Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast

Welcome to Episode 440 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. Recorded live at the North American Cloud and Collaboration Summit in Branson, Missouri, this MS Cloud on the Road conversation has Ben sitting down with Jay Leask of Microsoft and Microsoft MVP Norm Young. Norm turns host and asks what their work looked like before generative AI: hand-written PowerShell, manual conditional access reviews, and deliverables that took two weeks instead of 45 minutes thanks to transcripts and Copilot Cowork skills.

From there it gets philosophical. They talk about whether your own experience (the “Ben factor” and the “J factor”) still shows up in AI-assisted work, why Ben feels some of the fun and creativity of the job slipping away while billing for faster work gets harder, and what automation means for people whose jobs cannot simply be reskilled. They close on whether models trained on AI-generated content will plateau or regress, whether the current spending pace can last, and why the sooner AI becomes just another feature, the better.

Show Notes

North American Cloud and Collaboration Summit

Copilot Cowork overview

Use Copilot Cowork: Cowork skills

Connect with Jay

Jay Leask on LinkedIn

Norm Young on Sessionize

Jay Leask

Jay Leask is a Principal AI Workforce Engineer at the Washington DC Microsoft Innovation Hub, where he works with customers on Microsoft 365, Copilot, and modern IT practices. He brings more than 25 years of IT experience, much of it with public sector organizations, and is a familiar voice at community events like the North American Cloud and Collaboration Summit.

Norm Young

Norm Young is a Microsoft MVP and solution architect who focuses on Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform, with a particular interest in Power Platform governance. Based in St. Catharines, Ontario, he is a regular community speaker and blogger on how Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform work better together.

Prior podcast context

Ep 432: AI-Era Consulting Billing for Microsoft Cloud Delivery

Ep 427: Copilot Cowork Hands-On Experiences

Ep 417: Workplace Ninjas US, Zero Trust, and Conditional Access!

Ep 410: Joy and Jay take over and talk Change Management

About the sponsors

Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits.

Intelligink designs, secures, and modernizes Microsoft 365 and Azure environments for organizations of every size, working alongside your internal IT team or MSP. From security audits and Copilot readiness to migrations and ongoing fractional cloud services, it’s the same production-tested advice Ben shares on the show, applied to your tenant. Book a conversation

Welcome to Episode 439 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott dig into two Azure agents with confusingly different names: the Azure Copilot Troubleshooting Agent and the Azure SRE Agent. Scott’s mental model is that the Troubleshooting Agent is the free, human-in-the-loop entry point built into the Azure portal. It runs as you, works one problem at a time, and opens a support request when it gets stuck. The SRE Agent is a paid operational platform with its own managed identity. It watches your logs, alerts, and repos, forms hypotheses, and can act in review or autonomous mode, much like a new member of your team.

They also work through the SRE Agent’s Azure Agent Unit (AAU) billing model, the built-in guardrails worth copying into your own skills (no deletes, no Key Vault, respect for resource locks), and the VNet integration that lets the agent reach private endpoints and on-premises systems. They close with why you might spin it up for a few days just to see what it finds, and their ongoing wish for one place to manage every Microsoft agent.

Show Notes

Azure Copilot Troubleshooting Agent

Agents in Azure Copilot

Overview of Azure SRE Agent

Azure SRE Agent portal

Evaluate Azure SRE Agent (30-day trial)

Pricing and billing for Azure SRE Agent

Azure SRE Agent pricing calculator

Run modes in Azure SRE Agent

Execute mitigations in Azure SRE Agent (safety guardrails)

Azure SRE Agent network integration

Configure network controls for Azure SRE Agent

Prior podcast context

Episode 438: Taking your WorkOS and LLM Wiki to the Next Level

Episode 434: Reading the Spec Sheet on Microsoft’s Agentic SOC

Episode 432: AI-Era Consulting Billing for Microsoft Cloud Delivery

Episode 419: Security and AI: Security Store, Security Copilot, and Agents

About the sponsors

Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits.

Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

Welcome to Episode 438 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. Back in Episode 429, Ben and Scott introduced LLM wikis. In this episode, they come back a few months later to compare what those wikis turned into after real daily use: personalized work operating systems, or a WorkOS, that tie together tasks, meetings, research, communications, and recurring workflows. Scott walks through the skills that now run his day, from a 9:00 a.m. prioritization pass and meeting prep to meeting capture, end-of-day review, and clipping ingestion, all while keeping governed documents in Microsoft 365 where they belong.

They also dig into how a workflow matures from an on-demand skill to a scheduled skill, a loop, and finally a deterministic Python script that any interface can call. Scott shows off his locally served web dashboard pinned in Edge, Ben shares the custom Obsidian plugin Claude built for his command center, and they compare notes on choosing a source of truth (Markdown versus Asana), filtering Teams noise down to the signal, and what these systems actually cost to run each month.

Show Notes

A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs

LLM Wiki v2: extending the pattern with lessons from production

Agent Skills open standard

About agent skills for GitHub Copilot

Use Agent Skills in Visual Studio Code

Building effective agents

Conductor: Deterministic orchestration for multi-agent AI workflows

Obsidian Web Clipper

Prior podcast context

Episode 429: Getting started with LLM Wikis

Episode 430: Scouting out Microsoft Scout

Episode 422: Back to the Terminal: The Rise of AI CLI Interfaces

About the sponsors

Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits.

Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

Welcome to Episode 437 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Nick Burling, Chief Product Officer at Nasuni, joins Ben and Scott to talk about getting unstructured file data ready for AI. Nick digs into why 70 to 80 percent of enterprise data sits in file shares and object storage, how that data tends to end up ungoverned and risky to point AI at, and Nasuni’s PSYCHIC framework for making it proprietary, secure, current, indexed, hybrid, and continuous. The conversation covers Nasuni’s AI Activate, the MCP based service that enforces permissions before a query ever runs, and the recent DryvIQ acquisition, which adds content classification, redaction, and policy enforcement on top of that index.

They also get into where this overlaps with Purview and Copilot’s own indexing, how DriveIQ reads and respects Microsoft’s existing sensitivity labels, and why 97 percent of orgs are piloting AI agents while only 43 percent call those projects successful. Nick closes with practical advice for anyone evaluating a platform like this: pick one high value use case, define success metrics up front, and keep the initial scope small.

Discosure: This is a sponsor interview with Nasuni who is a sponsor of the podcast.

Show Notes

Nasuni

Nasuni Research Finds 97% of Enterprises Are Adopting AI Agents, Yet Most Projects Fail to Meet Objectives

Nasuni Acquires DryvIQ, Enabling Organizations to Classify, Secure, and Activate Unstructured Data to Unlock AI Business Value

Expanding Purview DLP and Information Protection to Foreign Platforms

Nasuni Resources

Nasuni News

AI Program Success

Related episodes:

Episode 431: Agent Governance Is the New App Governance

Episode 429: Getting started with LLM Wikis

About our guest

Nick Burling is Chief Product Officer at Nasuni, where he leads the company’s product strategy at the intersection of enterprise data management, cloud infrastructure, and AI. He is responsible for shaping Nasuni’s vision for how organizations manage, protect, and activate unstructured data for enterprise teams and AI at scale. This includes expanding the company’s capabilities for continuous cost optimization and protection, while empowering compounding workforce productivity through AI-optimized unstructured data.

An accomplished product executive and entrepreneur, Nick brings deep experience translating technology innovation and market shifts into clear strategic advantage. His career spans leadership roles at Fortune 500 companies including Microsoft and IBM, as well as early-stage ventures he has guided from launch through successful exit. At Nasuni, he leads the teams defining how enterprises will manage and act on unstructured data in an AI-driven world. Nick Burling’s Forbes Technology Council profile.

About the sponsors

Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits.

Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

Welcome to Episode 436 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott dive into Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance. Almost nobody runs one Microsoft Entra tenant. Mergers, divestitures, dev and test environments, regional partitioning, that one AI proof-of-concept somebody spun up on a credit card. Organizations accumulate tenants the way they accumulate SharePoint sites. The difference is that nobody ever built an inventory of the tenants, and central IT frequently cannot name them, let alone say whether they are configured safely.

Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance, now generally available, is Microsoft’s first-party answer. It is genuinely four products under one blade: it finds the tenants you did not know about, gives you a least-privilege way to administer them without local accounts, monitors their configuration for drift against a JSON baseline, and gates the creation of new ones so the next tenant is governed from birth.

Show Notes

Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance is now generally available

What is Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance?

Deploy Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance end to end

Related tenants in Tenant Governance

Licensing for Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance

About the sponsors

Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits.

Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!