Oh Copilot, my Copilot

In the first episode of our third season of the “Talk Data To Me” podcast, Daragh spoke with Tony Ellis of Buckinghamshire Council in the UK about their journey in the early phases of their Microsoft CoPilot journey.

Key Learnings

Some key themes emerged in this discussion:

1. Use Cases are important to help make the best use of technology like Microsoft CoPilot – but sometimes crowd-sourcing the potential uses is a good way of engaging stakeholders
2. Investing in planned safety nets for when things do go wrong is important. People shouldn’t feel blamed or that they have done something wrong, but they need to have defined ways for raising issues and getting them resolved (aka Data Governance/Data Quality).
3. Behind every CoPilot is an army of Stewards… in other words, CoPilot success requires investment in data governance, records management, data classification and all that “fun” stuff. Investing in the foundations of good data practice is a key enabler of responsible implementation of this kind of technology.
4. The savings will never be what you think they will be. Rather than replacing roles, CoPilot is changing roles. Where staff might have been front-line support in the past they move to second-line support. So, plan for the transition of people roles as part of your planning for new tools and the implementation of new use cases
5. Tools like CoPilot need to be implemented as part of a coherent data strategy to support clear business objectives, even if the specifics of implementation are found by running a “Dragon’s Den” type crowdsourcing activity!

How Castlebridge Can Help

Castlebridge helps people put data to work. We can provide advisory supports on data strategies for implementing AI tools in a responsible and effective way, with an eye on regulatory compliance and organisational risk. We are actively working with clients on engagements like this, as well as providing training for organisation leaders.

To find out how we can help your organisation, get in touch!

Listen to the Podcast

The podcast recording is available on Spotify and where ever else you get your podcasts!