lewis richards

This week at #PPCC26, I saw one of the best keynotes I have seen in a LONG time…and I see around 200 keynotes a year. The topic was The Future Workplace and the main speaker was Nirav Shah. Now Nirav usually tackles very deep, technical topics but this talk was very different, it talked about what the future workplace will look like based on where our various industries are headed and what we humans need to be doing today to prepare. He started by making the joke of "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas--kind of like your enterprise context." What he meant by that was that the context of your work stays in the app or agent the work happens in. For example, a customer issue to resolution stays in the Customer Support app and is not available to others in the org who could benefit, like the people building the product. This is where the concept of IQ comes in, specifically Work IQ that now connects to your Business Apps! This is a new functionality that connects the context of your various business apps, it improves the more you use it + give it feedback and stays in the flow of where you work rather than dragging you to some new UX. The two parts of Business Apps in Work IQ are: 1. Business Understanding - extends AI reasoning and retrieval to various business data and business processes in the language of YOUR business (TLAs and all!) 2. Business Skills - like an onboarding doc for Agents that empowers agents with reusable skills that any agent can use Then the talk goes on to uses an RFP-to-invoice process to show the difference between a documented business process and actual work. The process on paper is a beautiful linear 6 step thing but as we all know, the real process involves Outlook emails, Teams convos, Word doc revisions, Excel, ERP stuff, and more meetings! And across all these steps, guess where the context stayed? Yes, in the app and DISCONNECTED from all the other apps! The solution is to treat the process as a relay with guardrails with knowledge and actions being shared as needed. Then there were some product demos showing how to build this in Copilot Studio with Keith Ramsdell and governing this whole enchilada in Agent 365 with @mamaspring_24 of course! I loved the idea that after we spent decades teaching people how to use apps, we're now teaching AI + IQ how to navigate our busineses! This was SUCH a good talk--exactly what we need to hear and see given the crossroads all of our orgs are currently in. I really wish it had been recorded, but maybe I can hassle the team to give it again! 10/10 no notes. Great job Nirav and co!