Leah Warwick: Hi everyone, I’m Leah Warwick and you’re listening to the Admin Edge. Here at ASAP we know a lot of you work in the Microsoft ecosystem and some of you have the Microsoft AI tool CoPilot or maybe you don’t have it yet, but you’re interested in learning more about how you could use it in a workflow. So if you’re wondering how to get started with CoPilot, say in Word or in Excel, take a listen with guest host Lydia Davidheiser, talking with Microsoft Trainer, Chris Menard, at EA Ignite.

Lydia Davidheiser: Hi everyone, I’m Lydia Davidheiser, Senior Content Coordinator at ASAP. My guest today is Chris Menard, Microsoft Certified Trainer at Chris Menard Training and trainer at this event EA Ignite. Welcome to the podcast, Chris.

Chris Menard: Thank you for having me, I appreciate it, I’m excited about this, one of my favorite events and this has been the best one yet.

Lydia Davidheiser: We’re so happy that you say that, and Chris, you’ve been a frequent returner, so you’ve been around for quite some time.

Chris Menard: I started, I believe Disney Coronado Springs was the APC conference.

Lydia Davidheiser: Okay, okay.

Chris Menard: I feel like it was 2022.

Lydia Davidheiser: Yeah.

Chris Menard: I got a call from this lady named Samantha, who I still see here all the time and that started it. My first one, so APC, EA Ignite, I guess we kind of pick where I come in based on my schedule since I work full-time, but I’ve always had a great time.

Lydia Davidheiser: Amazing, well we’re so happy to have you, and what better person to talk about Microsoft AI than yourself, Chris? So we have a very important topic here, Microsoft AI to your advantage and how to utilize it, and you’re very familiar with this, it’s your every day.

Chris Menard: I’m an everyday AI user, even when I’m off work, I use some form of AI, it’s the truth.

Lydia Davidheiser: Yes, and so to start off, because I think some of our audience is not as familiar as yourself since you’re an expert, so to start, could you briefly explain what Microsoft AI actually is and what tools or features fall under that umbrella?

Chris Menard: Sure, Microsoft has a few different AI tools, but the one that I’m asked about all the time and the one that users use all the time is called Microsoft Copilot 365. So this is a little pet peeve of mine with Microsoft, and I hope they don’t ding me on this. Microsoft’s got the $30 paid version of mine for users as an annual contract, that’s the one I just mentioned, Microsoft Copilot 365. We also have Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, so it’s just one different word. That is the free one. So everyone basically can use Copilot, and we just had two sessions on it, and I explained the difference, and I had everyone using some form of Copilot.

Lydia Davidheiser: Right, right, and it’s my understanding that this is actually built into a lot of the Microsoft application, so Microsoft 365 suite. So what are some of the easiest ways that admins can start to explore its uses?

Chris Menard: Great. I’m going to start off with my favorite app of all time, and I’ve been training since 1997, and that is Microsoft Excel. So when I crank up Microsoft Excel, I may have some spreadsheet where the first names and the last names are in a column, but it’s not always first name last name. That may be first name, last name, last name, first name, last name, comma, first name, and I can use Copilot to tell me the first name and the last name, and it automatically does that. I don’t even have to do anything.

Lydia Davidheiser: Right, right.

Chris Menard: Copilot has been out by the way. I want to mention this, Microsoft 365 Copilot came out, and I think only one person got this right in our session, came out two years ago, came out in November of 2023, when it first came out to be perfectly honest, I didn’t see the big deal in it, because it just, I didn’t feel like it was ready for prime time. But now I use it every day, I use it hours a day, but it saves me, used to be six to ten hours, now it’s probably eight to fifteen hours a month

Lydia Davidheiser: Wow, wow. And for admins, that’s a really big deal. I mean, saving time during their daily workflow.

Chris Menard: So a hundred percent. It’s so, a lot of admins sort of interrupt you.

Chris Menard: Outlook users. And I’m an Outlook user. So you have this really long Outlook thread, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s just internal people, external people. The thread is enormously long, and at some point you’re like, oh my goodness, we just need to have a meeting. Right. Outlook’s always have a feature where you could take an email and make it a meeting. That is not gone away, but with Copilot in Outlook, you say, hey, turn this into a meeting with Copilot, Copilot summarizes every email thread. It creates an agenda, it puts the agenda in the body of the email, it puts all relevant attachments in there, and then you just schedule a Teams meeting.

Lydia Davidheiser: Wow. So there you go, yeah. You know, honestly, that was a big one at the session today.

Chris Menard: Yes, yes.

Lydia Davidheiser: I could even utilize that. So this is really the meat of the topic, and what I think most people would want to know is what do you think Admins stand to gain by embracing Microsoft AI, and conversely what they might be missing if they don’t?

Chris Menard: So I have good news and bad news. Start with the bad news. I want to hear the bad news first.

Chris Menard: AI at some point is going to eliminate certain jobs. For example, telemarketing jobs could easily be eliminated because you could have an AI bot doing what a telemarketer could do. There are other jobs we’ve already seen robots in fast food restaurants, but administrative professionals, executive assistants, their jobs are not going away. The ones that embrace Microsoft Copilot or whatever AI they’re using at their company, they’re going to excel. It’s going to get to the point where there’s a huge difference between the ones using it and the ones not using it.

Lydia Davidheiser: Right, right, exactly. And I’d like to pivot a moment because I think another important conversation around AI just in general is the ethics of it all. And I think a lot of people listening will probably wonder what some best practices are for using AI responsibly within an organization, especially since a lot of executive admins or just admins in general, they handle sensitive information or executive communication. So what are your tips or best practices for that?

Chris Menard: I personally, and I have a regular full-time job where I work at, I would never use AI on any customer or client file without that customer or client’s permission. And I don’t care how you get it, but they may not want you using AI on it. But more importantly, even if you have their permission, sometimes Copilot and Microsoft is wrong. If you’re a Google workspace, you got Gemini, and I’m a Google phone user, so I got Gemini. There’s Claude. There are so many different AI models, but just focus on the Copilot. Go check to see if it’s right.

Chris Menard: So especially, especially in Excel, that’s an easy one you can go say, is that number correct or did it return the right result? In Word, if it does a summary of a document, you know, go and check some of the references that it gives you, see if that’s actually in the document, right?

Lydia Davidheiser: And Chris, I want to ask you a question that I feel like you’re going to really like.

Chris Menard: Okay.

Lydia Davidheiser: And this is totally opinion based, but I want to know what excites you most about the future of AI in the Microsoft ecosystem?

Chris Menard: So I don’t like your question. I’m just kidding. No, that is a great question. I mentioned that Copilot came out two years ago, and I was like, eh, it is amazing how fast AI is transforming how people work just recently. And I mean, recently the last two or three weeks, and I happen to have it because I have a beta version of Microsoft 365, so I showed this in our session. I had first name and last name together. And I wanted to combine them, which would be, we, so we right clicked in sort of column and everyone said name it full name, and I did the minute I press equal, I did nothing else.

Lydia Davidheiser: Right, right.

Chris Menard: Copilot came and said, “Hey, I’m going to take the first name into a space bar and put it in the last name,” and I said, “Yep, that’s it. Press it. Done.”

Lydia Davidheiser: Right, right. So there you go, okay.

Chris Menard: And I said, it was the month, the day and year, US format, right? And I’m like, you know, I want to pull the month out of here. So the same thing in sort of column did equal Copilot without anything else came out with a correct month.

Lydia Davidheiser: Wow.

Chris Menard: And everyone’s like, oh my goodness. So that is Copilot and one of my favorite features. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a Word document or a PDF file, you can tell Copilot to give me an audio summary of it. So imagine you came, imagine you just got, imagine you have a hundred page Word document. And you’re like, I don’t have time to go through this where you go and click on it. You tell Copilot to generate the audio summary and it gives you two options. Do you want just one person doing it? And it will even be shorter than option two, which I love is a podcast like we’re doing now. So you would be speaking about part of the document summarizing it that I come on and say, oh, that’s really a great feature. Let’s dig into this too, yeah. And it’ll, it’ll do a ten minute. You can take it with you and go walk the dog with it. I love this audio podcast feature.

Lydia Davidheiser: Amazing, amazing, it is amazing, yeah. And I’m sure there’s so many more tools and features that just continue to come out here after a year. All right. Well, Chris, we’re going to end with a listener question, which was submitted by one of our community members. They write, my company is still pretty cautious about AI. That’s a good way to introduce these tools to leadership and show the real benefits.

Chris Menard: Oh, this is a great question. When Copilot came out in November of 23, a company had to buy 300 Copilot licenses. So that’s 300 times 360. That is a lot of money. Two months later, they said, well, we can’t be doing this because my Chris Menard training is me and my friend Christian, they said, you can just buy one. So just go buy a few, find some users that you want to test on it with, and then let them test it, get their feedback, and then just gradually roll it out. Don’t go buy a thousand licenses if you have a thousand users without knowing what you’re getting into.

Lydia Davidheiser: Right, right. And I also wonder if you can talk about kind of the internal policies or the concerns that might come along with that if their company has certain regulations in that way.

Chris Menard: So the advantage of using Microsoft 365 Copilot, and I have nothing against ChatGPT, which I’m going to mention, if I go into ChatGPT and start feeding it prompts or questions, those prompts will train the large language models at ChatGPT, but with Microsoft 365 Copilot license with your company, they have something called enterprise data protection, and it’s got this green shield. Nothing I do is training the large language models that Microsoft. Great feature even the people that work at a company that have the free Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, have the enterprise data protection icon, it’s up in the top right corner when you’re in Microsoft Copilot.

Lydia Davidheiser: Chris, thank you so much for joining us on the Admin Edge. Where can listeners find you online?

Chris Menard: Find me at chrismenardtraining.com, C-H-R-I-S-M-E-N-A-R-D training.com. And then from there you can get to my YouTube channel, I’ve got a, I don’t know, 800 plus technology videos, a lot on Copilot, a lot on Excel, that over 25 million people have viewed.

Lydia Davidheiser: Wow, alright.

Chris Menard: And can I mentioned something? I’m so much into Copilot that recently in July, someone for Microsoft submitted my name to become a Microsoft MVP, Most Valuable Professional. It was a lot of paperwork. It took six hours just to fill the application. I did get accepted.

Lydia Davidheiser: Amazing.

Chris Menard: So I get to go to Microsoft’s campus and on March and talk to the product managers and tell them what I like and don’t like.

Lydia Davidheiser: Okay. All right. Thank you so much, Chris.

Chris Menard: Oh, this was great. Let’s do it again.

Leah Warwick: Yes. Thank you for listening to the Admin Edge, produced by the American Society of Administrative Professionals, our original music and audio editing by Warwick Productions with audio and video production by 5Tool Productions. If you liked this podcast, please leave us a nice review, five stars and subscribe. If you’d like to submit a listener question, you may do so on our website at asaporg.com/podcast.