Microsoft Copilot promises transformative productivity, but some of its most powerful use cases happen long before organisation-wide deployment. In this session, Rebecka Isaksson (Microsoft MVP), and Charlene King (Associate Director, Knowledge & Information Management, The Open University) share a candid, in-flight story of how Copilot helped shape the creation of a brand-new Knowledge & Information Management function at UK's largest university. Along the way, Charlene used Copilot to accelerate strategy development, team design, recruitment, workshop preparation, and decision-making, while navigating the cultural and organisational challenges that often determine whether AI succeeds or fails. Together, we'll explore: • Why successful Copilot adoption is a leadership challenge, not a technology deployment project • Why governance, lifecycle management and content quality are enablers, not blockers, for AI success • How communities, knowledge sharing and organisational learning create the conditions for trusted AI adoption This is not a polished "after" story. It's an honest look at the real decisions, tensions and lessons learned while building the foundations for AI adoption in a complex organisation. Whether you're responsible for Copilot, SharePoint, governance, or organisational change, you'll leave with practical ideas you can take back to your own organisation.

For years, governance in Microsoft 365 focused on content: sites, documents, permissions, and sprawl. With Copilot, agents, and skills, we're increasingly governing behaviour at scale. As organisations move from AI-assisted work to AI-driven action, new questions emerge: Who owns the decisions agents embody? How do we manage competing instructions, rules, and knowledge sources? And what happens when AI systems work exactly as designed, but produce outcomes nobody expected? In this session, we'll explore: • Why agent sprawl may become the next governance challenge in Microsoft 365 • How skills and instructions encode organisational judgement and decision-making • What organisations must do to build trust, accountability, and oversight into AI-driven work As AI starts acting, governance must evolve from managing information to managing outcomes. The organisations that succeed won't be those with the most agents, but those with the clearest understanding of who owns the decisions those agents make.