Shelly Thomas
Shelly Thomas - Executive Coach and Corporate Trainer - M365 Copilot
Anchorage, Alaska, United States
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Shelly Thomas, PE, MBA is the founder of Building Beta and one of the few Copilot strategists who has actually run the operations she now teaches executives to transform.
Her career spans 20+ years across oil and gas, manufacturing, and industrial distribution, managing Fortune 500 relationships at Morton Salt's Industrial Division and directing global eCommerce operations at Chart Industries. She brings that same operational accountability into every training room.
Her programs are built for leaders who are time-starved, skeptical, and responsible for outcomes their boards can measure. The goal isn't to make executives into power users, it's to make them the kind of leader who spreads AI capability across their entire organization. The teams who go through her programs become the most valuable resource in the building. That's what she designs for.
Shelly serves on the UAA College of Engineering Advisory Board, co-chairs Alaska's Women in Engineering Advisory Board, and co-hosts the Breaking Frozen Ground podcast on engineering careers in Alaska. She is based in Alaska, and she operates exactly where you'd expect someone called the Copilot Strategist on the Last Frontier to operate.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Building a Copilot Curriculum That Sticks Across HR, Finance, Marketing, and Ops
Org-wide (Microsoft 365) Copilot training is where good intentions go to die.
Finance lives in Excel. HR lives in policy risk. Marketing is experimenting faster than governance can keep up. Ops wants time saved, not another initiative. And somewhere in the middle, an MCT is supposed to build one training that serves all of them. It does not work. Unless the design is modular.
This session gives you a practical curriculum architecture for cross-functional Copilot rollouts: a shared foundation that creates common vocabulary and safe habits, plus department-specific tracks that map to real workflows instead of generic prompts. You will learn how to sequence the rollout so momentum builds instead of stalling, how to identify and activate champions who keep adoption alive after the workshop ends, and how to measure results in ways leadership actually recognizes.
You will also get the shortlist of cross-functional rollout failures I have seen firsthand, including the ones I caused, and what to do instead.
This is not a theoretical framework. It is built from delivering Copilot enablement across departments where every team had a different definition of "useful" and a different threshold for patience. You will leave with a reusable training architecture, rollout sequencing guidance, and reinforcement patterns that turn a single workshop into lasting behavior change.
If you have ever watched a Copilot rollout go quiet two weeks after launch, this session is for you.
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.
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