OVG

Cost for our OVG team of Copilot Studio user licenses: $0 (included with Copilot 365 at $30/month) Cost of Copilot capacity : $200 monthly per 25k messages (more than our team sent in total Teams chats last month) Time to build a custom policies & procedures Copilot: 30 minutes The barrier to entry for small and medium-sized businesses to experiment and create value with enterprise AI solutions is as low as it will ever be. All business operators should be collaborating with their technology teams to start learning and adopting these tools while prices are still artificially low. They will absolutely change the way people work, especially for teams like FP&A, Rev Ops, and HR that partner across the business.

We are happy to announce that Claire Hendershot is joining our OVG team as a part-time associate after successfully completing her summer internship. Claire has been an incredibly quick study with building low-code applications and applying them to solve FP&A and Business Operations challenges. We are excited that she is continuing her journey with us!

Sharing some thoughts from our first Microsoft Power Platform Community Conference experience that several of our OVG team had the opportunity to attend. Microsoft's platform strategy is hitting its stride and there is plenty to consider, especially for FP&A and business operations teams that sit at the intersection of strategy and analytics. #planning #lowcode #analytics #AI

A great wave of software consolidation is upon us, thanks to a confluence of AI and low-code innovations: “Klarna's (KLAR) CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said that the company is shutting down its software as a service provider (SaaS) Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) and within a few weeks will shut down Workday (NASDAQ:WDAY).” https://lnkd.in/g2g2r8ns (Thanks Matthew Wahl for sharing this!) With both low-code platforms and AI-driven full-code tools in play, the moats for incumbent enterprise software are rapidly evaporating. It’s not that off-the-shelf software has gotten worse, in fact they continue to get better. It’s that replacement costs have gone dramatically down when the core functionality of a CRM, HRIS, or EPM solution can be built in-house with minimal investment and minimal recurring software costs. PLG approaches are also streamlining the buying process. You no longer have to go to the dealer and haggle to buy most enterprise software. What’s remarkable is that this is possible for everything from SMB up to companies at Microsoft scale. This will fundamentally change how businesses or all sizes leverage technology and Saas providers will be forced to adapt. Theoretically there is nothing stopping the creation of unlimited custom software right now (as we discussed yesterday Daniel Eyre). The days of outsized software margins m and valuations are likely limited. More value will accrue to capital-intensive hardware providers, data owners, and operators/service providers who can quickly translate technology directly to business value. While this certainly doesn’t mean that all enterprise software is doomed, it does mean that the equation for making decisions on whether to buy off-the-shelf or DIY are shifting dramatically. Some software providers will adapt and figure out how to provide differentiated value, but others will not and will rely on buyers not knowing the alternatives. It will be easier increasingly important for buyers to buy understand what is truly value-add and what is not, and determine how agile they need to be given their specific business needs. If you are considering tech consolidation options, we’d love to hear from you!

Last month, Satya Nadella discussed how knowledge and frontline workers will start to drive more productivity with workflows and automation using Copilot Studio, in similar fashion to developers. Business operators and developers used to be entirely separate fields, but we have already seen many software development practices permeate into business teams over the past 10 years, for example the introduction of agile project management. Now not only the management approach, but the tools that developers use are coming into play. We are moving beyond inputting data or configuring dashboards, to integrating systems, querying and transforming data, and building bespoke mobile apps and web apps from scratch. With these tools and the right mindset, the level of productivity possible for operators will reach the same astronomical level as developers. For example, I talked with someone today who is running a late stage startup’s entire suite of business apps with only a team of two. It’s both a daunting and exciting time to be in an operator role today. How do we find the balance between automation and catastrophic failure, which will undoubtedly be different from the balance for engineering? If you’re going through thus experience now, we’d love to hear from you! #businesstransformation #dualthreat

Sharing some learnings on building dual threat teams! Also available on our Substack: https://lnkd.in/gaNMgKBw

An integrated low-code approach presents compelling cost savings and process improvement opportunities for companies across growth stages, industries, and functions.