So we have several ways. I mean, first and foremost, we have, uh, you know, many resources online and in digital methods for them to reach out to us. We also have support systems where they can reach out to get, you know, help with adoption or even when they’re stuck with a problem, you know, there’s free support where they can call A18 hundred number and get support. We also serve them through chat modalities. We have very specific programs around helping them first, you know, understand their jobs to be done, what we call what are they trying to achieve for their business and then help them adopt our technology to help resolve those jobs to be done. And then we have some persistent relationships with them to make sure that they’re continuing to get the best value out of our products, their subscription, and then also, you know, continue to look at as their business is growing and transforming, how our products can further help them. So we have very many ways that SMBs leverages to grow their business.

Lee Kantor: Now, part of that is this Microsoft and LinkedIn Work Trend Index. Can you speak of that? Any insight that you gleaned from that?

Rohit Panedka: Yeah. You know a little bit about the work trend index itself. Uh, we started this report out, uh, back during the pandemic, you know, where work took a pretty huge turn towards virtual. And, you know, businesses and users alike had to adopt a lot of digital mechanisms to get work done. And we started publishing that report every year. And in 2024, uh, you know, we met with 30, 31,000 users and 31 different countries. We spoke to, you know, our, uh, the S 500, uh, what we call the fortune 500 companies. Uh, and we studied trillions of telemetry data from productivity software that our, you know, users and businesses use. And, uh, you know, we we found a really interesting, uh, shift in work, which is, uh, more and more users are bringing, uh, AI to work and using AI to help them with their work. Uh, Atlanta in general is largely leading, uh, that, uh, you know, trend almost four out of every knowledge worker based in Atlanta is using generative AI at work. Um, and, uh, about three out of four of those users are bringing their own AI to work, and they’re not waiting for, uh, their businesses and business leaders to catch up. Uh, they have found the value in AI, uh, to, to do better work and free up time. And, uh, they’re taking full advantage of it.

Lee Kantor: Now, how are you defining AI in terms of use? Because, I mean, people were using AI years ago when they were asking their Alexa, you know, what’s the weather today?

Rohit Panedka: Yeah, that’s actually a great question. Um, you know, when we think about the current models, they’re actually based on large language models, which, uh, you know, have the ability to, uh, give more contextual responses rather than general, you know, uh, very high level responses to the point, uh, as an example, uh, I use, uh, generative AI to help me with my work, uh, particularly when I start the day, I basically come to copilot, Microsoft copilot and say, you know, help me identify all the important meetings of the day and tell me, what are the, uh, you know, critical pieces of information I would need for that? Those meetings, uh, what are the, you know, decisions that are waiting, uh, for me to be to make, uh, even during meetings? Uh, I, you know, ask questions like, what’s a really good question to ask based on this data? So these kinds of very contextual information based, uh, you know, uh, work support was not available in the previous versions of AI. Um, this is a very powerful, uh, you know, mechanism to help users really, you know, bring AI as an assistant to the work that they do. Right? That’s a huge shift. And as you know, many of us are not used to having assistants at work. This is really democratizing, uh, you know, uh, work assistants to, to pretty much all the knowledge workers.

Lee Kantor: So if you were an entrepreneur or even an aspiring entrepreneur, how would you kind of leverage AI today? Like what would you how would you kind of incorporate like, um, you know, maybe share some use cases or some, you know, actionable activities you would do, uh, to leverage AI throughout your entrepreneurial workday?

Rohit Panedka: That is a great question. You know, one thing that we are finding as entrepreneurs and business owners and business leaders are opting, I is, uh, you know, they’re pausing to think about what is their AI strategy. And what we’re finding is a better way to think about AI is think about your business strategy. You know, your core business strategy still remains the same. Your core mission of, uh, you know, what you want to serve your customers with or what products you want to go to market with, uh, and apply AI to make, uh, you know, speed up that strategy and transform that, uh, business. You know, good examples of those could be when serving customers in the customer service, uh, you know, engagements, leveraging AI. You know, large language models can help identify customers issues quickly, helping the customer service agents with knowledge at hand, uh, being proactive about the questions they can ask, making the whole customer service interaction a lot more, uh, you know, easy and pleasurable for customers, but also for the, uh, agents that serve them. Uh, so that’s a workflow that’s, you know, really up for disruption.

Rohit Panedka: And many of our customers are starting to leverage, uh, in that space. Uh, we also have, uh, you know, creative development. Uh, we have Estee Lauder as a, you know, customer that actually is using, um, generative AI for their product development and reimagining, uh, customer experience locally in Atlanta, we have, uh, Coca-Cola, uh, that has, uh, really looked at all stacks of their business, you know, back office work, uh, data analysis and data crunching, but also in some of the front office, uh, you know, customer serving, uh, situations. So I think we should think about, you know, if I were an entrepreneur, I would think of, uh, every area of my business, you know, how do I serve my customers better and faster? How do I make my employee experience better? Because with this assistance, they can be faster. They can, you know, uh, get rid of some of their menial tasks and focus on more of the meaningful aspects of their jobs, like being strategic and creative and happy employees equals happy customers equals great business.

Lee Kantor: But, um, as you mentioned, you’re making it seem like it’s pretty easy to integrate into your workflow. It just ask it questions, use it as an assistant. But isn’t it true that in order to really wring out as much value as possible, you have to be pretty good at asking those questions and those prompts? Because you can’t just ask, how do I make my, you know, um, employees happier? You have to ask a very a more specific question in order to get an answer that’s more fruitful.

Rohit Panedka: Yeah, you’re spot only. And, uh, you know, this is where we are starting to also see the emergence of what we call super users, right? These are not necessarily, uh, born. Right? I mean, these are workers like you and me that are starting to leverage AI more. And it is a constant, uh, you know, learning and trialing and erroring, uh, kind of approach. So these what we’ve seen with these power users is they experiment every day. Uh, they’re consistent users of AI. Uh, they use it every day. Uh, they ask, uh, you know, these prompts, we also see behaviors of them sharing their prompting behaviors with other coworkers that are doing similar work, uh, learning from them. Uh, they also, uh, give feedback. So, you know, all of the copilot, uh, you know, uh, surfaces of ours have ability for you to give feedback of when a prompt didn’t work. That gives us insights to make sure that the product is consistently evolving and getting better at answering users questions. The other thing I would say from a business leader perspective, leaders leadership perspective is encourage this use and experimentation.

Rohit Panedka: Um, you know, we have seen that organizations that have these, you know, propensity for super users and being much of the workforce is when they hear from CEOs, when they hear from the leadership, the importance of AI, the importance of adopting it. And also, uh, you know, invest in some of these training. I’d also say one thing from a Microsoft perspective as well is when you open up and start using Copilot, for every prompt, you will see suggested prompts as well as, uh, as a, as a starting point. So even if you’re brand new, if you start typing a certain intent of yours, we give you suggestions on prompts, but also on the prompt box right next to it. We also have what we call Copilot lab, which is just a click away where you can start seeing based on the scenarios you want information on. We can guide you through that. And there’s pre-canned prompts. Now obviously, like I said earlier, as you start using this, make it very personal to your work and your situation. And the model learns with, you know, based on your own behavior.

Lee Kantor: So then as you’re kind of exploring an area, it’s remembering what you’ve previously asked. So it’s building on that rather than you starting from a blank page every time you’re using it.

Rohit Panedka: That is correct. It actually, uh, remembers the context of you as a user and, you know, bases it on your data, right? And not anybody else’s. So it’s very, uh, that’s also important from a, you know, data protection and privacy perspective. It’s all within your, uh, you know, usage and usage patterns and data.

Lee Kantor: So now how would an entrepreneur kind of leverage it in terms of inputting some of its own data into it? So it’s it’s building knowledge based on the universe that exists in that organization.

Rohit Panedka: Yeah. So, you know, this is where we definitely encourage, you know, uh, working with Microsoft, you know, whether it’s your account, uh, relationship managers or customer success managers and, you know, have a strategy and an enterprise strategy, right? We we definitely recommend that, you know, we think through your business ideas. We have copilot, copilot scenario libraries that are very available and easy to use. Uh, so think through how and what data that you want to, you know, expose for these kinds of, uh, you know, business use cases and worker use cases and, and, uh, you know, put some boundaries around that. It all starts with how can you, you know, be relevant with your data, but also secure with the data in the way it’s used. And then, you know, obviously copilot does its job. Um, but I would say start with that.

Lee Kantor: Now, for the folks out there that are apprehensive about AI, there’s a lot of fear in the unknown, and especially when a new disruption comes into play, there’s a lot of catastrophizing of what’s going to happen in worst case scenarios. What would you say to the folks that are nervous about the future with an AI assistant as part of the team?

Rohit Panedka: You know, um, that’s that’s I mean, that’s a very fair concern, especially when a technology is new. Uh, we we are open to those kinds of, uh, you know, skepticism and, and, uh, but, you know, we continue to learn and we obviously steep ourselves in data, and data is very clear. Um, you know, workers are still reeling with, uh, you know, mounting amounts of work, uh, pace and volume is consistently mounting, which is why we are seeing four out of every five users in Atlanta using generative AI. We are seeing, uh, you know, three out of every four worker bringing their own AI. Now, this is a business opportunity for business leaders. You know, uh, get on with the plan, right? You know, make sure that we are creating a, uh, work environment and enabling our employees with those tools to take advantage of it. The third piece, I would say is, uh, you know, from a data perspective, while, you know, there is this fear that, hey, you know, jobs could be taken away by AI, that is not entirely true in the sense when we look at the data, when we look at the LinkedIn data, you know, almost half of the job seekers today are looking for a career change. And over two thirds of the managers that are looking for hiring individuals are looking for people with, uh, you know, AI skills. They’re even saying that they would hire somebody with AI skills more than experience. So I think that suggests that the future is going to be different, in the sense that there will always going to be demand for, uh, you know, people, uh, with, with skills. And in this case, the skills are going to be, uh, with, with AI skills.

Lee Kantor: Now, are you where are we kind of in this in the growth of AI? Is this are we at the very beginning? Is this the first inning? Are we in the seventh inning stretch here? Where are we at?

Rohit Panedka: Uh, you know, for the for from from our perspective, we say, you know, we are the first the first inning was experimentation. Now we’re in the, you know, first to second innings, which is, you know, take these experiments and translate this into business strategy. And as, uh, more and more users and entrepreneurs and enterprises start leveraging AI for their use cases, then comes the rest of the innings, which is there’s a lot more use cases to solve for, you know, beyond knowledge workers. There are frontline workers, uh, there are different verticals in the industry that are probably more, uh, you know, uh, you know, sensitive to security and privacy and things like that. So I think it’s going to take time and to, to get to all of the possible business transformation and user experience transformation. So I think we’re, we’ve we’ve kind of gotten through the first innings of, hey, was this novelty. Let’s experiment. Now we know. No, it’s actually really helping work and transform work in businesses. And we have to now start, you know, really sticking to that journey and invest ourselves, uh, and commit ourselves to that journey because we’ll all learn, uh, the more enterprises, entrepreneurs and users use these products, the better they become, because those that feedback is what helps us make sure that our products are meeting, uh, you know, everybody’s needs.

Lee Kantor: So how does an enterprise level organization like Microsoft help the end user when you have a disruption like this that like you said, we’re maybe out of the beginning stages, but it’s it’s, um, so rapidly evolving and the speed every year it gets so much smarter and so much, uh, more beneficial to the end users. How do you help kind of guide or sherpa the, uh, consumer into not only embracing the technology, but really kind of wringing out the most value from it.

Rohit Panedka: Yeah. Uh, that’s a great question. And, you know, I think when we think about, uh, you know, our responsibility, that is key as well. Uh, you know, you might have heard of, uh, investments that we’re making in different markets in terms of, you know, learning and, and, uh, uh, training and skilling, uh, people with AI skills. We are also, um, you know, making available free courses on LinkedIn where, you know, there’s a ton of courses there if you go and look up for LinkedIn learning in LinkedIn learning, uh, for AI skills, there’s a lot of courses there for, uh, from, you know, from right from the beginning, where to start all the way up to scaling up. Uh, we also have to, you know, to your point of small business owners and, uh, even enterprises, uh, copilot scenario library, this is for folks that are in charge of making AI their strategy. And, uh, uh, you know, their business strategy. So we have those kinds of help. And as I said, you know, very large enterprises that have relationships with us, uh, we have customer solution architects and, uh, you know, uh, success managers and relationship managers that will engage and take our customers through that journey. Uh, we’re all in this together. And I say this again and again, which is while we do that, we are being very, uh, intentional about understanding how users are using it, how, uh, enterprises are using it, what are their guardrails? And we are making sure that our product is, you know, aligning to those so that we can be, uh, a one step ahead in terms of making sure as people are adopting more and more they have they get what they need.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to learn more, uh, connect with you, somebody on the Microsoft team on how to best kind of leverage this is it through LinkedIn or is it through Microsoft? Is it through a combination? How what coordinates would you send somebody to, uh, learn more?

Rohit Panedka: Yeah. So, you know, I would definitely encourage folks to go to microsoft.com forward slash, uh, work trend index or work labs. Uh, we have a lot of resources there for anybody that wants to learn more about these technologies. But if you have specific needs, depending on whether you have a relationship with Microsoft, in the case of you having a relationship with Microsoft, definitely leverage your, you know, uh, account managers and uh, or like I mentioned, you know, our support channels that you can come through, uh, if you want to self-study, uh, you know, sources like LinkedIn, uh, you know, feel free to use any of those. And. Yeah, again, you know, if you have any, uh, you know, questions for us, just reach out to us on, you know, Microsoft.com and give us feedback, and we’ll reach out back to you.

Lee Kantor: While we’re ahead. Thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Rohit Panedka: Thank you, Lee, and thanks for the work you do for our Atlanta, uh, listeners.

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