Bill Compton: Each day of the month for December, it will give you an idea for an agent. And it's because it's a declarative agent and it points only at Microsoft's Copilot website. It's free to use across the whole organisation as well. It's not limited by the former users, the full licensed users. It's the 1st of December. We're recording this. I'm toying with putting this out for the whole of December. You never know. I might put it out. I might not. I'm still playing around with it, but it looks good and it's a great way, again, of increasing adoption because people see the art of the possible. Right.

Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the podcast. This week we are talking adoption and business change in a 20,000 user plus organisation. Not just Microsoft Teams, but also Windows Copilot OneDrive. How you can really drive that adoption of business change, digital champion networks, and everything in between. Some really actionable tips from Bill. Many thanks for him for joining the podcast. Also, many thanks to Luware who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate all their support. On with the show. Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week we're going to have a great adoption journey story. We like having end customer stories. And this is a really good one. Bill joined me on a panel at, it was UC Expo, wasn't it recently? Yeah. So, yeah, really great conversation. I thought we'd get it on the podcast. So, Bill, thanks for joining. Well,

Bill Compton: thank you for having me. Yeah, it was good to finally meet you because we chatted a few times, but it was good to meet you at the UCX event, Excel at ExCeL in London, wasn't it?

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, we had a really good turnout. It was a good conversation and really good event. So, for people listening in, Bill, give a little bit of background to your role and your organisation and your recently expanded scope, I believe as well.

Bill Compton: Yeah, so I work for Centrica, PLC, who are known for owning British Gas as a brand, and Hive and Dyno and a couple of other companies as well. We trade mostly in the UK, although we have got a North American arm through our Centrica Business Services. I believe I might have got that wrong. But anyway, the point is that Centrica has about 22,000 full-time employees in the UK, with some second party contractors, and we have some offshore teams as well. But I've been at Centrica pretty much for about the last, I don't know, nearly 30 years. Between 25 and 30 years initially as a contractor. But I went full-time about 15 years ago and about eight years ago we created an adoption change management function to try and get people to adopt. Primarily at the time it was Windows 10, oh, how we laugh, Teams and Office 365 and really moving people off from on-prem into cloud storage in OneDrive as well.

Tom Arbuthnot: And you've got a really diverse workforce. So it's not just people behind desk nine to five, you've got field workers, you've got platform workers, really different profiles.

Bill Compton: Yeah, we've for many years tried to divvy up the profiles, you know, try and work out the personas within the organisation and you can go very, very deep and there's some very unique personas, but at its highest level, we really have, I think, three if you think of it as the three highest level. We have knowledge workers, a lot of people based in offices. We have call centre agents and we also have field workers, and it's about a third of each across the organisation. Obviously we're well known for having field workers because we have a lot of people out in vans going, fixing boilers and doing electrical work. And we do all sorts of different things within households. And the call centre agents, you know, we, at one point we were one of the biggest employers of call centre agents within the UK. Not so now, but we've still got a very large number of call centre agents. Some work from home, quite a lot work from within call centres still. And then we've got knowledge workers, like most traditional companies, we've got knowledge workers across IT, Procurement, HR, Finance, and corporate functions as well. So we've got a whole range of different types, which is really interesting from an adoption perspective because obviously not everybody wants the same flavour of the one form of soup that you are making. Right.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. It's really interesting because you've got a plethora of tools at your disposal in the M365 stack and other things I know you use as well. The use cases are very different if you're a mostly mobile field worker doing hands-on versus we have a lot of podcasts with the classic knowledge worker scenario, but you've got some real diversity there.

Bill Compton: One of the challenges we faced very early on was identifying how to get into those dark corners of the company because knowledge workers are very easy to tap into. They're largely office based and pre COVID, obviously mostly office based with some homework in. And, but getting to talk to field workers and call centre agencies was traditionally really challenging. In particular, call centres are a protected environment. You can't just walk into a call centre and start talking to people if they're on the phone. Yeah. They're doing their job. Like, just, yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot: It's funny to even think about that, isn't it? Because in a knowledge worker style, you can, it's like, well, I just wander around and wait for you to have a window. But yeah, if you are being managed in a larger contact centre, you can't just take people off their job.

Bill Compton: No. Well, if you want to talk to call centre agents, you have to book time and the same with the field workers. So there is a process by which you can book out time and it is a conveyor belt of things that come through that process. So getting time with those agencies traditionally really difficult. Both field and call centre agents. Like you say, office workers. If you're in the office, you just walk up to somebody, you tap them on the shoulder and you just chat, right? Or you just see them by the coffee machine. But I do think that was one of the first challenges we faced. What we identified really early on was the need to talk to these different areas of the business and how we could do so. So we made the decision quite early on to start a digital champions network. But effectively a change coalition of sorts. And one of the rules we set very early on was we wanted people to be volunteering, not voluntold to be champions. We wanted people who were actually really positive about embracing change, embracing new technology, trying to understand what tools were available to them. So we put a call out and we started off with about 80, we got handed 80 digital champions who'd worked on the Windows 10 OneDrive migration. And then we just started to build that champions network up. And I remember how hard it was to get people to be interested in what you had to offer because you know, when you talk about things like Prosci and ADKAR and you think about how are we going to roll a change out across the organisation and you want to raise awareness, desire, knowledge, all that great stuff. I started to apply that principle to recruiting digital champions. So thinking about we can make people aware of the fact that we've got all this great technology, but if they don't have the desire to use it, they're not going to touch it. Right. So if you think about a digital champion, they're aware of the fact there's a champion's network, but there's no desire to be a part of it.

Tom Arbuthnot: It's very meta, isn't it? It's like you're applying the change process to the digital champions to help the change process.

Bill Compton: Yeah, exactly. And the funny thing is, it's almost, I sometimes talk about it like an onion. It's like those many layers, the champions network's right at the core of it. And you build out those layers on top of them. But I think with our Digital Champions network, what was key was getting them to want to be involved. So we had to build up the desire, we had to gamify it to a certain degree. And I remember very early on, we were offering pizza parties to people if they signed up and actually carried out some activities for us, which, you know, I think is really good. And I've lean away from gamification and I come back to it. And I think it has its time, but you can't gamify 24/7.

Tom Arbuthnot: Is it harder with different workloads? I mean, you've been doing this for a while, but we're going to get onto the Copilot journey story, but I feel like I struggle to get excited about a new operating system, but Copilot or Teams, maybe I'm biased. Maybe nobody gets excited about Copilot Teams, but they're more business impacting, then we swapped out your OS.

Bill Compton: Yeah, I think so. I think the trouble was that those very early adopters were largely voluntold to be a part of it. So they would seem to be somebody within their area who was very technically minded. Right. So they were keen to understand the technology or they were the go-to in their team. If someone said, I don't know how to do this, they would know the answer. So I think those very early adopters were ahead of the curve. They were people who were very engaged with tech. They understood Windows, they understood OneDrive. They could work out to share a document, which is still a dark art, you know, for a lot of people. But it was the building of that network. I think you're right. It's that finding the right person, but at the same time, not trying to dissuade people. So what we've found is over a period of time, we've attracted a real mixed bag of people. We've got people who come along who say, I haven't got a clue, and I'm here to learn. Which is great because I'm always here to share. Yeah. So I love sharing knowledge with people, but at the same time we have a lot of people who come in and say, I know all the answers. This is a waste of my time. And I try and tell them, well, no, you are the perfect example of how you can lead the Champions network to the new horizon, you can help lift up other people. Getting those people to do stuff is incredibly difficult because it's almost like they've, they know it alls rather than learn it alls.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. It's interesting isn't it? There's a special talent to transferring knowledge, which is different to knowing things and sometimes actually the people who know less quote unquote have learned on the journey, are more willing to share. Yeah. They have more patience or are more excited because it's newer to them. So yeah, there's a special mix of people that suit that digital champion role for sure.

Bill Compton: Yeah. Well, I've always said, I mean, you know, since I can remember working in IT, I've always known that there are people around me who believe in that knowledge is power mantra, which is that if they know something about the job, they have a fear, they're feared of sharing that information because they may lose the job themselves. But I just don't see the point in that. I think in the society that we live in now, where people are trying to work more collaboratively, they've got to communicate better between colleagues. If you hold onto information, you are a single point of failure. You're not a great person to work with. You become well known for, oh, he's not in this week, or she's not around next week. Yeah, we've now got a risk point and there's no one to back that up. So I think you need champions networks, not just for change, but you also need them for knowledge sharing and for people to be just spreading the love a little bit wider across the organisation than pockets of it here and there.

Tom Arbuthnot: And that Champions network is bridging the different types of workers and scenarios we talked about there. So you don't hive it off to different scenarios. Do you ever focus on particular use cases with a subset?

Bill Compton: You try to do. You know, the funny thing is, last week I've been mulling over a change to the Champions Network for a while and we've been talking about bringing in two new personas within the Champions Network. So everybody within the Digital Champions network's largely the same. They are, as you say, spread across the whole organisation. We've got people in every area. We've even got digital champions who are based on oil platforms in the North Sea, and that's just the reach we would never get to. You know, I'm not going to go, I'm not going to go for the dunk test and get in a helicopter and fly to an oil platform to show someone how to use Word. So, you know, having champions out there who are absorbing that knowledge when they're on shore and then going offshore and taking it with them is great because they're there in person. Right. But I think when it comes to the champions themselves. I've identified a thing where we've almost like we're a victim of our own success, we've got a lot of people who are very similar, but we've got no leaders within the digital champions community. So I've proposed at Centrica that we create Ambassadors for Change, which will lead change programs within the organisation. And this is to scale up. You know, we need to drive more change within the company. We're trying to become more digitally fluent, more data fluent. And the only way to do that is to actually have people who are willing to do it. So if I can get Ambassadors for Change, who can go out and talk about, there is a different way of doing this, there is a more fluent way of doing this, then that's great. And our L&D team have also asked me to create a function called digital educators, which would sit within the Champions Network as well. So it goes back to that learning piece that we would formalise it as part of the Digital Champions program, and that doesn't mean everybody has to be, we've got 535, I think it is now, digital champions. We can't make all of those ambassadors for change. Yeah, that's the

Tom Arbuthnot: point. It's a subset,

Bill Compton: isn't

Tom Arbuthnot: it?

Bill Compton: That are doing some extra stuff. Yeah. So using those pockets, hopefully then we get the digital champions that wrap around them to become their support team. And part of the reason I've leant into that is because, while Centrica has taken digital adoption quite seriously, five years ago when COVID hit, I effectively lost my entire team. So I was once in a team of four, and I've been a team of one since the end of 2020. That's changing. I'm going to get a team back at the start of next year. And I, as you alluded to at the start of the podcast, we've got, I've been, my job title has been adoption manager, but from the start, well, actually from today, I'm now Head of digital adoption. Gosh, I've got to try and remember. That's great. Well,

Tom Arbuthnot: great. Yeah. Yeah. It's quite vital, which I love

Bill Compton: it loves. It's a great title, but it means that I need to now form a team and I need to really change the direction of travel for the digital champions. And that's as you say, that's really where we can then lean into the business, into the personas and start to really focus on those specific areas. And it'd be great to say, take some field agents and say, let's see where we can make a difference here. Let's do some stuff for you guys that is purely honed just for you instead of this broad brush stuff to do. Yeah, because it's

Tom Arbuthnot: quite hard when you've got very different use cases to be like, well now we're going to spend a whole lot of time talking about mobile first scenarios. And then maybe the desk space worker's not so clued into that or yeah, you know, here's a shift example. It doesn't apply to the office worker, that kind of thing.

Bill Compton: Yeah. And that's what, and that's because we've been very linear in what we've been doing. It's almost back to back things rather than running things in parallel, which we can now do.

Tom Arbuthnot: And what does your technology estate look like? Bill, we're going to get into the Copilot piece, but like Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, are you fully Teams, are you using Teams for phone or rooms? What's that look like?

Bill Compton: Well, yes, Teams, we adopted like everybody else by aggression, thanks to COVID. Yeah, although we were really, we'd rolled out Teams beforehand. It wasn't having wide juice. But yeah, we are fully Teams. We do have some areas that make use of Slack, but they're really developer areas, but we are a hundred percent Teams across the whole organisation. Everyone's licensed for that. We also have Office 365 or Microsoft 365 across the whole org. We have a variety of different plans that we use in different things, but most people are on E5 licenses for M365. And yeah, OneDrive, everything's in the cloud. We do have a couple of legacy file systems, but you know, they're really just for archiving more than anything else, but everything is in the cloud.

Tom Arbuthnot: So you're, yeah. So you're pretty, you're there on that digital transformation journey. You're in the cloud, you're ready? And what's the mix of Copilot in terms of the included licenses versus the premium 365 Copilot license?

Bill Compton: Yeah, so in December, 2023, we enabled Copilot chat for all full-time employees and second party contractors. That's about 22,000 people. And we started a very small pilot from Microsoft, they were very keen for us to start using Copilot as a desktop product. And we start with 25 licenses, and I think that was around about November, sort of October, November that year as well. And then we just slowly scaled up and we've increased it. I think it was about 25 licenses, about six months. And now, for the last sort of year and a half we've slowly scaled up. And in April 25 we had about 800 licenses, full Copilot licenses. And then we hit the button on getting some more licenses. It was about the end of April and we moved it up to about 2000 licenses.

Tom Arbuthnot: So you've taken a very measured approach. It's not been like, fling it out there and see what happens. You've deployed it, seen value and stepped up.

Bill Compton: What we didn't want to do was just give it to everybody and then let them run away with it and not have any idea as to how or why they're using it. And I think very early on we were quite risk averse. And it's mainly because, you know, as an organisation you look at expenditure, you're looking at cost. You don't want to be spending millions on licenses and not really understanding what they're going to do. Of course. And, you know, we've talked about this at UCX, but Copilot as a product when it first came out was very immature. You know, it's like a teenager, right? And especially in Excel, it was almost like a baby in Excel. And because quite a lot of our group functions and our office workers are finance people who is spreadsheet heavy. They started to use it and found it quite clunky and very difficult to use. And the trouble with that is from an adoption journey that pushes people away, you're burning bridges, right?

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. It's interesting. You could definitely make the case that Microsoft marketed too hard, too early, and people came in and saw the YouTube and they were like, well, it doesn't do what the YouTube says. And now I feel like, you know, two and a half, three years later, we're getting there with the agent mode in Word Excel and PowerPoint, and you have to circle back round and be like, okay, it's matured. Give it another go.

Bill Compton: Yeah. And I've got quite a difficult job in those communities because some of them have switched off to it and given up their licenses as well. They've just said, it's not for me. I'm not getting anything out of it. But what we did was, in the middle of 25, it was July 25, I had this weird dream that I thought, wouldn't it be great if we could create a hybrid event because we've got this workforce across the UK because we've got a lot of people in different places and mostly working from home. We have, and at that point we had the licenses available, the 2000 licenses. But no one was really buying into them. No one was taking them up. They were slowly eking out. So what I did was I created this event called Copilot Live 25, which sounds really exciting. And what we did was I created a hybrid and in-person event. And the principle concept of it was just to wake people up to the art of the possible with Copilot. And it wasn't leaning into the full Copilot singularly, it was looking at Copilot chat as well. So I think

Tom Arbuthnot: that's a huge point. Because you, there's lots of value in the included Copilot chat and suddenly you're pitching stuff that everybody can get to right now in the organisation. So if you do a road show and you focus on the paid license, you're immediately limiting your audience or saying you need to persuade your boss. But I think lots of people are missing out on the value of that included Copilot chat.

Bill Compton: Oh, big time. Yeah. And it's, and even since July, you know, it's come on as well, they're pushing it into the apps as well. Yeah, so Microsoft has pushed it into Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and now people can actually use it alongside documents that have got open. But at that point in the middle of the year, it really, it wasn't, Microsoft hadn't even announced that that was going to be the case. So what we did was we had, we finished up with 12 stands in our Windsor office that people could visit in person, and each one was about a Copilot in an app. So there was a stand for Word, stand for PowerPoint, stand for Excel. But we also had stuff for Power BI. So we were looking into Fabric. We had stuff for Power Apps as well. So we were looking at Copilot studio. Oh wow. And then we had a stand for Digital Champions as well. Because I thought, if I'm going to bother with this, I'm going to get some promo for the digital champions while I'm here. So we arranged the 12 stands, but then we also created eight 20 minute sessions. And I think this was the most important part of it. These eight, 20 minute sessions were available for people to watch in person, but they were streamed live over a four hour window. So we created a four hour single stream. And I'd noticed over years, when we did multiple sessions, if you created lots of separate Teams meetings, people would sign up to the first couple, they'd be like, yeah. And then the sign up ship would tap off. Yeah, drop out.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Compton: So I created just one event. One event four hours long. Because that's the maximum you can record in a Teams meeting, right? And that four hour event started at 10:00 AM and finished at 2:00 PM So it was bang in the middle of the day. So it gave people an hour to sort themselves out. Then they could join it at 10. And each of those 20 minute sessions was interspersed with a 10 minute gap. So the first session started at 10, five past 10. Finished at 25 past 10.

Tom Arbuthnot: Right. So people could have a break or they could drop in and out if they knew that the Excel was three o'clock and that's what they really wanted or whatever it may be.

Bill Compton: Yeah. So exactly that. So what I wanted to do, and the reason I did it at the five past 25 past is because people say, you know, my meeting's overrunning, or I need to, I'm going to miss this. It gives people a chance to actually attend the sessions.

Tom Arbuthnot: Mm-hmm.

Bill Compton: So webinars in Teams only allows you to have up to a thousand people attend. We had way over that subscriber, I think it was like 1300 people subscribed in the end. In the end, about 780 people joined the live session for most of the day. But what the benefit came was when after the session, I cut the session down to a two hour, 20 minute recording. Time spliced it, put it in with markers, put it up on Stream and put it out there. And it's been watched now, I think, by about 3000 people.

Tom Arbuthnot: Amazing. So

Bill Compton: that coverage across the company, I would never get, not even through the Digital Champions network at the scale that I would need, but it woke, the first thing we did was, the first session was what is Copilot, and the second session was how to create the craft, a crafty prompt. Or the art of the crafty prompt. That was it. And the third session was how to use Copilot chat. So the first three things we did was educate and then inspire, and then give them the knowledge that they need to be able to use anything. And this meant that anyone within the company could start using Copilot straight away. Yeah. Because we were telling them you've got it, you can listen what I'm telling you now you can follow straight away. And it's there on their desktop as they're watching it. And I'm reaching people who are at home in call centres. If someone in the field wanted to watch it on their phone, they could. But we had such a wide coverage that overnight our Copilot licensing just rocketed straight up and within I think about four weeks we'd reached double the number of licenses in use. We were at about 1800.

Tom Arbuthnot: And that's the interesting thing about Copilot. Obviously there's been a lot of pressure on understanding adoption and driving change. So it's pretty measurable now from Microsoft. There's always areas for improvement, but at least you can see if people are getting value out of those licenses and what they're using. And even what they're doing, if you go down to site level.

Bill Compton: Oh yeah. No, totally. It's improved. I mean, even last week there was some more stuff coming out in the Copilot dashboard in Viva Insights, it's very insightful. There's still some things in there which I find a bit hokey of things like assisted hours and you're like, Hmm, okay, well I get where you are going with that. But yeah. I attended a Microsoft event a couple of weeks ago and there was some big companies there, and each one of them was talking about we've managed to save X number of hours. And it was that figure. And then another company said, well, we don't call it saved hours, we call it, what was it? I can't remember the name now. It's something like retrieved hours or bought back or something. Recovered hours.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. And

Bill Compton: I said, it's just none of those things. It's assisted hours. And that's very different. If I was to get a colleague to come and sit next to me and we worked together on something. I guess I'm saving time, but they're assisting me at the same time.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. We've gone faster, but could you quantify how much? Yeah, but they're unarguably, if they're persistently using it, they're seeing some value, so they've gone faster. It is quite hard to credibly, you go up against a CFO or something, they're like, well, show me where the money is back for those hours. It doesn't really work like that. They just do a bit more. It's like, well, okay.

Bill Compton: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it's off the back of that, I got a little bit annoyed about the whole, people are thinking one thing and we're actually doing something else. And I worry that if you are trying to drive value in Copilot, if you pin all your hopes on, we are just going to get tens of thousands of hours back. And in the case of ours, I think it said in the last four weeks, we've managed to get 21,000 assisted hours, which is a ludicrous amount of hours when you think about it. Right. In four weeks. Yeah. But at the same time, that's not to be sniffed at because that is a system,

Tom Arbuthnot: well, especially not the Copilot free tier where it's like, well, it was in the box anyway, so I haven't asked the CFO for a $30 uplift per user. In that case, I've just used what we've already paid for.

Bill Compton: Well, quite. And I think that in itself gives you a sort of, it gives you a very different take on what Copilot can do because I think there's still this, there is still this mindset of it's a search engine, I can just ask it to give me answers to stuff. But I've been, last week I ran another event. We called it the Great Copilot Black Friday deal. And the concept of that was get people to tell us the prompts they're using. And for every entry that they put in, they get put into a prize draw. And we're going to reward some prizes this week for the best prompts. And I'm also going to get Copilot to judge it as well. So the irony is not lost on me. I'm Copilot all there. I mean,

Tom Arbuthnot: it feels like that's what you've got to do, haven't you? If you're going to do it, do it.

Bill Compton: Well, exactly. Yeah. What's really good though is because we can't get out of Copilot what people are using it for. Not without digging into Purview and looking at real, you know, actual brilliant detail. Yeah, yeah. Which there are some issues with doing that and it's not something that we just allow the entire company to go wade through what people have been doing. By getting people to actually volunteer their prompts. We've now got, and I think, what was it, 312 people submitted prompts in five days. We've now got some really good insight into how people are using Copilot instead of just looking at that figure and going, oh, look, 20,000 assisted hours, or, you know, they've submitted 16,000 prompts or however many prompts they've done. We can actually see now the value that they're putting into Copilot because they've shared their prompt, they've shared a little bit of a explanation as to what that prompt does for them. We ask them also to tell us how many hours per month or how many minutes per month they think that would save them. So this is a personally quantifiable thing that people are, yeah, and getting a feel

Tom Arbuthnot: for what their role is and where they're seeing value, which builds you a bank of stories of peers, like, okay, this is going to be relevant for other teams that are similar to this or your peers in this scenario, I think that's a fantastic way to get the feedback.

Bill Compton: Yeah, and you're right, we're going to turn these into stories. We're going to turn these into show and tells, we're going to show people the art of the possible, but because it wasn't anonymous as well, because it's a competition, we know which area of the business these came from as well. Yeah. So like I say, we can now focus on those areas. We can take those people who submit the prompts and we can lift a few of them up as Copilot champions in their own right where they can become poster children for using Copilot more fluently, more digitally. Yeah, more, you know, getting great value out of it.

Tom Arbuthnot: And it feels like, I mean, you've got a big job in your hands with such a big organisation, but it feels like the digital literacy thing with AI, it feels like certainly your organisation has got the idea that we have to build this muscle and it's going to be a journey. And actually just again, the Copilot included tier people are getting to know what's possible and then maybe they get step up to the premium tier if they've got a good use case.

Bill Compton: Yeah, and we've, we have got the, we are starting to look at Copilot studio as well. So we're looking at agents, we're looking at how people could use them. Declarative agents are available for anyone within the org to build. And funny enough, this morning, I was browsing GitHub as you do, and I found that somebody had posted up, I think I might have seen it on LinkedIn, a thing called Advent of Agents, which is a 24 day Advent calendar. Oh, very good. Yeah, it gives you an agent per day. It says this would be an agent you could use during the festive season. So if you tweak it and it took me five minutes to set up and I've shared it with a few people. Each day of the month for December, it will give you an idea for an agent. And it's because it's a declarative agent and it points only at Microsoft's Copilot website. It's free to use across the whole organisation as well. It's not limited by the full licensed users. So I'm toying, it's the 1st of December. We're recording this. I'm toying with putting this out for the whole of December. You never know. I might put it out. I might not. I'm still playing around with it, but it looks good and it's a great way, again, of increasing adoption because people see the art of the possible, right.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. There's so many takeaways here for how you've driven adoption. I think the key thing is you've done it, you know, haven't had the hundred people in an adoption team going around, so the things you've done remotely, the videos, the content on demand. I like the hybrid showcase as well. I think that's really cool. For others that are in similar situations to you, like they're in an adoption team and they're in a big or complex enterprise. Out of all the stuff you've done, what would you say is the best bang for buck for them to maybe consider?

Bill Compton: I think doing things, I think it's very easy to sit back and go, oh, we need to measure the value of this. We need to understand the business use case for that. I think what's worked at Centrica is actually giving the tools to people and letting them tell us how they're going to use them. I can't understand every single persona within Centrica. I can't see what everyone else is doing. So having that ability to be able to say to people, here is a tool. You may only have it for a limited period of time, but you can come and use it. And having them pull the tool in and want to use it themselves

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.

Bill Compton: Is always going to increase adoption if you start pushing things out to people. And I, for many years have said that we've always in IT have done things wrong. We give people tools and we expect them to use them. I think if you say to people, let's talk about these tools, and that's what I've done with these hybrid sessions. People then go, look at that and go, there's something there for me. I'm interested. You're giving them a little tidbit. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit more pitching, a bit less forcing, basically.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I think so. I think rolling out can have, it can be right in certain circumstances, but you've got a rather captive audience before you do that. If you don't know who your audience are, they're going to want, you're going to need them to pull from you rather than you drive it into them. And then it's a board that just keeps rolling. And that's what I've seen. Yeah. And there is a second part to that. I do think you need a champions network. I think a lot of companies don't, it doesn't matter what scale or size it is, it could be 25 people in an org with 10,000 people in.

Bill Compton: Yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot: Because then you've got the credibility of people in those departments or roles or teams rather than you pitching from IT outwards. It's actually how do they, you know, help their peers?

Bill Compton: Yeah, totally. You need people in the business who are technically aware of what's going on, connected, and they're looked up to by their peers. Like you said, they're trusted. They're almost like they're almost as good as senior sponsors. You know, we talk about getting senior sponsors within an AAR able from their ivory tower, but that doesn't work. When people are very removed from that ivory tower, they just see noise. Yeah. Also,

Tom Arbuthnot: they can be perceived to be a long way away from the job being done at the ground floor. So actually, if it's a peer that's more aligned to your role, it's like, okay, Sarah's found some value. I'll give her five minutes to hear what she's doing. Because I can see how that might apply to me. Whereas if you get it from IT or you say from SLT. Well, of course they're going to say, do the thing like that, that's what they're supposed to say. But are, you know, are they doing it on the ground with me? I can totally see that.

Bill Compton: Yeah. So, yeah, that would be it. There, I think those two things, get those champions involved and give people an opportunity to tell you how they're going to use the technology. Because you'll learn so much about your business from doing that.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome, Bill. Well, thanks for sharing such an amazing journey story. It feels like we're going to have to check in again, maybe midyear or next year when you've got the bigger team and see what the numbers are at. But I really appreciate you sharing the insights and hopefully we'll talk again soon. Yeah. Brilliant. Thanks very much Tom.