ArchitectNow

We were one of over 17,000 attendees in San Francisco last week for Microsoft Ignite 2025, hearing the biggest updates on AI Agents, Azure, governance, and security. Join us on December 4 at 12 PM CT. We’ll be live-streaming our Ignite Recap webinar from the Microsoft Innovation Hub in St. Louis, covering what’s new and what it means for becoming a Frontier Organization in 2026. Register here: https://ow.ly/6g8T50XwZri

The companies that actually ship AI all start in a similar way. And it has nothing to do with a strategy deck. It's pretty straightforward.. They get the right people in a room for half a day. We've run these sessions dozens of times now. Business leaders, process owners, technical team. One focused conversation. Walk out with 3-5 real AI use cases ranked by impact and effort. Most companies get further in that half day than they did in six months of internal discussions. From there, we take the top use cases into an Innovation Hub session with Microsoft. Small group, 8-10 people. Map the architecture, identify where to start, and figure out what to build on top of it. As a Microsoft Partner with the AI Apps on Azure Specialization, we also help qualifying projects tap into Microsoft funding incentives. This can be a game changer, allowing our customers to get a taste and feel for a funtional POC without having to foot the enitre bill to even see what's possible. Most companies don't need an AI strategy. They need a starting point, a partner who's done it, and knows how to go from ideation to successful deployment and adoption. You'd be amazed what a 30-minute call that starts with "we want to do something with AI" can turn into 60 days later.

Your Fabric estate is landed, modelled and governed. The value is still stuck in the last mile. Agents collapse it. On September 9, Kevin Harmer builds four of them live on real Fabric data, then gives a straight read on what is production ready today and what is still preview. Wednesday, September 9 at 12PM CT. Free, 60 minutes.

One page. One owner. Fifteen dollars a seat. That's what AI governance actually costs a mid-market company. The enterprise version of the conversation is what scares everyone off. Enterprise AI governance reads like audit committees, a chief AI officer, and a six-figure GRC platform. Leaders at a 200-person company skim that and file the whole topic under "not us yet." Meanwhile: three Copilot Studio agents in production, a Power Apps approval bot, Power Automate flows touching customer data, and someone in sales pasting contract language into a public LLM. Same governance gap an enterprise has. Less margin to absorb the incident when it surfaces in an audit or a board meeting. Closing it takes four things. A one-page acceptable-use policy. What's allowed, what's not, which tools are approved. A single named owner for AI risk. Usually the CIO or CFO, wherever the spend lives. An inventory of which agents exist and what data they touch. A spreadsheet is a fine start. The Microsoft controls you already license, turned on: Entra Conditional Access, Purview DLP, and Agent 365 at $15 per user per month for centralized agent visibility and audit trail. That set closes about 80% of what actually shows up in mid-market audits. Agent 365 GA: https://lnkd.in/egnGPu3Z The board question is coming either way. It's cheap to be ready for it.

AI doesn't replace your sales team. It does the prep work your sales team won't. The hype says AI will replace quota carriers. Two years in, that has not happened. It will not happen. Customers buy from people who can read a room and adjust mid-conversation, and AI cannot do that yet. What AI does, very well, is the boring 30 minutes nobody on your team wants to spend before a customer call. Pulling the prospect's website, scanning the last three press releases, checking the funding history, identifying which tech they run, reading the LinkedIn profile of the person on the other side of the table. Drafting a one-page brief. Anyone who has actually carried a quota knows the truth: the prep is the part that gets skipped, not the conversation. The conversation is the fun part. The prep is the thing reps cut when calendars get tight, and quality drops when that happens. AI fits in exactly that gap. Not as a replacement. As the prep layer the rep would have done if they had another hour. If your sales team is consistently skipping prep, the fix is not to replace them with AI. The fix is to put AI on the prep so they walk into the meeting ready. If your sales team is skipping prep, fix the workflow. Don't replace the team. What is the worst prep gap on your team right now?

18% weekly active. That's the Copilot usage number that lands in front of the CFO two months after rollout. And it's almost never a training problem. It's a seating problem. Seats went to whoever asked loudest. Department heads, IT, the early hands. The people who live in Outlook, Excel, and Teams six hours a day (the board memos, the budget models, the status meetings) never got one. The 30-day fix, on the same license count: 1. Pull the Copilot Dashboard usage report and the Viva Insights Copilot adoption report. 2. Rank seats by prompts per week. 3. Swap the bottom 20% of seats to the heaviest Outlook-Excel-Teams users who don't have one. 4. Give the new seats a 4-hour session on their five real weekly workflows. Skip the generic training. Adoption typically climbs 40 to 60% inside 60 days. Same SKU, different humans. And the CFO conversation flips from "why are we paying for this" to "who gets seats next quarter." The telemetry is already there: https://lnkd.in/ezzNkCgH If your weekly active number has you dreading the renewal conversation, look at who's holding the seats before you buy more training.