Transcript for "Copilot for Comms: Putting communicators in AI's pilot seat": Hello, everyone, and welcome to Copilot for comms. My name is Chuck Gose. I'm the founder of ICology and the least most important person here today. But I'm so glad to have you all join us today. I wanna kick things off. Some of you have already gotten started in the chat. I want you to drop into the chat, tell us where you're joining us from. And because the chat inside Goldcast is is fun to be in, I want you to share a GIF that represents your current experience with AI. Are you excited? Are you cautious? Are you overwhelmed? I wanna see what everybody's got in there from a from a GIF standpoint. And, yes, we have matured as a culture to say gift and not the other variation of it. So go in there. I'll take a look at those a little bit. But if this is your first time at an ICology event, welcome to this. ICology is a community built for internal communicators by internal communicators. We believe in learning together, sharing honestly, and building better employee experiences through strong communication. So if internal comms is your passion, ICology is your community. You can join us at joinpsychology.com, and we're actually doing something new today that I've never done at another event ever. Sign up today and then use the code copilot, c o p I l o t, copilot when signing up, and you'll get 25% off your first year. That's a $50 savings. And if you are someone who is in between job opportunities right now, we recognize that you need community more than ever. We have a special gift of grace membership for you, and you get your first three months free. So whether you're in internal comms or you're looking for a role in internal comms, if you're passionate about it, we want you as part of ICology. I wanna sneak into the chat here to see what we've got. We've got some fists going up. We've got some people ready to learn. I love it. A little AI practice. Great. Great, Joe. Not surprised, Joe. Well done on the on the AI reference there with practice. We got Elmo. Love it. So keep dropping those gifts in there as we continue to talk through things. So couple other announcements I wanna share with all of you. August 26 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Yes. Why Sioux Falls? Why not Sioux Falls? We are hosting our third annual employee comes and culture festival. Flyover Festival is our only in person community wide event this year. And if you wanna be in the room with other forward thinking communicators and just be a part of something different from additional conference, FlyOver Festival is it. High energy event, very intimate. We tap it at 40 people. You can find all the details at joinICology.com. I will also put this link in the chat for all of you to make it nice and simple to find it. And next yes. Oh, also, I wanna say this year's event is sponsored by Staffbase, First Stop, and LucyHub. So thank you for those three companies for supporting this year's Flyover Festival. And speaking of LucyHub, we have a video series with them called Lights, Camera, Communicate, which is all about helping communicators and comms teams get better at creating video. Our second episode will air July 22. This is a live studio show. I have to go to Vegas to record this. It's painful to go there, but it's important for us to keep this education going. I'm gonna put a link in the chat for this as well so you can get signed up for the second episode of Lights, Camera, Communicate. I love seeing all the energy in your scene. So let let everyone know. If you're an ICology member, go in there and and shout it out. Drop a gift what you think about being an ICology member so we can get more people in our amazing community. We'll keep that going. Now let's talk about why we are here today. As we know, AI is everywhere, and it feels a little cliche to talk about it because everybody's talking about it. But while the the tech is impressive for those of us who are using it, I more so love hearing stories about how communicators and leaders are empowered by it. And that's what today is all about. I do not believe in creating fear around AI. I do not think that is helpful. I believe in educating on AI. And so our session today, Copilot for Comms, is a conversation with real communicators who are using Microsoft Copilot and other tools in their day to day work. No fluff to this. No pitches to this. Real ideas that you can take back with you. And if you learn some things today, we'd love for you to write a LinkedIn post about it and tag psychology. Wanna spread the word about all the great things that our speakers are gonna be sharing to us today. And I have been known to send out some occasional sweet treats to surprise and delight if I see some great posts out there. So you take some screenshots, if you get some great lessons learned or some prompts to share, do that. And inevitably, everyone asks if this is being recorded, people. Twenty twenty five. Of course, it's being recorded. Anybody who's registered will get the the on demand afterward if you have to drop. And the second question everyone asks, will you get the slides? The answer is yes, but if you are a member of ICology. So the slides are available to anyone who is a member of ICology. And I'd also wanted to shout out we have a very special guest with us today in the in our studio audience. One of our speakers' moms is attending. So if Katie LeBrun's mom can go into the chat and and say, announce yourself, let us know you're there. Everyone celebrate Katie's mom. We know how great it is to have our parents and be proud of us and celebrate that. So, yep, say everybody say hi to Katie's mom out there. So we've got three truly incredible speakers with us today. A couple months ago, we did what we call a campfire session inside ICology on this topic. I was blown away by what was shared. And much like for those that are internal problems where you wanna have this conversation with your employees first before you tell the rest of the world, we like to do the same inside ICology. So we meet as a community first, and then we share it with with all of you. So we've got all everybody's a communicator, but we've got Katie LeBrun from Premier Bankcard who is here, Carrie Knutson from Choice Bank, both in the comps professions. And many of you will be jealous of this. We have a CIO on this call today who also cares about communication. Susan Gerock from Elm Communities. These are all leaders in my mind with hands on with the work, and they're here to share with us what's working, what they've learned, and what they're still figuring out when it comes to AI. Like I said, I am the least in person least important person on this call today. So, Katie, Carrie, and Susan, will you please join me on stage, and let's get into it. Thank you so much, Chuck, and shout out to my mom. Thank you for joining and supporting me. I appreciate it. Alright. We are gonna get set up here in just a moment. So I'm gonna go back into the chat while you're getting that pulled up. I'm loving I'd I I shouldn't be surprised at the number of mom gifts that are out there. And thank you for everyone for keeping it to the appropriate mom gifts from what I can tell, I believe. But, yes, thank you, Christy, for being here to support your amazing daughter and everyone who's here to support Carrie, Katie, and Susan. Oh, yeah. Laurie's coming out. They they Laurie, I they didn't give me the memo on the green. I'm sorry, Laurie. I did not know we were all supposed to dress in green. That was a conspiracy against me, apparently. I don't think any of us knew about the green until we popped on today. Happy accidents. Alright. Well, with that, we are going to get started. So to begin with, I just wanna share a story of how Carrie and I connected, and it was through iCology. We actually met at the first flyover festival, and we connected, about two years ago and have just really stayed in touch. And I tell that story to highlight the community within psychology and it just how much people are willing to share information, share best practices, and really that's where this presentation sprung from was our willingness to share ideas and our knowledge with each other. And now we wanna share that knowledge with all of you. So we are thrilled to be here today and sharing our experiences, what we've learned with everybody on this call. We've worked together to come up with the idea and content for today's discussion, but what happens if you don't have a Carrie or a Katie to work with? Well, that's where Copilot comes in. Today, we're going to walk through how to use Copilot in meetings, how to use it to stay organized, how to use it for content creation, and then we're going to bring in Susan. And she's going to bring her perspective as CIO about how to successfully collaborate with IT. But before we dive into all of that, we wanted to take an opportunity to introduce ourselves. So I am Carrie Knutson. And, yes, Knutson is how you say it for those of you who are not in the Upper Midwest. So and I have twenty plus years of experience in communications. Ten of that is in the accounting and financial services world. And my previous 10, like a lot of communicators, was in journalism. So, and this is a photo of my wonderful family, my husband, Michael, who I believe is on this call, so which is awesome, and my twin daughters, Maggie and Grace, who just turned five on June 30, and then there's our little hyperactive morkey dog, Roxy. And a little bit about me, to keep in theme with, the third annual employee comms and culture flyover festival of bands and music. My favorite musical moments. So this is me, with Chris Shiflett of the Foo Fighters, me with William Tell from Something Corporate, and also with Matt Nathanson of Matt Nathanson. And I love going to concerts, and I have the privilege of being able to bump into, these wonderful guitarists, either outside the venue or maybe pay for a little bit extra for Matt Nathanson to meet him. So that is some of my music favorite musical moments is meeting, musicians. Alright. And then a little bit about me. I live in Sioux Falls, South Dakota where the Flyover Festival will take place August. I have over twenty years in marketing and communications, ten of those years in financial services. And this is a picture of me and my family, my husband, Chad, my daughter, Piper, who is 11, and my daughter, Ayla, who is six. And one of my favorite musical moments is also meeting Matt Nathanson, and, no, Carrie and I do not share a playlist. Another happy accident. And I am really excited to be hanging out with the coolest people who are internal comms people, to be invited to this August group. I've been in IT for thirty years. Most of my career in commercial real estate. And people say real estate, what what my career is focused on are office buildings, shopping centers, and retail centers, construction, apartment buildings. And, pictured here with me is my husband, Jim. That picture, is from last month. We were celebrating our thirtieth wedding anniversary, and we are pet parents. UC Forrest, my adorable beagle, and Lotus, my very, very grouchy cat. Now, Susan, have you not met Matt Nathanson? I have not. See, I once again, I am not as cool as these people. I am very, very happy to be hanging out with the cool people. However, I am the coolest person in my niece's life. Pre pandemic, Jojo Siwa was the absolute favorite entertainer of all tweens. I got third row tickets to a concert here in the DC area, and you can see me there with my niece at dinner before the concert. I am still riding those cool on points, like, all the way until now. Alright. So let's get into why you all showed up other than getting to know all of us. So we're gonna talk about Copilot. So Copilot for Teams meetings. This kinda goes into why I started using Copilot. You know, few years ago, AI was a huge buzz. Right? You open up LinkedIn, people are talking about AI. You're looking at different articles online. It's what is AI gonna do? Is it gonna take your job? You know, where can you use it within the workplace? And so through my research and through our team's integration here at, the organization I work for, Choice Bank, I found that Copilot could be brought in, and used through Teams meetings. So this was literally my first thing of, like, how do I think about this? How do I use Copilot? And so, we have a quarterly performance update that we have here at our organization, like, lots of people. And I do the follow-up email for that, along with a few other people. And I thought, what if we could just record this, use Copilot to take that transcript, and help with that key takeaway email. And so the more I researched it, the more I was like, okay. Like, this seems like it would be a really good use case for it. And so when I think about, like, that quarterly call in the email that that I was producing. It took about two days worth of work and kinda really buttoned it down to about maybe four to six hours of work. If it's a shorter call, maybe two to three hours worth of work where it can pull out these key topics and things like that from the transcript for a meeting. And so when thinking about the efficiencies of that I could gain, while a lot of communicators are out there, you probably know, you know, a lot of places, you know, you're a team of one. And I put that in quotes because, yeah, I may be a team of one and doing what I do, but I have support for many within our organization. And so how could I make my job a little more efficient to not have to rely on the support from other people, but also continue to create great content for everybody? So worked with our IT department, asked about Copilot, said, you know, can I get a license? And, they ultimately said yes. And so with that, on the screen here, you can see or use it for transcripts, pulling out key topics from meetings, asking Copilot what are the action items to follow-up from this meeting, create an agenda for a follow-up meeting, or even asking is a follow-up needed needed meeting needed for this particular case? You can do live prompts. So if you're in a meeting and you have that transcript turned on, you and you come in five minutes late, you can type in the Copilot. What are the key takeaway so far? What have I missed? Copilot can kinda get to know, like, who you are and what you do, and you can ask it, like, where do we disagree on this? As a as an internal communicator, where would I potentially push back on this? And maybe, like, what are the unresolved questions we haven't tackled? So getting that real time live props for Copilot. Post production, you know, drafting the company email, summarizing the key points, and then being able to go in there and just, polish it up. Perhaps creating a newsletter from the content from the meeting or scheduling, like I said, a follow-up meeting. And, also, we can suggest content. What are other ways that I can use this content covered? So you you take all this time and effort to create this amazing piece, this email, but how can I use it in other ways? And, also, having it look at that email and saying, like, what will people still have questions about from this email so that you can maybe check it and add a little bit more information to that email. Carrie, I have to jump in here and let you know, and let the audience know one of the things that we have found is that, while the transcripts are great, sometimes if you have unique spellings, like, for example, my company Elm is e l m e, and the transcript was always spelling it e l m. Do you know that if you have certain words that are spelled or interpreted a certain way, you can actually load that in to Copilot, and so it'll always spell it this the right way when it hears that word. So there's there's a tip for everybody you can work with your IT department on. This is why I didn't know that. Yes. This is why she's here. That is great. And so now I'm here to talk about how to stay organized with Copilot. Again, small team, team of one, and I do not have an assistant as I'm assuming most of you don't either. But, again, I do have Copilot. So one of the ways I've used Copilot is to help summarize emails, especially when I've been out of the office. Around mid June, I took a vacation with my family, and I was out for a week. I'm sure like most of you, I kind of always dread coming back to the office and just the pile of emails that I've missed. But for the first time, coming back on Monday didn't just set me on edge, and I didn't need to block out two hours of my morning to go through emails. I used Copilot to summarize my emails, to create my, to do list, and to just kind of prioritize things. Now, again, it's not perfect, but it did at least get me through the hump and get me through kind of that hectic first Monday morning back. And it did allow me to at least begin my week back from more of a place of calm rather than just more kind of chaotic, which is what I was used to. And I did the same thing for the missed team chats. So I had it summarize what are the chats that I missed while I was out, and it provides just this nice kind of summary and a nice list. And then I can come back and, again, prioritize between the team's chats and the emails what I need to get done immediately. I do kind of the same thing now on Fridays getting ready for the next week. I asked Copilot to look at the meetings that I have for the next week. What priorities do I have? What are the work items that I need to prioritize in order to be prepared? What workflow items do I need based on the importance, but also the deadlines that I have going on? I've also used Copilot to prepare for meetings. So I've used prompts such as summarize and prepare me for my daily meetings. So it will again look at my calendar, it will look at my documents, and it will put together the items that I need to be ready. Again, this is something that if I had an assistant, they would do. It's also things within the past I've had to spend my time doing, but now Copilot is taking those tasks and doing it for me. It will also take from meetings, identify key points and action items. So if we're not using a team's meeting and we're getting, you know, notes or if we're getting, you know, agenda items, you know, all of those materials that you get from a meeting, I can upload those to Copilot. And, again, it will summarize specific to me what I need as a communicator those items to pull out from the agenda from the meeting notes. And I've also really been using it for file search, which I have found to be really helpful. Again, team of one, you can have so many different business lines that you're supporting and generating a lot of files, especially if you're doing different versions. So sometimes I can remember well, the file was about this and I know it was a PDF and I can't remember exactly where I saved it, but I can type in some, you know, general ideas to kind of get me started and I know it's a PDF and Copilot will search the folders that are connected to my Copilot, and it will be able to find those files for me based on those keywords. Again, I sometimes it can, you know, take you a half hour, maybe an hour to search for those files, especially if it's not one that you've used in a while. You know, somebody's like, hey. Do you remember when we did this two years ago? Let's pull up that communication from the cookout. You know, when you try to go to look for it, this makes it so much easier. Katie, I wanna just chime in here quickly on that. I think that was the part when you talk about it it managing your emails while you're out and giving you some peace of mind of not worrying about that you might miss something as we know, and you try to take a week away. You wanna not read email because you're worried about missing something and just having that peace of mind. Even if it's not perfect, it's better than not having it at all. I just think that's a great callout to think about how this tool can really help you manage even being away from work. Absolutely. Yep. And before I get into this next slide here, I've been watching a little bit of the chat and, some people saying, like, hey, I don't have that capability. This is if you have a Copilot license that integrates with your m three sixty five environment. We'll be talking a little bit more about that later. But so for those of you who are trying to real time, maybe do some of these things if you don't have that official license, You might not have some of these capabilities, but, one of the cool things about this presentation is it's gonna show you so many ways to create efficiency in your job that you're gonna be able to use that Copilot chat to write a proposal to your IT team on why you should be having, Copilot, the license official license. So, just to kind of answer some of those questions Wanna jump and carry on on that. If if you're looking for technical support with your with your copilot, talk to your Susan Gerock. Talk to your your IT team about this because there is so much related to setup and what's integrated and what permission levels, and there's different co pilots out there and all of that. So if you're having issues or you're excited, I'm excited. I'm I don't even like Microsoft that much, and I'm excited about what, they're talking about. Talk to your IT team, whoever your Microsoft team is. They can help you get get all this stuff set up properly. Yes. And like I said, Katie and I will go into that. That's a little bit of preview with Susan being here too on how to get this, so stay tuned. But I'm gonna go a little bit into Copilot and relationships. I know that sounds kinda weird. AI and relationships. Right? You think like, oh, I can maybe look through documents for me or help me draft communication. But, as I was exploring more about Copilot, I love challenging Copilot to see what I can do. And so the one thing that I was researching is, like, how I can give you tips and tricks on different things. And the one amazing thing about working for Choice Bank is we are a strength based organization. We talk about our top five strengths constantly. It's in our signatures. It's on our desks, our nameplates. It has our top five strengths, and, it helps us realize, like, how different we are, you know, so, how I lead with a developer or a relator strength, things like that. And sometimes when you try and communicate, you might not know exactly how to communicate with each other because of those different ways of leading with these strengths. And so, what I did since I have the integration, is I went into Copilot and I said, you know, I'm a person with these top five strengths. And I have a meeting with this person who has these strengths that are nowhere near my top. They're in my bottom 34. And, how what's the best way to be able to approach this meeting? Because I found the meetings previous to this, we didn't always jive. Like, it felt like it wasn't a smooth meeting, and I knew it's because we thought differently, and which is awesome. But at the same time, like, how can we make this a little bit more efficient? And then I went further from there. Like, what could be some potential roadblocks between me and this person? How can I be most effective in this meeting? And, what do I need to do to be more confident with this particular person? And I never thought I would say, hey. Copilot has helped me become a little more confident, in meetings, you know. So those of you who are maybe just starting to, like, work with, you know, senior leaders or executives and you might be a little bit, like, timid or things like that, it'll give you prompts on ways to be able to assert yourself a little bit more. And so I have really enjoyed the relationship part of learning and, how I can use this to work with people within the organization. I think that also blew me away, Carrie, when you share that because I would have never thought of how can this tool and use it as a tool truly help someone prepare for a meeting, not just with the materials, but also who else is there and how they learn and how they might respond to things. That I think that's that's pure magic. And the amazing thing about when you have the license and it's integrated. So since these strengths lie within our SharePoint, when I typed in the top five strengths of this particular person I was going to be meeting with, it pulled their name in and said, hey, looks like you're meeting with this person. But, you know, this person has authored these things on your SharePoint page. This is the type of role they're probably in because it's pulling from that m three sixty five environment. And so it really felt like it was a tailored, you know, almost like, hey. This is how you and this person can work better together. And so, it's just a lot of fun to push Copilot to say see what it might be able to do. Alright. And now into some of the fun stuff, the content creation with Copilot. So the brainstorming and training is, you know, kind of the fun part. You know, some ideas for this is, you know, trying to, you know, upload your content and, you know, working on the headlines. One of the ways that I've used Copilot is, generating content in a very specific tone. So last year, we rolled out a new strategic plan for my organization, and we really wanted to communicate differently with our employees. So using kind of an employee focus group, we determined that we wanted our content to sound more like Ted Lasso, which is a very different style of communications than we've done before. Admittedly, I've actually never seen Ted Lasso. I know of the program, and I I know of it, but I've never seen an episode. And so I sat at my desk and just thinking, how am I going to do this? This is where Copilot came in. And so I would write my content. I would upload and then say, please revise this in the style of Ted Lasso. And it has helped train me, and so now my content has gotten better over time. And really at this point, as I'm writing it, I'm basically just kind of checking it against Copilot, but I have gotten better in my writing against this very specific tone that I really wasn't comfortable or confident writing in before Copilot. Yeah. And as Katie said, you know, it's great for that tone, and it's also good for taking that communication that maybe you wrote and just simple things like, what's a good headline for the story? What's a good subject line that'll get people in, to actually click on something to read? And, we use that within our organization, or I use it a lot because it's like sometimes Friday afternoon, your creativity is tapped out and you just need to plug something in and go help me out a little bit. Help me brainstorm. And then you might be able to piecemeal a few things together to to make sure that you have, like, a good engaging subject line to get people to actually read your communication. Katie, I have a I have a question about I have a question about this Ted Lasso admission, Katie. Mhmm. Do you just not like good television? Do you like the violence or the drama? My family. Drama. I have kids, and they control the TV. So if it if I ever get the chance to watch anything that's not animated, like, it is it's a crazy good day. So I would say it's kid mostly kid friendly. You might wanna trick them in the tech kinda having it on. I just there's a lot of great lasso gifts going on with that. So just so we're Okay. Well, if anybody wants to share their Apple password with me in the chat, I am happy to partake and then access Ted Lasso. We'll throw that out there. So, Copilot is also great for drafting content. So I wanted to do something fun around the holidays, and I've been kinda thinking, you know, for a couple weeks, what can I do that's just fun? And, you know, it hit me at home. Gosh. Wouldn't it be fun if we could create an article in the style of The Night Before Christmas? But, gosh, how am I gonna write that? Maybe Copilot can help. So I came into work the next day with this kind of idea of a prompt of what I wanted to do, and that's basically what I plugged in. I knew kind of the subject of what I wanted to do, and I said, okay. Take the subject, but write it in the style of The Night Before Christmas. And it put out this amazing article. And, again, I did have to go in there and edit and kinda massage and do things. But for me to have spent that time creating, like, to get the timing and the rhyming and all of that put together, it it was so much fun, and it was one of our best received articles of 2024. And it was fun to it was fun to work on. That when Katie shared that, I was blown away. Like, think about taking your strategic plan and saying, like, make it in the form of a wrap or, just something like that to create that fun content that might be more engaging for people to actually read or talk about within different teams. One way that I've been able to use it is in open enrollment. So our HR team and marketing team are amazing, and every open enrollment season, what do we do as communicators? How do we get people to actually click into those things and read them and sign up for all of the benefits that you have to offer. And so when thinking about, some of the previous, open enrollments that we've done here, we've had the theme of Mario or Hocus Pocus or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. So what are ways that you can put some of your content into Copilot and have it be in a Mario theme or Hocus Pocus theme? Could it write a potential script for a fun video to do on open enrollment? Could it give you ideas for maybe some desk drops or things like that that you can do to kinda get some excitement around that? So I know Carrie also uses, Copilot quite a bit for bias checking, and I remember when she first told me her story about how she was using it. And, I mean, similarly, I was completely blown away. It's, I just think, such a great way to make sure that your content is hitting what where and who it's supposed to hit. Yeah. This is one thing that I have loved being able to do with our communication, especially the all company communication. Because, well, I love working for a bank and not coming from a financial background so that I feel like when communication comes to me, I can if I don't understand it, not everyone in the org probably would understand it. The longer I've worked here, the more I'm getting to know more about the financial services and banking industry. And so I am not as, you know, I'm not looking at it from a clear lens like I used to when I first started here. And so it's been great to be able to create a persona, which is so cool to do. If you've never done this in AI, try it out. Type in there, I'm a, you know, frontline employee at a bank with 500 plus employees, and it'll say it'll actually give you a spin out like, hi. I'm, you know, James Smith, and this is what I do, and these are my hobbies and kind of, what my typical job duties would be. And if those job duties aren't exactly what your organization is, you can tell Copilot, nope. We don't do that here. We do this type of thing. So, like, feed that information to Copilot saying create this persona. And then take your communication, copy, paste it in there, and say, what would I get out of this communication? And it will spit out to you, you know what? You'll understand this, this, and this. These particular points might be a little too high level or they might be confused about this. It'll pull out this sounds like jargon. Do you need to clarify that a little bit more? One amazing thing that I love about our organization here is that we, have a lot of choice words, and phrases as a lot of you, I'm sure do within your own four walls. And so some of those prompts, I'm like, nope. People within here know exactly what that means. And some of them, I'm like, you know what? Probably for some of our newer team members, we need to explain this a little bit more. So it's been so great to be able to check that content bias. And that got me thinking too about how to use that in my organization, and we have a very large, call center component within my organization. And so I do check my content against, is this understandable by frontline employees? Because we do have to balance to make sure that, like, our back office, you know, finance, HR, IT, that the same piece of content is understandable across so many different positions. And, is there a way to balance all types of employees to make sure that it's understandable for everybody? And so, again, once Carrie had shared what she was doing, it it just got me thinking, well, how can I apply that to my organization and make my content better? And then it also kind of got me thinking onto our next topic about creating FAQs. So similarly, one of the ideas that I thought of was during open enrollment. You get all of this content and I kind of thought, you know, what if again, just experimenting. We didn't really have plans to do this, but just kind of testing out what can you do with Copilot. And so I took our open enrollment documents from the year before the communications, uploaded it to Copilot and said, you know, please create an FAQ, you know, that, based on questions that employees might have. And it it put together maybe 10 or 15 questions, and I just thought that's, again, just such a great start. At least that gets you started. It may not be the final product, but to Carrie's point, it kind of, gets you back in the mode of putting yourself in the shoes of your audience because it's really easy to kind of drift away for that sometimes depending on what your work is. But I feel like, you know, Copilot can really help you kind of recenter, recalibrate, and put you back in the shoes of your audience. And I thought it was a great exercise. We didn't end up using it. It was really just more for myself as kinda to test out what the system could do. And when talking about creating those FAQs, I also think about this is great for that large change communication as well. You can put in all of your different documents into Copilot, have it reference these documents, like Katie said, pull up those FAQs. But, also, you know, if you're doing a large change and you wanna create perhaps a SharePoint page, internally for all of your employees to go to that has all of these different, documents together. It'll give you suggestions for, like, what should be housed on that SharePoint page, or, you know, what would this particular employee be looking for in this change? And then you're able to create those particular documents as well to make sure that in that change communication, you are setting up your internal stakeholders, your team members for success in any type of large change. So analyzing data. Copilot is not just for creating content or not just for helping you stay organized. This was one that I was able to kind of really do a deep dive on with a survey that we did earlier this year. So my organization, as part of our strategic plan, did a survey to employees, and we got back quite a bit of data, and we had a lot of open ended questions within our survey. Well over a thousand comments back that, we needed to go through. And, you know, in the past, you know, I would go through and I would try to do my own sentiment analysis, and then you're also trying to pull up themes. You're trying to figure out, you know, what are action items and, you know, what things we need to communicate better on. And, of course, all of this on top of your regular work and deadlines, and it just it doesn't create a great environment for clear analysis. And I do not pretend to be, a data scientist at all. So on top of this, it's just it's difficult to do anyway. So again, tried to figure out, like, what can Copilot do. So I put in the data that we had, and I just kind of asked it, you know, first, I just started kind of easy, like, you know, what what are the themes in this data? And it put everything together. I was like, oh, okay. And I had read through all the comments first. So, again, making sure that I'm look looking for hallucinations. I could verify, you know, this is correct. And I said, then I kind of, you know, went a step further. You know, what does the sentiment analysis look like for this data? And it put that together. What are some action items that you would suggest that are coming out of this data? It put together that, and then I said, what are some intranet articles that would be beneficial for our employees that would kind of close the feedback loop from this data? And it put it together. The amazing thing with all of this was, we had a meeting late afternoon that where we were meeting to go over this data, and my stakeholders had a meeting with the executives at, like, 07:30 the next morning. And we were like, we really need to be able to present this. I was able to put together an entire packet with all of this information for them in maybe thirty minutes. It took longer to format and put everything into a word document than it did for a Copilot to run all of the analysis. Now, again, prior to running the analysis, I had done the work of reading all of the comments because I think especially with open ended questions and responses, it's really important to make sure that the system isn't hallucinating. So I did feel really confident in the results that Copilot was returning, but it took just what would have been this massive project and just made it super, super simple. And now Copilot prompts. I'm just gonna be giving some examples of different ways you can use Copilot here. So we've been talking heavily, about internal comm, but, also, how can people who are just communicators in general use them? So talking points, create talking points for an upcoming town hall where we'll be announcing a particular thing. So maybe you're not in internal comm, but you're gonna be the one presenting. Like, what are the talking points I should have for this particular town hall? You can rehearse a q and a with Copilot. You can have it review a document and pretend that it's the employee and say, based on this content, ask me these questions. Ask me questions in a q and a format, and then you can maybe kinda get to know what might be asked for you during maybe a live town hall or something like that. Interviewing. Review this document and draft a list of questions to ask this particular person focusing on this particular subject. Communicators, that's what we do a lot is interview people on these specific subjects so that we can make sure we can communicate it out to everyone. And so sometimes you don't even know, like, where do I start with which questions are the ones that and this is just a way to spark that, like, creativity and way of thinking of what I should be doing next. Comparison. How does this compare to the news coverage about x y z? So as internal communicators, I know, especially in our our ecology group, anytime something large is happening, big news event that's happening externally, a lot of us are internally asking each other, like, hey. Is your company addressing this? If they are, how are they doing that? But you can also take that messaging and say, like, is this how the news is covering it, or is there any bias in it? You can reuse content. So as we talked about a lot, rewrite the score. That is such a powerful prompt. Rewrite it for SharePoint. Rewrite it for Viva Engage. Rewrite it for an executive. Rewrite it for, a new employee. And this is ways that you can tailor communication to different people within your organization and rewrite, as I kind of decided above with reusing content. Rewrite this email for an executive. We know that executives, they're not gonna wanna, you know, read that long, long email. It'll give you suggestions on, like, these are probably the things that these particular people would wanna know. And that has really helped me in my communication and learning how to communicate with different people at our organization. And then with Copilot, have fun. I know Copilot. It's Microsoft. Oh, it's Microsoft. Do you know Copilot is fun. I have had so much fun exploring what we can do with Copilot here. Go into let's get creative ideas. What's a good open enrollment theme? What's a fun game to play for virtual employee engagement? These are really great ways to, like, just start brainstorming things. Create a fun q and a for an employee meeting. Let's say this meeting is about a particular thing. You don't have the extra half hour to research and come up with your own questions. Let Copilot do it for you. Create a rap about internal communications. We have had fun at our organization, different teams saying, hey, create a rap about HR, and it will spit out the most funny, hilarious rap that you could ever have. So it's a great for employee engagement too and team building. Simple ideas like, what's a good name for a newsletter? What's a good name for an intranet? Awesome idea. I actually have used Copilot to help, people at our organization, team members who walked by my door, figure out how many degrees from Kevin Bacon they are. This was just a hallway conversation talking about something being how many degrees from Kevin Bacon, and half of the people knew what this concept was and half of the people didn't. So we got into it a little bit more. And what we ended up doing is, I think about my next door neighbor here. She said that she was at the Eiffel Tower at the same time as Jennifer Aniston. So we plugged in Jennifer Aniston to Kevin Bacon, and we found out how many degrees she was from meeting Kevin Bacon. So use it to think outside the box. So we're telling you all about this. A lot of you are like, hey. It doesn't integrate. How do I get this? So this is where we're working with IT. So as I said at the very beginning, this is something I was researching. I'm like, how do I get this? Because as we know, like, CHAPPGPT, like, I work for a bank. Katie works for a bank. We are highly regulated. We cannot use OpenAI sources. It's just not possible with the confidentiality that we have in in our line of work. So it was how could we use this to help make us more efficient? And so when talking, with IT about it, realizing that Copilot is part of Microsoft and Microsoft has that capability. And Susan will talk a little bit more about this, but, that security capability through their accounts. And so, it was just a conversation to have with IT. And that's the one thing that I think we need to remember as communicators or not communicators is you're not gonna know if you can get this if you don't ask. We come up in our mind with all these scenarios of, like, oh, they're gonna say no because of this. It's gonna be because of this, this, and this. If you have a great use case and a passion for it and and really want it, have the conversation, but don't just say I want this. Explain why and where you think that you can grow and why it would benefit your organization. So that is the one thing with working with IT. I was able to work with our awesome IT department here. Our organization loves to have out of the box thinking, and I said, alright. I'm gonna go for it. And they said, yes. And so after they said yes, I was having a conversation with Katie about how I got it and she works at a bank as well. Yep. So it actually happened. One of the other great benefits of Icology is that we have these industry specific groups within ICology, and Carrie and I both belong to the finance and banking group. And it came up in one of our, like, group discussions that we had about, copilot. So I asked Carrie if she'd be willing to meet with me outside of our group meeting, and we talked about it. And she just gave me some really great ideas, and I just got really excited. And so I went and talked to a contact I had in IT, and I was like, hey. Do you think there's any way that I would be able to get Copilot? I just I've been talking to somebody I know that's also in banking, and I just think there's some really great opportunities to use it for internal communications. And he said, you know what? That's a great use case. We could use you in our pilot group. And that's how I got added, and I was able to test it out and then again just start kind of testing all of the different things that we have worked with today. So I think what is really interesting in the presentation we have today, it's not just the communicator side. We're also going to have the IT side. And with that, I'm gonna have Susan share a little bit. It as I said, it is so exciting to be part of this group, and I am I'm very passionate about internal communications in my role, so I may be a little bit biased, but love, love, love working on anything where I can improve internal communications in my company or with any of you as well. Number one, and this may seem so basic and you may say, oh, well, you know, we've had that, but check to see if your company has an AI policy. And if not, internal communicators help them write one. And help them write one with a mindset of let's find a way to make this possible. Let's not just shut everything down. And that's so important. And I think to understand and and help IT understand, really, that this is gonna change. Your AI policy is gonna change as the technology changes. I kid you not. Every morning I wake up and there is something new available, and something has changed in what AI offers, what it does, what it doesn't do, what bad things it's done. And so we have to constantly be changing and moving, and so work closely with your IT team. If they if they have an AI policy, offer to help them review it and make it better. You know, we talked about you know, I love that the team has really been, talking a lot about being early adopters and volunteer. I think that is one of the absolute best things you can do. I think internal communicators have some of the best use cases for, the generative AI, like Copilot. Volunteer to be an early adopter. You know, come with those ideas like like you've heard them talking about. The next big thing is make sure you're organizing your content thoughtfully. You know, we I've seen a little bit in the chat about, oh, sometimes it's really hard to find things or it doesn't it doesn't find what I'm looking for. We've heard we've heard throughout this conversation. If you have organized things thoughtfully, if you've named things properly, if you put them in the in the right places, you know, if it's in SharePoint, if it's in if it's in OneDrive and and those locations, it's gonna be a whole lot easier for Copilot to actually do something with it and give you the kinds of responses. And then talk about the different use cases. Talk about how you can suggest even automation opportunities, and we've we've heard a lot about those here. But one of the things that I challenge our copilot group with here is what are you trying to do? What problems are you trying to solve? Let's let's share all of this together. I would say, also, don't be afraid to provide feedback. It is so important for us in IT to know what's working and what isn't. A lot of times, it might be an access issue. It might be a permissions issue. It might really help other people adopt it if we know how you're trying to use it and what works. So do not be afraid to provide regular feedback. As a matter of fact, here at Elm, we have a copilot, test group, and we all share our successes, our failures. Sometimes somebody will say, I'm trying to get Copilot to do this. This is the prompt I put in. It's not working. Everybody jumps in and helps them. But yesterday, at the end of the day, we had, one of our team members said, hey. Go into Copilot, upload a picture of you or a friend, and ask that to write a roast about you. So definitely try that one. It's, it's not too bad. Even if you're thin skinned, it's not a bad thing. But we also have a lot of fun with it as you've heard some of those, comments throughout the day as well. Not everybody knows how to use generative AI. Not everybody knows how to use COVID. We are all learning together. So talk to your IT team about training and quick guides. You know, whatever someone has has done, is really gonna be helpful to someone else. So like I said, there is no true expert probably in any of your companies on all of this. So ask for that training. Ask for those quick guides. We I've seen some quotes in the in the chat asking about success with some of the other Microsoft tools. You know, it's built in to things like Teams as we've heard today, into Word, into PowerPoint, into Outlook. It works better in some than others. I'll be the first to tell you that. I I've tried using it in Excel, and I've I've never been successful, but I've also had really great experiences in Outlook. So work with IT and talk to them about what's working and what's not. And once again, it goes back to sometimes it is a matter of the level of licensing that you have. It's a level of access that you have, and all of those things can be worked on together. That final bonus tip is sometimes there are extra licenses needed. And I just saw a question about building agents. We just learned a tough lesson about agents the other day. We had built a Copilot agent, over our Power BI instance to be able to ask and query a lot of our Power BI dashboards. We're so excited about it. It's really powerful. You have to have the full Copilot license in order to use it. So now we have to go back and say, okay. Who really needs this because we have to change our licensing? So work really closely with your IT team about that as well. It is a real joy to be part of internal comms with all of you. I'm actually an ICology member as well and am always happy to chat with any of your IT departments or IT teams about what you're trying to do. Thank you so much for joining us today. We, again, are just really excited to share what we've learned with everybody here. And, I know we've shared a lot with you today, but we've got some time for question and answers. So So I'll turn it back over to Chuck. Yeah. Thank you all. Thank you all three. Go into the chat and give all kinds of welcomes and celebrations and flowers and all the above for that amazing knowledge. Thank you, Carrie, Katie, and Susan, for doing that. There are they ask people to upload their questions. We're gonna go based on the ones, that we've got here. I'm gonna pick one of you to answer this because we can't all answer all of them. So, Carrie, what's your company policy for distributing AI generated content? Do you disclose what's AI generated or not? That's such a great question because, one of my favorite things about Copilot is, I heard this in another training, so I can't even take any credit for this. But it's Copilot. It's not pilot. Right? You're in the driver's seat. So while I may be using this to help generate content, it is not the one that is finalizing the content. It may give me ideas. It's that intern that I need. It's that person who can come in and maybe just skim something for me and pull it out. But, ultimately, we are still going in and we are writing the content. It's just creating a lot of that efficiency in it. So when it comes to using AI, I can honestly say I have never just copy pasted a communication out of AI. So everything would have to maybe say assisted with Copilot on it. But I don't really feel like that's needed because it's like having that intern or assistant there who would maybe say, hey. Here here are the high level things you really need to communicate about. Like, go in now and write about this. So, I can't really tell you that, like, we have a policy yet, and I think it's because we don't typically use it that way. It's it's that content generation versus doing it for you. And I would say we're not using we're not using, like, written with spell check. Right. No. Or Grammarly. Yeah. So, Katie, that was gonna be Katie, you and I are on the same wavelength. I don't know if you knew that or not. Because I was gonna ask Carrie the question when you does it if you're there's a CEO article, does it say written with the assistance of Carrie Knutson at the bottom of it? Right. Mhmm. You know? I mean, for those of you who are on this call who maybe are not internal communicators, surprise. Your You can give away all the secrets, Carrie. I know. I know. Your c suite leaders may not write everything. They're giving you the ideas, and you come in and try and write in their voice. And then you give it back to them, and they polish it up. But never is my name on that. You know? Like, it's just we're here to help and assist. Maybe we've just come up with a new term CI, communications intelligence. That we should have rebranded this this whole time to help clear this out. Carrie, do you know does Copilot support AP standards? I think you would have to build that to Susan's point. Earlier, I think you would have to build those standards in because you do have to train the AI system to, like, recognize just like house standards, you would have to build that to, like, your your house guide, and then you would have to put an AP standard. That's not, like, a standard parameter within Copilot, but you could easily build that. Yep. We do have a question from Frank, and I don't even have enough time to read Frank's question. So apologies, Frank. It's so long in here. I would just say that, as we know, no tool is perfect. Mhmm. But sometimes we just have to use the tools that are given to us or have the proper governance for our corporation. So this was about co I don't use Copilot. I use ChargeGPT. I use Gemini. So use the tools that you're allowed to use or able to use or encouraged to use. Obviously, I would love to see companies open that up, but, obviously, there's governance and restrictions and regulations and all that in place. And then, one final question here. This how are you you're saying that Copilot does remember. So how do you help it? Maybe this is your point, Susan, now you're teaching it things. How who is the one teaching it? Who is the one running those efforts? I think it really a lot of times, it is it's learning as it's interacting with you, and it's remembering the conversations it's had. It's remembering your voice. It's remembering when you've told it, no. That is absolutely not what I wanted. But also for those for those standards like we've just been talking about, I would say if you have particular standards or spellings or any of those things that you wanna put in place, connect with your IT department because they can help make sure that that is incorporated into the background of the product. And with that, we are absolutely at time. Thank you everyone for joining us today. I think this has been truly remarkable. We loved everyone who signed up. We had more than 500 of you joined or registered. At one point, 250 of you actually in the room with us. Absolutely amazing. So thank you, Carrie, Katie, and Susan. I will see you all backstage after this. For everyone else, I called you thrilled to be a part of this community, driving efforts back into our own internal comms community. We'd love to welcome you there. If internal comms is your passion, psychology is your community. Learn more at joinpsychology.com. Thank you, everyone. Bye.