Several weeks ago, I co-presented at a full-day Copilot workshop with Mark Rackley and Antonio Maio at the M365 Community Conference in Orlando for over 120 attendees. 

On May 8, Microsoft and LinkedIn published their most recent Work Trend Index (WTI) report to describe current AI trends in the market, including their finding that 75% of knowledge workers are already using AI.

Our audience provided some interesting contrasts to the WTI report.

Over 53% had little or no personal experience with AI.

We asked attendees “What is your personal experience with LLMs” (large language models include AI tools like ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot).

We got ninety-one responses (via Mentimeter anonymous voting).

We were certainly surprised by the relatively large number who had not tried AI at all. As I met people at our booth over the week, I found these tools are actively blocked at many companies, which may partially explain this number.

About 49% have little or no use of AI across their organizations.

Our next question was: “How is AI being used at your org?”

Also with 91 replies, we got a much more expected response distribution

Organizations are excited about AI, worried about security and cost

Finally, we asked people to enter free-form words about what their organizations think of AI/Copilot

The 87 responses were grouped into a word-cloud with the size of the words indicating more common answers.

It is clear that there is excitement with security and cost being the biggest blockers.

At Synozur, we use an empathetic approach to drive workshops to develop consensus around goals, initiatives, and blockers. Group breakouts listed executive support as both a top ingredient to success and the largest blocker to successful deployments.

It was a fascinating day with a lot of multi-way learning. Do you have any questions about what we saw? Please book a 45 minute consultation on your North Star AI Strategy with us at no obligation. Thanks.