Rohit Panedka With Microsoft

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.