Pradeep Hegde has been amazed by technology ever since he first set eyes on a computer at age 13.
His school in Dharwad, a city in India’s Karnataka state, had arranged for students to be trained in BASIC, the go-to programming language for personal computers in the 1980s.
“They taught us about logic, and how to order our programming by line numbers. I was super fascinated,” he said.
Today, Hegde is Chief Information Officer at CITIC Securities International (CSI), formerly CLSA, in Hong Kong. And he’s fascinated by Microsoft 365 Copilot’s potential to transform how the investment firm works.
He first used Copilot about 18 months ago, to summarize a long email. Then he began asking it to summarize and highlight key points in documents. After these initial interactions, he concluded that the AI assistant would be “a much more powerful tool in the years to come” because of its ability to integrate with the data and functions available within the Microsoft 365 environment.
Hegde heads a team of about 550 people who take care of CSI’s technology requirements, be it developing in-house apps, planning infrastructure or providing day-to-day support. CSI is the global arm of China’s largest brokerage CITIC Securities, offering stock trading, investment banking and wealth management services across 13 countries.
His usage of Copilot has morphed beyond just summaries. The summaries now feed into Power Point slides and help him focus when delivering his quarterly town halls.
“I started understanding the overall power of Copilot, given the fact that you can leverage multiple channels like your e-mail, your documents, your Teams meeting,” he said. “It gives you a much better picture of what’s going on because it can synthesize these multiple channels more effectively.”
He also uses Researcher, the Copilot agent, to get up to speed on financial concepts like stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency.
“I found Researcher very helpful because it not only went to the Internet, it also looked up and translated some documents in Chinese that my own company had sent me,” he said. “I was very impressed.”
Hegde has even asked Copilot to stand in his shoes, as a manager giving feedback on his colleagues’ annual performance appraisals. The experiment transformed what he usually found to be a tedious process into a satisfying outcome.
“I told Copilot: You are the manager. You read all of this and tell me. What is a good response to these KPIs (key performance indicators) and the self-assessment?” he said.
Hegde had already read the material in advance and formed his own opinions, as he firmly believes Copilot “should augment judgment and not replace it”. He was pleasantly surprised by how closely the AI assistant’s views matched his own.
Copilot produced well-crafted responses that needed minimal changes. “My job became a lot easier because I had to only modify a few sentences,” he said.
Copilot’s rollout at CSI began organically, said Hegde, with licenses given to employees who expressed an interest in using it.
“I told my CTO (chief technology officer): We need this tool in our office. We need this tool for everybody,” he said.
Now, the firm holds 700 Copilot licenses and hosts regular training sessions conducted by Microsoft. “We have made a more concerted effort at ensuring Copilot gets used in the organization, making sure more people can take advantage of it,” he said.
Looking ahead, he plans to use Copilot and its agents to set up automated helpdesks at CSI. And he wants to explore what he calls “the numerical side of Copilot,” including its Analyst agent and coding capabilities.
“I’m glad my 13-year-old self, took the right step by getting interested in technology,” said Hegde. “I’m one of those lucky guys who actually likes what they do for work.”
Top image: Pradeep Hegde, CIO, , CITIC Securities International Photo: , CITIC Securities International. Image background generated with Microsoft Copilot.
