Shelly Thomas
Building Beta - Executive Coach and Trainer
Anchorage, Alaska, United States
Actions
Shelly Thomas is a licensed Professional Engineer, Microsoft Certified Trainer (pending), and founder of Building Beta Executive Coaching, where she helps C-suite leaders navigate AI transformation without losing their authority in the room.
Her professional foundation spans 20+ years across oil and gas, manufacturing, industrial distribution, and engineering. She managed Fortune 500 client relationships at Morton Salt's Industrial Division, directed a $550 million global eCommerce operation at Chart Industries, and has designed training programs for complex enterprise deployments including Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft 365 Copilot Agents, and Oracle.
Her coaching philosophy, you cannot automate what you cannot explain, shapes every training program she designs. She builds Microsoft 365 Copilot curriculum that meets executives where they actually are: time-starved, skeptical, and accountable for outcomes their boards can measure.
Shelly serves on the UAA College of Engineering Advisory Board, co-chairs Alaska's Women in Engineering Advisory Board across UAA and UAF, and hosts the Breaking Frozen Ground podcast focused on Alaska's engineering community. She currently holds dual roles as Senior Project Manager at Resource Data and founder of Building Beta Executive Coaching.
She is based in Alaska, and yes, she genuinely loves it there.
Area of Expertise
Topics
From Boardroom to Back Office: Training Executives on Copilot Across the Stakes Spectrum
From Boardroom to Back Office: Training Executives on Copilot Across the Stakes Spectrum
Here is what nobody tells you about training executives on Copilot: the moment you say "prompt," you have already lost the room.
Execs do not want training. They want speed, clarity, and decisions. But the room changes depending on who is sitting in it. An SMB owner with a thin team and zero patience needs a completely different entry point than a VP reporting to a board with governance obligations and investor scrutiny. Most MCTs are taught one version of Copilot enablement. This session gives you two gears.
You will learn a repeatable framework for executive-facing Copilot sessions that lands in the first five minutes and holds trust through the demo. We start with the foundation that works in every executive room: framing Copilot as a decision accelerator, choosing demos that build credibility instead of triggering skepticism, and closing with adoption steps that fit real-world chaos. Then we raise the stakes. You will learn how to layer in governance-aware coaching, safe use boundaries, and board-ready language for executives operating under regulatory or reputational pressure.
This is trainer-to-trainer. Built from a year of corporate Copilot training, including the sessions that bombed and the ones that earned repeat business. You will leave with a session flow you can use Monday morning, demo patterns that work across the stakes spectrum, and a closing approach that turns executive curiosity into confident repeat use.
Whether your next room is a 12-person SMB leadership team or a publicly traded C-suite, you will walk out ready to deliver.
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top