Insight ON What Charles Schwab Figured Out About AI Adoption That Most Companies Skip

Audio transcript:

What Charles Schwab Figured Out About AI Adoption That Most Companies Skip

Howard Hecht:

The advanced security people who troll the internet for bad people. I put them our first 20 licenses of copilot. Eight of them went to those guys.

Jillian Viner:

And how did that help you? It

Howard:

Actually went really well because we, they found that we had really, copilot had really good controls versus, you know, some of the searching capability tools that SharePoint had, that we, you know, we don't necessarily use all that, but the point is they don't lock it down Microsoft. So copilot had better tools for locking it down, built in, in the magic side of it. So my position was I just sold the most valuable people in this company of this tool, not the leadership, which are valuable, right? Because they're gonna pay for it and they're gonna use it. But if you can't get past the red team, you're stuck. And so I got them on as early, like round one.

Jillian:

If you're making technology decisions that impact people, budgets and outcomes, you're in the right place. Welcome to Insight on the podcast for leaders who need technology to deliver real results. Hi, I am your host, Gillian Weiner, and today's episode is a conversation with Howard Hecht, the managing director in workplace technology at Charles Schwab. And this is a great one if you're trying to separate real AI adoption from the, we turned it on and hope for the best mentality. Schwab, as you probably know, is a global financial services organization with a very conservative security posture. So any move of degenerative AI has to have a, has to clear a really high bar and fast. But instead of pushing straight to broad licensing, they partnered with insight on a phase rollout of Microsoft 365 co-pilot, starting with a successful pilot and building a plan to scale adoption through change management, high impact use cases, and clear success metrics.

Jillian:

In this conversation, Howard gets really practical what drove the decision, what early wins looked like, and how they handled the robots, or taking my job anxiety and why security needs to be in the room from day one. He also answered what it takes to keep agent building from turning into absolute chaos. One quick note before we turn on that interview. We did catch up with Howard live during Microsoft Ignite, so you might hear a little bit of background noise from the show floor, but I promised it's worth it. Let's go. So you've ruled out copilot to about 40,000 employees.

Howard:

We, that's kind of our target right now. We're at 15. Okay. But in the new year it's gonna be between 30 and 40. So the number changes based on some, you know, some licensing and then some people need it more than others or want it more than others. But that is the plan. Yeah. And it's gonna happen fast. It's

Jillian:

A pretty big strategic bet. Yeah. What, what was the decision factor? What made you realize that we need to do this?

Howard:

You know, internally with copilot, you know, we, we are a Microsoft shop, right? So using some of the products and the tools that Microsoft has had us spend, you know, using and then making our lives easier from an end user experience. You know, saving time, money and effort with summarizing your emails, your calendars, checking with chats, uh, using facilitator or transcription. That's all big ticket. And more importantly, one of the other initiatives we have, we've comboed with, with it is saving time in, in general, right? So, you know, I have three subject matter experts on my team. Do all three need to go to the same meeting? No. But why then why are we doing that, right? And then, so we've looked at the way we're doing business to be more efficient and helping more people, and then that's a reduction of meetings. And then using copilot, like let it solve your problems.

Howard:

We, if you ever have to say out loud, how do I do something before copilot, you should have used a browser, it probably would've given you that answer. And now with copilot, it will give you the answer. So internally especially, right? Um, that will save us time with our service desk. So we provide white glove, right? So you can ask us something technical or how do I do in my out of office? Or, you know, how do I do my email signature? So those are easily searchable, but we've always provided white gloves. So now we're gonna go through somewhat of a paradigm shift. Let's use the tool and Ed answers it for you so you don't have to be on the phone waiting or searching. Um, and then we, you know, you're more effective day to day.

Jillian:

Now you talking to that point client, customer experience,

Howard:

Experience, right now, all employee, all my stuff is internal. Okay? So everything with copilot, you know, you know, just end user, like anything Microsoft related. So we are working on agents and then we'll have connectors to like Jira and let's see, uh, confluence and Workday. And those are, you know, there's so many things going on, so they'll connect. But right now the focus, the 2025 is and has been, uh, mostly Microsoft.

Jillian:

So Insight has helped you with this onboarding. How has it helped you? Why would not just go directly to Microsoft and just go get licenses

Howard:

As a, as a technical person, like, I'm looking at some of the stuff and it's hard for me to figure out and, and it became frustrating and it was like, what's the value in it? What's in it for me? Right? And so spending a lot of time with Insight, you know, and you, you were using it internally and I got to see how you were using it. Some small use cases, some larger, you know, how do I summarize my email? How do I do calendaring? If I'm an admin, how do I manage three calendars, right? So that's stuff I got to learn and see early on that there was a light at the end of the tunnel and I knew there would be, right? But, so Insights a trusted partner. We've been using them for many years on buying hardware and software, and Microsoft had recommended them as, uh, the, the main player in the space to help us with our rollout.

Howard:

So, you know, then up front we had to figure out what are our goals? You know, just don't want to turn it on to turn it on. Like, what problems are you solving? What are you trying to automate? What manual steps are too manual? And then some of the guidance was a lot of times when you don't know, you don't know. So if someone is used to hitting five steps manually and waiting 15 minutes to do something else and hitting it again, they don't know because we've never given them a tool that can make their life easier. So we had to do a lot of homework up front, like, what's not working in your space? And, and pressing them. I wouldn't know their space, but like, why doesn't it work? How could it be better? And really challenging all across the firm, like how to make their jobs better. And so that was an epiphany type of moment, right? Like, I'm not in marketing, I'm not in hr, right? And I understand a lot of the fundamentals of what you do, but what makes your life hard? So we did all that before we ever started, and that was on the advice with Insight.

Jillian:

Brilliant. Are you seeing any early successes so far of like how it's transforming either team workflows or individual workflows? Yeah,

Howard:

I would, I, I think, uh, specifically one case I know of is, is in marketing. So we obviously we were, we sponsor a lot of events like golf tournaments and marketing, like hotels and a lot of things. So this, uh, lady I worked with, she goes, Hey, you know, I want to be an early adopter. I don't necessarily know what I'm doing, but I've heard a lot of good things and I'm not gonna, you know, I don't wanna, I don't wanna be at the end of the, the rainbow. I wanna start now. And basically she was able to take a campaign for a major hotel, um, resort and something that she said would take her two to four weeks if she did nothing else, took her about 30 minutes. And then, then because of that success, she was the star of the team. But then my team got to present to her team, like in their town hall.

Howard:

And so part of that was positive, but there was some negatives to that because some people are like, well, it's gonna take my job, you know, and look at this, ah, you know, robots. But it's, the whole thing was to make her and the team more efficient, right? So how it can be better at the team. 'cause she was going through campaigns and PowerPoints and words and Excel spreadsheets and press releases. And so she could, and we showed her how to use the magical forward slash in copilot and she could merge a bunch of documents. And so that is a massive win for that organization that's been shared. And then I think another one that, um, so, you know, Microsoft does a great job with tools for, you know, if you're visually impaired or hearing impaired mm-hmm . And, uh, a lady shared a case with me where she has a really bad dyslexia and she finds herself staring at her emails for a long time and making sure she's written them correctly and accurately mostly be mostly for tone, like depending on what audience she's at.

Howard:

So now she, she uses copilot and I kind of gave her some tips and tricks, like make this more professional and kind of set it up for her. Um, and it's been a, it's been a whirlwind whereby she's, she feels better about her job. She's not as stressed because she knows she's, she doesn't always like rely on the technology, but she knows it's there and it's really brightened up her day because she goes, you know, if I took 20 minutes to send an email, I might only take two or three minutes. Now. She goes, as long as the content's there and because of the tone, she really likes the tone. So she could write up sideways or to her or her, um, you know, her direct people that she manages. Yeah.

Jillian:

That's a beautiful story. Yeah,

Howard:

That was a good one.

Jillian:

How have you addressed the or robots to ignore my Jobb? People have, they come around

Howard:

For us. It's a lot of the metrics that Microsoft and Insight have provided. So Microsoft has these magic, you know, Veeva Insights and we use all those dashboards to say who's, we can't get down to the one person. I don't get down to that level and say, Howard's doing this, but I can say this organization is using it to do. And there's, how about, here's so many meetings they summarize, here's how many emails they summarize, here's how many emails they did X, Y, and Z and then we can showcase that type of stuff. So we just show it as it's here to save you time. Right? So Microsoft says, I think correct, you know, it's like 11 minutes, um, a week if you know, to half an hour if you're a power user. But my leadership's like, we can do better, right? So, um, but that's been the message.

Howard:

It's not gonna take your job. It's just supposed to make you more efficient. You know, I just recently myself did something for the f the, uh, for FINRA and the SEC and I've written the stuff so many times and it's all over the place. It's in PowerPoint, it's in Word, it's in a OneNote. It's all over the place. And I, so I used some agent to compile the data and then I, I then I said, I need a PowerPoint based on this. And then, and I did it and I actually showed our auditors what I did. And so they're like, holy smokes. And so now they're using copilot. I don't know if they're doing the exact same thing, but the point is you can't half-ass when you talk to the federal government. And so they were pretty pleased with what I did and that I had the data mm-hmm .

Howard:

Um, and so it's not taking anybody's job, it's just making us more effective. Right? And so there are still some naysayers out there like, I don't want that copilot and I'm comfortable, you know, and I'm on the mainframe team, what do I care? You know? Um, so I can't force you to use it. It's not part of your daily life if you choose not to. But if you do, it's there. Um, and then on the other side of it, you know, if you go out to, you search in a browser and you ask 'em question, you might get an answer. And it might not be exactly, but you can tighten up your question with copilot chat, right? And get a better answer. And we have, we've locked it down at Schwab so that if you go out to, let's say Google and you ask a question and it comes back to the big red stop sign, 'cause you don't have the rights, those same rights are in copilot, right?

Howard:

So you're not gonna fool it. Um, whatever the same rules apply to you internally and externally using our internal systems and not, sorry, our browsers. So if you ask it, you're gonna get the same thing. But with copilot you might get a better answer specifically around like, um, scripts. A lot of people don't, aren't know how to write scripts and they'll try something and then they kind of get it from a website here and there and you know, they can try it out in qa. But I found that people who aren't good at some of the scripting, they get better answers with copilot. It's not the save all the save all, but it is better, which helps them grow their skills and then they, they can get better and then they can teach somebody else to fish. So, so that's kind of the message is you can get better at your job. Like AI is not gonna take your job. You need to, you can always get better using AI at your job.

Jillian:

When you think back to the beginning of the adoption, the integration, is there something, was there a moment where you're like, I'm so glad that we invested in that upfront?

Howard:

Yeah, I, that's, I like that because initially, like for us, because we have so many layers to get through that, I think it's hard to explain, but the end of the story is getting the red team involved.

Jillian:

What does that mean?

Howard:

Our security, the advanced security people who troll the internet for bad people. Mm-hmm . I put them our first 20 licenses of copilot, eight of them went to those guys.

Jillian:

And how did that help you?

Howard:

It actually went really well because we, they found that we had really co-pilot had really good controls versus, you know, some of the searching capability tools that SharePoint had that we did. You know, we don't necessarily use all that, but the point is they don't lock it down Microsoft. So Copilot had better tools for locking it down, built in, in the magic inside of it. So my position was I just sold the most valuable people in this company of this tool, not the leadership, which are valuable, right? 'cause they're gonna pay for it and they're gonna use it, but if you can't get past the red team, you're stuck. And so I got them on as early, like round one and it's been a godsend. So whenever I go through round two and three, four, and five and six, I always point back at those eight guys. And so when somebody new comes up and goes, have you thought of this? Yes. So I don't have to deal with that anymore. But anybody who's rolling it out, you've gotta get the people, the naysayers, which are usually security and rightfully so, uh, involved right away.

Jillian:

Can you imagine for a moment what this journey would've been like if you didn't have insight? If you just went out and deployed licenses to your teams?

Howard:

Well, it would've been tough because of a very small team. We manage all Microsoft and copilot is just one part of it. And to try to roll out something, it just, it would've been a flop. So with, with Insight, we did fundamental basic training. You know, some people are ahead of others, right? 'cause I tried it at home, or I did my year end review last year and I emailed it to myself, you know, so there's always people at different levels. But we started at the basics. This is what, and then from that we built like a SharePoint side of FAQs. Mm-hmm . And so as we started rolling it out, we're like, you can't do anything until you read these FAQs. Don't ask anyone a question 'cause they're probably in there and if they're not, we will add them. So with Insight we kind of built on that. And then we did fundamental PowerPoint. Today we're just talking about PowerPoint. Tomorrow we're gonna talk about Word, right?

Jillian:

Like how do you use co-pilot within these programs?

Howard:

Those programs. Got it. And then as we grew, people would say, well, how do we get our brand template in there? 'cause Schwab has a lot of branding, right? Okay, great. So then that was on my team as the product owner to get that in there, right? And then we've worked with your people a couple of days in advance before we do the next training to showcase how we built that in so that they can present on that with us if they needed our help. So they were a part of the journey as we grew our internal stuff, I didn't wanna surprise anybody at Insight and say, Hey, look at that. We turned that on, forgot to tell you. So that's been really valuable. We also have asked the experts, um, where people could just show up. We have like a bridge and like people up to a thousand people could dial in, call in these teams, .

Howard:

And uh, they can ask questions and nothing's off limit. But if there's a valuable thing, well to our FAQs, you know, again, I'm not in many of these business units, I haven't thought about some of their questions and I'm out. I would not sit, pretend. So from that, we could be more targeted with our audience. So if, if people in HR ask these 10 things, but no one else did great. That's an HR separate training. So we have fundamentals, we have ask the experts, and now we're building more siloed training. So some stuff can transfer to other groups, but this, that's, that's one of the main things. And it's also helped us be better at our training and more efficient. Um, and then from that we also get higher level buy-in where the leaders are saying, Hey, go to that insight training. Or Hey, did you go to that insight training?

Howard:

Or Hey, why didn't you go to that insight training? Right? So insight's been great to try to tailor, you know, some people are client facing, so that's usually market hours, right? So they're not gonna go to the training, so they have to go in the afternoon. So we, they've been a great job with the same SMEs, keeping the same message, and then my team sprinkled in here and there to keep everybody honest about Schwab rules and stuff. Not in a negative way, but like, there's certain things, 'cause someone will say, well, why don't we use this? I'm like, we're not allowed to 'cause of the SEC. Oh, okay. And then we have regular project management meetings and updates and talk shop. Um, and, and some of, some of the things that have been really the, some of the best trainings have been the unexpected trainings.

Howard:

Like what? Um, we've actually done a training where someone was using Ex Excel and they, they typed in something. I forgot what the command, the prompt was and it didn't give 'em a good answer. And I took it as a positive. And some people were like, well that's not what you expected. And the lady, she goes, you're right. And then I chimed in. I'm like, exactly, there's, that's a hallucination. That is not Insight, that's not Schwab. That is some magic of copilot. So trust but verify. So it was a per, it wasn't supposed to happen, but it happened. So like even the people know what they're doing in training. It's, you know, there's always, you're like, I didn't know that was gonna happen. So I think that's been valuable, some of those gotcha moments. Uh, it's been a couple, but the point is, it's valuable.

Howard:

'cause I, I do it myself. I type in something, you know, and we've been with Insight keeps pushing and so does Microsoft ask the prompt question as best as you can, like, don't wing it. Like, um, you know, I asked the question about the stock market and it, what I thought the answer was, was much different because of the way I asked the question. So I wasn't wrong, but I wasn't Right . So, um, it's just, it's just practice. And the thing is, I keep saying whatever the rules are at Schwab, those are the rules. But play with copilot, try it out. It's not gonna break, you know? Yeah. You know, don't ask me, ask it. I get a lot of, sometimes at the beginning I was getting a lot about, wow, uh, what does it do? Type it in ,

Jillian:

Go ask it. Go find out what it can do. Final question, now that you're on this adoption path, you've, you've got it scaled out. You're growing over the next, you know, year or two with this. Where do you see this putting you ahead of other competitors in your space?

Howard:

Uh, well I think right now, because I, 'cause copilot is so far down the path, Dow we're invested in agents and that's where insight's helping us too is, um, so there's some out of the box, right? Mm-hmm . And you can turn 'em on, you go off, you go through your levels of approvals. But, um, it's empowering people to, in different ways. Because if you don't know, you don't know. Like I keep saying to try things out. Like there's researcher and analyst agents we have right now and those are very popular. Um, because they can go through a lot of data quickly and with spreadsheets especially. Um, but we also use Copilot studio and there's a lot of rage in a positive fest. People are, are just bananas right now with I want In, but you know, we have to go slow and low. I can't like leash the Hounds.

Howard:

Um, I'm not in po I don't say no 'cause I want people to grow and challenge themselves across the space, but I also gotta make sure that if you're working on that, what's this guy doing? Aren't you doing the same thing? So that's part of it is corralling the goats right now is making sure that we're doing that because there's such excitement about it. And then, um, also in personal space, like how do I make my my job more efficient than I can share with my peers using agents? So that's what your customization is you're helping us with right now. And then people are going to town. So that's really the biggest thing I would say for us is it's, it's a real positive. Like it's, it's like a, it's fast and furious. It's the most excitement. I've seen something in it in a while. So I'm pretty excited about that.

Jillian:

I just want one more follow up on that. 'cause I feel like that's a big pain point that a lot of organizations have. Like you've got your, your enthusiasts who are out there making agents and everything. But to your point, like how do you know that Jack isn't doing what Jill's already doing? Have you solved that? Is insight helping you

Howard:

Solve that? Well, today at, at the keynote, they have a thing called the a that agent copilot. Mm-hmm . And it was, 'cause I've asked people, how do you, uh, how do you, do you have like a, uh, a SharePoint site? You know, do you have a naming convention? Do you have best practices? So that's something we started, right? Because we don't wanna waste anybody's time. Yeah. Right. And then this thing just came out where it's like a storage locker, if you will. And like the naming conventions best practices, oh, that guy or that gal did this and then you, it's like you can use 80% of what they did and then add your 20%. So that's what, but I think will happen next because we have to get our hands around that. 'cause a lot of people roll out products and it's all fun and games and then no one knows anything. 'cause there's no naming convention and you're like, well, how would I know the name of that chat? Or that agent? And you're like, so we're, we've always done a good job of that and being consistent with our branding, uh, you know, from communication, our corporate communication. So I think this is definitely the next big thing for us.

Jillian:

Howard, you're wonderful. Thank you so much for spending some time with us today.

Howard:

Awesome. Thank you very much for having me.

Speaker 3:

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