Beyond the Prompt: Mastering Microsoft Copilot for Real Productivity with Jess Stratton [MVP]

Welcome to another episode of the MC65FFM podcast. Today I'm joining my someone who has spent years helping people get a million from technology instead of just talking about it. My guest is Jess Chatton, Microsoft MVP, Ted Xt speaker, founder of NORDGILJS LLC, Outro of the Co-Pilot for Microsoft 365, harness the power of Generation AI and Microsoft apps, use every day and one of the most recognized Microsoft 365 trainers. Millions of learners have watched her courses on LinkedIn, learning, organization, rank and from university to healthcare providers have trusted training and she is focused on one of the biggest challenges in AI. How do you make Microsoft co-cilot work for you, not just generate AI content? Today we are going beyond prompt engineering, talk about personalization, adaption productivity and why the future belongs to people who know how to collaborate with AI instead of simply using it. Jess, welcome to the MC65FM. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Definitely along when didn't draw. I need to shorten that a bit. I'm going to work on that. I'm going to see what co-pilot can come up with for me. Yeah. Yeah, I think you are really famous or on LinkedIn, but for the people who didn't know you, who is Jess and what's your journey through the Microsoft technology? Yeah. So, I was a senior staff instructor with LinkedIn learning and that just opened up doors to me. I started doing courses in PowerPoint and all the Microsoft 365 suite and just because LinkedIn learning is so integrated with companies, everybody is on it, we are in with LinkedIn, we need to be very current. So I was so lucky and it gave me all these great opportunities to really force me to learn everything new and make sure I could keep up, you know, stay one step ahead of everything. And that's been a journey. So when co-pilot came out, you know, we were trying to learn it really quickly. So I've just become good at being agile, right, keeping up with things and getting them, getting the courses updated and over time it was really hard because we had to learn how to add new features into these courses where at the same time grow with the changing needs of people in shorter attention span. So it's almost like, you know, teach more, but also at the same time make the course shorter. So we just had to learn how to be really efficient in that. And it just kind of grew from there. Now I'm on my own, I'm doing contract courses with LinkedIn learning, I'm trying to create some more of my own courses and just keep up with co-pilot, which is, you know, as you know, a full time job in itself. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a, I know that's content creator. I think you are the first guest that's the most MVP's, but you are also the LinkedIn, how is called LinkedIn learning instructor, how did you become a LinkedIn learning instructor? So it was actually quite funny. I was on my own as an independent developer and administrator for Lotus nodes. So this is like going way back like last century is weird as that sounds. And I was doing the conference circuit there, speaking at a lot of conferences and just networking. And this is kind of a testament to how important it really is to just network and meet people, which is one of the reasons why I'm super excited that I'm an actual Microsoft MVP now. I get to meet unbelievable people and continue that networking. But what happened is LinkedIn learning at the time they were called Linda.com. And they were much smaller than hadn't yet been purchased. And I was approached by somebody who said, hey, so we're trying to get a customer and we don't have anything on our courses about Lotus nodes. And I've talked to certain people at IBM and they say that you're the person to go to. So it was fantastic. So I did a course for them. And at the time, apparently the benchmark for quality was really low because I just handed everything in on time. And then they were, I did a course on Outlook and then they were like, hey, well, you work full time for us. So it was great. That was all she wrote. And then I just started cranking out courses and having a great time and learning all sorts of new technologies. Awesome. So yeah, that's really interesting. But yeah, how will you say have has teaching changed funds? Yeah, generative AI there. It's changed in that we have to kind of more of what I was talking about before. We have to find ways to teach people in a much shorter amount of time, a lot more information. And it's also, there's so many different levels, right? So when it comes to co-pilot and I find this when I teach live in front of webinars or in person, you know, you could take a group of five people, you could take a group of 200 people and half the people will never have used it before or will just have played around with a little bit or just don't fully understand what it is. And the other half are almost experts and just use it daily and can't imagine their lives without it. So it's really challenging to try to cater to everybody at every different level because there's people looking for advanced tips and there's people who are still just looking how to get started. And we need to remember that, you know, there's a lot of people that just don't have a lot of experience with this. Yeah, I think also couple of these headmasters, so many experienced with this, I think a lot of companies buy these co-pilot license, but yeah, they're struggle to see business value. Why does this happen so often? Because a lot of the training is not just about making sure they know how to use it and this is something that we've had to pivot a lot when we teach. Even in one of my LinkedIn learning courses right now, I'm actually recording a course right now, redoing a course on learning co-pilot. And it's a beginner course, but we're pivoting how we teach this course. So it was more of a, here's how to use co-pilot. Here's how you use it in each of the courses, but now we're changing it to, here's how it can help you. And here's what you can do with it. And here's how you're going to get some real productivity gains with it. So it's not just a matter of saying like, here's where all the features are and here's how to use it. It's why you need to be using it. How it's going to really help you. So a lot of times the mission is not the same, right? Companies need to learn that when they're trying to get people to adopt co-pilot, they have to teach them how it's really going to help them and why and what kinds of things they can do with it. Will you say the biggest obstacle is technology, governance or simply human behavior? Human behavior, I think. I don't think it's quite the governance because I think that enough admins that are setting up co-pilot are pretty clear on what needs to happen and the risks. And most admins know like, this is a pretty serious thing. We need to do our due diligence and learn about it. And Microsoft has a lot of safeguards in place. You can do your test runs, your pilots. You can see where you're oversharing information and you need to lock down some confidentiality and some files. So I don't think that's what's happening, but I think it's really just this showing your employees what it can really do for you and how it can really help them. And I think that's where we all need to start catching up. So we're definitely learning that we need to start, we need to change how we're teaching people these things. And even Microsoft, they're making it easier, right? As you know, like this, this is changing daily. It's so it's like a full time job keeping up with the changes. And one of the new features, it's relatively new. I think that I'm really excited about is the fact that organizations can now create custom prompt galleries, right? And the admin tool, it's right in co-pilot. You can put in your own suggested prompts now. You can sort them out by department. So previously when employees could go to the prompt gallery, right? That's been there's right since the beginning to help us out. And you can sort them by department and by task and just to get some inspiration. But now companies can put in your own prompts specific to your own organization. And I think that it's going to be a game changer because people have and companies have very specific workflows, very specific apps. I mean, they even have their own acronyms and terminologies that they use. And now all of these things can be put in the actual prompt gallery. And it's going to give a lot of users that aha moment as to how it can help them. I think it's trainer you have. Yeah, you get I think you get a lot of feedback from from users. So what are the biggest misconceptions people have about Microsoft co-pilot? The biggest misconceptions are a lot of them tried using it early on. And it was slow. It was clunky. It didn't always work. It was very limited in its functionality. And people are still a little bit jaded about that experience. And so I'm trying to explain to people, you know, even in the past couple of months, it's just come leaves and bounds. It's a different co-pilot than it was, you know, especially with the ability to choose models. So one, a misconception is that it just doesn't do a lot. And of course, we know that's wrong. Another misconception is, you know, I should just be able to use it right out of the box and type of prompt and it's going to like instantly think or snap to everything I wanted to do. And that's really not how it works. I'm as you know, right? You got to really get in there and you got to make it work for you. You got to, you got to get real good at writing a prompt and getting it lots of context and telling it what you want. And you have to get, you have to learn that you're going to get a better result if you can change the model from that drop down. So it's almost like you kind of have to be a power user and to get like the really good benefits from co-pilot. Awesome. If you're drawing a company on day one, and yeah, they are co-pilot coach, what will your first week look like? As a co-pilot, well, let's see. So they're already using co-pilot. That's my question. Yeah, they're all. Yeah, I would definitely, I like to get everybody on board. So my first order of business and even as a trainer, if you're going to do courses and if you're going to do webinars, I always like to do my intro to co-pilot session. And I call it the getting excited session. And even if a company said, hey, we've been using co-pilot for a year, I would say, guess what? We're still going to do this. Is that important? I like to get everybody on the same page because you can't, the company, I feel like I can't assume that everybody is on the same level. I can't assume they all know how to be responsible with their problems. And even with things like, I'm just sure you know, with enterprise data protection, that little green shields, right? We can't assume that everybody knows what that means. You know, a big, and I'm sure you know, this is a big comment is a lot of companies, people and businesses are like, well, why can't I use Chanjee PT? Right? You're saying I can use co-pilot, but how come I can't use this other AI tool? And so I like to take them through everything, right? Here's what introduction to chatting. Here's why co-pilot secure. We talk about enterprise data protection and what that gives you. We talk about responsible AI, right? How you got it? You still got a fact check, you know, you can't leave everything up to co-pilot. Here's how to write a good prompt, right? Why can't you even assume that people have learned Microsoft's four pillars, you know, goal, context, source, expectation, all of that? They're basic to you and me and sometimes I forget, which is not everybody knows those things. So I would always, like week one would definitely be like, food camp, you know, we're going back to basics and make sure everybody is on the same page. Yeah, you can't do this, doctor. I'm a little bit nicer, right? We're going to try to have fun. It is called the get excited session. So I want people to actually enjoy using co-pilot. That's the other call of it. It's a prompt, how much productivity comes from puns and versus changing the way you actually work? Yes, it's crazy. Yes. And that's even such a big question because it's not even just prompts anymore, right? As you know, it's agents and it's skills. I loved, loved one of your podcasts and your articles about how you're talking about skills are great because agents are now just kind of wasting computing power. Like I love that. You nailed it. If you guys don't know, it's in one of the previous podcasts that Merco did. It was great. And he's saying like skills are going to be the way to go, right? Because you were, you were talking about how they just, they hold on to, they don't release every single bit of resource until it knows it neatly. Yeah. Yeah, I think that it's because really, really interesting all it's, yeah, it's so fast, fast growing, I think. Yeah, it's a little bit hard to do a course because you have, you get every, I think every, yeah, weak. We see new announcement from Microsoft. Yeah, that affects everything, new and now. And then you have to kind of retrain everybody. So yeah, and agents are a little bit, they're a little bit tough to teach because they're so, and I, I feel like skills are going to be easier to teach because, okay, you can kind of get behind that. You can say, all right, I understand. But what this is doing, right? I'm, I get to just kind of plug in what I want. Whereas an agent, it's almost like giving somebody a piece of paper and being like, be creative, you know, people need boundaries and, and what to do. And agents are kind of, you know, how do I do it? How do I, how do I create an agent? Whereas at least with a skill, you can say, all right, I'm in PowerPoint, you know, I know I can, I can do this thing. It's kind of, there's some boundaries that I think people need. Also, yeah, yeah, this is, there are, or what habits do people need to unlearn before AI can really help them? Oh, that's a good one. That's a good one. I think, and I'm answering this question as me because this was something that I've had a lot of issues with. So I'm going to assume that other people have to, especially if you're kind of a power user and you're really productive and you're really independent. Sometimes you're just like, well, it's just easier if I do it myself. The, you know, I know how to do this routine. I know how to like move things into folders and I know how to create rules in outlet, you know. And so I think sometimes it's hard to give up that control and just let an agent do it. Now, cowork is obviously changing that because cowork can take, you know, it can, it can create a ballet of things that are going on, obviously. But everybody is going to get to use cowork. I'm still not even really teaching it yet. I'm still kind of doing catching up, teaching everybody, co-pilot. But at the same time, I think a big thing that everybody has to unlearn is giving up some of that control to let co-pilot and to trust it and, or to learn how to prompt. If you're really feeling stressed about it, how to prompt some checks and balances into the output so that you can learn to trust it. Do you think we also often, I don't know, we, we, yeah, pressure, old workflows in AI instead of redesigning work itself? Yeah, that's interesting. So here's the thing, I feel like companies have a huge opportunity in which they're getting to start fresh, right, with this, with this co-pilot thing, right? And still going back to even my days is a Lotus Notes developer. And if you, I don't, can't remember if you do developing or not, but so many enterprise pieces of software just start out with, hey, can you create this quick thing? We're only going to use it for this one project, right? And so you put together kind of this hack that's terrible, that's not been designed for, you know, future expansion or scale or anything. And that sucker will get used for 10 solid years, right? Everybody will use it until it's been like sliced and diced and thrashed within an inch of its life. Like, this is just kind of the way it goes. And so hopefully, with co-pilot, I feel like, okay, we've been, this is brand new technology, right? Let's start. So let's learn how to do things right, like create tidy agents, you know, like use that, use that prompt gallery, like make, make them nice, make them like clean and organized, like don't, don't do like hack jobs right now. I feel like we're at a crossroads where it, whereas, okay, we're going to, you know, this is going to leave some serious, like enterprise clutter if it's not done right. So I'm hoping that people treated as a fresh start. Yeah, I think one of the topics, yeah, I think your passionate about is how to make co-pilot sound at, yeah, yourself instead of sounding like AI. Why is that so important? People, it's, I feel like it's especially apparent on LinkedIn. And I don't, I don't want to sound like I'm obviously not ungrateful about the amount of posts there because I'm learning a lot, but it is true. Like let's face it, they're all starting to look the same, right? Everybody's post kind of looked the same, every infographic looks the same. And people are starting to get tired of it. Like you can tell, there's people are starting to resent it. And when I'm scrolling, I will get those infographics and I will get those posts. And I will also see posts of people complaining about how much the posts look like everybody else's posts. I think there's a lot of tools now in co-pilot to help avoid that, right? And one of them is obviously good prompt writing and, you know, be clear on how, what you want and make it yours. But there's so many ways to avoid this now. And you can, you can use those methods, for example, and PowerPoint, right? If you're creating infographics, you're creating a social media post, right? You can now put brand kits. You can specify how you want them to look every time. So if I just say, you know, create an infographic using my brand, boom, it's going to be my colors, it's going to be my fonts, it's going to be uniquely mine. You know, and it's so easy to take advantage of that. You can do it right in the create tool, actually. That's where you can create a brand kit for yourself. And you can also do it in PowerPoint with templates, of course. So there's that. But in just about every app now, for example, Excel, you can go into the settings and you can specify how you like things to be outputted, right? So you can make it sound like you and you can do that in co-pilot. And even in, in Outlook now, you can do that. You can tell what your voice is going to be in those settings. So something that I like to do is a fun exercise that I like to do with people. And I actually did it in one of my LinkedIn learning courses. I illustrated this. I'm trying to find a prompt, but it involves just going to a co-pilot prompt and saying, look through the last two weeks, ten weeks, whatever of my send messages and Outlook and create customer instructions for me based on my voice. And it's actually really funny because, you know, I am not the mode, I love writing. I don't use co-pilot a lot to help with writing, but I am sometimes not the most professional writer. Like I may put in like a few extra exclamation marks that I don't need. And it's very funny. It's almost like a little character study when Outlook comes back and tells you about yourself to create these rules. Like for me, it was, you know, exclamation marks are, oh, pay. You know, you need a friendly tone. And it says, I'm citing this example where you said, yay. It's really funny. Like it's definitely a character study in yourself, but I tested it and I asked it to send out an email and sure enough, like the change was instant. Like this email sounded like me, you know, so that the tools were there. You use them. I'm trying to tell everybody. I think if Excel sounds like me, it's have to done five times the view look up wrong. But that is me. What did you think what mistakes prevent copilot from, yeah, producing personal results? What mistakes, like what mistakes do we make when we prompt or what mistakes does copilot make? What, what we do. I think that we don't, we're not clear enough about what we want. So like sometimes it's, well, think about it and we'll say, hey, I want copilot to do this. I want it to like, I'll put this report for me, this executive summary for me. And then we get mad when it doesn't look right. And well, we didn't tell it, you know, you can expectations, I see expectations part of that or pillar framework, right? There's a goal. And that's what everybody starts with, right? Right mean executive summary. And you can give it context. You can say like, I, I need to be able to read this fast because I have a meeting coming up. All of that helps copilot, but what we forget most often is the expectations. Right. How do we want it to come out? Do you want it really rebose? Do you want it long? Do you want it professional? Do you want to implement points? And it's hard to tell people. And this is again, part of that, you know, be creative on a blank piece of paper issue. It's hard to tell people like, well, you can, you can do whatever you want. You just need to ask for it, right? So some people might forget like, oh, I can say like, I actually just want three sentences or this is for, this is for a dialogue box on the web and you have them, you know, I've got 500 characters. So, so tell me, do all of this and keep it within, you know, 500 characters. All of those rules and boundaries, that's really helpful and you can, you can write all of that. So it's just, we have to be good at actually identifying what we really want before we do things. So it's almost like, you can take some of that extra time and just think about how it would most help you to get the result. It's not just about doing it. It's about, obviously, this is about making things easier for you. And it's not easier for you if you have to sit there for hours and refine it. But if you just asked for it the first time that way, what exactly what you need, you know, it's astounding how specific you can get the instructions of what you're looking for. Awesome. Yeah. I think, I think a little bit about personalization. How many contexts need co-pilot yet to become dramatically better in answering? That depends on, so I used to teach, all right, it's as many as, it's whatever will get you what you're looking for, right? But now there's, it's a little more nuance than that because you can add lots of contexts. I'm trying to remember how many, what is it like 8,000 characters, some like, you can make these prompts crazy and you can go on YouTube and you can see some people prompting and their prompts are met like they're using up that whole thing. And some prompts are really short and I feel like there's a happy medium right there in the middle, but it's also important that while you're giving this prompt that, and I, we talked about this earlier that it's also important that you're changing the model to suit whatever task you're asking for. And that's really going to affect what you get as a result. Like it really is. So it's almost like everybody kind of has to be a power user in order to make this work really well. What I like to tell people if you really want to know what they're doing for you, you know, put in your prompt, keep it on auto and then clear the chat, change the model and run the same prompt and just watch how vastly different it is. And sometimes it takes longer, right, but it depends. So what, with, to answer your question, some of those nuances are, you know, how much time do you have to wait for the response? How important is it that this information is factually correct? Obviously, you know, what's on the line here? And all of that depends on what kind of prompt you should be in what model you should choose. Yeah. Is there also information I never showed, yeah, or never become a part of the personalization? So personalization is in just about every aspect of co-pilot now. And you can access them from that settings tool. But you should also check it in everything. And it's in word, right? There's little places that you can customize everything that you do and it's all over the place. For example, even in teens, something that's huge is for every meeting you go into, you can customize those meeting minutes. So if you have a specific meeting and you want your output, you want your meeting minutes and your action items like in a certain way every time, you can customize that. And not only that, you can have multiple pieces of customization per meeting. So like if you just want a quick summary for your teen that's super informal with action items, you know, you can it'll set it out and you can save it. And so every week after that meeting, there it is. But at the same time, if you're also giving those leadership and management, you can have a much more formal one, like right next to it that you can just copy and paste and send in to an email. So these little places where you can customize everything, you know, they're kind of everywhere. And of course, the co-pilot memory, you know, you can, that's something else that you can't easily see and it's hard to remember that it's there. But if you're constantly adding the same context over and over again, right, we can just go into a co-pilot chat and say, remember that I am this, right? Remember that I like, you know, I like bull face headings or remember that I am a computer trainer, things like that. What did you think about personal prompt libraries and how can you build this, yeah, in a useful way? I love it. So what I like to do is find, and this comes down to kind of an adoption, an adoption technique, right? These managers, you know who your champions are. And I just watched a great LinkedIn live event. And I'm going to go look up the names of them because they were fantastic. And one of the key takeaways for me that I remember is she was saying that adoption and finding champions is not the smartest person. It's not the person that knows everything about co-pilot. It's the person that's the most excited to share it with others, right? So in every department, you're going to want to find those people. There's a perfect marriage of people that use co-pilot and that love sharing it. And I do find that there is that in every organization. There's always that one person that just really gets it and figures out how to help it. You know, they've created an amazing agent already. They're kind of off to the races. And there's somebody that doesn't really know how to use it that well in their department. And so that's where the big trick is, right? You got to take these people that are doing very similar job functions and you got to put them in the same room. And that's where the magic happens because they'll talk to each other about it. That's interesting. I think a little bit. Yeah, yeah, I think that's cool. But more personal questions. Have you or can you share the three of your prompts that you almost, yeah, or what you are most most in use with what's kind of most most in some most of my prompts are actually just kind of trying to grow my business right now. And it's amazing how much co-pilot has helped me do that. For example, when I'm trying to, you know, like I'm working on the second chapter, the second edition of the book that I'm writing for co-pilot and it's taking a very long time when it's co-pilot, it just doesn't stand still. But it's been great because a lot of times when I'll do a course online or if I'll do a chapter of my book and I include screenshots, I can then very easily take those documents and tell PowerPoint, use this reference document, make a presentation for this amount of people. It's this length there, this, it's this target audience that has this level of technical knowledge and create a presentation and include all the screenshots. And you do that and it takes everything that was in that document and it just makes a beautiful presentation. So that's one area where it's really helped me. And then another area that it's really helped me is I'm kind of, so I'm, I would love to hire an intern and I'm getting ready to do that. And so a big part of my daily duties are going to be creating things like standard operating procedures and here's how I like to do things. So I'm using co-pilot a lot to just chat and say, okay, help me create, these are, this is where I'm struggling. So help me create some job descriptions and lists of duties and I can talk about how much time would be required to do all that and what level and where can I find a paid intern, things like that. So it's been really helpful with that. And then the final way, you get the third way that I really love using co-pilot and as a trainer, obviously you can't use any real data. Right. So one of my biggest time sinks as a trainer is creating scenarios, right? Creating these fictional, fictional people, right? And I always joke with LinkedIn learning, like some of these fictional people, like I was closer friends with people that didn't exist than people in my real life, right? I had more conversations with these people. So a lot of times creating these, these scenarios. So I can use co-pilot and especially I was so excited once Claude became built co-pilot because it just can create these fantastic documents. So I would say, you know, create scripts for teams conversations, you know, we have questions that need to be answered. We're a fictional company that puts on conferences, you know, and I can, in my demo accounts, I can tell co-pilot, like, remember that these are for training courses. Remember, this is a fictional company and it's so good about coming up with scenarios for me. It's like, oh, you want it, you need to teach this. We're going to, we're going to set up this environment for you because it's going to help you really demonstrate what you need to demonstrate that day. So yeah, yeah, that's cool for a, for a while, I think for two months or so. I've built an, yeah, AI prediction tool inside AI Foundry that's generated more than 1000 companies with employees and families and then you can ask a question. I don't know. How can I put my training course into my target group and then all the companies and the employees are all working and discussed and then you get completely, yeah, long reports. It's like, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it's like what's in English. I don't know the English word for this market research tool and it's really cool what you can also build with with with AI actually. So that was a really funny experiment. I have used it for finding our, to I must then how cybersecurity issues come in companies and then it's works for, for, yeah, it's really or long log rank. It's out, I think it was seven days. It was running and yeah, this was cool, a cool project. Yeah. It's funny because cybersecurity was one of the examples I use. I created a presentation on cybersecurity when I was updating my course on using power, co-pilot with PowerPoint. It was funny. It's like, let's teach everybody that these fictional, that's what we're teaching them today. Yeah. I think, yeah, the most, I don't know if there any product has not a co-pilot integration, but yeah, I think every, every product now has, I say, has co-pilot integration now. What are your favorite co-pilots? Well, where, where works co-pilot best with, with what Microsoft products from your perspective? I would say I'm having the best luck with co-pilot with PowerPoint and maybe that's just because that's where I spend a lot of my time. So I've just gotten to know it really well. There's a lot of nuances. I think for each product, whether it's Excel or PowerPoint or Word, you kind of got to know, like, this is how it's going to work best, right? With Excel, there's definitely certain ways to ask things to get the best results, right? And PowerPoint is the same way. So when you create slides and PowerPoint, sometimes people get frustrated because you go in and you try to change the slide layout and it's just a blank square. And it's like, okay, well, yes, when you create slides and PowerPoint, co-pilot is 100% favoring AI. So it's just kind of placing things on the slide. It's not a real layout. But I've learned that if you have a reference document, if you're trying to create a presentation from a document, you can set yourself up for success. There's things they can do. You know, like if you have a Word document, you're going to really want to make sure your header styles are all in a row. Like your ducks are in a row and it's a neat document, right? You're not just bull-facing titles. You have actual headers and they're nested because co-pilot uses all of that. And it's best if you're trying to use co-pilot to create slides that look like an existing design. All of those design elements, they need to actually be baked into the slide master. It's not going to clear that you have images there and it's not going to care that you have objects on that slide. Unless they're actually part of the slide master, it's not going to use them. It's just the nature of the beast. So I do love it. I feel like now that I've really gotten to handle a PowerPoint, I can create really great useful presentations right off the bat with just by answering some questions, but you just have to use them. And learn their quirks, you have to accept it and find ways around it. And I think that's where we are now with it. Yeah, I would say I have been here for at the start, I think, oh, cool. I use co-pilot on PowerPoint and then it gives me all, yeah, it's also like Kippy. It says, you click there, click there, click there and I was so happy with co-pilot and then PowerPoint. It's like, I never have four points in time. I remember when I was talking about earlier, like a lot of people got like use it in the beginning and were like, you know, thumbs down and then just never came back to it. Yeah, this was really frustrating. Can you say, what's your tip for people? They will become an eye professional. What's the main tip you can give them? Yeah, keep up. It's kind of what I think, I think it's here to stay obviously. It's not going away and it's changing really quickly. And I think part of what we do and, you know, just looking, learning on LinkedIn and learning is just keeping up because if you get far behind, it's so hard, you know. And now even if you really want to practice AI at the same time, like a great thing to do is to build yourself agents and find mechanisms to use AI to keep you informed about what's new with AI, right? So that's like a great exercise in using it to build yourself something to do that. But I think the really the biggest thing is just keep up, you know, find out what's new, what it's doing where it's integrated. You're hearing all these words, right? And even me, like, I remember when Claude came out, I was like, I don't know what this word is, Claude, that everybody's talking about sounds really important. I'm going to go see what it's all about. That's just what it's all about. You've got to learn like the, what's sticking and that's what you need to learn, you know. Yeah, I think that's, yeah, really important. What did you think? You say you don't use really copilot for writing your post and so on. Did you think the writing skill for people become more and more important skill or is it some less important skill with AI? I think, yeah, I think that's the million dollar question right now. I think this is what's happening because it's easy for us as older people. We have that, that baseline, right? So one of the things, this is kind of a two-parter. So the first, the first thing is I always say, you know, use AI for the things that you don't like doing. Like don't, you don't have to use AI for everything. If there's something you enjoy doing, then please keep doing it. Obviously use AI for the things you hate or you don't have time for and that's what it's great. It's great. I personally love writing. I always have and sometimes it's not professional. So 100% I'll use AI to help me polish it sometimes, right? But I have that baseline of existing writing. So if I wanted to, I could teach copilot, this is how I write, you know, like my writing's all over the place in various forms, blog entries, you know, fiction, things like that, books. So it's easy to train copilot, just like for all of us who are older, right? We've got, we can feed it all of our old things and say like, right like me, where I think it's going to be way more challenging is for younger people coming forward who don't have that, they don't have that baseline writing. So they don't know what their writing style is, right? And maybe we might even get to a point where they just don't have one, which would be a big shame, obviously. But this is where we're getting into that gray area where, okay, it's all kind of starting to sound the same on LinkedIn, you know, you got to really, you got to stand out, you got to have a voice. So what I would tell people is have a voice, you know, if you don't know what your writing voice is, you just got to, you got to do it. You got to find out what it is. And it may even be that in the future, we're not, we're not teaching it our voice by showing it our old writings, but instead we're, we're describing it, right? This is, this is my voice. This is what I want it to be. And I think that's where we're going, right? I want to be friendly yet confident. I want to be quirky. I want to use, well, you know, we're going to have to start teaching how we want our voice to be. And that's how it's going to stand out. What I think is going to happen. Yeah, that's really, really interesting. I think a little bit about the, yeah, I think how your teacher, you get all the disinformation with say, say it before, but how did you, yeah, I don't know, cluster it or how did you not become overwhelmed with all this information, Microsoft dropped and all the other companies like Claude and so on. I am constantly overwhelmed with it. Well, that question is invalid because there is no way there is like no timeline in which I'm not completely overwhelmed by all, you know, all the new things. And I honestly think that this is something that I've been meaning to even bring up on LinkedIn is how do we, as trainers, deal with just burnout, trying to catch up, trying to keep up, trying to update our courses. And it's, we're kind of getting into crisis mode. I kind of feel like, you know, it is hard, constantly updating, constantly feeling like you're behind. So we can make these things easier. Like I was saying, like build yourself the tools to get the new features to you quickly. So you don't have to go out looking for them, have them come to you, you know, like create an agent to tell you what's new. Instead of watching Netflix, watch the watch YouTube videos on what new, you know, that's kind of my life now. And I think it's, it'll be interesting to see if that ever slows down. If it ever changes, is this sustainable? I don't know. Like that's really where I am right now. This is kind of like the million dollar question for me right now is how do I, how do I deal with this and grow? And that's partly why I was just saying, I need an inter, you know, I'm getting ready to grow and scale and hire somebody. And then maybe they can help me with that. So it is the crisis right now. That thing, when we think about cool pilot and, yeah, you can make it better in one, one thing. So, certainly, Dalia comes and say, hey, Jess, you get all the money and the resources you need to make a co-pilot a better, better product or a, build a better feature. What will you, what will you do to make it better? You, I like that. I like that. I would say, okay, I, well, one, I would say just stop change, you know, kind of slow down the changes, but I would probably create more of a unified approach to everything, right? Because right now everything is everywhere. You know, I would, I would love it if there was just ways to customize, like, like, give me one app that's like customize co-pilot and you can just go in and set everything right there. I think there's too many things all over the place. And I think that's, it's really confusing. And from the admin side, like, admin settings are just everywhere, you know, and from the update side, from the, here's what's new side, I think things are, again, just everywhere. I would love just to see everything just consolidated into less places. And I think that would be life changing. Let's just jump in the, in the rapid fire round. I asked some questions, did we give a short answer? One Microsoft 365 feature everyone should start using tomorrow. Ooh, Microsoft 365 feature. I would say, this is still kind of co-pilot, but I love the create feature. I think that it's amazing. You can just create everything in the create tool. You can do, like, graphics, infographic surveys, forms. I love it. I tell everybody. What's the most underrated co-pilot capability? Saved prompts, I think. I had to, like, this is rapid fire, so it's just kind of, a lot of people don't know about it. A lot of people will just kind of do the same thing over and over again. It's like, just save it and reuse it. And it's kind of buried. I think it's too buried for how powerful it is. If co-pilot become, I say, a person, you can meet anywhere. What will you do with them? I would create, like, the physical embodiment. Like, I would get a rock and put googly eyes on them. So I'm actually talking to somebody. They always say, like, don't anthropore, you know, promote-fized things. I would be like, nope, I'm all for it. I'm naming it and I'm putting googly eyes on it. That's what I would do. What's the most overrated AI trend? The most overrated AI trend. That's a good one. See, I'm a writer, so I'm still going to say, like, writing, using it to write your LinkedIn posts. I don't like that. Yeah. You say you are a nerd girl. Why not a geek? So, this actually goes back to my Lotus Notes days. We had all less girls and I think it's just because, you know, the vocal structure of it just worked better, nerd girl. We all had, back then, there just wasn't a lot of women in tech still, so we would do panels and we would be like a panel of all the nerd girls and I was very honored to sometimes be on those panels. And they were still great to be in the audience watching them. We would just talk about, you know, what it meant to be a woman in technology field and what was changing and how we felt about things. And so over time, I was just kind of evolved into nerd girl, Jess, nerd girl, Jess. And then when I got laid off from LinkedIn learning and then went off on my own, I was like, you know, well, I'm just going to take this, like, I've been using nerd girl, Jess for a while. I'm just going to take it and run with it. And then even a couple of months ago, I finally decided to actually trademark it and inform an LLC. So it was just kind of one of those things that it has a very fond history of these amazing women that I used to do panels with and that I'm still friends with. So, um, coffee, tea or energy during trainings? Coffee all the way, all the way. And though I am my mother, oh, I have a, you know, my, my heritage is English, but I'm not a tea drinker. I'm a coffee drinker and I'm very jealous of people they can drink coffee all day. I cannot do that. I would have I could 100%. Um, what's the best thing to be a Microsoft MVP? I'm so excited. I'm excited about getting to me and hang out with other MVP's. That's the one thing. I worked at home for 25 years and I've worked by myself for 25 years. I've talked to myself, you know, and my animals all day long and my fictional characters that I use for training purposes. So I'm super excited to actually have other people to talk with and bounce ideas off of and hear their thoughts about things like I'm so excited for that. If you meet your younger Jess, I think, I think for 20 years, what, what will she, yeah, are most exciting about your self today? Oh, probably. Um, I'm more confident. I'm a lot more confident. And, you know, I may not have everything together at all on the inside, but I feel like I'm better about Haley's projecting that outwardly that I have that I kind of look like I know what I'm doing a little bit. Um, I think definitely a confidence level. And that's something that I think just comes from everybody when you get older, you're just more experienced and you're more sure of yourself. And I feel that young, young women especially need that. So hopefully they can get some. If you say one book to understand AI without AI in it, what book should people read? Ooh, one book to understand AI without AI in it. Uh, I'm going to say it's one of my favorite books, The Phantom Toll Booth, because all about, you know, it's about a little boy who's, you know, facing depression. And so he comes along and this Toll Booth helps him just appreciate life, right? So, I think it's not just about the way he's been doing the sounds, the sights, the colors, the smells, the, you know, so it's great for describing things. It's a great, if you were going to tell up an AI about, OK, this is our world and this is what makes it amazing. That's the book to teach it. Yeah, so yeah, thank you for for for being my guest today. So then my closing question is if, let's not remember all we won a lesson from today's session. What show did be? Ooh, if we remember, I, I feel like it's important for companies to really, um, do adoption right? Do right? Get everybody excited about a copilot? Get, get that departmental training, build that prompt gallery by department that your company can use to get some actual like win so that they can feel successful in their own job right now. That's what it would be, yeah. Yeah, awesome. So yeah, I say, yeah, thank you for just thank you for joining me today and yeah, the listeners find all the information and links in the show notes on the podcast side from you. And yeah, I think this conversation made, oh, yeah, one thing very key from here. It's, it's not about right, the perfect prompt. It's, yeah, building better habits, providing better context and making eye, I work the way you work, not the like it's work. So yeah, if you'd like to learn more from just book also, you've got it in the, in the show notes. So yeah, thank you for for being here and thank you for listening. Thank you. Bye. Jess. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much. Bye, everybody. (chuckles)