The word "vibing" is taking over tech, moving from coding to content creation. In this episode we explore this new flow-state approach to AI prompting and how it's revolutionizing instructional design. Featuring a deep dive into Sana Labs, this episode shows how to "vibe build" immersive learning experiences like complex simulations and custom UIs using only natural language.
This episode is a deep dive into Microsoft People Skills, a groundbreaking AI-driven tool that transforms how organizations understand and leverage their workforce's talents. Discover how this digital detective works in the background to provide real-time insights into skills, enabling strategic planning and career growth. Learn about the Skills Landscape Report, privacy controls, and how People Skills integrates seamlessly into Microsoft 365. Tune in to uncover how this innovation is reshaping the future of work.
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In this episode, Anand continues our deep dive into Anthropic's Claude Skills. We know what they are, but why should you choose them over a Custom GPT, a Google Gem, or even a Microsoft Copilot agent?
First, we break down, comparing how Claude Skills' efficient, code-ready folders stack up against the easy-to-build chatbots from OpenAI and Google. Then, we tackle the "heavy suitcase" of Model Context Protocol (MCP) and show why Skills are often a lighter, more practical choice for daily work.
Finally, we explore the most exciting part: the "hybrid" future potential of AI in your workplace. Anand explains how you can combine the power of Claude Skills with the tools you already own, like Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, to create custom AI helpers that save time, reduce errors, and deliver real business value.
Transform your static PowerPoint presentations into dynamic, AI-narrated videos. Discover the step-by-step process to breathe new life into your old slides, turning them into engaging tutorials without the need for a recording studio. Learn about the practical tips and potential pitfalls, such as handling Microsoft Purview Sensitivity Labels, and find out how you can create multiple training assets in no time. Tune in to unlock the hidden value in your digital archives and enhance your productivity with ease.
In this episode, we dive into the transformative world of Claude's Skills, exploring how these modular, reusable toolkits can revolutionize your workflow. Discover how Claude's Skills enhance efficiency by automating repetitive tasks, from spreadsheet creation to brand guideline adherence. Learn about the mechanics behind these powerful skills, their seamless integration across Cloud products, and how you can build custom skills without extensive development knowledge. Claude's Skills empower you to become an AI builder, automating what matters most.
Ready to transform your workflow? Tune in to find out how!
What if you could teach your AI to be an expert in your specific job?
Anthropic just dropped Claude Skills, a brand new beta feature that turns Claude from a general-purpose AI into your personal, specialized assistant. But what are they, and how do they actually work?
In this episode, we pull back the curtain on this powerful new tool. We'll show you how a "Skill" is just a simple folder of instructions and scripts that lets Claude master your unique workflows, all while being incredibly token-efficient.
Then, we'll walk you through the "skill-creator" in real-time. Together, we'll design a brand-new skill from scratch, step-by-step: building a complete, four-part "Monthly Analytics Report" skill that can fetch data, analyze it, visualize it, and compile the final file, all automatically.
Finally, we look at other real-world examples, from a slack-gif-creator that respects file size limits to a brand-guidelines skill that ensures every piece of content is perfectly on-brand. This isn't just about prompts; it's about building reusable, automated tools for everyone.
In this episode, you will learn:
What Claude Skills are and how they work under the hood.
How to design your own skill using a simple, 4-step blueprint.
Real-world examples of how Skills can automate everything from marketing to data analysis.
Why this simple, text-based approach is a massive leap forward for personalizing AI.
We've all been there: staring at a screen, buried under endless folders, reports, and emails, wasting precious time searching for a single file. But what if your files could talk back?
In this episode, we dive into the game-changing integration of Copilot in OneDrive, an AI assistant that turns your digital chaos into organized clarity. Forget mind-numbing searches; this is about getting instant answers, summaries, and insights directly from your content, right where you work.
In this episode, you'll learn:
The Shift from Search to Answers: Why asking "What's the latest on Project X?" now gives you a summary, not a search list.
Real-World Time Savers: Hear how a sales rep closed a deal faster and how PwC cut training time by over 90% with AI-powered summarization.
Beyond Text: Learn how Copilot understands meeting recordings, pulls key data from images, and can even read documents to you on the go.
For Work and Life: From automatically creating a family vacation album to helping IT admins secure company data, we cover how this tool works for every part of your life.
This isn't just another tech update; it's a fundamental change in how we work and live with our digital content. If you're ready to stop digging and start doing, this episode is for you.
You've learned the frameworks to get powerful results from your AI Co-Pilot. In this final core episode, we give you the professional guardrails to use that power safely, ethically, and with an eye toward the future. This is the capstone session that separates a casual user from a true AI-savvy professional.
I will walk you through the essential non-technical skills for long-term success:
In this episode, you will learn:
The #1 non-negotiable rule of data privacy that will protect your company, your clients, and your career.
How to spot and correct for the hidden biases that can show up in AI-generated content.
Simple, sustainable habits for staying curious and keeping your skills sharp as technology continues to evolve at a breakneck pace.
Our final "Your Turn" challenge will set you on a path of continuous learning and empower you to share your new knowledge. Listen to this episode to put the final professional polish on your AI mindset, ensuring you can lead with confidence in the age of AI.
It's time to move from theory to practice. This special episode is an interactive workshop designed to put your new AI Mindset into immediate action. Grab a pen and paper or open a notes app for this one, you're going to be an active participant.
I will guide you step-by-step through a practical exercise to completely transform your actual work week.
In this hands-on session, you will:
Triage your real-life to-do list using the Three-Bucket System.
Identify a key "Co-pilot" task that is perfect for AI collaboration.
Build a professional, ready-to-use prompt for that task using the C.O.D.E. framework.
By the end of this episode, you won't just have a list of chores; you'll have your first AI-assisted strategic plan of execution. You will walk away with a tangible prompt, custom-built for one of your own projects, and a clear path to getting it done. This is where the real productivity gains begin.
From the last two episodes, you understand your AI's strengths and flaws, and you have the C.O.D.E. framework to write powerful prompts. Now for the most important strategic question: When do you use it? Applying AI to the wrong task can be inefficient at best, and professionally risky at worst.
This episode introduces the heart of the AI Mindset: the Three-Bucket System. This is a simple but powerful mental model for triaging your entire to-do list, ensuring you leverage AI with both maximum efficiency and professional wisdom.
In this episode, you will learn to distinguish between the three categories of work:
AI Autopilot: The low-risk, factual tasks that you can safely delegate.
AI Co-pilot: The creative and drafting sweet-spot where you partner with AI for an 80/20 split.
Human Lead: The high-stakes, strategic, and sensitive tasks where you are firmly in the pilot's seat.
We'll walk through concrete office examples for each bucket, and this week's "Your Turn" challenge is a simple five-minute exercise to build this new mental muscle using your own to-do list. By the end of this episode, you'll have a clear, confident framework for smart delegation, allowing you to save mental energy and focus your human brilliance where it matters most.
You've met the "smartest intern on Earth" and seen its fatal flaw. So how do you guide it away from making things up and toward producing brilliant work? The answer lies not in the AI, but in your instructions. A vague request gets a vague, or even fabricated reply. A professional prompt gets a professional result.
This episode delivers the single most practical skill in your AI toolkit: the art of the prompt. You'll learn the C.O.D.E. framework, a simple, four-part method for crafting perfect instructions that turn your AI from a generic guesser into a focused collaborator.
In this episode, you will learn:
Why providing context is the key to preventing AI hallucinations.
A step-by-step breakdown of the C.O.D.E. method: Context, Objective, Details, and Example.
How to apply this framework through a powerful "before and after" audio demo.
Get ready for this episode's "Your Turn" challenge, where you'll apply the C.O.D.E. framework to a real-world task: drafting an email you need to send. Listen to this episode to stop getting robotic replies and start getting 80% of your work done on the first try.
To truly master your AI, you first need to understand its nature. It's not a magic box; it's the smartest, fastest, and most eager-to-please intern on Earth. And just like any intern, it has incredible strengths and critical, career-limiting flaws.
In this episode, we move beyond basic queries to establish the professional mindset for working with AI. You'll learn why this "intern" is brilliant at drafting and brainstorming but possesses a fatal flaw: its tendency to "hallucinate": that is confidently inventing facts, figures, and sources.
We will cover:
The three key tasks AI excels at in an office environment.
A deep dive into AI hallucinations and why they happen.
The golden rule that separates amateur AI users from the pros: Verify, don't blindly trust.
Get ready for this week's "Your Turn" challenge, where you won't just use AI, you'll deliberately push its limits to see a sophisticated hallucination firsthand. Understanding this foundational concept is the essential first step to building powerful prompts and using AI with true professional confidence.
Do you feel like you're only scratching the surface with AI? You've experimented with tools like ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and Copilot, but the results can feel generic, and you don't yet trust them for the work that truly matters. This is the starting point for changing that.
In this prelude episode, Anand introduces the core concept of the entire series: the journey from making simple queries to building a true strategic partnership with AI. This is your official flight plan for the course.
You will discover:
The crucial difference between being a casual user and a professional "AI director."
A high-level overview of the practical frameworks you'll master, including the C.O.D.E. method for perfect prompts and the Three-Bucket System for triaging any task.
The tangible outcomes you can expect, from reclaiming hours of your week to future-proofing your career in a world where AI is everywhere.
If you're ready to unlock the true professional potential of AI and make it your most valuable co-pilot, this essential introduction is your launchpad.
If you're only using Microsoft Copilot to draft emails and summarize documents, you're just scratching the surface. In this episode, we move far beyond the basics to reveal the powerful, surprising features that transform Copilot from a simple tool into a true AI teammate. Discover how specialized AI agents can manage your projects, analyze unopened files, and even join confidential meetings securely. This is your guide to unlocking the real power of your AI coworker and reinventing the way you work.
Is your company's SharePoint site a digital junkyard where files go to disappear? You're not alone. This chaos creates a huge "garbage in, garbage out" problem, making even the most powerful AI tools ineffective.
In this episode, we dive deep into Microsoft's bold new solution: the SharePoint Knowledge Agent. Billed as an "intelligent AI librarian," this tool promises to automatically organize your content, provide instant, accurate answers, and turn weeks of manual work into mere moments. We'll walk you through the jaw-dropping official demo that showcases its power.
But is it too good to be true? We also pull back the curtain on the early reactions from the user community, digging into their real-world concerns about premium pricing, limited rollout controls, and whether this is a true revolution or just a fancy band-aid for long-standing problems.
Join us as we weigh the hype against the reality. Is the Knowledge Agent the future of content management, or a promising tool with serious growing pains? Tune in to find out.
In this episode of Techies, host Anand Vijayaragavan explores the transformative power of AI in creative processes with Microsoft 365 Copilot. Discover how AI is not just a tool but a creative partner, helping you generate and refine everything from images to videos and documents. Learn about the security and transparency features that ensure your creations are safe and authentic. Tune in to see how AI is reshaping the future of creativity, making high-level creation accessible to everyone. Join us as we delve into the exciting possibilities that AI brings to the table.
Have you ever wished you could get personalized, world-class advice right when you needed it? In this episode, we pull back the curtain on my experience testing the groundbreaking Google Labs Portraits experiment, which provides personalized AI coaching built directly from the expertise of real-world masters. Specifically, I accessed the AI trained by acclaimed author and storytelling coach, Matt Dicks, finding the application "incredibly useful" for refining my presentation storytelling.I share the crucial coaching session where we focused on distilling the user experience down to two powerful "I once was X, but now I’m Y" thesis statements.
The LinkedIn post and application referred to in the episode
Join me as I explore the transformative potential of Notebook LM, a groundbreaking tool from Google designed to revolutionize how we learn and conduct research with AI. Discover how this Source Grounded AI empowers users to create personalized learning experiences by focusing on reliability, privacy, and a closed cognitive environment. Dive into the innovative features that allow you to become the architect of your own learning journey, crafting a personal AI expert tailored to your unique needs. Whether you're tackling a complex project or simply seeking to enhance your understanding, this episode will inspire you to rethink the way you interact with information.
In this episode, Anand Vijayaragavan explores the revolutionary concept of "Vibe Working" with Microsoft 365 Copilot Agents. Discover how this new approach transforms traditional tasks into collaborative experiences, allowing users to interact with AI as a partner rather than a tool. From simplifying complex data analysis in Excel to crafting polished presentations in Word, learn how these advancements democratize expert-level skills, making them accessible to everyone through natural conversation. Tune in to understand how this shift is redefining our relationship with technology and empowering creativity in the digital workspace.
In this episode of the Technology Made Easy podcast, we dive into the fascinating world of AI's exponential growth. Inspired by Julian Schritweiser's insights, we explore the gap between our everyday experiences with AI and the explosive data-driven trends that reveal its true potential. Discover how AI is set to transform industries by 2027, outperforming human experts and reshaping the future. Join us as we unravel the complexities of exponential growth and what it means for your career and industry. Tune in to stay ahead of the curve!
