The Role of AI in Microsoft Teams Phone and Modern Work, Real-world Thoughts with Rohan Milne

Tom: 0:00

Welcome back to the team's insider podcast. This week, we've got Rohan Milne from SwitchConnect in Australia. He's CEO and founder there. SwitchConnect are an operator connect partner, and they also do lots of work with MSPs, helping with Teams Phone. We talked about Teams Phone projects, where some of the challenges are, where the opportunities are. We talked about AI in the modern workplace and Teams Phone. And again, where there are benefits and where honestly, there are still some challenges. And we got into what the, the future opportunities are for Teams phone and modern work. Thanks very much to Ribbon, this month's sponsor for Empowering Cloud and the Teams Insider podcast. Really appreciate their support. And I know Rowan uses a lot of Ribbon technology as well in his environment. Hope you enjoy the show. Any questions, comments, or feedback, let us know. Thanks a lot. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. I've been looking forward to this one. Actually, Rohan and I talked about doing this a few months ago. It's taken a while to get it together. It's Rohan from Switch Connect. to introduce yourself and give us a little bit of background about you and Switch Connect?

Rohan: 1:02

Hi, Tom. We have, we've been talking about this for a little bit too long. Yeah. So Rohan Milne from Switch Connect. We're based in Australia. So I sit as the CEO and founder. We are a primarily Microsoft shop. So we're an OperatorConnect provider globally. But we also do a lot of consultancy to MSPs and partners who want to add that Team calling capability, but don't have the skill set as well as we work with many of the operators in helping them scale quickly on board to the OC platforms as well.

Tom: 1:33

Awesome. Cool. We had a bit of a chat before we hit record on the wiki to talk about a whole load of different things here. One of the things I wanted to get your take on, I'm just back from Ignite in the Netherlands and talking to a few of the different Telcos there. There were a lot of Telcos there. And we were talking about the pros and cons of the new shared calling model with Microsoft. So what are your thoughts on that?

Rohan: 1:54

Shared calling for us is interesting. It's a no brainer and a good thing. So we just a little bit of background to that in why we take it that way. So when we first started doing Teams calling first came out, I said, when it went GA in Australia, we on boarded our first customer. So we've been doing it for years. We sold the per channel model from day dot. So for us is it's a no brainer. It's really good for our customers is we had a lot of customers in the education space and large enterprise where I need to give dial tone. But why do I have to buy a direct in dial number for this phone to enable it for Teams calling? I don't want it. So shared calling. Is a natural evolution of that. I think where carriers go, and I think they struggle with these. Everyone's trying to push everything per user per month. I said, Microsoft does it. Everybody does it. And the issue is when you're a carrier and you're only delivering the voice component and don't deliver anything else. You've got no. Elsewhere to make that margin. So if you drop that per channel, you'll that per user and go to a per channel. Yeah, you do see a drop, but it's all about adding all the other value added services around that. And that's where they then struggle and the wheels come off and the financial costing models they've been using for 20 years stop working. So I think for them to wrap their head around it, it just becomes too hard. So a lot of them are scared of it. As we're talking before, because they've all done these funky projection models and go, Oh for every 10, 000 Teams calling users, we're going to get these rebates. We get these Microsoft rebates. We get this carriage revenue I can tell you exactly how many minutes will be used per customer. So when I'm selling an unlimited plan, I can exactly tell you the minutes per user that's actually consumed and I can break that down by vertical geography, region, business type, and

Tom: 3:51

Yeah. I'm seeing I'm seeing a lot over here of the people, obviously the market is seeing the Microsoft Teams, phone numbers go up and up at a pace. They're like, we can capture a bunch of those. We can do it. Yeah. We'll be doing a couple of dollars a user, maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less than everybody's assuming per user revenue on their models, I did and some kind of calling plan potentially.

Rohan: 4:12

Yeah and that's where it comes off. And then, so they see one user plan and go that's screwed that model. I think it's just being that we're newer to the market, we haven't got that legacy of 100 years of selling voice. We're a lot more agile and cause we wrap. Everything else, like for Teams calling for us is like the old school, Oh, you got a business. You need an internet connection. Okay what do we wrap over the top of that? Okay, you want video conferencing. You need Cloud, you need 365. You need some managed services. We work with all our partners. That's where the money is. Teams calling is just a tick box. Like it's one of the things we see, especially in the MSP market. I come from a background of running MSPs for, Too many years, 15 odd years until I moved to the dark side of Telco. But one, one of the models when we used to consult in that space is you never own the customer unless you own the voice, the data and the IT. So in, in the age old days, you used to have the Telco provider that used to provide the phone system and the internet. Because they were the carrier dealer, whether it's UK BT or they were the AT& T dealer or in Australia they were the Telstra dealer and then they worked hand in hand with the IT company because they managed all the MSP. Now, as the Telco models evolve, carriers have paid less and less commissions. So in, in Australia, if you're a Telstra dealer, there's no more trail incomes. It's a one time upfront. So there's no margin in it anymore. All these businesses were worth millions years ago, are worth nothing now. So you can't even sell them because it's like the carrier owns the customer. They're not even your customer. They're the carrier's customer because they're billing them. Your business is worthless. So they're all now going how do I sell off and retire? The only way is I've got to move in, into many services. So what MSPs, Struggle to understand is Telco guys have been doing managed services for 50 years. They've been doing managed services on telephony systems with high touch. And when you go and talk to these customers, they love the telephony guy. He comes down. He reprograms. He sits and talks to the receptionist. They all love him. And it's Oh, it'd be really good if we could get that same level of support from our managed service provider. So you're seeing a lot of these guys now rebirthing their businesses as managed services companies now. So there's this massive churn through it through the market going, but they're doing it as their brand. So now they're going, they've gone and stitched up their own wholesale agreement with some data provider and voice provider. So they're still either selling their PBX or some cloud, cloud service. They're selling the data and now they're also pitching for the MSP business. So MSPs now are having to evolve into doing data and telephony. So it's this whole trend through, through the market. But that's where it's all about the volume add. Like I think the comment I said earlier is that you can, anyone can add dial tone to Teams. You YouTube video.

Tom: 7:13

to, we're up to 84 OC providers. Like it's a click through type scenario. Like obviously there's edge cases, right? There's some complexity there. There's may be some porting, but you, your typical use cases getting easier all the time.

Rohan: 7:25

But even that you can go into watch a five minute video on YouTube, you can jump in as you are, you can download a Ribbon Suite Lite SBC with some trial licensing, follow the wizard, follow the YouTube video, and you can have direct routing configured. In half an hour. If you didn't know what you're doing. It's probably half an hour to an hour. If if you've got a bit of voice background, like we can spin those things up in five minutes admittedly, we've got some automation scripts that make that a hell of a lot faster, but in, in, in essence you can spin that up in an hour, move your SIP trunk and be on direct route. But what we're see is the businesses today is going, Hey, we've moved all the office based working users. So when we look at enterprise and businesses now, it's all the complex use cases is how do we move them? And even if you talk to Microsoft is we don't have an issue selling Teams calling. We have an issue in enabling Teams calling, so if you look through all the OC providers, 90 percent of my week is talking to the big OC providers going, I don't know how to onboard this because our whole model has been around, we deliver dial tone, the old day, we delivered a copper PSDN line with dial tone and we charge minutes, we've evolved to SIP trunking, so instead of copper, it's a, it's an over OTT, Phone line with minutes. Now that we've gone into Teams, all we want to sell is a calling plan with minutes. That's where their model has been. And that's where they transition. And that's where shared calling kind of screws them around a bit. What they have no experience with is how do I get this person off this call manager or this Mitel or this. Avaya system and migrate it because now I'm having to dig into call flow and stuff. And this is where MSPs come unstuck as they go Teams as simple as ticking a license and it's just another Microsoft license. But fundamentally, you've got to understand voice because you've got to be able to dig into these old systems and go, Hey and we still get caught out today. Like we're doing a project at the moment where reception consoles. I need a reception console and we went through this whole discovery and we literally re quoted a project in a week, eight times with four different platforms going like they're going Teams, but what do you need out of this? So it sounds like you just need reporting. It's you don't need an attending console. We can just do this with some analytics and some reporting. And we went back and forth until in the end. I'm like, okay, can you like clearly we've got a definition. In our mind, we come from old school voice. So when you say attendant console, you're like, the old receptionist with 50

Tom: 10:01

Yeah. Yeah. The, yeah.

Rohan: 10:02

Yeah. So that's what we got attendant console. So we're like, can you send me, can we have a Team's meeting? And you show me what your current system is. And all it was a wallboard dashboard that showed him how many calls were queued in a queue. And I'm like, okay, so you want reporting and analytics this is where we look at advanced workloads is having that voice experience because coming from legacy PBX, we get all the time, like five or six times a week. Customers go, I need a call center. I'm like, okay, we've got Team save call center. Easy. Okay. How many agents? What workflow? What do you want? It's overflow. Wrap up times and stuff. And they start looking at you. And it's okay, when you say call center, what call center functionality do you use? And they're like, oh, they just want wall boarding and dashboarding. And it's okay, Teams isn't. A PBX replacement. So this is the fundamental thing where people struggle with Teams. I said, Teams is the collaboration platform with an overlay of PBX functionalities where when you go to some of the other vendors, like if you go to WebEx, they're more a PBX platform with an overlay

Tom: 11:11

With some collab.

Rohan: 11:12

Very differentiated. And once you wrap your head around that, people come to us and go, Oh, Teams hasn't got this this functionality, basic enterprise functionality doesn't exist. And I'm just like yeah, but okay, you go to Mitel or Cisco and goes, I've got 5, 000 feature sets and look at all these features that my system can do. And I'm like, okay. So what do you actually use? And it's there's nine functions and I'm like Teams does all of that and you get this basic call center. So going back to the call center instance, they go, oh, we want to call center. So what do you want to do? I want it to ring in and queue and I want to see how many calls are in the queue and average wait times and stuff like that. And it's we could do that with reporting because Teams is a queue by default. So you've got basic call center functionality in Teams because again, it's a collaboration platform with an overlay of PBX. So I've come from ring groups, hunt groups or whatever you call distribution groups, whatever you want to call it in PBX language. But, and then you had a call center because you wanted to queue a call. And I'm like Teams by default. We actually make them hunt groups by changing the music on hold music to a dual tone, to a ringtone. So we make it a hunt group by changing the music on hold. So it sounds like the phone's ringing because people don't like the answer and put it on hold so you just upload a music on hold file that's just ringtone.

Tom: 12:37

Ringing, so I think it's just

Rohan: 12:38

yeah, so it's ringing. So everyone goes, here's your hunt group. But it's actually a call queue. So I think it's really you've got to really understand the product. And I think that's where the gap is in, in, in the MSP community is they haven't got the extensive voice experience to know how to translate those things, but then it's also around having the portfolio of all those advanced feature sets. So we work with many of our partners. So we run a really large channel and wholesale business also. And a distribution. So a lot of the portfolio platforms we've got global distribution deals for. So working with actually going like all these contact centers and stuff. They're not hard. We can roll out a team's native contact center in four hours. Like complete Teams native and this is the other thing like when you move into call centers, many people don't know they go. Oh, yeah, it's team certified. So it's a good fit. And I'm like, yeah, no,

Tom: 13:34

Yeah there we're up to 24 certified contact centers in Teams. It's what does that really mean anymore at this point? Like there, there's a. Fast difference between, some of the players in that list. Some of them are super integrated and super native. Some of them just do a SIP trunk and everything in between.

Rohan: 13:50

yeah. And that's what I mean. You've got three different levels of Integrate. Like, when we talk Teams native, and this is where we're starting to see tenders now are going it needs to be a Teams native contact center. And I'm like 20, probably say 18 of those contact centers listed are instantly off the list. I'm like the classic ones, is Genesis and go, we're Teams certified. Contact center. I'm like you're not really because in the OC world, you can't sell it because it's SIP integrated. If you choose the right OC part, we can integrate it with OC, but that's just the

Tom: 14:25

You can find a

Rohan: 14:26

So we've built our architecture and we've done a lot of Complex, really funky stuff. In theory, you can't

Tom: 14:34

the problem the standard model is it should be extend because then you could push calling plan or OC or

Rohan: 14:40

So it should be extend. So we sell an extend platform. You could also argue that Genesis can only work just getting to some real legal stuff if the guys are carriers on this line. You could argue sticking Genesis in front of Teams would violate your Operator Connect contract. It violates some, wording of your OC contract that you would

Tom: 14:59

the bigger thing is even apart, if apart from the technology, if you're trying to be team centric as a customer, going to one of those super big context in the players, how interested are they in tightly integrated Teams versus having you on that platform? And also if you want to be on Genesis just be on Genesis have the aged experience on. Genesis. I don't see the, necessarily the benefit there. If you're going to go Teams properly, go Teams.

Rohan: 15:24

It's actually, it's a really bad user experience. So like we've got three customers, domestic, large customers on Genesys where we're doing Teams for them. And it's a really bad end user experience. So all of this comes down to end user experience. Is why, because people go, why don't I just go my UCaaS, we have a UCaaS platform as well.'cause there's certain use cases. And I think that's the other point I'll say, and I get chastised by Microsoft quite regularly for saying this is Teams doesn't fit every user case. So there's still a valued argument for UCaaS platforms and we still sell UCaaS because Teams, again is a collaboration platform, not a PBX. So there's certain markets. That need a PBX.

Tom: 16:10

Give us some use cases around where you're like, it's just a better fit for classic UCaaS

Rohan: 16:15

so where we see it is like education is a no brainer for Teams, even when you look at classroom phones with the discounting licensing and stuff. It's a no brainer where you start to get into is we found in. Medical and hospitals. So where you've got Teams is all based around a persona. So my my account and that's my extension where it's the wheels start to fall off is where you go shared devices. So I've got a shared device shared by 15 people. That's where it starts to go wrong. So when you start looking in health care and hospitals and things like that is you start to run these hybrid environments. And that's where we've done a ton of work in building hybrid environments because you go, hey, nurses on a ward, Teams is not the right solution for the cordless phones and all that sort of stuff. That's where you go. A UCaaS platform is way better. But when you look at admins and doctors. And medical staff and specialist Teams is that right solution. So it's marrying those 2 together and knowing where that works. The other 1 is actually your local GP. general practice doctor surgery. People hate change. So you'll get people that have been running general practice for 50 years that go, a call comes in and they're like, oh, key system days. Call comes in on line two. I answer, I park the call on line two. I ping the doctor and go, hey, when you finish your consult, you've got a patient on line two. Or park slot 1, can you pick it up? And yeah, Teams can do park slots and stuff, but you don't get all your BLF buttons on the side of the phones, you don't get a Park button, and it's like these functionalities, and we've had partners try, and I'm like, we've run a couple of projects, and I'm like, this is not going to end well. It's just not going to end well. And,

Tom: 18:09

The thing is in that scenario, they're not seeing as you said they're not seeing the upside. They're not using all the collaboration and doing a bit of phone. They're buying it, or they want the phone. That's the primary function, and they don't care that it does chat and all this other stuff. They're just like, I just want the phone to do the phone thing.

Rohan: 18:24

Yeah, it's one of the things people have to fundamentally change their business model or the actual funniest one I ever had was G Suite customer came to me and go, I want Teams PBX and I'm like, okay, so you got a 365 tenant, no. This is the thing I couldn't wrap my head around commercially. How you could justify buying

Tom: 18:47

Buying

Rohan: 18:47

team's license

Tom: 18:49

just

Rohan: 18:50

it as a soft phone. And I'm like, so are you going to use chat and stuff? Good. No, we're going to use Hangouts and all the Google chat. And I'm like, but how do you like. I'll sell you my UCaaS platform. It will integrate to your G Suite. This is what, this has come back to the point is, Microsoft doesn't have an issue selling this. Microsoft has an issue is enabling it. And

Tom: 19:11

Yeah. We know there's, there's millions and millions of licenses out still to activate, so there's

Rohan: 19:16

And then fundamentally where a lot of that is, is contractual arrangements. So this is where you MSPs and people, if you haven't played in the government contracting space. So most of that blue space is government. Like, all our state governments in Australia, Microsoft has done deals, they've all got E5. In Australia, we're the most dense E5 licensed country globally. If you look at any stats, so if we look at I'm in Queensland, we look at our Queensland government, they've got a five year E5 license for everybody. If you look at the adoption of Teams calling across that E5, it's 12%. And where that is, is going back to, you need to go back to how telephony contracts are done. So you've got, in government, you've got, okay, when I signed my internet connection with Telstra, that's bundled with my SIP trunking connection. And then I had a contract for the PBX with my Telco PBX provider. So I've got a Mitel, a call manager, and I bought that off the Cisco dealer, not the carrier. So what happens is, IT goes, okay, Call manager is end of life, or they get the maintenance bill and go, what?

Tom: 20:31

Yeah.

Rohan: 20:32

You want me to pay what?

Tom: 20:33

That that, that nice chunk of smartnet every year.

Rohan: 20:36

yeah, that's SmartNet. So they go, okay, I want to go to Teams. In order to go to OCs, you got to work with a carrier that's can deliver the voice. So they go back to the carrier and go, Hey, I want to move the Teams and they go no, you're still in contract on this other contract because it was signed at a different time. Or then we found a lot of carriers in Australia go no, I make more money. You sitting on SIP trunking than what I would in

Tom: 21:01

This is the reality of telcos. They're making more money and they're not in a rush to change the market, right? It makes sense commercially to them.

Rohan: 21:09

So like we, we went and disrupted that market domestically and went, okay, we'll go deliver you OperatorConnect, bring your own carriage. Now, there's some caveats around this. It's not an SMB product. It's more a government product because there's some interconnect issues that we need to deal with. We've disrupted that market now and go, okay, we'll help you replace that PBX. We'll use our OC integration, but take your current Telstra SIP and route all your calls via your Telstra SIP so that everybody's happy. The other issue you've got to deal with, like when you're looking at enterprises and government is, it's a people issue. It's actually nothing about technology, is that at the moment, they've got 10 people within the organization that support this platform. And it's all these silos and empires. So it's sort of stuff. If everyone deals in enterprising government and medium sized business, it's all empires. So everyone's got their own little empire and they're like if we move this to Teams, we don't need 10 people now. So all these people that aren't really doing anything, but people think they're doing anything because the PBX is this black magic

Tom: 22:17

yeah, and it's who owns the decision there because very often the people that own the Microsoft decision, the Microsoft 365 service owner is nowhere near the telephony team and they don't have any authority to say that should be easier, simpler on our platform.

Rohan: 22:30

or they are selling that going we don't need that Teams. So we're going to consume their budget into ours and give us a bigger budget. So it's all these empire issues. So part of the, a lot of the work we do. Is actually non technical is actually going to these guys and go, you spent, it's like any sort of startup is that you spent so much time working in the business you don't work on the business. So why don't you actually turn rather than it being a money pit that most organizations think as ideas. Why don't you transmit to an asset to the business and a profit center? Why don't spend if you're spending all your time trying to keep this legacy old Cisco box working, why don't you go out as business consultants back into the business and go, hey, involve us in your projects so we can streamline processes with Teams where we're trying to get to, and they become a money generation and a value add to the business so that they transform their job and going, you're not having to keep it working anymore. You're about expanding that capability. And driving direct interconnection to the business. So you're driving value to the business where the business will see you as an income stream as IT that it's a value add and an income stream rather than this money pit. And I'm like, man, you may even get a pay rise out of it because you're adding value now because the business wants to pay you as little as possible at the moment because you are an operational expense on a line item where you're costing me and you don't generate me any money. Where if you go into, hey, I'm streamlining the business and stuff. No, you're making me money now. So you're helping me develop new products, digitally transform my business. And this is where,

Tom: 24:07

you take it away like that's the end state. Definitely. But like even the step before that, I've like the customers that already have E5, at least sweat the money you've already spent on the E5 license. They can at least go back to the business and be like, we've already spent this money. Let's leverage the most out of that spend.

Rohan: 24:22

correct. And then it's back to advanced workload, like compliancy recording. Contact centers, analytics, sentiment analytics so analytics from a reporting analytics and then real time sentiment. So you're talking contact centers. So one of the simplest one we do is real time sentiment and call QA. So you run a call center, 10 percent of your staff will be call QA staff. That will sit there and pick one in 10 call to ring and make sure that you answer the call properly and did it. It's like we can do that in real time as soon as you hang up the call. So when you're looking in the financial services market, we can already fully analyze the call and go, okay, you rang the bank. We all know that when you ring a bank, they've got to ID you and verify that you are who you say you are. And I know in Australia, most countries we call it RJ236, which is I legally have an obligation to report any call that hasn't been vetted correctly as a privacy breach. And most countries globally have this now. So it's like we can automatically do that. So as soon as they hang up the call we can analyze the call and go, Hey, you didn't follow company process. So that's flagged to a manager instantly to go. Hey, that's been flagged. Is it possible fraud? Is it whatever? And do are we legally obligated to report that but not only like old school system used to do like voice to text. I used to get the SMS is where someone leaves your voicemail message as voice to text. Then you spend the next 6 days of trying to work out what they actually said. Because you're like, I didn't. Are they ordering me a pizza? I'm not really sure what this is. So like you, so that technology has got a lot better with AI, ChatGPT and everything. That's got a lot better. But now you can also analyze the emotion of that. So I could ring you Tom and go, Oh, you're the worst company, IT company ever, but it will work at how I've said that. So have I seriously said that or have I sarcastically said it now? I may let it fly the first time, sarcastically, but if someone, I'm a big believer in it. If someone's saying something, there's a reason why they're saying it. So if they say it three times and I go, yeah, okay. And maybe it's not a joke, but also we've seen in this thing is it's all about root cause and how we can drive the better end user customer experience is also from a business. We've seen this as drive into sales leads. So we've seen a call QA system now with real time analytics and sentiment analytics driving sales leads because I've rang the help desk and about a problem and a help desk guys. KPI is the close that ticket as fast as possible. And if a customer keeps going, I really wish I could move to the cloud. I don't care about you moving the cloud. I don't get paid on that. I just get paid on fixing your printer not working. So you can actually set up all these keywords and phrases that, hey, if someone keeps saying, I want to move to the cloud, it can automatically classify that and create a lead for the account manager or sales team to call them back. So now these platforms pay for themselves because it's it's a lead gen system from my own client base now. So this is where I think this is where the world's going. And then I guess we talk about Copilot and AI and everything. Everything like

Tom: 27:32

what are your thoughts there? I'm like, I think we're definitely at the top of the hype cycle from my point of view. I think it's gonna be hugely impactful, but not as quickly as, the market.

Rohan: 27:43

I did an interview yesterday for another crowd for a magazine articles coming out and they asked this whole AI question and I'm like, AI will transform our industry, but I don't think it's in the way everyone thinks it's going to, I said, everyone thinks everyone's going to be out of a job and AI is going to be running the world and go and do this thing. And I'm it's good. But it's bad. So like we've tried it with a bunch of social media content. So we've had our marketing guys go and write all this content. And like you play around with ChatGPT and go, Oh mate, this writes awesome content. I'll challenge you to put it in a word document, save it and go read it three days later. When you do it, you're like, Oh, look, it's written all this content. I'll cut and paste and do it. And you sit there and read three days later and go, this stuff doesn't even make sense. Like the English and grammar and stuff's not great. And I was talking to one of our partners the other day and I said, because we have this argument about he goes you didn't seed it properly. You didn't seed it that in how to ask the question correctly. I said, can you write me an AI program that like, or like a wizard that I can give me all the seeding questions. So when I want to ask you to do something like you can write an AI app that will tell the AI

Tom: 28:51

write the AI app to write the

Rohan: 28:53

Yeah, to write my AI prompt so I can get my AI content, and he's I could probably do that for you, and I go, mate, I was joking but it's around this, so I think AI and Copilot is definitely a value, and I think Copilot is great. If you're in the Microsoft ecosystem, because it can give me contextual information. So that's where I think it's going to be absolutely great where someone emails me and as a CEO, I go, someone escalates a complaint to me. I've got no visibility. I don't even know what they're talking about. And I'm like, yeah, okay, I'll have to go and talk to the team. Being able to. While I'm in that call, it's identified who they are, dug into all our CRM's, ERP support system, PSA systems and go, here's the snapshot of the 15 last tickets. Here's where they've given us all,

Tom: 29:39

It's much stronger today at summarizing information. You've got than generating like the generating is the exciting demo, right? Like you say, write me a blog post on Microsoft Teams and it all spouts some words out. Questionable quality where we've done this all our videos on empowering cloud. We ran them through AI to get. summaries and do questions and answers on them. And like it's not a hundred percent, like it's about 80 percent there, but that's hugely valuable for not much compute overhead, but it's summarizing stuff that's already there. It's not generating.

Rohan: 30:08

Yeah. And I think that's it because. Like, all the AI engines now is just referencing data lakes of data. People go you're not gonna, it's not gonna cure cancer. Because it's reference point is existing data. You still need people who are gonna put, push the boundaries. And like we the actual article we're doing was on entrepreneurship and startups. And I said, people have lost that. Like people see these massive businesses come now and it's oh entrepreneurs will disappear now because AI will do that. I'm like, it can't. I said, AI is still has a reference of history. It can't reference future, it can't have a vision that, hey, this is how to go and solve things because most of the times in the entrepreneurship where we solve these life's great technology problems, everyone said the person, it wouldn't work, it's got no sound evidence or research on it and the guy was high on smack when he came up with the idea because no way in history would that work. So I said, AI is never going to come up with that. Because it's bound by a construct of historical information in what it's got. But it can analyze that and come up with some possible things. But it's not going to change the world. I think it will help streamline it. But again, people, it's still one of those buzz technologies that everyone's talking about because it's cool and it's got the media buzz cycle. But I think that we're going to be in this buzz cycle for a bit. And then the industry is going to have to go what value does this have? Like you look at Copilot, it's 30 bucks a user. That's a fair chunk of pocket change. Does that deliver me, what is it, 3, 000 a year or so, I think per user. So it's what value does that bring me? And it's like the age old systems we've played around there's all these AI social media things and like we play with some of them like, oh, it's good. But then it's once you use one, you then like it generates you like your social images and stuff and then like you start scrolling through social media and it's I see the same. It's not really AI. It's got a bunch of templates that it wraps in some text and it's like you start seeing the same image formats everywhere and it's like I go back to our graphics team and I go Neil make sure none of my images look like these because I'm like I want unique artwork because I'm like you start scrolling down you're like you'd see the same images everywhere and it's like I can tell you what AI engine you use now because I it's just a bunch of templates that it smashes in content so Is it AI or is it just a really smart templating system? There's those sorts of things where I think we still have some time to go and, hey, will it get there? Yes, but I think it's still going to take a lot of smart people and entrepreneurs to go, how do we actually productize that? I don't think anyone's got the silver bullet productization yet. I think a lot of people are still in the buzzword and everyone's talking about, oh, look how great I can go and do all this. But I think there's still some work to actually productize that.

Tom: 33:02

yeah, I think in our space, actually, I think it's interesting, like the context into use case, the pre agent scenarios, like those are relatively easy scenarios for AI to add value to, like it's a, like if someone's ringing into a context, there's a finite amount of reasons they're going to be to do it for. You can train the model up very well on question and answers. Like you're not asking it to generate a blog on X. You're saying opening hours, close hours, complaint. Where's my thing? How the person hasn't turned up. So I think our in the context of anything, that's one of the places going to get disrupted the fastest with it.

Rohan: 33:34

Yes. In a Teams client hey, meeting summary is pretty cool. Give me the action points. Cause you're probably a bit like me. We spend all days in Teams meetings and you get to the end of that and go, I swear I committed to doing 20 things today.

Tom: 33:49

Yeah.

Rohan: 33:50

I can only remember 10 and I'm like, if it's important, someone will call me and go, where's this? And I'll be like, let me do it now. But yeah, so it's one of those things like auto summary and like auto go and create tasks for me. That would be awesome. But yeah, I don't quite think we're out there to start firing staff and outsourcing to AI bots yet. I think we're a little bit far off. I don't know if I want an AI bot to invent my new car. I think I still want the guy with 50 years of engineering experience to make sure the brake system works because it references stuff online. It doesn't know if it's right research. It just goes here's an article I

Tom: 34:30

Yeah, these words correlate the most together, therefore it's the most probability of being the thing you want, but that's not right or wrong, yes or

Rohan: 34:37

It doesn't validate to go, is that right? And that's where, again, a human with that knowledge needs to read through and go that's not right. And it's like even simple stuff, like I spoke to a guy I know in construction, and he goes, he's proven the point, he goes, go write ChatGPT on a guide in how to plaster a wall. Comes back with all these steps, he goes all those steps are correct, four of them are in the wrong order, that if you do that, you're going to have a very bad wall. But it's it technically was correct, but it's like you would never do it in that order

Tom: 35:08

that's the other problem with AI demos, isn't it? If you don't know the topic, it seems plausible enough. The best test is when you test it on something you really know.

Rohan: 35:17

correct.

Tom: 35:18

Teams calling options to me, that kind of thing. And then you're like, Oh, okay. I see where it's gone wrong. If you didn't know what calling officers were in the first place, you'd be like, that sounds plausible.

Rohan: 35:26

The actual thing I found it's really good is the Bing one is for the Bing AI in the browser is writing knowledge base articles is where I found it the most successful because ChatGPT is only text. Bing will give you text and also it puts all the reference links. Like, when we're writing articles on Teams stuff or in our

Tom: 35:49

Oh, it all referenced back off the docs or relevant

Rohan: 35:52

off and give you the ranking back to learn dot Microsoft. We go, hey, here's how to do it today. And it was valid when we wrote this article, but here's the link to the information.

Tom: 36:01

Yeah. For when it inevitably changes.

Rohan: 36:03

yeah, so it does all the back linking for you, which is really great, and then all you got to do, it'd be really cool if it pulled in the screenshots on those websites, like you just got to go and create screenshots for it, but it's It's really good in that sense. So if you're writing knowledge base, I highly recommend the big one because it does all the back links for you and then you can then actually click on the link. It tells you where it pulled the information from, so it gives you the ability to vet it and go, yeah, okay, that's Tom's blog. I'll probably believe it, or that's some other guy's blog. And I was like, eh, some backwards guy. And I'm like, eh, nah, I don't trust them.

Tom: 36:38

have enjoyed seeing a few screenshots from Bing chat or Copilot is now referencing my blog some very old blogs in some cases because it's pulled it a long time ago but it's funny to see awesome cool thanks for taking the time Ryan we're gonna have to revisit that that AI conversation maybe in six months or so and see if we were right or wrong on that if you want to find out about more about you and Switch Connect what's the best thing to do

Rohan: 37:00

Best thing to do is yeah, follow us on the socials. We have been a bit slack on the socials, but 2024 is a new year. Or check us out online at Switchconnect.com.au. And yeah, feel free to reach out, happy to have a chat if you need help or want to know what products are out there. Our Teams are always available. We are in Australia, but we do service every continent. So I'm a bit like Tom, who appears to always be online. I'm always online, so reach

Tom: 37:28

cool thanks Ryan appreciate it talk soon

Rohan: 37:30

Okay, talk