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Maximilian Kenfenheuer

Manager · Microsoft 365 & AI Transformation @ BearingPoint

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#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

Microsoft Scout in Preview: Admin Enablement, Policies and Attestation

Tuesday, August 25, 2026 · Maximilian Kenfenheuer

#Microsoft365Copilot #MicrosoftAI #AI #Copilot #CopilotStudio #EnterpriseAI #DigitalWorkplace

Microsoft Scout is an always-on personal agent in Teams, Outlook, OneDrive and SharePoint, powered by Work IQ. In the preview, it is off by default and requires admin enablement, policy configuration and explicit attestation, because data may leave Microsoft 365. Microsoft thus treats persistent agents as a capability close to identity, policy and device management, not as a convenience feature. In this article, I explain what always-on AI requires from governance and user experience and how organizations can prepare.

Event-Driven Tasks, Skills and Browser Use in Copilot Cowork

Monday, August 24, 2026 · Maximilian Kenfenheuer

#Microsoft365Copilot #MicrosoftAI #Copilot #AI #EnterpriseAI

Microsoft 365 Copilot has passed 30 million paid seats. The product direction says more than the seat count: Copilot Cowork now supports event-driven tasks, custom skills, plugins, browser use in Microsoft Edge and usage-based billing. Work can therefore start when an email, a Teams message or an @mention arrives, not only when a user opens a chat. In this article, I explain what event-driven and composable AI change for enterprises and how to measure value at the workflow level.

Copilot in Legal Departments: A Stress Test for Enterprise AI

Sunday, August 23, 2026 · Maximilian Kenfenheuer

#Microsoft365Copilot #MicrosoftAI #AI #LegalTech #EnterpriseAI

Legal departments need speed, accuracy, traceability and control at the same time. That makes them a stress test for enterprise AI. Microsoft positions Copilot for contract review, case law extraction and audit preparation. Vodafone reports time savings in contract review, Uniper productivity gains in audits. Partner agents such as LegalZoom work directly inside Microsoft 365 Copilot. In this article, I explain why legal work suits governed agentic support, which trust requirements apply and how the model transfers to procurement, finance and HR.

Markdown and Text Files in Copilot Notebooks: Using Operational Knowledge

Saturday, August 22, 2026 · Maximilian Kenfenheuer

#Microsoft365Copilot #MicrosoftAI #AI #Copilot #EnterpriseAI

Copilot Notebooks now accepts Markdown (.md), plain-text (.txt) and rich-text (.rtf) files as references. This sounds minor. Much operational knowledge, however, sits in READMEs, wikis, logs, transcripts and handoff notes that nobody ever converts into a Word document. Copilot can now use this material together with formal documents. In this article, I explain which teams benefit most, how cross-source reasoning improves and which governance questions arise with lightweight files.

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.