Back in the (Intra) Zone - Mark Kashman

Polaris is a production of Synozur – the transformation company. Synozur reimagines business for our clients, navigating the complexities of transformation and strategy with ease.

Former Intrazone co-hosts Chris McNulty and Mark Kashman reunite on Polaris to unpack the biggest news from the Microsoft 365 Community Conference—AI skills, Copilot's evolution, SharePoint's 25th anniversary—and reflect on the enduring power of community in the modern workplace.

Takeaways AI adoption vs. readiness gap. Chris cites industry research showing 91% of organizations now use at least one AI technology and an average of 5.4 hours saved per employee, drawn from a study of 443 million work hours across over 1,000 companies1. Yet at the recent AIIM Summit in Baltimore, Chris polled a room of roughly 50 professionals on daily AI use—and was the only hand up2. The ActivTrak "2026 State of the Workplace" report confirms that while 80% of employees now use AI tools (up from 53% two years ago), only 3% spend the optimal 7–10% of their work hours in AI, and 57% spend less than 1%3. Leaders should focus on practical readiness—not headline adoption numbers.  Content structure is critical for AI. Modern enterprise content management platforms now use AI for auto-classification, document summarization, and contextual Q&A4. But Mark stresses that the underlying metadata, lifecycle management, and information structure must be sound first: "If the form that nobody ever filled out gets filled out and is valid and truthful…you will have a system that works better"5. Organizations should prioritize content readiness before scaling AI.  SharePoint Skills — no-code AI instructions. Microsoft unveiled SharePoint Skills in public preview, allowing teams to encode best practices and process rules as Markdown (.md) files stored within SharePoint sites6. These skills give Copilot and AI in SharePoint persistent context—tone guidelines, product terminology, workflow steps—so results are on-brand and site-specific without any coding7. According to the buckleyPLANET conference recap, Skills are included in existing Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Copilot licensing with no additional procurement step8.  Copilot CoWork and Skills convergence. Chris explains that Copilot CoWork, based on Anthropic technology, lets individual users build personal AI skills stored as Markdown files in OneDrive9. Meanwhile, SharePoint Skills operate at the site/group level10. The expectation is that these two streams will