LESSONS LEARNED: TWO YEARS OF AI ADOPTION

Francine Katsoudas, Chief People, Policy, and Purpose Officer at Cisco (credit Riana Daehler)

Two years ago, my wife/CMO April and I founded Aston-Price with a simple vision: help small and mid-market businesses realize value from AI through a human-centric process.

Today as we celebrate our 2nd anniversary and achieving our Microsoft Solutions Partner for Modern Work designation, I’m looking back on some lessons learned from the journey.

Our Biggest Win: Crossing the Chasm

One of our accomplishments this year was helping a healthcare organization move from a successful Microsoft 365 Copilot pilot program to an enterprise rollout covering approximately 25% of its workforce.

Getting a pilot to work is one thing. Helping an organization scale adoption confidently is something entirely different. The rollout was blessed to have strong executive sponsorship, user engagement, robust communications, governance guardrails, and a learning strategy designed to help clinical employees connect AI capabilities to real patient outcomes.

But what makes this story meaningful is what happened next. The client returned to us after the rollout to help build quarterly learning programs focused on both standard Microsoft Copilot Chat and premium Microsoft 365 Copilot optimization. They recognized that AI adoption is not a one-time event. It’s a paradigm shift to a culture of learning, innovation, and continuous improvement.

For me, that client represents a simple truth: Organizations don’t buy transformation. They build it.

The Harshest Lesson: Adoption Takes Time

If Year 2 taught me one hard lesson, this is it: AI value is only as strong as the data, processes, and governance that support it.

We were invited to support a partner-led pilot with ambitious expectations. The goal was to produce measurable hard-dollar ROI within a three-week timeframe through revenue recovery, cost avoidance, or demonstrable productivity gains. Those are excellent goals. But the real challenge was the technical and organizational foundations were not fully in place.

Much of the business’ information remained on file shares and SharePoint on-premises environments that Copilot could not access. Web grounding was disabled. Data classification and Data Loss Prevention capabilities could not be implemented in time for users to experience them fully. Even though we delivered a highly customized training program, business leaders understandably struggled to see substantial value when users had limited access to the information required to complete meaningful work.

The experience reinforced something I now tell every prospect: Your success with AI is a direct result of digital transformation. Business leaders seeking measurable outcomes must make sure that their information, governance, and user readiness strategies are ready to support those outcomes.

Adoption Comes Full Circle

One of the outcomes I’m most proud of didn’t happen immediately after implementation. It came around a while later. Four months after a client deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot, they reported to us that 70% of their licensed users were meeting their usage targets, and leadership had established a disciplined process for measuring value and optimizing licensing.

Rather than treating licenses as a fixed investment, the organization continuously evaluated usage patterns. They reassigned licenses from inactive users to eager employees on a waiting list, and they provided additional licenses where business outcomes were trending up. One example of this was an HR agent that responded to questions from a generalist knowledge base. The agent saved enough time to support expanding premium Copilot licenses to additional users in similar roles.

This is exactly the type of behavior change we hope to see in our clients. Success isn’t measured by how many licenses are bought. Success is measured by whether organizations develop the capability to identify, measure, and scale value.

Looking Toward Year 4

Over the past two years, we’ve shown that small and mid-market organizations can successfully adopt AI as a workplace assistant and build agents for high-value business use cases.

The opportunity ahead is even bigger. By Year 4, I want Aston‑Price to be known as the company that helps businesses build effective hybrid human-agent teams. I do NOT mean teams where AI replaces people. I mean teams where people and agents work together to produce intelligence on demand, reimagine business processes, and generate measurable business outcomes. The future of work isn’t human versus AI. It’s human plus AI.

Large enterprises often have the resources to experiment aggressively with emerging technologies. Underserved markets don’t. So our mission is to help bridge that gap. We want businesses of all sizes to benefit from the future of work, not just those with the deepest pockets.

Our Three Strategic Goals for Next Year

1. Continue building success through our partner ecosystem. Many of our most impactful projects originated through trusted Microsoft partners and channel relationships. Our first goal is to help our partners succeed by helping their customers succeed. Every successful client outcome strengthens the ecosystem, deepens trust, and creates new opportunities for innovation.

2. Achieve AI Specializations. Achieving our Solutions Partner for Modern Work designation represents an important milestone in our journey. It validates us as an organization with the expertise, processes, and record of customer success to deliver at a high level. We want more cred.

3. Build an Agentic Center of Excellence. 1.3 billion AI agents will operate in businesses by 2028, and agentic organizations are cropping up. Our third goal is to build an Agentic Center of Excellence where customers can learn how to become what Microsoft calls a "Frontier Firm," combining human creativity, expertise, and judgment with intelligent agents capable of amplifying business performance.

Thank You

Entrepreneurship is a hard road built on relationships. We couldn’t have made it here without our customers, strategic partners, Microsoft community members, colleagues, family, and friends who have supported us during these first two years. You have challenged us, trusted us, encouraged us, and helped shape who we are becoming.

So raise a glass with us!🥂 Here’s to the next chapter and helping even more organizations unlock measurable value from AI. Hear hear!