How Partners can Accelerate Copilot Success - Wesley Budd, Partner Solutions Architect at Microsoft

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Who should listen: Microsoft partners building or scaling a Copilot practice — adoption/change consultants, security advisors and Power Platform teams — plus M365 service owners who want to know what to ask their partners for on a Copilot rollout.

Guest: Wesley Budd — Partner Solutions Architect, Microsoft

Wesley Budd, a Partner Solutions Architect at Microsoft working with EMEA partners on the Copilot Jumpstart programme, sets out the three areas where partners can add real value to customer Copilot projects: adoption and change, readiness and security, and building agents. He also covers the tiering and funding available to partners, and why agents are now the bigger commercial opportunity than user productivity alone.

Many thanks to AudioCodes, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• The Copilot Jumpstart programme runs on three tiers — community (entry level), ready, then prioritised. Reaching the ready tier unlocks Microsoft-funded workshops and engagements that partners can deliver to customers, so tier progression is a direct route to funded customer work. ▶ 2:09
• A common customer pattern is buying a handful of licences and never getting to regular usage. Adoption and change management is not a core competency for smaller businesses, which is precisely where partner-led programmes are needed. ▶ 5:13
• Coaching for Copilot Chat is mostly about prompting — the interface is simple and hard to get wrong. Full M365 Copilot needs far more change work because it is embedded across PowerPoint, Excel and the rest of the apps. ▶ 8:15
• Budd's advice despite Microsoft's own adoption push: don't skip the security groundwork, whatever any seller tells you. Get SharePoint site permissions and access rights right before Copilot resurfaces years-old content to people who shouldn't see it. ▶ 12:53
• Two distinct agent categories to sell against: retrieval agents for individuals, built by any M365 Copilot licence holder from chosen websites or SharePoint sources and publishable into Teams; and Copilot Studio agents for business process transformation, where partners bring the deep skills including Power Automate and autonomous scenarios. ▶ 14:25
• SSE's published case study is a useful reference for first-line support agents — query volume reaching human agents dropped sharply, and the calls that do escalate are the more technical, time-consuming ones. ▶ 16:57
• Run an 'agentathon' (the successor to the promptathon) once a first agent is live: bring multiple business units into one session, show what was built, then harvest their process pain points as the next agent backlog. ▶ 20:35
• For partner skilling, Microsoft's Skilling Hub is now the place to go for self-paced M365 Copilot and agent training, and completing it is an essential requirement for Jumpstart ready-tier status; the M365 Copilot specialisation is also available in Partner Center. ▶ 22:09

Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.

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