Power user’s guide to AI for advanced scenarios

AI empowerment: Advancing productivity and creativity

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the way we work, communicate, and create. How can you harness the power of AI to enhance your productivity and creativity in advertising and marketing? In this blog post, we will share insights and tips on how to become a power user of AI for advanced scenarios. This is the first blog of a three-part series, where we will focus on how you may develop yourself and your team to use AI effectively and confidently in your work.

Our journey with Copilot for Microsoft 365

Microsoft Advertising started using Copilot for Microsoft 365 last summer, when we were among a select few to get early access to this amazing tool. Copilot for Microsoft 365 is a suite of AI-powered apps that help you create, collaborate, and communicate better. Over the last year, we learned how to effectively use Copilot for Microsoft 365 to improve our work and outcomes. Here are some of the key lessons we learned:

• Discover, adopt and commit to usage. There is no one right or wrong way to use Copilot for Microsoft 365. Everyone will have to define their own workflows, discover the apps and endpoints that work best for them, and collaborate with others to unlock the full potential of Copilot for Microsoft 365. While this blog post is meant to help you reduce time required to accelerate the value of your AI investments, the simple truth is that there is no replacement for the combination of time, iteration, and measurement to understand how your organization will best adopt and utilize AI in their daily work.
• Training is critical. When we started using Copilot for Microsoft 365, we were so excited about the technology and what it could do to enhance our productivity and creativity that we initially overlooked the most important factor: the human factor. Using AI in business is new, and it may not be clear to every employee how the technology can help them. Whether it's an internal tool like Insights Navigator, CoPlanner, or even a robust technology like Copilot for Microsoft 365, we invested in creating resources, conducting training sessions, and providing support to help our employees maximize their use of AI technologies. We also measured results and feedback to understand what we were doing well, where the gaps were, and where we should focus going forward.
• Collaboration is key. Copilot for Microsoft 365 is not just a tool for individual work, but also a tool for teamwork. It enables us to share insights, co-create plans, and deliver presentations with more impact. By collaborating with Copilot for Microsoft 365, we can achieve more than we could do by ourselves. We will talk more about collaboration in the next blog post of our series.

The AI learning curve: Training for transformation

Based on our experience, we developed a guide to help teams tackle advanced scenarios that can be used to accelerate their own AI deployments. The guide consists of three steps:

1. Start with the end state first. At an organizational level, you need to know where you want to lead your employees, and how you want to deploy AI to achieve your business outcomes. You will also want to create a culture of power users that embraces AI as a partner in their work. We discussed this in our previous blog article that outlines how we thought about the technologies we would build, then modelled the training to cultivate a culture of power users based on the behaviors we wanted to foster.
2. Map the workflow. For each set of roles that you expect to drive impact with the deployed AI technology, you need to map their workflow and define success. You can start by understanding the usage patterns of your users and how they differ across groups and functions. A recent study at Microsoft Advertising helped us highlight several of these usage patterns in our organization:

• The core usage dimensions we measured were:
  • Discovery: Copilots used vs available (breadth of usage)
  • Adoption: Level of Copilot usage vs maximum level of usage (level of usage)
  • Commitment: Looking at Copilot Adoption relative to Discovery (depth of usage)

• We then derived personas off usage dimensions:
  • Reservers: Low number of Copilots used, with low level of usage ~26% of population
  • Observers: High number of Copilots used, with low level of usage ~34% of population
  • Targeters: Low number of Copilots used, with high level of usage ~21% of population
  • Trailblazers: High number of Copilots used, with high level of usage ~19% of population