From Novice to Expert: Building a Power Platform Career with AI

Mark Smith: 0:19
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Copenhagen, in Denmark. He works at Projectum as a senior consultant. He was first awarded as MVP in 2024. He is certified on the Power Platform as a senior consultant. He was first awarded as MVP in 2024. He is certified on the Power Platform as a solution architect as well as a Power Platform evangelist. He writes blog posts, runs a YouTube channel featuring the Power Platform training material. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Soren.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 1:15
Thank you very much, Mark. Thanks for having me. That's quite an introduction.

Mark Smith: 1:20
Good to have you on the show and I'm looking forward to hearing your story. And you know what your journey has been, of course, into the Power Platform. You know how did your career take you that way. But before we get going, tell me a bit about food, family and fun. What do you do when you're not, um, in front of your computer?

Soren Lauszus Weber: 1:41
yes, um so fun, let's talk with that. Um so I'm pretty excited about making music. Um so I've been uh, drumming, playing guitars, and also actually I have a made a little bit of hip-hop rap earlier in my life, but everything sort of in relation to music. I have an electronic drum kit at home set up right now and also have a guitar just lying around, so music is a pretty big part of my life. That's one of those things that just de-stresses you and gets you in a different mood and different vibe.

Mark Smith: 2:20
Yes, yes, so that's fun. Tell me about food.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 2:27
Oh, that's a good question. So I like cooking. Definitely my go-to is Mexican food. It can be a bit tricky to find it, always in Denmark. It's getting better, but yeah, trying new recipes. In general sort of grew up with parents that wanted me to. We had to cook from when we were kids, so sort of got the hang of that early. So I like experimenting with different kinds of things. My mom used to travel in ex-Yugoslavia a lot so she sort of picked up a lot of dishes from there as well. So sort of always been exposed to a lot of different types of food. So, yeah, but you know how it is, there's always staples and so there's always your sort of go-to. For me it's lasagna. It just always works. But yeah, I like trying a lot of different things. I'm not a picky eater, so I'll eat anything.

Mark Smith: 3:31
Nice, nice. Who's the most famous author in Denmark?

Soren Lauszus Weber: 3:38
Oh, that's a good question. Well, I mean, I guess everybody knows sort of Hans Christian Andersen and Kierkegaard and stuff like that, actually, in terms of modern authors.

Mark Smith: 3:52
I was thinking Hans Christian Andersen. I didn't realize that he was so prolific when he. You know the little mermaid um, the ugly duckling, you know, which are very famous in, in, in, I know english culture, snow queen, um, and even the the emperor's new clothes, which I I liken that in it. So often I use that story to go like is anyone going to call out this is just marketing, there's actually no reality here whatsoever and we're all believing, like right now, I feel that's where we are with agents. Everyone's like, oh, agents are amazing, we're doing it. And I'm just like the concept is amazing. I agree, I think I'm going to give it another year before I'm going to start going. Hey, it's going to totally change my life, you know, as in, yeah, definitely.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 4:42
Yeah, it's one of those things for you, because we also do so. I sometimes do like AI courses and sort of, and people are they're happy about the. You know, when you're if you're taking it sort of from a very basic level, without getting too much into technology, because we're still doing the, the non-technology talk, but just just clearing this topic out of the way um, I still want to see that thing where you know you're talking to people and they really go like, yes, I can definitely see how I can use this in my life. Um, because there are some of the things and and just on a basic level talking co-pilot or chat, gpt and stuff like that there are things where people will say, okay, this is faster or this is nicer and yeah, it's good, but it's not that sort of epiphany or sort of that.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 5:28
Okay, this is really going to be awesome. I can really see this. I'm going to go home and use this straight away. I'm going to go home and use this straight away. So I completely know what you mean with the agents. It's a little bit of a. It's being sold as sort of it's going to be, it's groundbreaking, it's going to change the world forever.

Mark Smith: 5:47
But yeah, let's see, let's see, let's see. Yeah, as in, the, marketing always seems to be head of the reality. Tell me how did you get into the Power Platform? How did you first come across it? What was the first day that you remember being exposed to the power platform?

Soren Lauszus Weber: 6:05
so it was, uh, it was actually. It was pretty much five years ago. Uh, I started with, uh, I started with or actually I took. I was at um project from the company I worked with. They had a. They had a course sort of the Power Apps in a Day, so they were running those in Denmark and I attended one of those courses and I didn't have any experience with the Power Platform whatsoever.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 6:29
But then I just sort of I could see there was something about this. This was pretty exciting and I was at that point. I was sort of looking for a little bit of career change in my life. I wanted to. I wasn't working with IT at that point. I was sort of looking for a little bit of career change in my life. I wasn't working with IT at that moment, but I wanted to do that. I could see this is sort of because I've always been a bit of a tech guy, a little bit of a sort of nerdy. So I knew I sort of wanted to do that and I hadn't sort of worked with that properly and so I thought OK, and then I sent them an application and they were.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 6:58
So I thought, okay, I, and then I sent them a, an application, and they were like, okay, you don't really have any experience, but they were starting out Projectum at that time with the power platform, just sort of early days, and didn't really know a lot about it themselves, so we could sort of go on the journey together. So they were like, all right, we'll, let's see what happens if we hire somebody that doesn't know anything about it. That's going to sort of learn on the job. So, yeah, it started out like that and fortunately I just hit it right at the right time, the right place, the right time and then just, yeah, immediately fell in love with it, because it was such a in terms of not knowing, sort of not having a, because I wasn't sort of established in IT, I hadn't been, I wasn't a developer, I didn't know sort of, I wasn't an IT consultant before that.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 7:48
But because of the Power Platform, it's just so there's so many things that it's easy to pick up and when you sort of, if you have the right tools for it and a little bit of drive for it, then it's really easy. And that's also what sort of drives me when I'm doing the sort of my own blogging and YouTube channels, is that I like the idea of saying to somebody if you come from nothing, you can still do this pretty easily. It's sort of it's not like a huge barrier. Yeah, without getting too much into that, but that was my start in the pop platform five years ago, starting with Projectum.

Mark Smith: 8:54
And what's your role now? So, after five years, how would you describe yourself to somebody asking?

Soren Lauszus Weber: 9:03
So fortunately it's still a lot of the same. So of course it's taking on more responsibility, but fortunately I can still use a lot of my time working with companies, helping them. We're making apps for them. We have sort of a standard solution, so we have some managed solutions that we're installing already and then sort of configuring on top of that. But I get to use a lot of my time.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 9:32
I was actually just before this call. I was just doing adding fields, making a form, making views, stuff like that, because we work in model ribbon apps mostly, so not Canvas apps that much. So just doing just basic Power Platform stuff, which is which is just really really nice. I get to do that. But then also I mean with the, slowly in time it started becoming also more mentoring, helping others, sort of getting better. So so when there's new people starting in the company, helping them, and then also I'm sort of internally within Productum, I'm sort of what we call a tech lead, so also sort of setting the what to call, setting a framework and setting the direction for how we work with the Power Platform. What is sort of best practice stuff like that for how we work with the Power Platform? What is sort of best practice stuff like that. So get to use as much as my knowledge and ideas about it as much as possible, which is awesome. So I get to talk about the Power Platform all day.

Mark Smith: 10:40
What are you most proud of in your career?

Soren Lauszus Weber: 10:42
So so far it's definitely been. I mean, being here and being able to work with this and I mean the MVP title is, of course, something that I'm really proud of. It's sort of getting the recognition for all the work, but in general I just sort of what I'm driven about is or what I'm driven what drives me is just being able to help people. So every single day, seeing that sort of I'm able to either make it easier or make it nicer, or sort of being able to help someone towards the goals, it's usually the realization of, okay, we had this process before, we were working in Excel sheets or we were working in whatever sort of old school software and saying, okay, then we moved to the Power Platform, everything was just so much nicer and snappier and easier. And the fact that they could also sort of immediately make changes themselves. See it themselves, they don't have to be a developer, it could be citizen developers and we can make everybody a citizen developer.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 11:52
I love seeing that thing, because there's always that you know, like, if you have an SAP system and they're saying, okay, we need a new field, well, it's going to take two consultants two weeks to make a new field, but here it's just, you can just do it yourself. I can show you how to do it, and that's fine. We'll do a quick session and then next week you'll just make your own fields, it's no problem. I love that aspect. That really is sort of it makes me happy every day that I can say you know what? You don't even need to pay me for it, you can just do it yourself pay me for it.

Mark Smith: 12:28
You can just do it yourself, it's fine. Tell me you know, in the evangelist type role you will. I assume that you have a bag of stories that you tell right when you want to illustrate a point or you know something about the power platform it might be. You refer to working in a particular industry, on a particular project, on a particular workload. What are kind of those key ones that you pull out to from time to time, those stories that you tell with that evangelist hat on to get to inspire potential future customers of the art of the possible?

Soren Lauszus Weber: 13:03
Yeah, so I have. There's actually this one guy that was just there's. Of course there's a couple, but there's one that sort of comes to mind immediately that sort of. And in the beginning I had been a little pensive, I was thinking, okay, because he seemed sort of he was like a little bit of an old school guy. That was sort of he was and sort of his approach seemed like he just wanted us to do it and sort of his approach seemed like he just wanted us to do it.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 13:26
But then he became a little bit curious about that. I think he sort of switched also or something switched in his mind about sort of the platform, the possibilities, and then he started also being curious about it. And you could see that when he was applying that curiosity. And then at one point he said we were supposed to do a sort of a training session or something like that. And before the training session he had been in there not even making new fields or changes to forms, he had also been making changes to business processes, he'd been making changes to scripts, he'd been making all these kinds of things. I was sort of blown away by it. I was thinking, wow, this guy, this is amazing. I mean we have a consultant working for us that don't do that within the first six months, and he was just doing it within a couple of weeks. So sort of that curiosity. But it also said that I don't know how tech minded he was. Of course it requires a little bit of ability to do that, but still, I was just amazed that he was able to do that.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 14:29
And every single time where we yeah, I can always bring up that story that I mean we have this guy that just he just does it and I don't have to worry about it, it's not like, ah, you shouldn't really touch that because then you might break things. I know whenever he does something, he'll do it the right way. He thinks about it. He something, he'll do it the right way he thinks about it. He knows that should I do this, should I do this? And then if he's in doubt he'll write to us. But most of the times he'll make great stuff and he's happy, the company's happy and we're happy. I mean it's fine that we're not billing them, because they're always happy, because they're doing exactly the things they want themselves. So they also feel the sense of autonomy and feel like they own their own software on the platform and they can sort of control it, and so they sort of yeah, they take ownership of it in a greater way. It's amazing to see. So, yeah, that's definitely my go-to story.

Mark Smith: 15:24
You've got the whole tool set that makes up the Power Platform. If you're only allowed to work with two of the tools, which two tools would you not give up?

Soren Lauszus Weber: 15:39
So how are we defining the tools? Are we talking about….

Mark Smith: 15:43
So Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages, Power BI we'll even leave that one in there. And what's that? Is that all our powers? Yeah, I think that's most of them. I'll even give you AI Builder in the mix as well.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 15:59
Yeah. So I would say I mean Power Apps. Of course I have to say that Power Pages, so it's also easy for me because I don't do a lot of power pages. So so I don't think I see a lot of the. I don't think I see as much of the potential in it as there there is. Um, I realize some of the things you can do with it, but but we don't.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 16:22
Uh, the customers we're working with don't really use PowerPages, so I guess it's sort of free for me to just, yeah, we'll just throw that away. So sorry to anyone that's actually just really crazy about PowerPages. But yeah, so we'll keep PowerApps and definitely Power BI, because it's always what sort of ties everything together. I mean, without the reporting it's sort of I feel like we're still halfway there, or I mean somebody's got to look at the data at some point and it's also the people that are paying for the bill a lot of the times they're on the Power BI side. They're not always using the Power Apps themselves. So I would say it would make it pretty impossible to get rid of Power BI, and I also really like Power BI. But I think Power BI is sort of a. It's sort of they snuck it in there. I'm not. I mean, it's not, it's power platform, but it's. I mean, is it the same power platform as PowerApps and PowerPages and Power Automate? Actually, power Automate, oh man, I can't. Yeah, that's really tough.

Mark Smith: 17:39
I'm surprised you're giving up your automation layer.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 17:43
Yeah, no, I just realized, but it's yeah. Oh man, this is impossible.

Mark Smith: 17:51
You've got some charting objects in Power Apps right that you could use.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 17:54
Yeah, yeah, I mean I guess I could use Logic Apps and model-driven, yeah, I guess I could use Logic Apps so I could go the Azure route instead of Power Automate in a lot of cases, you could use PCF to build out your visualizations. That's true. Oh, that would be a nightmare. I mean because I'm not good enough for that.

Mark Smith: 18:19
Interesting, Interesting thought experiment right.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 18:22
Definitely. Yeah, that's a fun one. That's a fun one.

Mark Smith: 18:25
Yeah, I fundamentally feel that within five years, none of us will touch Power, automate Nobody. All Logic Apps, how? So? It'll all be done by AI. The tool will still be there, we just will not need to go. What trigger will I use? I think it'll be much more us explaining what we need, and it then creates an optimized version or way of doing it. It'll decide what APIs it needs to consume. Where does the data sit? You know, is this going to be an on-demand? Is it going to be synchronous or asynchronous? All those type of things. I think AI will run the pros and cons and make the best informed decision at a speed much faster than what we could manually do it if we were attempting to build those at ourselves.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 19:17
I think that's a good point. I remember when was it April Dunham that did the?

Mark Smith: 19:22
I think that about Power Apps as well, I think.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 19:24
I mean, april Dunham did the demo last year at the Power Platform Conference in Las Vegas where she showed the sort of the first co-pilot things that were happening in Power Automate and already then. So we're talking a year ago and they had just started with actually rolling out Power or co-pilot and the AI and already then it was actually pretty awesome. You could do a lot. You could tell it. Hey, I just want a flow that does this and this and this, and it's only becoming more powerful each month and quarter and year. So I think you have a good point there.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 19:55
The question about, of course, power Apps is, I mean, it goes both ways, because it's still a question of. There's so many things that goes into into it the, the whole, talking about the, the design process, but of course, it could be that the, that that we're then just using all of our time talking, talking about the design process and talking about the, all the things behind, and talking about the, the process and the sort of the human interaction in it, and what do you want to do? And and not doing the app itself? Um, it's, it's it an interesting thought and it'll be really interesting to see where we are in five years.

Mark Smith: 20:35
The next five years, I think, are just going to be literally mind-blowing as into how far or how fast we will travel. You know. For me, even just as talking to you, then I just wonder, by the end of 2025, how much of our screen, our computer monitors, will be fully AI aware. So therefore, you know to be able to interact through a microphone, through a keyboard or a mouse if we want, but it will have context of where our mouse is, what our focus area is on screen area is on screen, and therefore be able to literally say, or even you imagine it running in the background and looking at the repetitive patterns that we do and how we do work, and it just starts learning them. It just starts you do, you do it this way, you do it that way, and then you know one day it says do you want me to help you with that? And all of a sudden it does it in a fraction of the time and then it goes you what I can actually improve on, how this could work, because you have not been thinking about this functionality and it could be.

Mark Smith: 21:34
I'm not educated on it. So I'm like educate me on it, bang it educates me on it, and I'm like heck, I had a blind spot to that way of doing it. It picked up the blind spot. It helped me with it. Now we can more efficient, create better experiences, whatever it might be. I just think that, yeah, a lot's going to change in the next five years.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 21:56
No, and I agree it's fun. I had an experience earlier this week with one of the. We have a student worker here and she was showing me how. You know, it's this thing where somebody is showing you how they work with Power Apps and you're like I don't do it that way, you do it in a different way. We're supposed to be clicking on the same menus, we're supposed to be doing the same things, but we're actually not. We're doing it in different ways. And she showed me a way that she was working and I'm like that was really smart.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 22:25
I never thought of that. I've been doing it for five years and I didn't realize I could do that. And she's like yeah, it'll save you a lot of time. Yeah, and but just back to your point that AI could definitely point that out. For me, it could just have improved that immensely straight away. And so it's just yeah, we get stuck in our own ways. We get stuck in sort of doing things the same way because we know that's how to do it. It's just like people that still use classic mode or legacy mode. But yeah, I mean Microsoft is putting a lot of money into making Copilot much better every single day. So I definitely agree. A lot of things are coming.

Mark Smith: 23:07
If someone asks you for advice about taking a career in the Power Platform, now is it too late. Do you think there's much runway? What advice would you give them?

Soren Lauszus Weber: 23:18
I think there's still going to be a lot of demand for it, because I don't think I mean, even if AI makes it easier, I don't think it's going away, so I don't think it's, and so I don't think it's, and it's also one of those fields, that is.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 23:33
I think one thing is that it's because it's so easy to pick up, just sort of relatively speaking, as opposed to saying, okay, you have to learn C-sharp or whatever from the ground up.

Soren Lauszus Weber: 23:45
It's pretty easy to become a citizen developer and start making apps, and then you sort of graduate into making more awesome apps, and then it's sort of it's also at least for me it was sort of a gateway into all other Microsoft things. So then you because then you sort of get to okay, then you're also doing a little bit of things in Azure, and then you're also doing a little bit of things in SharePoint or whatever. So it's sort of for me at least you're never really just completely doing Power Platform stuff. So even if the Power Platform develops into something where you're not really needed as much as a developer anymore, then there's still other, as long as you sort of keep your ear to the ground and sort of also are willing to learn new things, then I would definitely say getting into Power Apps is still a great thing, but then, of course, keep learning and expanding your skillset. That's what we all need to do anyway, right?

Mark Smith: 24:48
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffeecom forward slash NZ365 guy. Thanks again and see you next time. Thank you.