Mark Smith: 0:14 Welcome to the Copilot Show, where I interview Microsoft staff innovating with AI. I hope you will find this podcast educational and inspire you to do more with this great technology. Now let's get on with the show. My guest today is Wim, someone I've had the privilege of knowing since 2012. He was already a Microsoft MVP and I was just starting my journey. Wim is a remarkable individual, a gentle yet strong soul with incredible technical expertise paired with a kind and humble spirit. He's a master storyteller, using software as his canvas to craft compelling narratives. With years of experience, Wim has been the creative force behind some of the most memorable on-stage demos at Microsoft Technology events. I'm excited to dive into this journey and insights today. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Wim. Wim Coorevits: 1:14 Wow, mark. Thank you, Good to have you on, mate. I'm not sure how I'm going to live up to all those expectations from that intro, but thank you so much. I'm happy to be here. Mark Smith: 1:24 It's so good to have you on the show and as I've known you for quite a long time and I've seen your journey both as an MVP and then, of course, inside Microsoft, where you have had a massive impact over the years, both behind the scenes and, of course, on stage, doing some amazing big event demos in the business application space with Microsoft. Before we get into your journey, your tech career and what you're up to nowadays and what's top of mind for you going into 2025, tell me a bit about food, family and fun. Wim Coorevits: 1:54 Let me start with family. It's basically my wife, my son and myself here, all based in the area of Seattle. Family and fun. Let me start with family. It's basically my wife, my son and myself here, all based in the area of Seattle, washington. As you can probably hear from the accent, I'm originally actually from Belgium, so all the rest of our family is still back there and I guess we kind of abandoned them in a way to have this role here at Microsoft at headquarters. So that's the family part I would guess. Wim Coorevits: 2:19 Like, what I like to do with my family is like we like to cycle up, like there's lots of mountain bike parks here in the area, so we really enjoy that. And since about a year and a year and a half ago, I really got into like Zwift as well. So this indoor cycling it's like e-gaming or e-sports as they call it, and so I've actually lost a lot of weight just cycling Indoor. It's safe, it's warm, it's cozy, compared to, of course, the Seattle weather, which is, like 10 months, 12 months, really bad. So that's the fun part Lots of cycling, lots of mountain biking, getting outdoors. We have a dog as well, so that's outdoors as well. And then the food part like being Belgium, I think the safest choice, of course, is going to be chocolate. Mark Smith: 3:01 Absolutely. And what about beer? Wim Coorevits: 3:03 Belgium beer is pretty famous yeah it is, but I'm not really a beer drinker, so I'll stick to chocolate, stick to chocolate. Wim Coorevits: 3:11 Chocolate works all the time, any time of the day, any occasion. Chocolate is a good go-to for anyone, so true. How often do you get back to Belgium? I think as a family, like we, would try to go every two years, but I end up more often there because of like sometimes events or being in the neighborhood because of like work reasons. I'll try to kind of squeeze in a visit to my family back in Belgium as well. Mark Smith: 3:38 Are you going back in 2025? That's giving away the surprises for the family, I guess, oh of course, yes, no, I'm kidding, here's the thing I could twist your arm, see, is that I'm going from New Zealand up to Slovenia for a conference called Dynamics Minds, and I went last year and they invited me the first year. This will be the third year it's running, and I tell you what it is the best conference experience you will ever experience in your life. Wim Coorevits: 4:07 Like so many questions, as a result of that I've been to a lot of conferences. Mark Smith: 4:11 Right, the difference with this conference is that it's in Slovenia. Most people can't say that they've been to Slovenia and it's kind of like your hardcore tech sessions all through the day, but the night turns into like a carnival atmosphere and they go hard out. It's right on the Adriatic Sea, beautiful sunsets, you know the sailboats out on the harbor. They put up this massive stage, they bring in DJs, food, just amazing, amazing food, and musical and theatrics and everything experience and it's a big deal.
Wim Coorevits: 4:54 Is it like a great vacation with there happens to be some technical content? Mark Smith: 4:59 It's hardcore Microsoft right. The whole thing is all around. You know, dynamics Minds is a play on Dynamics right 365. The originators were more as in the company that puts it on is an ISV in the truest sense of the word. But there's a full power platform track. There's a full dynamics, ce, fno and which have also covers. You know NavVision history at VC, of course, now and then there's a business track and there's a partner track. It's a really robust, you know, conference. I should see if I can get you on the invite list. Wim Coorevits: 5:34 Yeah, how important do you think is the location there, like, can you replicate this somewhere else? No, do you feel? Mark Smith: 5:39 No Location's critical. This ISV has done one of the smartest things that all ISVs over the world should take a leaf out of their playbook. Rather than going and having a booth at any number of conferences, right where you're just one in a crowded booth hall of many people, they did something quite unique and that they were like hang on, how can we flip this on this head? Could we bring all our customers to us by putting on a high value event that people would want to attend, which we will host? And the beauty is, you know, the cost of things in Slovenia is, I think, more economical than other. But, like, if you try to run the same event in London or Paris or something like that, it would be X-y, it would be quite a pricey event. So they've probably got an advantage. Mark Smith: 6:25 On accommodation, transportation, you know you've got planes, trains, automobiles, ship you can take any of those scenarios to get there. They all work. I took them all last time, apart from ship. Did I get it on a boat? Yeah, all work. I took them all last time, apart from ship. Did I get it on a boat? Yeah, it's the only one I did. Ah, I did. I did because I was in Venice before the event and, of course, the only way around Venice right is on the canal boat, so I did do actually all modes of transport last year. Anyhow, highly recommend. I'm actually going to talk to the organizers and see if we can get you a spot, maybe the keynote address or something like that. Mark Smith: 6:56 I think there's probably much better speakers for a keynote there than I am you would love this, but I appreciate it and you can go to Belgium, you know, on your way home, type thing, or do your stopover through there. Mark Smith: 7:08 Anyhow, I digress, I digress, I digress. Tell me I gave a bit in the intro of your tech career as a Microsoft MVP and then going blue badge and working for Microsoft. But take us just a little bit before that. How did you become an MVP? What were you doing at the time? And then why did you choose to go into Microsoft? And then a bit of your Microsoft journey. That would be awesome. Wim Coorevits: 7:32 Sure, I mean, I started my career as a developer building web applications in a marketing agency and the main thing I learned there was that I love to combine like technology and business, like making that bridge between like these business problems and then solving it with technology ASP, vbscript, super basic and it became a little like after a few years first job, like I was like ready for the next challenge and I accepted a role as a trainer for NET development so I taught other people how to build Windows applications, web applications with NET and the colleagues there. They were really amazing. There was a company called U2U. They're based in Belgium. They did trainings across the world and we had multiple MVPs for SharePoint and for other technologies within that company. So they were great examples for me on what they did During the day they were teaching classes, but then they used that knowledge as well to educate the community and connect to the community and learn them about great new technology that Max was bringing up, and so I think that kind of inspired me to go do the same and it took a while to kind of find kind of where I wanted to do that but like I landed in, like as you know, as an MVP in the dynamics in the business apps world. Again, going back to what I learned in my first job really loving that combination of technology and business and I was looking in how to translate that I thought like there's no better place than to do that than with business applications, because that's what they're designed to do. And so that's how I landed in dynamic CRM back that day like CRM 3.0. And then we went to 4.0. And that's when I started really kind of engaging in the business app space and I started doing like sessions, like for the local community in Belgium and like starting to get engaged in the community there. Wim Coorevits: 9:30 And that's how I became an MVP really is like out of this passion of I'm using technology day in, day out and then leveraging that to share it with the world. I never thought of it that way. I never started with, oh, I want to become an MVP. It's just something that I love doing. I love talking about all the stuff I learned and all the things you could do with it, and so that's kind of how I rolled into. And now I'm doing this session for Microsoft and now I'm going to speak at an event, and now I'm going to do this and I'm writing a blog post or whatsoever, and so I almost rolled into it without truly realizing it, but it was all driven by this passion for making that bridge from technology to the business, and that's kind of how I ended up becoming an MVP in that context of being a trainer as a next step, because we could talk probably the entire podcast about all the steps in my career. Wim Coorevits: 10:20 But I think that the common thread is really that combination of technology and business, because, like what I learned doing those, like as a NET trainer, I started training like Dynamics RAM courses as well. What I learned there was that I love to do introductions courses as well. What I learned there was that I love to do introductions. Like I noticed in the course, like, oh, we're gonna talk about all these amazing things and this is what you can do with it and that's the value. And then, okay, now we have to go do it. Oh, no, like, this is so boring, like all the little steps to actually make it happen. And then the next chapter oh, this is gonna be amazing because there's all these amazing things and you can do these different types of applications with it and it's going to be so cool and then okay, now we have to look at the details to do it. And so I really learned from myself that I love to do introductions and kind of evangelize technology. And that brought me into pre-sales, like when I was looking at my next challenge like, oh well, maybe pre-sales is my thing, because it's exactly this type of thing where I will look at a business problem that a customer has and then I'll look at technology and see how this technology can fit to solve that problem. And that's how I landed in pre-sales. I was an MVP there, like I continued to be like an MVPvp for dynamic serum at that time. Wim Coorevits: 11:38 But my biggest plus or my biggest value at a time was that because of being a dot net trainer, I had a very broad kind of exposure to my acts of technology, a lot of colleagues who did sharepoint, lots of culture, pure dot net development, and so my value really that I thought of as a pre-sales was like you know, some people like if you have a hammer, everything is a nail right. So my value really that I thought of as a pre-sales was like you know, some people like if you have a hammer, everything is a nail right, and my value was like that was not my situation because, yes, I loved and I was super passionate about dynamics, but I knew that some cases like maybe SharePoint was better or in some cases, maybe custom development was better, and so that was awesome in my time as a pre-sales consultant was really that I could look at a problem and translate or build a solution that was really fitting to what the problem was, and maybe that meant dynamics with SharePoint or maybe that meant something else. So that's kind of what I enjoyed doing for a while and that's really also the point where I got exposed a lot to Microsoft and how I ended up with Microsoft as a technology strategist. I was for partners, which was a partner technology strategist basically doing the same how do I help partners do pre-sales, how do I help partners kind of like scale and how do I like make sure that they learn all the new capabilities and possibilities? And so, interestingly enough, like, all these steps in my career is always a buildup. Wim Coorevits: 13:02 Like, if you would look at my LinkedIn, it's like some people I'm sure would think like this is so random from a developer to a trainer, to pre-sales, to then a partner technology strategist to then a product marketing manager in Office 365 for data center expansion. How did that happen? What's the connection there? And for me there's a super clear connection, but like someone looking at it without any context, I'm sure it's a bit more challenging and the link there is really pretty simple, like when I was a pts, when I was a part of technology strategist. Wim Coorevits: 13:35 Like you always look at the big events and you see Microsoft and during the keynotes there's someone doing a demo, and that someone was typically a product marketing manager or a technical product marketer and I was like that's awesome, that's the job I want to do, because it's closed on technology and it takes new technology and translate it into the value for all those customers listening. This is like the next level of pre-sales. That's what I want to do. And so I simply looked at the title of these people and I started looking at microsoft career side, like are there any jobs that are this specific role? Because I want to go do this. I want to be that person doing the demo, and so that was for me, the next level of resales was becoming a product marketer and doing those demos, but within the business app space. Like that role never opened and to me that makes sense because it was, of course, the best job in the world, so no one would want to leave that right. And so I had a mentor at that time that said, like maybe you should like open up your eyes a little bit more and look beyond just Dynamics. And that's how I ended up in Office 365 as like a technical product marketer there. Wim Coorevits: 14:45 It was fun, I learned a lot. Like it was crazy move, because that's the move that made me go from Belgium to the US. It moved me from Dynamics into the Office 365 space. It's a place where I had no network at all, like the network I had was all MVPs in business apps, was all the Microsofties in business apps. So it was a crazy move New country, new job, like new technology. But I learned a lot and it was great. I would do it again. But I learned after a year like okay, this isn't perfect, because I was missing my connection to the business, because I was talking about data center expansion. It was mostly about is my data going to be stored in my country or in my region? Wim Coorevits: 15:25 Because I care about that compliance or whatever reasons, and so it was a checkbox and, while I learned a lot about messaging this type of stuff, it was like, yeah, I can be passionate about it. Messaging this type of stuff, like it was like, yeah, I can be passionate about it. And that's when I came back to business apps, really, because I realized, like my next job and any next job after that. Wim Coorevits: 15:45 I need to make sure that it's always around something which I can be passionate about, and that's going back to the common thread technology and business somehow combined. So I landed in the Power Platform space. Like Power Apps was brand new at that time. Power Automate was new. They were still called different at that time, like Flow and those type of things, and I started building demos for like Power Platform and I like looking back at that period and then I never looked at it that way. Wim Coorevits: 16:13 But Ryan Cunningham once introduced me to like another part of the team and he said hey, everyone, this is Wim. Wim Coorevits: 16:19 Wim has been representing the power platform for two years straight on every single platform in the like any single stage in the world. Wim Coorevits: 16:29 And I was like, well, like that sounds exaggerated. Wim Coorevits: 16:31 And then I started thinking about it. Wim Coorevits: 16:33 I was like, well, maybe, but maybe it is true in some way right, like, yes, like at that time I was traveling the world with James Phillips doing his keynotes, doing the demos there, either being on stage myself, either being backstage supporting someone else to do the demo, or someone was doing the demo that I built for the keynote purposes. So, in a way, like Ryan, as usual, was right and like, even though it sounded like an exaggeration, it it was in a way, true, so it was interesting to hear someone else talk about it that way and like get this perspective that I didn't have before that. Actually, yeah, I've been building a lot of demos that have been used, especially on those early days, every single stage across the world, and that's kind of a fun memory to think back of and a lot of good kind of experiences came out of that period as well, doing demos and doing keynotes at that level in your mind what was the biggest catalyst between dynamics, crm or, you know, dynamics 365 CRM that we had back then? Mark Smith: 18:06 And I mean because at the end of the day it was low code, right, we could easily produce other apps without being customer relationship management. But you would have seen the different leaders, as I saw right, go through pre-James Phillips and I feel like we were on a steady curve. I remember being in the Advanta campus and the kind of inside joke was biz apps paid for the Microsoft end of the year barbecue, right. In other words, the revenues it produced was like it might cover a group lunch. You know, kind of joking, joking, joking. Mark Smith: 18:44 And then we saw Dynamics 365 come into play, the unification of a lot of the applications from a go-to-market perspective, and we saw the kind of between 2016 and 2019, the coming together of the power platform really gotten its name power platform 2019. But in 2016 we saw you know it was power apps and flow etc. Back then, what was the biggest catalyst going on behind the scenes that created almost this hockey stick effect of then growth and adoption around the world? In your mind, looking from the inside, what do you think were the big catalysts, that transformational piece inside microsoft and its go-to-market I'm not sure if you have a good view on that. Wim Coorevits: 19:32 I'm not sure if it's something that is actually a decision that's made at Microsoft right Product market fit. That kind of happened at some point with like Very important, this technology now works for a large amount of people. My expertise, if I may say so, like back when I was working in Dynamics Firm, was not sales marketing or service Like. I was super gung-ho on like this is XRM. You can build any relationship management with this thing, and that was my like. I was a strong believer in XRM back in the day and it was always a fight to convince others about like hey, you're not buying a sales tool, you're buying a platform. Wim Coorevits: 20:11 Like that was my message all the time and so, but it didn't pick up at that time and I think a lot of it was well, because the world wasn't ready for it, that back then because everything needed to be bespoke or needed to be built or was better if it was like perfect, fit or whatsoever, and I think it's just kind of like the world almost got ready for it because of like I mean, there's multiple factors there, right, like there's oh, like it's really hard to get the right people to build things. Wim Coorevits: 20:39 Building things takes a long time. It's like that entire same story that we had back then around the xrm, like the buy versus built and kind of how this is the perfect thing in between. Like yes, you can buy a bus to go from a to b, but it's not going to get you exactly from a to, exactly to b. Or you can buy a car, which I compared to building, like yes, you buy the super expensive car, you can do everything you want with it. You can drive exactly a, exactly b. Or you can do xrm buy some platform which is like a taxi and you pay for, like exactly where you get picked up and where you get drunk guys. So that's kind of how I used to compare it and I think, because of all the challenges and the world, kind of thinking at that time and kind of the need around resources and things need to go faster. Wim Coorevits: 21:28 I think that helped kind of accelerate a lot of those things. And Power Apps became the low-code platform. Part of that is just how things evolved and how it came together. In those early days with Project Sienna I considered it a nice tool. It was a pre-sales tool. Like hey, you're going to do a CRM pre-sales or a demo for a customer Great, why don't you start with Project Sienna? Because if you show like a customized mobile app that does exactly the specific tasks that you wanted to do, that the customer wants, the customer is like this is amazing, this is exactly what I need, I want it and like, yeah, but if you want this, you first have to, of course, build the platform and buy. Mark Smith: 22:14 CRM. Wim Coorevits: 22:14 Yes, yes Do all these extra things on top of it, but like it's similar to how Power BI was ICANN in the beginning, also in pre-sales. Oh, let's show the numbers what it could be and what the outcome could be and then like, okay, how do I get there? Well, you need to do like your opportunities and your leads and qualified things and whatever it is, whether it's like in a sales scenario or sales marketing service, or whether it's in an XRM, like any relationship type of scenario. Sorry, not direct answer to your question. No, that's good. That's good. Mark Smith: 22:47 And I learned a good thing there, because I had never, when I always did the build versus buy, I never used that analogy that you used of bus, taxi and car, and I find you know, because I've had been in that pre-sales role myself most of my career is that your ability to translate into real-world scenarios for business people is so, so, so important than you know just talking about tech. And I love that because what I've noticed in the co-pilot world of the last six months and to a year that I've been involved in it, is that this build versus buy is coming into play again, which we hadn't I hadn't seen since 2012, 2013, right where now they're going. Co-pilot m365 is your buy, extend is another little play in there, which is Copilot Studio, and then, of course, your build is Foundry, and it's interesting that little nuance of play and ways of thinking about it we can upcycle and use it again. Wim Coorevits: 23:48 You'll find those slide decks again. Yes, yeah. Mark Smith: 23:51 I've still got them in some old archives. You know, I'm sure I have some external disks somewhere. Wim Coorevits: 23:56 On OneDrive. Mark Smith: 24:02 As I try to get everything onto one drive once it came out and I often, you know, I've got like 15 odd years, I think. Now I've stuffed back in there, and every now and again I see something come up in a presentation. I'm like I've got a good way of diagramming this, because it's in this old slider. We can just modernize the graphic and and it Tell me about what's your role now. Wim Coorevits: 24:18 Before I answer that I was thinking when you said like that. One of the changes that I witnessed more closely to home was when you said something around like how important it was to translate it into real kind of cases for customers. I think that was a change that we did, for example, with demos as well, where every time we build a demo, like the requirement was like start from a customer and not like Contoso or Northwind Traders or whatever Start from an actual customer. Wim Coorevits: 24:46 Yes, and then like take that and like yes, sometimes you need to up level that, or sometimes you need to add like a new feature to that, because no one has seen it yet. But like start from an actual business case to that because no one has seen it yet. But like start from an actual business case, and that's something we still do in my role today is like we start from a real case, from a real customer, so good. Wim Coorevits: 25:04 And then we kind of go from there and that's maybe a tie into like your questions, like what do I do now? Right now I'm the community lead for business apps, so everything which is Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, and that sounds super ambiguous, probably, but what that means is like in my team I have a set of evangelists, or really product experts, who build demos, demos for keynotes, the release wave videos that you see they're built on my team together with the studio. Like business application launch event, all the demos that are in kind of the presentation there, like, are all built by those evangelists. So we have a set of experts, product experts, who build demonstrations for keynote level events, let's say whether that's a video online or whether that's an in-person event. That's one set. And then we have community engagement. So everything which is community sites, the forums, like for Dynamics and for Power Platform, are managed in my team as well. So that's again a set of managing kind of the sites and kind of the engagement we do on that, making sure the monitoring, moderation around the forums and so forth. Wim Coorevits: 26:11 Then you have advocacy programs. The MVP program is one of the programs we run in there. Of course, mvp is a broad Microsoft program, but we fit into that as kind of the business apps, mvps and kind of support for that. But also other programs like super users, who are most active users on the forums, or user group leaders like you and others who kind of have their own local kind of user groups and kind of want to distribute, be an evangelist as well for Microsoft. And then events everything around kind of community events, is supported by my team as well. Wim Coorevits: 26:45 So that's already like four buckets, if you were going through it. You have like evangelism, which is really content creation. You have the community forums, the site there kind of how do we engage with the community on like an online kind of presence, and what comes with that as well is like LinkedIn and YouTube and all our social media channels for community. Then you have the events like how do we take all that content that we created and bring it to the people through community events and support content and send speakers, for example, for Dynamics Mines or any of the other events like Power Platform. Community is really big for us. And then all the advocacy programs which are somehow related to the community as well the MVPs, the user groups, the super leaders, the super users and so forth. So that's kind of the scope as a community lead. All that stuff kind of fits into the things that my team does here. Mark Smith: 27:38 So, if you look at your schedule for the year and the big events that are on, which ones are you directly involved in? Because, like I see more BizApps content in Build these days Ignite, of course, and then you've got the big community conference, like the Power Platform Conference in Vegas. Are there any others that you have your finger in, so to speak? Wim Coorevits: 27:59 Yeah, we get involved in first-party events. We don't run them on my team, it's a marketing team that organizes those and we typically get involved like oh, we need kind of a keynote type of stuff, so we're kind of fairly hands-off for those. It's mostly the community events. So the big ones for us, like our Platform Community Conference is our biggest one. If you think about the Dynamics example, you would have like the UG one. What is it called Dynamics Con? Yeah, anything in Europe Like European Power Platform Conference. Mark Smith: 28:32 Oh, you're involved in that as well. Wim Coorevits: 28:34 Yes, we were last year Like every year is kind of a new decision. Mark Smith: 28:37 Yeah. Wim Coorevits: 28:38 But, yes, like that's our bigger one in Europe for Power Platform and I'm involved, for example, in the BizApp Summit which is happening in Germany. So we get involved in different kind of levels. And actually one of the things we're working on right now is have this more like an event tiering strategy, because there's so many community events and we have limited scale on the teams. Like how do we decide which event you go support exactly? And like it's not that one is better than the other or worse than the other. It's like, okay, what is kind of an objective way to make a decision like this is one that we as a community are going to get involved in more than an other, and why. And so that's something that we're actively, for example, working through. Like what is that framework that we can use so that anytime someone comes ask us, hey, Microsoft, can you support my community event? We can go to the framework and say, oh, like looking at this, you're a tier three community event. This is how we can support you. Or you're something else, like maybe you should reach out to the local Microsoft office. Wim Coorevits: 29:41 It's never a decision about is this a good or a bad event. It's typically, if we could, we would support everyone, but we don't have the scale, we don't have those resources. So we need a way and we try to make that as objective as possible. For the really big ones it's kind of obvious because you can look at some of their sizes and the outcomes they run and kind of support them from there. But we get a lot of requests and so it's always a challenge to kind of it's never fun to say no. Unfortunately, we have to say no a lot because there's a lot of events, which is great. Mark Smith: 30:16 Well, with that, Wim, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure. Wim Coorevits: 30:20 Thank you, Mark. This was awesome. Thank you for having me. Mark Smith: 30:23 Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host, Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. Is there a guest you would like to see on the show from Microsoft? Please message me on LinkedIn and I'll see what I can do. Final question for you how will you create with Copilot today, ka kite?