Thank you to everyone who joined us for The Application of AI in a Modern Workplace and don’t worry if you couldn’t attend – we’ve recapped it for you here.
Our latest webinar was all about the past, present and future of AI application within the modern workplace, with key notes taken from Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index Report alongside some practical applications of modern AI and hosted by Founder & Director Christopher Potts and Marketing Manager Connor Thomas.
If you’d like to watch the full recording, it’s available as part of our bank of previous webinars here.
Introduction to the Microsoft 2025 Work Trend Index Report and key AI terms
The webinar began with Connor exploring the premise of the Microsoft 2025 Work Trend Index Report, opening with a bold vision statement which would inform the rest of the presentation: intelligence on tap will rewire business. Every leader needs a new blueprint.
Connor went on to explain tome new terms for a new world of work:
- Capacity Gap: The deficit between business demands and the maximum capacity of humans alone to meet them.
- Agent: An AI-powered system that can reason, plan and act to complete tasks or entire workflows autonomously, with human oversight at key moments.
- Digital Labour: AI or agents that can be purchased on demand to scale workforce capacity.
- Frontier Firm: A company powered by intelligence on tap, human-agent teams and a new role for everyone: agent boss.
The History and the Future of AI
Flashing back to the past, Alan Turing was introduced as a reference point – a hugely influential figure in modern computer science, responsible for the creation of the Turing Test, and its method for challenging a machine to respond like a human.
Connor went on to explore the timeline of artificial intelligence following the Turing test in 1950 and all the way up to our current understanding of multimodal and agentic AI, before introducing some key stats from the Microsoft Work Trend Index Report 2025 which related to current working conditions.
Did you know that during their 9-5, employees are interrupted every 2 minutes by emails, or pings? Factor in activity outside of core working hours and that adds up to 275 interruptions a day.
60% of meetings are now ad-hoc vs scheduled, chats outside of the 9-5 are up 15% year-on-year, meetings after 8pm are up 16% and edits in PowerPoint spike 122% in the final ten minutes before a meeting.
This is all to demonstrate: humans are busy. Once again, the core message behind AI resonates with our experience: it’s not just about working harder, it’s about working smarter with the application of AI.
Introduction to AI Agents
From here we explored the concept of agents within AI and their role in the workplace: support.
By 2026 Microsoft envisions a workforce which is powered by agents and managed by humans – one human could be responsible for six powerful agents, providing intervention and guidance while the disciplined agents collaborate and carry out the tasks set.
Christopher began to introduce the agents which already exist within the Microsoft Copilot offering, getting ready to give practical use demonstrations of some of the key agents currently available.
An Overview of Copilot, Prompt Coach, Researcher and Create
Christopher started with an overview on navigating Copilot, and the different modes available – Work and Web mode. Work mode leveraging organiational data such as emails, documents and conversations within 365 where Web mode provides public information, using Bing as it’s source, with both modes creating different conversations for the user.
We moved on to the use or Prompt Coach within Copilot, with Christopher creating a New Business Sales plan using information from within ITC Service to inform the prompt development. Prompt Coach is the perfect way to learn how to work with Copilot by helping you refine the prompts you use, based on your original idea, to help you achieve your end goal.
Using the prompt he had developed, Christopher then introduced Researcher, having taken the original prompt into Microsoft Word where it enhanced the prompt using business content.
Researcher is the perfect example of a team of agents – behind the scenes you’ve got the researcher, the writer and the critic – with each agent working together to produce a result which is grounded in different specialities and informed by current business information whilst checking its own knowledge and providing referencing.
Chrisopher then moved on to Agents and the Agent store, demonstrating where these agents live within Copilot including Researcher, Prompt Coach, Analyst, Writing Coach and more – alongside the option of creating your own agent.
We then explored the application of multi-modal Copilot generation and how AI is now creating graphics, presentations, voice recordings to support creative endeavours.
The Create section includes a library creative prompts that are ready and waiting to be customised by you – put into practice with a practical example from Christopher when it comes to designing vehicle livery.
Christopher showed his process from prompt to execution, asking Copilot to generate potential vehicle liveries for ITC Service using some essential information and setting it to generate.
Finally we covered the ability to transcribe spoken word using AI (including the ability to distinguish between speakers), with the help of Mr Edgar Allen Poe.
Christopher read aloud the poem The Raven, chosen for the challenging language used throughout, before displaying the transcription and the original poem side by side – with a surprisingly high level of accuracy.
AI Is No Longer a Future Technology – it’s Already Here
The webinar came to an end with an overview of the potential for building and connecting agents in the workplace, bring the subject full circle.
With examples of an Events Planning Team, a Pitch Deck Prepper and In Person Transcription (although each are worthy of their own webinar, so were only covered fleetingly) driven and powered by agents, it became clear that this is no longer future-technology, it’s already here.
AI is always an exciting subject to cover and we would like to thank everyone who joined us for our latest session on the possibilities within the modern workplace.
Our next session will continue the conversation around AI with guest speaker Jon Hope from Sophos joining us to deep-dive into the intersection of human instinct and artificial intelligence in the fight against modern cyber threats in Instinct vs. AI: The Human Firewall in an AI World.
You can register for our upcoming webinar and access our bank of previous webinars, from Cyber Essentials to Copilot, and everything in between, here.
