Summary of Guardians of M365 Governance Ep.32
In Episode 32 of the Guardians of M365 Governance monthly webcast, my co-hosts Ragnar Heil (@RagnarH), Joy Apple (@JoyOfSharePoint), and I take on the real meaning of AI readiness. Our starting point: preparing your content for AI is only one part of the equation. There’s more to do, and governance is the key. Joy explains that AI readiness is largely a rebrand of governance, and it can’t be a one-time project you finish in a few months. Organizations that only focus on cleaning up their content often start and then give up, so it makes sense to also govern the agents themselves and the sources they ground on. Joy then demos Orchestry’s new agent dashboard, which shows agent inventory, growth trends, Power Platform environments, and risk ratings for things like autonomous agents.
The conversation then shifts to cost and complexity. I ask whether cost-conscious organizations are rethinking when to build an agent and when a simple Power Platform flow would do the job, and Joy floats the idea of a tool or super agent that reviews a solution and tells you whether it would be better built as a flow or an agent. Ragnar loves it, since a lot of governance vendors are only building tools to estimate costs. Ragnar also describes customer confusion over recent Copilot Studio licensing changes, including makers now paying for every prompt during development. I compare this to my SharePoint migration vendor days, when volume-based pricing discouraged customers from testing, and argue that metering AI the same way reduces the experimentation organizations need.
Perhaps the most compelling theme of the episode is that governance is as much about people as it is about technology. We talk about skills in SharePoint, and why organizations need to communicate, train and enable users even when features seem intuitive to IT. Ragnar shares a customer workshop where the CEO said the biggest challenge was mindset and culture, not technology or a lack of agents, which led to a conversation about new roles that combine AI, adoption and service ownership. I close with my Deming hat on: keep optimizing the system, with a strong business analyst function and human judgment in the loop.
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