Valto Talks #1 — Is your tenant actually Copilot-ready?

Dougie Wood: Welcome to Valto Talks. I am here with Robert Thomas, and today we are talking about the thing every client asks for and almost nobody is ready for — Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Robert Thomas: The licence is the easy part. You buy it, you assign it, and on day one somebody asks Copilot to summarise the pay review spreadsheet and it does, because they had access to it all along and nobody noticed.

Dougie Wood: That is the part people miss. Copilot does not grant access. It surfaces access that was already there.

Robert Thomas: Exactly. Every over-shared SharePoint site, every “share with everyone in the organisation” link somebody created in 2019 — Copilot makes all of it findable in natural language. So the readiness work is really permissions work.

Dougie Wood: Where do you start with a tenant you have never seen?

Robert Thomas: Three things. Oversharing reports out of SharePoint Advanced Management. Sensitivity labels, at least on the obvious categories — HR, finance, legal. And a hard look at anything with an anonymous link on it.

Dougie Wood: How long does that usually take?

Robert Thomas: For a mid-sized organisation, a few weeks. It is not glamorous. But the alternative is a rollout you have to pause in week two, and those are very hard to restart politically.

Dougie Wood: What about the data nobody has looked at in years?

Robert Thomas: Archive it or label it. Copilot will happily quote a 2017 draft policy as though it were current, because nothing in the document says otherwise. Retention is not just a compliance exercise any more — it is an accuracy one.

Dougie Wood: Good place to end. Thanks Robert.