Need to Know podcast–Episode 366

Join me as I unpack the most impactful Microsoft Build 2026 announcements for SMBs, including Work IQ’s general availability, new autopilot and Scout agent features, enhanced agent security with Microsoft Execution Containers, and the latest MAI models for code, image, and voice. Discover how upcoming Work IQ APIs, OpenClaw integration with Windows, and the shift toward hybrid AI solutions are shaping the future of business technology, with practical insights on cost control, disaster recovery, and agentic security. Don’t miss this episode for actionable takeaways and expert analysis on the evolving AI landscape.

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Microsoft Build 2026 blog – Be yourself at work

Developer-Tech – AI agents, Copilot, Windows developer tools

VentureBeat – AI agents and enterprise use cases

Thurrott – Scout personal work agent and AI models

VentureBeat – Data silos and Microsoft IQ

Windows Report – Securing code agents and AI models

Engadget – Build 2026 live blog

Microsoft Learn – Work IQ in Azure Foundry

Firstpost – MXC, OpenClaw, and OpenShell

Copilot in PowerPoint

Most people type “make me a presentation about cyber security” into Copilot, watch it spit out ten generic slides, and decide the whole thing is a gimmick.

I don’t blame them. That output is rubbish.

But that’s not Copilot failing. That’s Copilot doing exactly what you asked — building from nothing, with no source, no structure, no brand.

Garbage in, garbage slides out.

Here’s the shift. Copilot in PowerPoint isn’t a “write my deck” button. It’s a converter. You already have the content — a Word doc, a PDF proposal, last quarter’s report. The job isn’t inventing slides. It’s turning what you’ve already written into something you can stand up and present.

What is Copilot in PowerPoint, really?

Think of it as the worst part of your week, automated.

You know the drill. The thinking is done. The report is written. The client signed off on the wording. Now you’ve got two hours of copy-pasting into slides, fighting text boxes, and nudging the logo a pixel to the left.

Copilot eats that two hours.

You point it at a file. It reads the structure, pulls the key points, and drafts slides — text, layout, the lot. You’re not staring at a blank slide anymore. You’re editing a first draft.

That’s the whole game. Not creativity. Removal of drudgery.

Step-by-Step: building a deck that doesn’t look generic

Open your template first

This is the step everyone skips, and it’s the one that matters most.

Before you touch Copilot, open your organisation’s PowerPoint template — your branded .potx, your client’s deck, whatever carries the right fonts and colours. Microsoft is explicit about this: start from your template and Copilot keeps the theme and reuses your existing layouts.

Skip it, and you get Microsoft’s house style. Every. Single. Time.

Reference your file, don’t describe it

Open the Copilot pane, then reference a file — click the paperclip, or just type / and pick the document. Word, PDF, Excel, a Loop page. Now Copilot reads the actual content instead of guessing at it.

Write a prompt that points, not pleads

Don’t ask for a slide “about the project”. Tell it exactly where to look:

Create slides from the attached proposal.
Use the "Scope" and "Pricing" sections only.
One slide per phase. Key points, not full sentences.

Notice what’s missing? Any mention of colours, fonts, or design. You don’t ask Copilot for those — your template already decided them. Ask once, point clearly, and let the template do the rest.

Review, then refine in place

Copilot drafts. You read. Then you tell it what’s wrong — “tighten slide three”, “drop the jargon”, “add a summary slide” — in plain English, right there in the pane. No re-prompting from scratch.

A couple of traps before you sell this to clients

Two things will bite you.

First, dense slides. Copilot tends to lift whole paragraphs straight off the page. If your source doc reads like a report, your slides will too. Fix it in the prompt — “bullet points, not sentences” — or trim after.

Second, the file has to be readable. Text-based PDFs work. Scanned images and password-protected files don’t. And keep source files under 24MB, or the results get flaky.

Old thinking: “I’ll block out the afternoon to build the deck.” New thinking: “I’ll point Copilot at the doc and spend the afternoon making it good.”

That’s not a small change. That’s where your hours go back.

Why this actually changes behaviour

Here’s the real win for anyone running this in a business.

Your team already produces the content. Proposals, reports, meeting notes — the substance exists. What kills them is the packaging. The deck that has to look right for the board, the client, the pitch.

Copilot collapses the gap between “we’ve written it” and “we can present it”. The expensive part — the thinking — stays human. The tedious part disappears.

And be straight about the cost. The file-referencing piece sits behind the paid Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on, not the base subscription. For a lot of SMB clients, this is the use case that justifies the licence. Not chatbots. This.

Show a client how an afternoon of slide-building becomes ten minutes, and the conversation about value is over.

If you’re running Microsoft 365 for clients and you’re not showing them this, you’re leaving real money — theirs and yours — on the table.

Copilot in PowerPoint isn’t there to make your slides.

It’s there to delete the part of the job nobody ever wanted.

The Quietest Cancellation You’ll Never Hear

The hardest clients to keep are the ones who never tell you they’re leaving.

I’ve been turning this over for a while. The clients who churn loudly — the ones who ring up annoyed, send the sharp email, ask for a refund — those are actually the easy ones. You know where you stand. You can fix something, part ways cleanly, or at least learn from it.

It’s the silent ones that hurt. The ones who stop replying to your monthly check-ins. Skip the review. Renew once out of inertia, then quietly don’t renew the second time. And somewhere down the track, you’ll hear from a friend of a friend that they felt burned by your business.

Nobody robbed them. They just never really bought.

Sold isn’t the same as bought

There’s a real difference between a client who bought and a client who was sold. Small word, big gap.

A client who bought made the decision. They walked in with a problem, recognised what you offered, and chose it. They own the outcome. Even when things get bumpy, they stay engaged because it’s their decision to defend.

A client who was sold went along with it. Maybe you were persuasive. Maybe they didn’t want to look uncertain in front of their team. Maybe the proposal looked sharp and they signed before they’d really thought it through. They never crossed the line from interested to committed — but on paper, the deal got done.

The first kind tells their friends about you. The second kind tells their friends about the business that talked them into something.

Where I see it most in MSP land

I see this constantly with Copilot rollouts right now. An MSP gets excited, runs a slick pitch, the client nods along, the licences get assigned in the Microsoft 365 admin centre, and then… nothing. Six months later the usage reports look flat. Nobody has Copilot pinned in Outlook. Nobody is asking it to summarise a Teams meeting they missed. Nobody is in Word using it to redraft a proposal or in Excel asking it to explain a column of numbers.

That client didn’t buy Copilot. They bought the meeting being over.

The same pattern shows up with backup uplifts, security stack changes, anything that lives behind a quote. If the conversation was about us getting the agreement signed instead of them understanding what changes on a Tuesday morning, the meter starts ticking on a quiet exit.

The signal isn’t loud. It’s a slower email reply. A “we’ll think about adoption training next quarter.” A skipped quarterly business review. By the time it shows up in your churn report, the relationship was over months ago.

Make them buy, don’t sell them

The fix isn’t softer language or better slides. It’s slowing the conversation down before the contract goes out. The best deals I’ve seen lately are the ones where the close was almost anticlimactic — because the buying decision had already been made out loud, by the client, weeks earlier.

I want the client describing the problem in their own words. I want them telling me what their inbox looks like on a bad day. I want them booking the adoption sessions before the deal is signed, not after. If they won’t put time in their calendar to actually use the thing, that’s the answer — and it’s better to hear it now than read it in a Google review later.

Selling closes a deal. Buying starts a relationship. One of those keeps the lights on this quarter; the other builds the kind of business worth referring.

CIAOPS AI Dojo 13

What’s the session about?

This month we will be focusing on new Copilot features and updates as well as optimising AI for Small Business.

Who should attend?

This session is perfect for:

IT administrators and support staff
Business owners
People looking to get more done with Microsoft 365
Anyone looking to automate their daily grind

Save the Date

Date: Friday the 26th of June 2026

Time: 9:30 AM Sydney AU time

Location: Online (link will be provided upon registration)

Cost: $80 per attendee (free for Dojo subscribers)

Normal Is a Group Decision

I sat in a room recently with a group of MSP owners and listened to a conversation about pricing. Every person at the table was earning a decent living. Every person at the table was also quietly miserable about how hard they were working for it. Nobody was a bad operator. Nobody was lazy. They had simply, over years, settled into a shared idea of what “normal” looked like — and that idea was the ceiling.

That moment stuck with me, because I think most of us underestimate how much the people around us shape what we believe is possible.

Limited isn’t the same as bad

When something feels stuck — your business, your income, your role, your energy — the easy story is that someone is doing you wrong. A bad client. A bad supplier. A bad staff member. In my experience that’s rarely the real problem. The real problem is quieter. You’re surrounded by perfectly decent people who have made peace with a smaller version of the game than you secretly want to play.

Limited people aren’t villains. They’re warm, helpful, often very good at what they do. They just don’t think bigger than what they already have, and over time that becomes the air you breathe. You stop pitching certain projects. You stop charging certain prices. You stop applying for certain rooms. Not because anyone told you not to — because nobody around you is doing it either. The same thing happens with the clients you accept and the staff you hire. Like attracts like, and the average keeps quietly resetting itself downwards.

Audit the room

The room is bigger than you think. It’s the peer group you call when something goes sideways. It’s the chat you scroll while the kettle boils. It’s the three or four voices you hear most often inside your head when you’re making a decision. If those voices have all settled, you will too.

This is where I find Microsoft 365 quietly useful, in a way that has nothing to do with productivity. I use Copilot in Outlook to clear the noise faster, so the time I free up actually goes into conversations with sharper people — not back into more email. I use Copilot Chat to pressure-test my own thinking before I send a proposal: “argue against this”, “what would a more ambitious version look like”, “what am I leaving on the table”. It doesn’t replace good humans. It does stop me defaulting to the average opinion in my own head.

I also pay closer attention to which Teams communities and channels I actually show up in. If every conversation I’m part of is about doing the same thing slightly better, I’ve answered my own question about why my ceiling hasn’t moved. I keep a running Loop page of articles, podcasts and operators who think a level above where I am now, and I make myself read it before I make a decision I might otherwise rush.

Move the ceiling on purpose

You don’t have to fire your friends. You do have to be honest about what each room teaches you. Add one peer group that’s a level above where you are now. Subscribe to one voice who genuinely makes you uncomfortable in a useful way. Spend one hour a week somewhere your current “normal” would feel small.

The ceiling is invisible until you sit somewhere with a higher one. Then you wonder how you ever called the old one a roof.

The Pendulum Might Be Swinging Back to On-Premises

For years the story was simple. Move everything to the cloud, pay for what you use, never buy a server again. I bought into a lot of that, and for plenty of workloads it still holds up. But lately I’ve been having a different conversation with MSP owners, and it keeps circling back to one thing: the cost of running AI is climbing, nobody is quite sure where it stops, and it’s no longer a fringe worry — it comes up in nearly every planning chat I sit in on.

The bill that grows while you sleep

Here’s what I’m seeing. A client switches on an AI feature, the team loves it, usage goes up, and three months later the invoice has quietly doubled. Tokens — the units these models bill against — get consumed every time someone asks a question, summarises a thread, or drafts a reply. Individually they cost almost nothing. At scale, across a busy business, they add up fast.

The trouble is the meter never sleeps. A traditional software licence is a known number you can budget around. Token-based AI is a tap that’s always running, and the more useful it becomes, the more it costs. I’ve watched owners realise that the productivity win they were celebrating has a recurring price tag attached that grows in lockstep with their success.

Why bringing it home is back on the table

This is where on-premises starts creeping back into the conversation. Hardware that runs capable models locally is getting cheaper and far more practical. For a business with predictable, high-volume AI work — document processing, internal search, summarising the same kinds of records all day — a one-off box in the comms room can start to look smarter than an open-ended monthly bill.

I’m not saying everyone rips out the cloud. That would be daft. But the calculation has shifted. Five years ago, running your own AI infrastructure was exotic and expensive. Now it’s a line item a serious MSP can actually model for a client and stand behind, and that’s a service opportunity worth taking seriously.

The hybrid answer most businesses will land on

In practice I think most organisations end up somewhere in the middle, and that’s fine. Microsoft 365 Copilot is a good example of where the cloud stays. When someone asks Copilot in Outlook to draft a reply, or pulls a summary out of a long Teams meeting, that’s woven so tightly into the service that dragging it on-premises makes no sense. You’re paying for the integration, not just the tokens.

But the heavy, repetitive, high-volume jobs — the ones that chew through tokens by the thousand — are exactly the ones worth questioning. Does that bulk processing need to sit in a metered cloud, or could it run on a local model and feed the results back into SharePoint or a Power Automate flow? That’s the kind of question I think every MSP should be asking on behalf of their clients this year.

Where I’ve landed

The pendulum has swung hard towards the cloud for a decade, and it’s earned its place. But cost has a way of correcting fashion. When the meter starts hurting, people look for the off switch — and sometimes the off switch is a server you own. Watch your AI usage like any other variable cost. Know which workloads belong in Copilot and the cloud, and which ones might be cheaper closer to home.

The Quiet Power of Showing Up

A few weeks ago I came across a study that stuck with me. Researchers looked at more than 10,000 millionaires and asked them what they thought made the difference. Eighty-five per cent put it down to one thing — habits. Not a lucky break, not a clever bet, not the right surname. Just small things, done consistently, over a long stretch of time.

That number is hard to ignore. And the more I sit with it, the more it lines up with what I see in business — and increasingly, in how people are using tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot.

The compounding effect of small things

We tend to overestimate the dramatic and underestimate the daily. The big launch, the big deal, the big idea — those get the headlines. But the people who quietly build something real are usually doing the same handful of unglamorous things every day. Reviewing the numbers. Following up. Answering the message they’d rather avoid. Showing up when nobody is watching.

Consistency is boring. That’s why it works. Most people can’t sustain it, and that’s exactly why the few who do tend to pull away.

Where this lands inside Copilot

Here’s what I’m noticing with Copilot. The professionals who get real value out of it are not the ones with the cleverest prompts or the longest training videos. They’re the ones who’ve built it into their daily rhythm — quietly, without ceremony.

Every morning, they ask Copilot in Outlook to summarise the overnight inbox before they touch a single email. They run the recap inside Teams the moment a meeting ends, while it’s still fresh. They draft the first cut of a proposal in Word with Copilot, then sharpen it themselves. None of these are clever. None require a prompt engineering certificate. They’re tiny, repeatable habits.

Six months in, the difference between someone who does this daily and someone who reaches for Copilot once a fortnight is enormous. Same licence. Same tool. Wildly different outcome. The gap isn’t talent — it’s frequency.

Why most people quit before it pays off

The trouble with habits is that the early payoff is small, almost embarrassingly so. You ask Copilot to draft a reply and the first version isn’t quite right. You try again, it’s better. You move on. Nothing dramatic happened. There are no fireworks that make you feel like a genius.

That’s the test. Most people abandon a tool, or a process, or a discipline, right at the point where the compounding is about to begin. They want the result before they’ve put in the reps. The 85 per cent of millionaires in that study didn’t have a magic week — they had a consistent decade.

I see the same pattern with Copilot adoption inside organisations. The teams who win aren’t the ones who run a flashy training day and a launch poster. They’re the ones whose people open Copilot in Outlook, Teams and Word every working day, almost without thinking, the way they once started reaching for the search bar without remembering the world before it.

What I’m watching

I’ve stopped being impressed by the brilliant one-off. I’m more interested in what someone does on an ordinary Tuesday morning, before the coffee has properly kicked in. The unremarkable habits — the ones nobody applauds — are the ones that quietly decide where you end up.

Luck shows up sometimes. Consistency shows up every working day, in the small choices that don’t even feel like choices. Over a long enough timeline, that’s not really a contest — it’s mathematics.