The second AI wave: Automate the work still run by email and spreadsheet

Most organisations have pointed AI at the same thing so far: personal productivity - writing better, summarising documents, transcribing meetings. That work is real and it has paid for itself. It has also left the expensive part untouched.

Emails arrive in a shared mailbox. People organise work in folders. Tracking lives in a spreadsheet, or in one person's head. The same details get keyed into three systems. Little of it is automated, much of it needs rework - and it consumes far more hours than it should.

Automating those types of processes is the work of the second AI wave, and it's where the serious returns are.

A lot has changed in the last three months. In September Tony spent three days inside Microsoft's Copilot Agents Architecture Bootcamp in London. What you hear is the current state of Microsoft's agentic products and roadmap - design patterns, governance, what's changing - before it reaches the blogs.

This is the session we've been running in person in Sydney, Hobart and Melbourne - now online, in an hour.

What you'll leave with

A view on which of your processes are worth automating first, a realistic sense of what it costs to find out, and the names of the two or three people who should be looking at it.

The hour

1. The demo. One process running end to end - documents arriving and being read, checks run, exceptions held back for a person, outgoing documents generated and sent. An agent does the work; a simple Power App sits over the top so people can see, approve and correct.
2. Applying it to your organisation. The scenario is deliberately generic - the pattern maps onto any high-volume process. Understand the building blocks, and map them to your processes.
3. Cost control. Agents cost money to run. Know what consumes Copilot Credits, the licence patterns worth understanding, and the controls an administrator has.
4. Straight from the bootcamp. The latest design and governance material from Microsoft - and how to organise a small group inside your organisation to learn this properly, and which roles to draw them from. Full resources list provided to all attendees.

There's time for questions at the end.

Who this is for

Executives and IT leadership - CIOs, IT directors, Heads of Innovation and Technology, Knowledge Management leads, senior business analysts and project managers.

This isn't a build session. A structured build course for technical teams follows this one, and we'll talk about it on the day.