 Hello and welcome to another episode of the collab talk podcast where we discuss the convergence of technology business productivity and collaboration culture. My guest today is Adam Harmetz. Hello, Adam. Great to be here. VP of product at Microsoft and we're talking today. So here's my fancy title collaborative by design colon cultivating a culture of collaboration. Liberation. Yeah, have to do that. So for folks that don't know at Adam and maybe more of an introduction what you focus on there at Microsoft. Yeah, sure. Today, I run a product data science and customer experience team that focuses on a couple different areas of of Microsoft 365 so in particular SharePoint bread and butter grew up through the SharePoint team as many of us did in the SharePoint community. But it branches out into Viva, various elements of Viva was a founding member of Viva and on the Viva leadership team right now because you know SharePoint and Viva overlap quite a bit in terms of helping employee experiences and helping organizations thrive. And then I sit on Jeff Teeper's larger leadership team which thinks about all the collaborative apps and platforms at Microsoft. You know, and it's a good good old chatter. It's and there's a lot under the hood I mean look that there's a it's not surprising why you look at the leadership team and see people that have been there like you're closing in on 20 years as well that next year when you hit the I think so yeah this would be 19 so yeah okay yeah well it's funny we started talking about doing this episode about a year and a half ago because you were I think I reached out to you first when you had just started your sabbatical. So you took that time off and then we saw each other interviewed at at ESPC, where was that ESPC which one was that together. I know I know this that we talked again and maybe Prague but I'm not sure you know well I'm sure we saw each other Prague but we we connected again in Amsterdam this this last December. But it was also when we first talked was relatively close to the launch of work lab of that site. And remember when we talked about because you were you were focusing on some other things again not tool based you were doing kind of bigger thinking about your culture and experiences when I talked to you about this and I, I love. And that that fit in very well with the cultural aspect of what I love talking about and what years ago I can't remember if I told you this I was actually going to go do a doctoral program where funny enough this is 25 years ago. And my plan study was to look at the at how collaboration technology impacted working teams, how to change culture, and which is really exactly what work lab looks at studies, a lot of the research there it's the home of the if you're not familiar with the work lab website it's the it gives a behind the scenes of like the thinking of how Microsoft builds technology, and it's also the home of like the work, a work trend index report and analysis. And so, yeah, I don't know, have you written for for work lab, or do you blog separately about those kinds of topics. Yeah, I mean well the work lab stuff is done by, you know, user research experts mostly those who do deep deep analysis and research that has quite a bit of rigor and backing to it. And I think the origin story of that for sure was as Microsoft deep in our relationship with customers to focus more on just sort of it tools as we did things like Viva which is absolutely a, you know, technology is not going to solve all your employee experience it has one role to solve and so does your people and your processes and your leadership strategy. And obviously with AI, which is a huge transformation you see the same thing right there's a role for AI and there's a role for change management and learning what others are doing and so work lab and work trends index was really saying like hey, you know, customers wanted our relationship to be more than just how to deploy the tool. It would be how to holistically think about this problem, also what the data that we are seeing in a global footprint from usage patterns are saying what analysis can we take from that. And just in general like customers relying on Microsoft more and more for guidance on how to approach some of these big transformational problems in their lives in their organizational lives. In addition to technology what advice can you give on how I can be a better executive a better person who's wrestling with these programs a battle change agent. And some is really the origin story of that I you know I do a lot of sort of separate personal blogging on my own journey as a product maker with my wife actually is also a VP a product that a, at a growth stage start up. So I have a lot of thoughts on, and I've seen over the years just like oh my gosh, like what used to be limited by technology is now limited by the ability for humans to all get on the same page. And that is the limiting factor of how much we can achieve together and I think that's super fascinating and it as as a product versus you know, for software development like products at the very center of that that bottleneck and solving that bottleneck. Well that that's a it's funny and so what we the interim while we talked about getting together doing this episode. We had a little release of something called co pilot that happened, and people probably aren't aware of what that is. Microsoft needs to do a better job of, I think selling people on that. I just, how did you choose a title for this talk with a bunch of season it and not that word. The podcast is the collab talk podcast, if I focus on collaboration. No, but I, but you talk about like that gap between the people in the technology that people with each other. And that's actually a huge opportunity for organizations is is for AI to help decipher the two I mean you think of it almost like when I was back in the working the manufacturing collaboration technology for the manufacturing space. A lot of we were doing is that you'd have different ERP platforms trying to communicate to get to each other and there was an opportunity for these third parties to create like a box a device that could take the incoming messages from two disparate systems, sort it out and then communicate back and AI has the ability to fill some of that gap. Oh no absolutely. A thousand percent. And, you know this has happened in our industry many many times every X number of years there's a new interaction model everything from mainframes to PCs more things be connected from PCs to the cloud well you can now have more fast solutions we're all about interconnecting disconnected services and AI is just the next evolution of that that frontier absolutely. And, you know it's exciting because I do think it is. There's always market and customer demand for more interrupt between disparate systems and every evolution of technology, you know, makes a leap on that and then eventually you can see you can't eke out any more integration among that leap and so you're invent another one and you know whether, you know, not to rag on crypto because that's probably going to get a bunch of haters on the podcast but like, you know, you know whether an emerging technology is going to like actually be sustainable whether it can actually move forward on that several different accesses but one of them certainly are productivity and collapse base is the ability to bring interconnected systems together and you could say other technologies like you look at it you're like meh I just don't believe that's going to be the paradigm shift step function and you look at AI and like is that a back is that a backdoor slam against dogecoin. I mean, come on, comment, no comment but more to the point for AI like it is so clear that that it is going to have a among many other positive outcomes and risk we have to manage but positive outcomes it is being able to bring interconnected disconnected systems and people together. You know, one of the things I'm blessed that I get to is as part of the ESPC community reporters the last few years I every year I get to interview Jeff Tipper as part of what he's out there keynoting. So it's like you see for folks that it follow along like there's the official ESPC interviews you'll see Tipper up there talking. I'm the one standing behind the camera asking the questions, but you're putting that together, and then I get edited out my voice everything on there but it's but it's there. But one of the things we talked about a little bit during that interview was with with the change that we just we don't yet understand with around AI and co pilot specifically. He made the comment talking about in parallel like cloud technology. And he says like it was, he says it took it was since I started talking selling cloud solutions was back in 2001. That's what I got aware of the topic and was going and talking with customer prospects, trying to commence them yes move your data into the SAS solution in the cloud and strong pushback from that. And Tipper mentioned he says it wasn't until like 2016 2017, where he felt like it really just clicked and everybody accepted that this is the future this is words could be. So that's, you know, 1516 years, it took time to get people to really accept the cloud co pilot AI is moving so much more quickly. Absolutely. So, you know that that's, and I'd say that, let me ask you this, do you think Microsoft has it figured out what that looks like in the next even three to five years, what that team culture and experience will look like. I mean, Benedict Evans as this quote, he's a tech analyst. Anybody thinks they know the future of AI as a fool perhaps a clever fool because people offering certainty will attract people to them because in this uncertain time. I mean, I think Microsoft runs on trust. I think, seriously, that's just not something we say I think maintaining and accelerating customer trust is incredibly important and so I think that's a mix of saying here's what we're sure about and here's what we're going to learn together. So, you know, I do hope that we have a lot of signals that gives us a point of view on the world and a point of view on how to adopt AI responsibly and well, and things we're very sure about and things we're hopeful of and investigating and and I think we're pretty clear, there are major conferences, you know, builds up coming about what we're sure about and what we're moving forward on and, and I think customers are want to bet and partner with us and trust and build trust with us on both what's ready and what's speculative and you know there's a whole spectrum of customers that want to adopt very early that want to sort of only adopt AI that seems pretty mainstream and you know, and in a whole spectrum there. So, you know, I think we have a great view compared to others in the industry and we're sharing that view and using it to build a lot of trust and make sure AI is deployed responsibly but no do we have every single thing figured out do we think we know like in three years. Exactly where we want to be. No, that's it's a, I would say two things. We always do our best work at Microsoft when we're co developing with our customers, both on in a big and a small way and this is no. This is no exception. We wouldn't have even been where we are today without incredibly awesome feedback in a you know, very tight fashion with some of our early adopters and we continue to learn from that. We do hope that when we're doing our best work at Microsoft we are a partner that customers can trust to be farther ahead of than anyone else they could choose. Partly because of our global scale partly because we're really good hopefully as product makers and partly because we're really building that trust with with our with our community our partners our customers and bringing forward along and you mentioned work trends already like that is I think one of the ways we build that trust is to be very public about what we're learning and very share that with the world. You know I have no way of proving this but I think the co pilot roll out might be the most studied piece of software roll out in the history of the world. What else would have been more studied than this I get it guarantee you the very early on partly learning from the cloud and how it was deployed and what we could have done to help prepare people more for that you know I had friends who were who were really whose careers were impacted many positive many not so positively about the cloud roll out. You know as they were great at racking and stacking servers but couldn't make the leap to what modern it is what's needed from in the cloud and I feel really responsible. I feel responsible for that and I feel in the air of AI that knowing that such disruptions are also going to happen. That's one of the reasons we share and partner and. What what are the comments that I make back talking with a lot of clients around digital transformation I think one of the gaps in talking about that is that a lot of organizations think of digital transformation they think instantly of well yeah upgrading to the newest version of whatever it's like. No it's like you go back to what you said it's there's the tools the technology certainly there's people there's process all of those things are part of it. For me digital transformation isn't so much around upgrading to less technology latest technology because you can use older technology older programs and get high productivity. It has more to do with like are we optimized to the tools are processes are people are we are we the best that we can be are we doing more are we generating more we innovating more we collaborating more. All that kind of thing one of the things I always use as an example. Like because Microsoft I'll say that when I left Microsoft in 2009 still so much of Microsoft sales was focused on selling the license getting that in there and and there was my perspective there was less interest. Whether they actually used it or not who cares but what happened and specifically with Office 365 is that people were getting to the end of their EAs and saying we're getting like 30% adoption 40% at best. Why are we paying for all this stuff and somebody woke up. Again this is my outside perspective somebody woke up and said engagement adoption what is that and this is important it's not just about selling licenses but making sure people are using this technology and so that's that was the beginning and this was I mean I would put it kind of in the. 2011 2012 when there seemed to be this wake up that that happened where people started talking more about adoption it helped that everybody's moving towards the cloud. Because and I used to always say that like you've got all these people that know the servers they know these boxes and so much of their time was spent keeping servers up and running rather than focusing on what are we actually running these servers in this software for. The technology this is to help our business our focus should be on the business doing more not hey I flipped switches and kept servers on and going. And so going back to digital transformation it's not just about updating all of these these tools is like what are we doing with that. I would argue that I think there's still a lot of work to be done on what digital transformation means and now with the rise of AI it makes it. Even more imperative that organizations don't just look at it as hey we deployed new technology but how does this really fit in and change the way that we do business. And that's something where that's why I like I wasn't seriously asking like what do you know in three to five years around that. The saying that we we have to communicate more we have to be talking about this sharing what we're learning. This is why I'm so you know interested I like I have to be ignite I have to be at ESPC because each one of these major and build is another thing I'll be watching online but starting to get the stories come in of the pilots of the early deployments to really understand like what did you learn from it. Yeah I know and I think we take that responsibility incredibly seriously and to your mid 2010 shift it was all about having the data that we didn't have before the currency for product success became monthly active users not seats sold. Not that anybody didn't want to track engagement and usage before but that's very difficult to do on premise just a different business model we just didn't frankly have responsibility for that half of the problem it was all you know different different stakeholders in the value chain. By the time I got to end users and one of the things of the cloud in addition to just cost reductions which is awesome you know great to save our customers money. Was also just this owning more of the end to end experience and then having the ability to measure and take accountability for it. I mean I mean to your point the. You know I'm I find myself to be the co-leader the Microsoft 365 conference coming up I don't actually know when this is published if it's before after but it's April 30. That's before. Great awesome everybody should come but. And it's very fascinating to be a co-leader of a conference at the product maker generally our marketing team exclusively handles it but you know these product level conference a lot more about guidance. And it's great to sort of be more involved in the the craft of putting on a conference I'm now a snob for keynote stages and I know every you know what how much money you can spend on what it looks like when you see. Better stages but in any case like Dan home a good friend of both of ours. I asked him to step up and and lead a super track at this conference for business decision makers so like you know it's like 65% it 10% developers and the best of the folks are like you know everybody that it partners with or like people that are in the business using this. Using all that we that we make. And it was really interesting to see us all think about so what are we going to do for these folks and you know partly it was very Viva focus because a lot of these business decision makers use Viva. And then partly we were sort of like well AI is coming and how do we prepare them for that and then many of these folks are adoption specialists and change agents and we sort of realized like oh my gosh that those three things are exactly the same thing. Like how can you use an employee experience platform to help with change what is the biggest change you have to deal with. It's it's AI and so you know there's a transform track or transformation track at this conference and it's just encapsulates exactly what you were saying where it's sort of like yes technology has a role to play especially the employee experience technology. You know but those it's really adoption change management you know that's always you know for always core to the ethos of our community and then really relating to that to AI because AI is very obviously it should be you know there's reasons for people have a little bit of fear of what's coming with it but it is actually just you know a change management project. Maybe more similar to ones you've already tackled in your career at your organization. But you didn't realize you know because it's brand new so you don't you can't quite pattern match it to the types of change management rollouts you've done before but all the technology and playbooks that you've used can help with with the transformation to. What's one of the reason I'm a huge advocate for the adoption. You know a website as well yeah great resources that are out there that's another thing I mean Microsoft has gotten. Much better at the documentation I often talk about and you know this to having been in the SharePoint world that a lot of the SharePoint community I would argue it was so cohesive and so strong because the documentation from Microsoft was so. Inadequate before the needs of the old and that's how we bonded by sharing that that information and so while that never slowed down and you have the MVP community have experts around the world. That are providing a lot in fact if you go to dot docs dot Microsoft a lot of the documentation is community oriented of course there's a lot of Microsoft people writing a lot of content. But you'd be surprised going in and looking at reference material that's Microsoft's official documentation and guidance on products. How much is community authors that are that are on there and working closely with Microsoft around that but yeah again this is something where I still it just it feels. Different it was so for years as a SharePoint at going to SharePoint Saturday SharePoint conferences all of those things. I'd say the majority of the content 60% was it pro related again we're looking at the servers we're looking at the administration of the tools and then there was developers a second the smallest thinnest was the end user the product productivity is like how to actually use that and it's now completely flipped around. So much is more business centric how you use is how do you get more out of it how do you transform change your business around that. And which I think is fantastic you know one that we have the luxury that technology works well enough and the cloud is benefited us by by I don't have to manage servers I've been a SharePoint admin. You know and running that doing that permissions management constantly and now there are tools and partners and things that are out there. So you instead can focus on how can we run more efficient meetings. So I want to shift to that slightly how was the meeting experience changed over the last couple years inside of Microsoft. Yeah it's hard not to answer that question without recognizing the pandemic of course where you know my org was a famous hashtag no screens culture in meetings where you know it sounds anachronistic at this point but like too many people on their phones or laptops during a meeting sort of being grazers of meetings or you know virtual popcorn eaters instead of instead of participating in the meeting and we had a real culture of no like be present. Put your phone away and then of course the pandemic started and all meetings were remote and and of course you had a screen and you know it was a little bit more about how to survive than it was how to how to thrive. And in now it's you know we don't have a return to work policy about 40% of my team is is not in the Puget Sound area well over 50 if you include sort of dotted line folks that technically aren't reporting structure but absolutely work on the on the mission and in the tribe. And and so you know you plan for that you plan for almost everything being hybrid actually this week right now the entire team is in Redmond we sort of do twice a year sort of onsites that sort of fill up our cup growth community and what why how you know alignment. And. And so you know I and and Microsoft's commitment to growth mindset to having many voices heard for a million good reasons including it creates better software is also sort of incredibly important to how we run meetings in terms of raise hand and sort of that protocol it's really shifted since it was you know mostly. You know in person only with a couple people may be trying to watch over over teams and you know before the pandemic. And then of course you know I can't help but mention copilot truly that's one of the elements of copilot that has the most product market fit the most depth the most positive reception from customers and my own usage like it really is. You know an ability if you miss something to be able to get updated on it. If you're not quite sure if you have alignment you can literally ask your you know copilot meetings copilot for their assessment of how much alignment you have it was just doing that something with three VPs the other day and I was like do we have agreement and it like listed out each each each VP and you know agreement but they had this concern agreement you know it was it was it was one of those magic moments for sure. And so you know I think that's you know coupled it out you know transcripts is also we just I said someone on my my that I work with closely that had a near infection and couldn't really couldn't hear well for a week. And was able to use transcription you know obviously it's awesome for those with sort of more permanent disabilities as well for whatever reason you know also for AI and transcription, you know search and all that, but it's also just a great reminder that accessibility is. You know also for you know it just makes software more usable and can help folks in a variety of different ways, including sort of, you know even temporary types of stuff which is what I think humanizes even more that the investments and sort of accessibility features that I've seen a lot in from the meeting team over the years. Yeah, it I often go back I think it was, I think it was at the old before it got rebranded as inspire the partner conference, where they did on stage, you know, maybe it was build, but they did like the future of meetings and they had like the little conference room set up on stage. And they were kind of showing this and people were like, look, this is all, I mean it's put it together it's a demo but it, they emphasize there's the things that it does that the tools and the technology that was changing process. Before you go in the meeting like, here's the things here's the decisions you're supposed to make this is what you're asked to do out of the last status meeting, you get all that for prep, then there's in the meeting, and they were showcasing some of the unified comms tools to be able to recognize. The voices that were dialing in there's somebody whose voice only there were multiple people on screen, there are people sitting around the table, and it was able to through the crosstalk, capture that identify who those those were, keep up with the multiple threads of conversations happening. And then after the meeting, summarizing that it was you know that at the time they were talking about I think it was officially referred to as the Cortana stuff I can't remember that branding happened later now now gone, which I kind of like because I'm a halo guy, but now, you know, there needs to be a Cortana add on or something or other to to co pilot but anyway, but you have all the post meeting, the analysis like here's what you need to do here's what you missed here were the side conversations, here's the the to do is off of that integration then into project into planner into your task your to do is I mean all that kind of stuff like I loved that vision of the future. And but it just seems so far away and out there, but this is well before pandemic for them to be talking about a lot of the stuff and I think really indicates to how long Microsoft has really been looking at AI and a lot of what you know the rest of the world kind of caught up to. And we're surprised by Microsoft being so much out in front. You know, let me let me ask kind of a broader question about your because you've been with Microsoft for a long time, like, how much have you seen around this own technology. I mean, how different would you say or what are the what are key differences that you see the way that your teams work together that your business unit works together versus, you know, 1015 years ago. Yeah, I mean there's just, gosh, your sprite striking so many thoughts in me. One is, I do think we work in an industry productivity and collaboration where, you know, two things happen one. You don't realize until you look under like a year or two or three and this is not just Microsoft is globally in the industry and like how much more efficient and productive you've gone from the just multitude of small fixes, you know, even, you know, not sending attachments around actually having real co-op being able to teams chat at a high volume per day. Understanding asynchronous collaboration I think is a huge change. But but yeah, but but there's two things in this industry. Some are are are are gradual and then sudden, like you're sort of talking about a little bit with the sort of meeting recap, working just like really well. Many years of work but once it got in the customer's hands it was a step function change. And I think those are great. And we all lionize those because we see a lot of them and they're easy to sort of have heroes. They demo well. Yeah. And and but but I actually like what gives the grit to make the 1% improvement every day makes a huge difference. Like you and I 10 years ago we're sharing attachments around with no ability to co-auth probably sending mostly email with no no real real maybe a couple chats a day. But like we're we are all way and that makes a difference in the amount that I can get done like and I look at my own career and my like literally I couldn't do the job I could do today if it wasn't for those productivity improvements I just couldn't scale. I'm reading Napoleon's biography right now. And he wrote about 3000 directives a year which is actually what that's almost 100 a day. So he spent a lot of time just sitting around telling people what to do which maybe is a little bit more like us we But like and he was probably the number one person you know the only person in the world so it'll be that much sort of and now every single person who uses you know any of our collaboration technology regardless of vendor can you know be able to direct more than that type of interaction today and if you think about the number of teams chats and emails are responding to in the you know right and so maybe that's a too long story art because we're talking 200 years but even just my career of 19 years I it's like it partly I've gotten better I hope at managing and processing information and partly there's been step function changes like we just talked about and then the unsung hero really is the grind from a bunch of product makers to eke out a little bit of progress until you don't even realize it but you are way more efficient you have way more superpowers and you ever realize in your ability to collab and be productive and it's a it I love naming it for people to work on the team because the times get tough and you don't get as much credit for eking out the couple percent improvement bug fix on performance but it makes a huge difference because it actually changes frankly probably more lives and some of these stuff function stuff just in terms of you know just that the way it enables collaboration to move forward and sets a new bar every every quarter every semester every year. Well that's a you know coming from a project management in a you know a kind of a PMO background shared services teams outside of why it's so important to baseline your metrics to be able to go back 30 every 90 days you quarterly to be able to show that that incremental improvement and look this is made a huge impact people need to hear that I mean that that's something else that I thought of as you were talking about this is that I remember when we were talking about everybody getting like like iPads started in smart phones and and people saying well and you know when you travel you're not going to need to have all these devices know what actually happened is we all had all these multiple devices. I mean I was free for years working in it and and working with clients like I had two phones I have the personal and I had my company phone I had a pager sometimes that is a joke one time working in a client site back in 2005. I had the pager my two phones my badge that was on like a belt clip on one of those expando lines whatever as a joke. I put a mini hung from my belt a little lightsaber just to see a people and I went almost the entire day without anybody real soon that I was standing in the doorway in a standing only like meeting and the director is just like it like pauses talking and he looks at me he's like is that a lightsaber. I was like I wanted the utility belt I mean come on. I promise not to have any ounce of judgment my voice people who had the cell phone on the belt no no judgment whatsoever. Yeah. No it was very much over people harass all the time like look like I'm on the go you have devices like just just let it go it's for work purposes I wasn't doing it for style points but but my point is that we new technology so much more advanced I mean my my mobile device today has so much more computing powers in the first 15 years of computers that I owned at home with all of that you think okay we could use fewer devices we did we use multiple we use multiple devices. Yeah, but it's a to take the human approach to it it opened up the obviously the mobile revolution among others sort of opened up a whole bunch of new joyous ways of experiencing computing. Oh, I just said how I got more productive over 19 years it's true but you know what I love to do every Monday I go to a coffee shop and I manage my task list and I respond to some teams chats and I respond to some emails, and I can do it right from my phone this isn't like this is pedestrian Christian talking about but like no but I couldn't have done that right joy of being able to work that way you had to go open the browser flexibility and I would have had to do it from home in front of a soulless like you know large desktop machine whatever it is so like. Once again it's a grind of 1000 people eking out the progress until it was just like you know an experience that is taken for granted and that you know the best technology should be taken for granted because it's just there as opposed to being lionized as something that's so novel that it is probably not good enough to be taken for granted. Well here's where I was going with that and why is because here we were you know for this opportunity to as you said you know where I'm you know so much more efficient than I was that with the tools in the setup. It's why sometimes even now, like when I'm out on the road I'm traveling to conference and I'm frustrated because I'm used to having the two giant monitors the setup where I could get everything done that I need to be done and I'm out in the road. You know and I'm like limited to this one smaller laptop screen I've got my second screen plug in that I leave in my room to do that. But part of this is that the more efficient we get you would think that people would then slow down a bit use that as opportunity to be more reflective of the things so we're even more efficient and yet we're still going at that that high speed. I mean I don't know what the where I'm going with more of that like the do you set see that and recognize that is that something because something we did see during pandemic is that people felt like they had to be online all the time. You know that working even longer hours that great efficiency with a lot of these the cool technology that came out of it and then burnout across the board. And so something that you think about as you're developing these solutions and thinking about a great increased productivity but how are we actually impacting our people. Yeah, no I mean well I think it's we could talk about that my personal journey my team's journey and then my journey as a product maker of either contributing or helping with the problem for sure. So we can take the conversation in any direction but yeah for you know one of the reasons I shared the like yeah I'm getting more efficient my job but I also love going to the coffee shop in the morning like technology that it's best it can do both things right like and and and I think that that's cool. You know there's no doubt. Making people more efficient and better at their jobs is great. Like, you know, I forget the economist he said there's not too many universal elixirs in this world but productivity improvements one of them right like. I guess you're we should measure happiness but just in terms of like in what most most economics are about trade offs right a or B but productivity improvement actually gives you a and B to you know, and we could all talk about how to distribute the benefits of that and make sure it's done fairly and the roles of various organizations and doing that but anyways to make it less theoretical. Yeah I mean personally I love a lot of my blogging has been about sort of the burnout and boredom spectrum spectrum it's one of my top sort of top posts that I've written something I think deeply about you and I sort of the impetus for this was during my sabbatical which is absolutely sort of a recharge time I think most creative people would say their moments of inspiration come from when they're not in the arena. Day to day you need that you need that fodder you don't want to be someone out of the arena but you need to step back in order to see. And I feel that myself I've been I have a job where my energy is the limiting factor not my time and my bill you know and restoring my energy is important and I do every time I take a step back and come back I come back with some new idea new way of approaching things that. That is really the unlock like I have a job where most things are going to happen anyways I'm blessed with an awesome leadership team that is going to get stuff done so like. The VP job or even the partner job at Microsoft a little bit like people trust you to figure out how you're going to provide value despite the right things happening anyways and so it's about bar raising it's about seeing the unknown it's about saying well we're going to go down this path but this one's even better and you can't do that without a little bit of. You know collecting data by being in the arena and then taking a step back and I'd like to think people on my team think that we you know we take that. Very seriously we use you know be the pulse and Glenn to measure it you know just from a tech perspective but then also spend an awful little time you know two or three of the all hand the year is dedicated to either burnout or rest or. Talking about the value of that. You know I found. Maybe I just you know lucky that experiences but as a teenager, you know I just read a lot read extensively but I would find it would struggle on something try to understand a concept or if I was working in you know it had a statistics class that I was frustrated with. I was about 16 and yet. And I found that to go and unplug from that just stop thinking about that and I may have a science fiction fantasy reader you know go and read something completely unrelated and I get like half a chapter and then realize then suddenly my mind cleared up would be like. Oh hey this is the answer that I was I was struggling with to this I would come up with ideas for things doing something completely unrelated. I mean it's like this now it's like I always have you know a science fiction book is my daughter was pushed me to go read this one the Pierce Brown. I think I read that before the last one was out so I have not. I read the first couple was good. Yeah, but but again I I that's another reason why I keep like a notepad around me because it's times where I'm just like oh I'm gonna unplug the brain from this and listen to something watch something just do something unrelated. It frees it up but makes me think I need to go and I just had an idea for this an article idea or I need to something I think that will help this project of this client you know comes out of that. Yeah I mean call it detox of the mind you know yeah yeah I work that way to I'm I try to not everybody does to there's many different ways very you know very different paths to success and thinking and creativity and so. Certainly the product maker try to recognize that there are many different ways of that coming to life and you know you and I live in very special times we were probably one of the point first point 1% of people in the world to use the Internet. If you just do the math of the number of people using in there today and when you probably use it first couple million right yeah well and so like wow what a privilege what a gift. And so we're more predisposed to seeing the advantages of information doubling every 2 years yeah and our lives have actually been centered around. That privilege we were given to be such early preview of what now the world is has adopted certainly I built my work life around it. Found satisfaction in many areas of life around it but also realize that you know that's not the journey that everybody has the technology many people's journey with technology is much less rosy. Much less all positive much less on the bandwagon of being the early adopter you know. Loving drinking from the fire hose and so you know I think a lot about that of the product maker one of the reasons I love Microsoft is I think fundamentally getting back to Microsoft runs on trust we. We see that even more so than other places in tech and the responsibility we have to recognize that there is gosh just so many emotions and thoughts on. People's relationship with technology and how we how we make as many of those folks achieve more it's sort of a I think it's a pretty cool mission. Do you think is is there danger in us becoming you know interpersonally more disconnected because of AI. Is that is that again is that a topic that your team the leadership team talks about is like we could do a lot of cool things and automate a lot of things. Do you talk about hey is this the right is are we disconnecting people too much from the those interpersonal connections. Yeah I mean you know like I said we. I think we take. Learning together with the world how I will impact it very seriously and it's not something we're going to do in a dark box it's something we're going to you know work together I think we were as you saw we were incredibly. Disciplined and intentional as we introduce copilot to the world last year to say it sits alongside you and it inspires your creativity. Microsoft which is not known sometimes in all cases of the best product naming copilot was a huge success and I think it's a perfect branding for this for what you're doing with AI that it is a copilot not the pilot. Yeah no absolutely and I think people thought incredibly carefully about that learning from all of our history, including how are we on board of the cloud and I'm pretty good friends with the chief. Yeah I have to assist at Microsoft she the neighbor of mine and so you know I know there's just a lot of people thinking about this not just from a naming but from a what it means. To all the stakeholders in the world perspective and so I think we take that role very seriously and I think you know. Microsoft got to that moment because of Satya's growth mindset because of things we put in place before because of frankly a business model that was a little bit less about. That had a lot of alignment between our customers and ourselves which I don't think could be said. For everybody in the tech industry and even before I came along I think that allowed us to take a pole position and how to think about these problems are realistically a lot of credit to Brad Smith this company for always being in the lead and thinking about. Thinking about that his book tools and weapons are the great read and across the valley from me now here. Great. But more to the point like I think that it wasn't. I don't think we could have had that level of. And frankly awareness of how to introduce this technology had it not been years of prep work to sort of take similar tough tough technology and societal problems wrestle with them. See what you know we're not telling everybody what to do and we're not a replacement for various other stakeholders in the system at all but we want to have a positive productive. Relationship there and you know I'm applying that to I'm. You know and we will see like certainly we're very excited about AI and so the whole industry is is. Seeing how it all evolves from. It sits alongside you and helps you be better was definitely a good statement about the technology can do today. And it was definitely the right way to introduce the technology to the world. I think to realize its full potential will have to figure out language and evolve a little bit as it can take actions as it can save time as it can automate full processes as it as we started this this podcast as it brings disparate systems even more together. You know it'll be really fascinating to co co develop co explore of how it. Is maybe a little bit less of only a personal co pilot and something that is more influential. Or more impactful I guess and how we do that with with a good understanding of how we're describing what it can do I think it's a really fascinating problem and. Like I said it goes all back to like working as much in the open as we can reporting that what we're seeing and then trying to be very intentional about how we introduce what we're doing to the world in a stepwise fashion. Well well Adam I really appreciate your time one thing I suggest maybe we maybe we we almost make this an annual thing maybe let's let's talk again. I'll see other events later in the year but but really like early next year maybe we would do it in person during MVP summit or something or other but where we go and we look at some of the. Again I'm fascinated by the whole digital transformation and the cultural impacts of what we're going through what we're sharing what we're learning about this and reflect on that again we could talk about the technologies and the specific examples of solutions out there. But I'm it's just fascinating to look at and say what what do we think has changed we we could even then go back and look at these episodes. Of the years and and say what what do we think and not know what we do I do a predictions tweet jam at the end of every year and some I've asked every year somebody says well what did we say last year. And I'm starting to go through and going back and calling people out on you said you thought this what do you think now. It's it's fascinating to look at that baseline use that as a reference for how much change has happened how much how many of those incremental changes have really added up and impacted our lives. Yeah I'd love to do that. Although I don't think it's about being right Christian I know I know it's it's not it's fun to go back and look at how different because we all know like like if I look if I think that my my car is going to be working. This is a dozen things that are going to happen over the course of the year. You know yeah yeah my car is running so. Oh this is this great book imaginable that I really love the framing it's about how to predict the future actually how to talk about the future and then gets the great lengths of saying it's not about predicting something right like our goal is to build a future we want to see. So it's not actually about saying I think it's going to be this way it's like I think by describing this potential future we can create it together and it's less about whether I'm trying to be right and more about like. I have a dream come with me type of thing so yeah. Let's do it every year. We should do it. When my kids were smaller. I had this I would tell them I said I know the answer to every important question and then they would you know obviously they didn't raise a question I didn't know the answer to and my response was that's not an important question. I'm reading a checkers guy to the galaxy to my 10 year old so we're we're about to get the most important question in the universe. There you go. That's the answer so we'll add a really appreciate your time and look forward to seeing you at the cut. I'm going to see you like a dozen times this year but we'll see at the next event. Yeah sounds good. Take care. You've been listening to the collab talk podcast new episodes are published weekly and you can find us on Spotify Apple podcast I heart radio and most other podcast platforms. Thanks for listening.