Streamline Teams in Canada with Legal Online Signature Solutions

How to eSign a document: online signature licitness for teams in Canada

Hey there and thanks for tuning in to our latest Spotlight video. Today I have my friend and colleague Eric Wand with me. Eric is a director who serves as our regional experience lead for Canada, and in that role he gets to interact with lots of C-level leaders to share our approach at Microsoft to digital transformation. And since we opened our new Canada headquarters in Toronto he's been facilitating tours to help our customers see firsthand how digital capabilities, aligned with amazing physical space, can transform the employee experience and really help our employees to thrive in a hybrid world. We recently opened up our new Canada HQ in downtown Toronto and I've seen pictures, it looks beautiful. But could you describe the building for those of us that haven't seen it in person? And in your opinion, what are some of the standout features of the new headquarters building? Yeah, it’s a great site, and I’m sure if you go online you'll find a lot of press around in pictures. So interesting about this site. We moved from the suburbs into the downtown core, so we're right in the heart of the city right now. It's a LEED Platinum certified building. It’s got all the bells and whistles from a sustainability perspective, and it's right in central with all public transit. And so that, again, supports our sustainability efforts. A couple of neat things about it. So there are smart sensors, thousands across multiple floors, and it's measuring water, heating, cooling, electricity, all in real time. And that's how the building itself stays green. On the Microsoft front, when you come on site, first of all, it's a frictionless experience. If you're on the train, you get off and come into the building or into a room. It's all seamless. Employees really don't have to do much as they go through. All of our meetings are one-touch. So you imagine those experiences that historically we’ve had, you walk into a room, takes a few minutes to start the meeting? That simply doesn't exist. I think the other one that's really interesting for me, it is a Zero Trust oriented Internet First site. It's the latest and greatest in that space and least privileged access but for employees when they come on site, they don't connect to a traditional corporate network that you would normally see. They're just connecting to the Internet onsite. And we're able partly to do that because Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, that's all cloud based at this point. So essentially we give them enterprise-grade connectivity, what they would have at home, but just at the office. So one thing I know that our customers really love to see at the new headquarters are what we call our Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms. Could you tell us about those rooms, and in your opinion, what makes them so special and so interesting to our customers? Yeah, so that's been a knock out success for sure. So, where we're at with it, is it’s an evolution of the meeting experience. And then when we look at it, it bridges that divide between being physically present in a room and those who are remote. And it really just allows any attendee, whether they're remote or in person in the room, to be seen, to be heard, and to feel included. It's been huge for us. I think what the most impressive piece that I get to experience when we do these type of meetings is everybody that sits across from me when they’re remote and they’re virtual is lifesize-like, they're eye level with me. And then we have spatial audio speakers, which means if it's a panel of six people in front of me and there's someone off the left and this person speaking, I'll hear the audio predominantly from that left hand side. So it really just augments that whole immersive experience end-to-end. That’s so cool, so spatial audio, plus that Teams front row view and you know for users that haven't seen it front row is available I think with just about any licensing within Teams so you don't have to have a Signature Teams Room to take advantage of having folks at eye level and it does really transform the meeting experience. Maybe building on that, what kind of equipment would our customers or partners need to acquire in order to build out their own Signature Teams Room type experience? Yeah, so there's no one size fits all, if you've got front row, sorry, Signature Teams Rooms. We have room archetypes that we talk through because depending on if you have medium room, a small room, a large room, you know, as long as you're working with a Team certified device that's one. Two, you're likely going to go towards an AI-based camera for intelligent tracking. You’ll invest towards intelligence speakers, but you really have a lot of flexibility even when we think about furniture layout because we don't just think of the technology when we build these rooms, we're thinking about guitar pick tables, or V-shaped tables. And so we've got a lot of customers come through and they try to prototype in their head what their room could look like using this Signature experience. Amazing, I can't wait to see more of those Signature Rooms opening up here on main campus in Redmond. You know, and so related, I know you split time working from home in fact you're at home right now and working from the new office. Have you seen a noticeable impact on inclusivity in hybrid meetings when people are using those new Signature Teams Rooms? Yeah, I would say so. So you're right. I'm working remotely today. I think what it does is it alleviates the need for you to think about, “Oh, let's make sure we're including the person that's remote.” or, “Let's turn on our webcams on our laptops to help them feel more included.” All of that just melts behind the scenes and it's a very natural experience. So you see that very often, and I think everybody just feels engaged more naturally that way. Yeah, perfect. Something else that I know that’s top of mind for just about any technology leader these days is generative AI. And we've announced several different Copilots coming to Microsoft 365, security Copilots, so this is top of mind for lots of leaders. I'm curious to hear what you're hearing and discovering based on your conversations with C-level leaders in Canada about AI. And have you heard any really innovative ideas, ways you didn’t expect that firms may be leveraging generative AI in the workplace already? Yeah so I mean Copilot it's in the news a lot and ChatGPT and everything else around it for sure. I would say most of them are looking how to further automate existing workflows and processes to take out the administrative individual transactional work that needs to happen to keep these things going. And so I think it's a big focus area because I think it's low hanging fruit where they could have cost savings there for sure. I think – so they're exploring that space. I'll actually turn the question around and say one of the things I've seen internally in the last couple of years that I really enjoyed is our expense management. So every company has expense management. Employees create expenses all the time and what we've done internally is, when I travel, you travel, and you know, there's an airport and a hotel and some food here and there, and taxi, no longer do I have to spend my Friday afternoons bringing all that together and circling expense reports and send it off to my manager. Monday morning of that following week I've got an expense report premade for me and the AI engine will take a look and assign a risk tolerance to it based on my patterns of spending and then auto send it off to the manager. And if the manager sees that it's a green, it's a low risk, it will auto approve. And I love it because one, I don't have to spend my time doing that kind of work anymore. My manager with confidence is able to see how risky that expense report is if I'm going to certain places. And then three, you think from a paid on time back to the vendor or to the credit card company as well as compliance, that's huge. And so our customers are all very eager to learn more about that to apply it in their own expense management systems. I love that example, because it really gets to the root of what all business leaders are having to do these days, which is, you know, doing more with less, you know, saving money because, you know, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes saved over the course of an entire year with, you know, maybe 10,000 employees, it really does add up. Okay, I’ve just got one last question for you today, Eric. If you had one piece of advice for digital leaders to help them succeed here in 2023, what would it be? I think right now leaders are interested in application of AI, so here would be my comment, I would say it's time to be bold. I think it's time to be curious, and I think it's time to be adventurous with experimentation. So experiment with AI, bring it to life in your organization, even in the incubation stage. This is how you’re going to get those leaps and steps forward to be where you want to be in 3 to 5 years from now. Awesome, couldn't agree more. All right. Hey Eric, thanks so much for making the time. It's been a real pleasure having you on the show today. Yeah. Thanks Keith. Appreciate it. Take care.