Richard Harbridge

What should we value about #AI? How should we shape the #FutureOfAI together with our #PositiveIntent? | @TEDxOshawa video is now up youtu.be/MB7csATn7hE?si… #TEDx #TEDxTalks @TEDx #GenerativeAI #Innovation #ArtificialIntelligence #DigitalAssistants #TechTrends #TechTalks #GenAI

AI will not fix a broken culture. If people do not feel safe raising concerns today, they will not tell you when AI or Copilot behaves strangely tomorrow. Trust is still the foundation.

SharePoint's new role as AI infrastructure is only as powerful as the quality of content organizations have accumulated inside it. For many enterprises, that content is a mess. An organization sitting on multiple conflicting strategy documents isn't giving Copilot a knowledge base — it's giving it ammunition to find the wrong answer, confidently. SharePoint's history of ungoverned sprawl has become a front-line AI governance problem. Here is an excellent article about it and more! reworked.co/knowledge-find…

SharePoint is not just a file share that happens to be online. SharePoint is a platform for shared work and shared experiences. If you only use it as a dumping ground for documents, you are leaving a lot of collaboration value on the table. This is also where @SharePoint and the @m365pnp community show again and again what “platform” really looks like in practice. <3

If your InfoSec team only hears about AI after tools are purchased, you are borrowing risk from the future. Bring them into the AI conversation early. Their questions often prevent reputational problems later. Pretty please.

A small AI habit for leaders: Ask Copilot or another assistant to summarise your week and highlight patterns in your calendar and tasks. Then ask yourself: “Is this really how I want to be spending my time?”

If you have never watched someone use Microsoft 365 Copilot live, you might be overestimating or underestimating it. Sit with a few real users. Watch where they struggle and where they light up. Design from that, not from marketing.

Good AI rollouts almost always involve peer learning. Formal training helps. But it is the “here is how I use Copilot on real work” from a colleague that usually lands hardest. Between @MicrosoftLearn, @MSTCommunity, and other communities, there is a wealth of resources available to help. However, focus on helping sharing spread through #VivaEngage in @MicrosoftViva, email, or in meetings to have a much bigger impact.

For IT leaders feeling overwhelmed by AI: you do not need an answer for every scenario today. You do need a shared vision, a small set of priorities, and a cadence to revisit decisions. That is enough to start.

A lot of AI anxiety comes from one fear: “If AI can do this task, what does that say about my value?” Leaders need to be explicit. People are not valued only for the tasks AI can automate. They are valued for judgment, relationships, and outcomes.

In Microsoft 365, the most dangerous permissions are often the ones everyone has forgotten about. Stale access. Old groups. Sites with owners who left years ago. Regular permission reviews and site attestation are not optional extras anymore. Don't just review workplaces either, review groups themselves and how permissions are assigned. Access packages, dynamic memberships and more make a difference in reducing future cleanup.

If you only measure AI by speed, you will miss improvements in quality and confidence. Sometimes the real win is not minutes saved. It is finally knowing the work is more complete, more consistent, or more documented.

In AI conversations, I prefer hope over hype. Hype skips the risks and complexities. Hope acknowledges them and still chooses to design toward better outcomes for people and organizations.

Optimism expects. Pessimism resigns. Hope explores on purpose. In the article I share a simple practice: 72 hour probes, guardrails, and language that changes behavior. If you lead AI work, this is for you. Read: bit.ly/4pKtX6y

If you move content into Microsoft 365 without revisiting permissions and lifecycle, you are not migrating. You are copying problems to the cloud. Use your SharePoint migration as leverage to clean up, simplify, and clarify who owns what. The work @SharePoint @Microsoft365 and @sharegatetools teams are doing on lifecycle and permissions makes that conversation easeier than it used to be.

We talk about “AI at work,” but many people’s first experience with AI was not at work at all. They met it through consumer apps, search, or social networks. Your AI education at work is competing with everything they learned out there.

If you are an IT leader, you are also a storyteller now. You are not just enabling features in Microsoft 365 and Azure. You are narrating how work is changing and why it matters. People follow the story as much as the roadmap.

AI can summarise your world. It cannot care about it. Leaders still need to bring empathy, context, and courage to the decisions that follow those AI summaries.

I rarely see Copilot succeed in a tenant with chaotic information architecture and unknown permissions. You cannot fix data chaos with prompts. Fix the structure, ownership, and security of Microsoft 365 first. Then let Copilot build on top of that.

Sometimes the most responsible decision is to pause a new AI capability. Not to block it forever. But to align training, governance, and messaging so you can say yes with confidence instead of fear.

AI makes it easy to remix and repurpose content. That is powerful in the workplace and on social platforms. It also means we need clearer norms around attribution, consent, and not impersonating real people.