Blog

Maximilian Kenfenheuer

Manager · Microsoft 365 & AI Transformation @ BearingPoint

Featured

#Microsoft365Copilot #MicrosoftAI #Copilot #AITransformation #FutureOfWork

Measuring Completed Work: Baselines, Assisted Hours and Business Outcomes

Thursday, September 10, 2026 · Maximilian Kenfenheuer

A team can generate thousands of prompts without improving a single core process. Another uses AI rarely but saves hours in contract review. Microsoft increasingly measures Copilot value by completed work and assisted hours instead of activity. Its internal guidance recommends baselines for painful processes before the rollout. In this article, I describe a three-layer measurement model of adoption signals, time and effort indicators and business outcomes, and explain why role-based deployment makes value measurable.

Power BI Grounding: Copilot Reasons Over Semantic Models

Wednesday, September 9, 2026 · Maximilian Kenfenheuer

Since the August 2026 update, Microsoft 365 Copilot reasons over Power BI reports and semantic models in Chat and Cowork. Copilot thus works with governed business definitions: how revenue is defined, how margin is calculated, which KPIs leadership uses and who may see which numbers. At the same time, a poorly defined KPI now spreads faster. In this article, I explain why semantic models become the foundation for trustworthy AI answers and how organizations can prepare their analytics layer.

From Draft to Deliverable: Agentic Copilot in the Core Apps

Saturday, September 5, 2026 · Maximilian Kenfenheuer

On April 22, Microsoft made agentic capabilities in Word, Excel and PowerPoint generally available and brought business apps into Copilot via agents. AI moves to where proposals are written, financial models built and board decks assembled. At the same time, human judgment gains weight: a polished deck is not automatically a sound strategy, and a well-structured spreadsheet is not automatically a correct model. In this article, I explain what changes when AI participates in the work and which five readiness questions organizations should answer.

Latest posts

Frontier Tuning: Reinforcement Learning Inside the Compliance Boundary

Friday, August 21, 2026 · Maximilian Kenfenheuer

#Microsoft365Copilot #MicrosoftAI #CopilotStudio #EnterpriseAI #AITransformation

Microsoft introduced Frontier Tuning at Build. It applies reinforcement learning inside the organization's compliance boundary, using its own data, conventions and workflows. The results are tuned models, skills, orchestration logic and a runtime harness that inherit existing access policies. Frontier Tuning comes to Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry. Pearson, EY, Bristol Myers Squibb and McKinsey are among the early users. In this article, I explain how tuning differs from prompting and retrieval and which questions organizations should answer before tuning agents.

Synced or Federated: Connecting Business Apps to Copilot

Thursday, August 20, 2026 · Maximilian Kenfenheuer

#Microsoft365 #Copilot #MicrosoftAI #AI #EnterpriseAI

A useful Copilot answer appears in seconds. Afterwards, the user often still opens another application, finds the record and carries the work forward by hand. Connected apps such as Adobe Express, Figma, Dynamics 365, Box, monday.com and Miro now appear directly inside Microsoft 365 Copilot. Copilot connectors link more than 100 external sources, either synced into Microsoft Graph or federated in real time. In this article, I explain the difference between synced and federated connectors and which four questions leaders should answer before connecting more systems.

The Copilot Interface as a Governance Surface

Wednesday, August 19, 2026 · Maximilian Kenfenheuer

#Microsoft365 #MicrosoftCopilot #AI #EnterpriseAI #MicrosoftAI #DigitalTransformation

With the May update, Microsoft redesigned how Copilot appears across Microsoft 365. As Copilot takes on more actions, the interface has to show what the AI does, which context it uses and what requires human review. The interface thus becomes a governance surface as well as a productivity surface. In this article, I explain why workflow fit belongs in adoption planning and why change management should target concrete moments of work instead of features.

Source-Level Governance for Copilot Web Grounding

Tuesday, August 18, 2026 · Maximilian Kenfenheuer

#Microsoft365Copilot #MicrosoftAI #AIGovernance #EnterpriseAI #Copilot #ResponsibleAI

Web grounding sounds technical, but it is becoming a leadership question: which sources may influence Copilot answers in an enterprise? Microsoft Learn documents domain exclusion for up to 1,000 sites, managed via PowerShell by admin roles. At the same time, Microsoft has rolled the feature back for now. That makes it a signal rather than a finished feature. In this article, I explain why source-level governance becomes part of the enterprise AI operating model and which questions organizations should clarify now.

Work IQ as Context Infrastructure for Copilot and Agents

Monday, August 17, 2026 · Maximilian Kenfenheuer

#MicrosoftAI #Microsoft365Copilot #CopilotStudio #EnterpriseAI #AITransformation

For many organizations, access to a capable model is no longer the problem. The problem is whether the model has enough business context to be reliably useful. Work IQ turns signals from email, meetings, files, chats and business systems into context for Copilot and agents. It works permission-aware and user-scoped, with central logging and policy enforcement. In this article, I explain why this infrastructure layer may matter more than the next interface feature and what organizations should prepare in information architecture and governance.