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On June 16, Larry Schwartz and Julie Hodges from Ingram Micro spent 45 minutes cutting through the noise on Microsoft 365 Copilot. No vendor pitch. No product demo. A straight conversation about what actually works, what can go wrong, and how Pittsburgh-area firms can start using AI in a way that holds up under scrutiny.
The recording and slide deck are now available for you:
Watch the full webinar recording: Copilot 2.0 – From AI Hype to Practical ROI.
Download the slide deck here.
Both are free. No form required.
The webinar ran through six areas that come up in almost every conversation we’re having with clients right now about AI readiness.
What measurable results actually look like in a real business environment, not a best-case scenario, not a product spec. Which roles tend to get the most out of Copilot, and where the returns are thinner than the marketing suggests.
This is the part most firms skip, and it’s the part that causes the most problems. Copilot has access to everything your users have access to in Microsoft 365. If your permissions aren’t structured correctly before you turn it on, you’re not just wasting money, you’re creating real exposure. Larry walks through what to check before you flip the switch.
What Copilot Agents are, how they differ from the base Copilot experience, and the governance questions you need to answer before you integrate internal or external data sources.
How to get better results from Copilot right away. The practical techniques that work, the common mistakes that don’t, and how to train your team to use it effectively without a dedicated AI specialist on staff.
What a real rollout looks like, not the Microsoft documentation version, but the version that accounts for the fact that most firms in our market don’t have a dedicated IT person running the project. How to sequence it, who to start with, and what to have in place first.
The last portion of the session was open questions. Several good ones came in on security baseline, licensing costs, and how to handle staff who are already using consumer AI tools at work.
“In order to use Copilot, you really want to build out that baseline security first. We market it as being Copilot-ready, but the bulk of the work is really on the infrastructure and the security. People don’t always realize how important that foundation is until something goes wrong.”
— Larry Schwartz, CEO, Midnight Blue Technology Services
This session is most useful if you’re in one of these situations:
Your firm is on Microsoft 365 and leadership has asked whether you should be using Copilot. You’re not sure where to start or whether you’re actually ready.
You’ve already purchased Copilot licenses but adoption has stalled. You’re not sure whether the issue is security setup, training, or something else.
You’re concerned about staff using consumer AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or personal Copilot on company data, and you want to understand the real risk and what to do about it.
You want a realistic picture of what Copilot costs, what it returns, and how to make the case internally before you commit.
Larry has been working with Pittsburgh-area firms on their Microsoft environments for over 20 years. MBTS manages Microsoft 365 environments for professional services firms across the region, and Copilot readiness has been one of the central conversations in every client relationship this year.
Julie works with organizations on Microsoft 365 Copilot deployments full-time through Ingram Micro, the world’s largest technology distributor. She brings a ground-level view of how firms at different stages of readiness are actually moving forward, and where they’re getting stuck.
A lot of people watch something like this and come out with a specific question they want to answer before deciding whether to move forward. That’s exactly the right place to be.
If you want a direct conversation about where your firm stands, what’s already in place, what isn’t, and what moving forward would actually look like for you, we’re happy to spend 30 minutes on it. No deck, no pitch.
Talk to someone at Midnight Blue
Not ready to talk yet? The blogs below cover the questions that came up most often about Copilot adoption.