The Problem
You’ve done the analysis. You’ve sent the spreadsheet. And nothing happens.
That isn’t a numbers problem. It’s a translation problem. The figures were right, they just never became something anybody else could act on. Get that part working and you stop being the person who sends the spreadsheets. You become the person in the room who gets what they asked for.
The Basic Agent
This week Valerie Merrill introduces Analyst, the second of Copilot’s two deep reasoning agents. If last week’s Researcher agent is your AI consultant, then this week’s Analyst agent is your data scientist.
You upload a file, you ask a question, and it works through it logically. In the episode it took a payroll file covering 287 employees and came back after 68 reasoning steps with headcount, gross pay, the real cost drivers and a set of charts.
Sixty eight steps. Many of which none of us would have thought to take.
The Agent’s True Value
The part worth staying for comes next. We asked it a leader’s question rather than a data question:
‘If I were head of payroll, what should I recommend to the board?
It refused the obvious answer. Rather than hunting for cost savings, it said the payroll operation looked well controlled and suggested framing the conversation around workforce planning, governance and risk instead. Then we asked it to write that up as a narrative for a conversation with the finance director, in the FD’s language.
The result: Context, analysis, communications. Three different skills. Not so long ago that was three different people.
The Human Element
One caution, and it matters more than anything else in the episode. Analyst is fluent, but fluent is not the same as correct. It’s predictive, it’s probabilistic, and it can be confidently wrong. You need enough domain experience to interrogate what it hands you, which is exactly why it can make you look good and can’t replace you. The analysis is its job. The judgement is still yours.
Valerie Merrill is a training and development specialist, director of Merrill Consultants and a Fellow of the Learning and Performance Institute. She’s also someone I’m glad to call a colleague and a friend.
Your Challenge
Take one set of numbers you need somebody else to care about, and let Analyst help you build the case.
Everything on the Hub is free, so if you’ve missed an episode you can catch up any time. Subscribing means you’ll know when I publish these posts, and when the articles drop plus you can eaves drop on, or contribute to, the chat screens.
Full show notes and the companion screens guide are below. The guide has screenshots of the key steps, so you can follow along even if you’re only listening: Researcher and Analyst companion guide
Next week Valerie shows you how to build your own agent in Copilot. This is a skill we will all need very soon. Mainly so we can delegate the work nothing off the shelf will touch.
So join us next week for the tour and I’ll add some Jobscaping tips for spotting the Zone one (Jobscaping) green work that’s worth delegating.
Thanks for reading, now click to listen…
And until next week, stay sovereign.
