Exploring the AI Frontier in UK with Simon Doy

Mark Smith: 0:14
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Leeds in the United Kingdom. He works at iThink365 as the Chief Technology Officer. When he is not involved in Microsoft 365, he loves music, gaming, skateboarding, snowboarding, lego and hanging out with his two kids and wife Now I assume that's two kids and not two wives, but two kids and a wife. A proud core member of the maturity model for Microsoft 365 since July 2020, and has been helping businesses and consultants understand the true value and impact of Microsoft 365 can have on their business. You can find links to his bio, social media etc. In the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Simon.

Simon Doy: 1:17
Hi there, Mark. How are we doing you okay?

Mark Smith: 1:20
Yeah, very good, Very good. I see you've got a lot of hobbies and activities there Snowboarding, skateboarding.

Simon Doy: 1:26
Lego, yes, yeah, and do you know what About? Last year? I got into climbing as well, actually, wow, yeah.

Mark Smith: 1:35
As in like fingers in the white powder. Yeah, wow.

Simon Doy: 1:40
Yeah, so bouldering, yeah. So a group of us go every Monday night. It's great fun, really really good fun. I don't know if you saw in the Olympics, but they were doing bouldering there, which is incredible, yeah really inspiring stuff. It's good fun, so cool so cool.

Mark Smith: 1:56
Tell me about Food, Family and Fun. What do they mean to you?

Simon Doy: 1:59
Food, family and fun. So food. I do like to cook a lot. I enjoy. I use it to kind of relax at the end of the day.

Simon Doy: 2:11
I generally do all the cooking in the house. It's nice to be able to just kind of catch up with everybody what's going on. We've started this routine, actually around the table, of what's been good today, what's been bad today. It's kind of almost like a daily stand-up with the kids and family. That's quite good. I love it, yeah. But we do Sunday roasts. My parents they live nearby as well and we get family and friends over and stuff like that. Yeah, and uh, being you know sort of near Bradford curries, Japanese food yeah, all that stuff is good. Family, uh, yeah.

Simon Doy: 2:45
So I'm trying to get the kids into climbing, uh, and trying to get. I've got a six-year-old and a ten-year-old, bethany, who's just reminded me that she's nearly 11, so so I had to tell you that and yeah, they sort of, yeah, they keep me on my toes. Bethany is a bit of a like a theatre star, so she's just doing, she's about to do an opera, so she's just going to be an opera and she's going to go touring around a few cities. But yeah, they're great fun, yeah, yeah, really fun. And yeah, hanging out with the missus and going on date nights and she's a doctor, so lots of late nights, which means I get more time with the kids and sorting them out, but yeah, and then fun climbing, a little bit of skateboarding, but not so much these days. I love music and, yeah, just hanging out with the kids, trying to get them out on their bikes and scooters and things like that.

Mark Smith: 3:40
I love it. I love it, love it. You sound like you have a full lifestyle.

Simon Doy: 3:46
Yeah, maybe a bit too full sometimes. It's trying to sometimes just get some space, isn't it, so you can relax. So, yeah, I've been doing a bit of meditation. I've been doing that for about four years now. Um, I'm trying to do a whole year, every day, meditate for a whole year. I'm 325 days into my my meditation streak. So just do that sort of first thing in the morning and it just gives me a bit of bit of headspace.

Mark Smith: 4:11
Uh, before yeah it all the chaos descends when I lived in london, I did it for a year and a half. Oh yeah, every day oh, wow um meditation and like, of course, started off, you know, not great at all, not been really um get in the zone as such, but of course, after a year and a half and it was only moving back to new zealand that I actually stopped doing it COVID happened, you know. Things changed and I'm actually getting back into it now.

Mark Smith: 4:42
Oh, cool, and like back then, I did everything you know with Andy from Headspace when Headspace was brand new, you know, and I just felt it so soothing, so therapeutic and so much of my success for the last probably five years all comes from 2018-2019. While I was in London, I did so much stuff. I read um 80 something books that year, you know, um business type books and or philosophy and things like that. I meditated, I just had these really good routines in living in London and I just feel like I've reaped so much since then from that had two kids as well, since then, so, yeah, it's been so good.

Simon Doy: 5:34
Yeah, no, that's good to hear, yeah, and it's good to hear you getting back into it as well. You know, something I used to just do for 10 minutes and then I've stretched it out to 15 minutes and that's made a big difference, because those last couple of minutes I've actually my brain's sort of switching off just then and you get a couple of minutes and then back to it. So, yeah, so any books which which I love reading, so any books which you sort of come to mind.

Mark Smith: 6:01
So I'll tell you one. I've just finished, and so powerful in what you're doing In fact, I'm not finished, I'm almost finishing. It's called Becoming Supernatural oh, okay, okay. By Dr Joe Dispenza. He's a medical doctor but heavily into neuroscience, and so just from reading that book, I did a meditation last week for 50 minutes which was my first back in and it shows me like at the end of that time I'd done this.

Mark Smith: 6:35
I know this is sidetracking slightly, but I got to the point that I would record my own meditations, in other words, so I guided and I would find the music I'd want in the background, but then I would be the voice, so it'd be in my voice and it'd be 100% tailored to me. And I've realized that since doing that meditation the other day for 50 minutes, that I'm like, oh my gosh, I need to get back into this seriously because of I feel the benefits so so much.

Simon Doy: 7:06
Yeah, I think what's interesting as well, particularly with because I don't see headspace as well with Andy and it's just that kind of that sort of shared understanding that, yeah, our brains are all a bit broken and it helps Not always, sometimes I completely lose it, but sometimes you just kind of take a step before you react. Just understanding where people are coming from is a bit easier.

Mark Smith: 7:39
Also, I think that we have lost a lot in time in our modern technology world maybe, and even the last probably two to three hundred years, of really understanding the mind, heart, body connection that we have and we've severed that kind of yes, yeah, um, and that's why I like it's still. His book you know how to become supernatural is because his whole thing he looked at from a medical point and that's why I like his book how to Become Supernatural is because his whole thing he looked at it from a medical point of view and being able to really understand that connection in your body and what you can do the mind and the heart is so incredibly powerful, and even that heart connection, because so much of meditation is in the mind but being able to take it man, it's a great area. I'll be interested to see what feedback I get on this podcast because I've never really talked about it before.

Speaker 3: 8:25
The book that I've read is this one that's a great book.

Simon Doy: 8:28
Yeah, this one Thinking Fast and Slow, Love it.

Mark Smith: 8:31
Love it. I've read it. I have always got more books purchased than what I have.

Simon Doy: 8:37
Yes, I get told off.

Mark Smith: 8:39
When I see books you know there's I kind of don't limit myself. I've got I just looked at my Kindle book and I've got over 300 Kindle books now and I'm not a novel reader, so mine are generally always people's stories real people's stories, philosophy, stoicism, that type of thing to a degree, and also a lot on ai. I've read a lot of books on ai, not just surface stuff but like really, and I mean I reckon the best book that really challenges your thinking is super intelligence. Oh, okay.

Simon Doy: 9:18
Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, I think Gary Trinder was talking about that in his book. I'll have to have a look. Yeah, one of the podcasts I love is there's a Microsoft sort of AI inside the research. I'm trying to think what it's called now, but it's inside the research going on at Microsoft Labs and there's some really interesting podcasts on that. Send me that.

Mark Smith: 9:41
Let's get it in the show notes, because I went at MVP Summit to some of the AI research sessions that they ran and I was like oh my gosh, there's this whole area inside Microsoft that's so worth like much you know, way before it becomes productized or anything like that. And I did a session on AI agents and so this was back in March this year and just you know, and I was looking at it from you know, having five AI agents to develop software, yeah, so you can have your agent just dedicated to testing.

Mark Smith: 10:13
You can have your agent that generating the code. You can have your QA, you can have your, you know your. You can have your QA. You can have your expert and the one that is looking for why did you do it that way? And then you see these connected up together and the speed that they can interact with each other and taking feedback and correcting, and it's just like man. This is going to be amazing. That whole agentification that we're going to see in the next couple of years, I think is powerful.

Simon Doy: 10:43
Oh, agents are really, really exciting, isn't it? You become this orchestrator of these agents. It's absolutely fascinating. There was a great session at MVP Summit on the semantic kernel and it was really, really interesting to see where, to see where this goes.

Mark Smith: 10:59
So yeah, oh, very cool. So tell me about copilot, because that's what caught my attention. You'd been doing some stuff on linkedin um around. You're doing a lot of stuff around copilot and I really want to get beyond, I suppose, the hype and the marketing message to that next layer down of you know the practical application of Copilot, what you're seeing, what you're training and delivering and helping people with in that space.

Simon Doy: 11:28
Yeah. So it's really interesting because I guess I really got stuck getting into it at the end of December and then someone's got access didn't we to a special area to play around with. But the bit that really interested me was these custom co-pilots. So I looked at a co-pilot for Microsoft 365 and, just for everyone's sort of awareness, that is the co-pilot that lives in the Microsoft 365 platform, in the various Microsoft 365 tools like Word, teams, outlook, et cetera, and it's using a Microsoft-based LLM, a large language model, and the bit that excites me about this stuff is the development, it's the extensibility side, and so I was looking at how you can extend that and it was okay. The problem, I found is that there's so much noise, there's so much content that you've got in a tenant how do you really get good quality, succinct results? And I found that actually custom co-pilots, which are where you may be using a Microsoft LLM to reason over the information, but you're controlling what data is being looked at, what systems you're talking to, gave much, much better results. And so that's where you know we've been doing a lot of research and trying things out and we've started then, you know, over since yeah, since about March we've been working with various customers and the first thing is and we've had some customers say, look, senior management just want us to deliver some AI and we need to do something. We don't know how to do it. Can you help us? And so we start off with knowledge bots. That's the first one. Get some content in SharePoint um, it's a content and sharepoint, maybe it's around it. Hr finance is the one I'm top of mind at the moment and, you know, let us push that into teams so they can start interacting with that and getting results back.

Simon Doy: 13:29
And it wasn't bad, you know, it was pretty good. So what it was, it was using copilot studio, um, and it was using um kind of the knowledge and generative answers. It wasn't bad, it wasn't great. And so they said, oh, you know, you said, can we do something better? And so we said, well, let's kind of the knowledge and generative answers. It wasn't bad, it wasn't great. And so they said, oh, you know, can we do something better? And so we said, well, let's now take, rather than using the Copilot Studio built in LLM, let's hook into Azure, let's use Azure Open AI services and we'll do a GPT-4 and we'll do a GPT-4.0. And so we did a side-by-side comparison. You could sort of tell it to switch through the KPI-C and they just loved the 4-0 results, the formatting, it was just that much better. And so they're like right, yeah, we sold, they showed it to their senior management team and they love it and they've rolled it out now. So that's sort of the first kind of one.

Simon Doy: 14:21
You know there's knowledge bots and you know they're relatively straightforward to kind of roll out. It's just about getting the data right and there are challenges. You know we had an issue where documents were too big and so we were ingesting the content into Azure, azure Search, which is a search database, ingesting the content into Azure AI Search, which is a search database which is, you know, very much geared up to being partnered with OpenAI and it's going to create an index, a little bit like the Copilot Semantic Index, which is what Copilot Microsoft 365 works. And so we sort of had to do some work there to kind of split the documents up so that those could be ingested and reasoned over by the LLM. But yeah, they're pretty happy. There's a few.

Simon Doy: 15:10
You know, gotchas Copilot Studio sometimes goes a bit funny and you know it might be that, particularly when it escalates, youates. We then sort of tweak the topics. So in Copilot Studio you have this concept of topics and it'll be a phrase which triggers that topic and very much like a Power Automate workflow. You can give it a way of working, but when it was hitting the escalations we'd get it to restart the conversation just to bring the user back to an own experience. So there's lots of tweaks we had to do. We found some issues as well with Copilot Studio and GP240. And I think a lot of it is probably because the amount of data that it's pulling back, and I'll send you a link. But there's an article which I wrote just a number of gotchas which we had and how we got around those for your audience. So yeah, Very cool.

Mark Smith: 16:08
A couple of questions I have that come out of what you said there. Number one, just to clarify when we're using Copilot so we've got Copilot that's part of M365, right, so subscription it's a SaaS Copilot, right. Then we've got Copilot that's part of M365, right, so subscription it's a SaaS Copilot right. Then we've got Copilot Studio, which allows us to extend and do custom Copilots, and then we've got Azure AI Studio, correct, yeah? And that's where you can really go a lot further. You can stretch a lot deeper.

Mark Smith: 16:33
Now let's just go back to Copilot and M365. And the reason is I tried it and paid for it and turned it off and early days and this is in my organization tenant and I suppose why? Because a lot of it was good demo stuff but was not great. Man, this is enhancing my daily productivity, right, and I'm like I get it. We're on a journey, right, and so I'll come back when it's more advanced, because I'm getting awesome results using ChatGPT, directly with Foro, and I'm also using Anthropic and you know, with Claude and Perplex, and I use a range of tools. In fact, I've just started getting into building out automations that string multiple language models together to add different segments and whatever, I'm working on, nice, nice. So the graph right, the Microsoft graph, that M365 copilot, how dependent is it on the graph?

Simon Doy: 18:03
So copilot for M365 is grounded.

Simon Doy: 18:06
The beauty of it, as opposed to ChatGPT, is that it's grounded on your data, the data that is in your tenants.

Simon Doy: 18:16
So you've got an organization, you've got your documents in SharePoint, you've got emails, you've got your Teams, chats, all of this content that you're consuming and working with and Copilot for M365 is grounded on that information and so it uses the graph to get to that information.

Simon Doy: 18:38
And what actually happens is when you switch on Copilot for Microsoft 365, you have an index so it's a search index, it's called the semantic index and you get two index so it's a search index, it's called the semantic index and you get two indexes you get one for the tenant and then one for each of the individual users so that it's able to understand exactly who you are, who you work with, and it's going to give better results. But when you're asking questions, so you say some productivity things like you know what emails should I respond to that information to be able to then work out who is important and then to be able to then pick out those emails as subject matter. So, yeah, it's absolutely built on the graph, and the graph is allowing it to access SharePoint Teams, all these different M265 services to do that.

Mark Smith: 19:47
So that's interesting. The other day I had a use case that was really practical in this respect, and that is a family member who's just acquired a new business, a large holiday park. They're setting up the M365, wanting DNS sorted. The system that manages bookings is run by a company overseas and integrated to their website and so they're controlling the DNS etc. And so she comes to me because she can't work out how to set up her DNS as you would expect, a layperson that's never done it right and so she's had this thread that's going with the support person in this foreign country, and so she forwarded it to me and of course I'm not going to read a whole thread and I just grabbed it and said what's the situation? Where's it currently at? Concise, it's been about this Text record identify approval from Microsoft to interact with M365 was the issue.

Mark Smith: 20:44
Where's that text? And I'm like, great, I've got it. That would have been wading through all those to kind of, where are they at? And bang summary perfect on the point solved the issue straight away. So I love it for that use case. The concern I have about the graph and Teams access, SharePoint access, et cetera is that for years companies have been storing a colossal amount of data. Yeah, yeah, right, and that data has been sitting there. It's been on their network, it's been on the shares, it's been on one drive, it's been all over the place and people because they are not, let's say, sql query experts and being able to go find me x or even really you know you have a lay person and been able to go find me X or even really.

Mark Smith: 21:29
you know you have a lay person and their ability to search and then you have somebody. I remember years ago back in you know, when the web was coming out, there was a book written called Google Hacks and it was around how you could in the string in the search box using different you know from a simplistic point of view and or operators and stuff, but then you could get into string pattern matching, things like that. You could find incredible data online. And, of course, back then it was like you can find credit card numbers, you can find all sorts of things, right.

Mark Smith: 22:00
Yeah, now we bring that inside an organization who has not cared about, let's say, what's sitting around you know in the file shares on the network and particularly PII right, information spread out all over the organization, little dot points, it's individual, you know, or standalone, it's meaningless.

Mark Smith: 22:22
But all of a sudden you've got an LLM that looks for patterns, looks for connections, looks for relationships and connections and stuff, and that data aggregated together becomes very. Then it's PI rather than PII right, and it's very clear and stuff. And so my question is to you how is and just on M365, not talking about custom counterparts yet or getting into Azure side is there a risk now inside organizations so not external but internal for data leakage? Or you know people being able to say you know what's the salaries of the top five employees of this organization and then what is the likelihood, or give us a percentage accuracy of who these potentially could be? You know there's those type of things that most people wouldn't know how to query or get that by a manual search, but with an LLM game changer. So what are your?

Speaker 3: 23:20
thoughts around that. Yeah, I mean, you know, to be honest it's always been there, you know.

Simon Doy: 23:26
Coming back to search, you know, back into the 2007-2010 SharePoint days, exactly the same problem. I remember one of the legends of search, agnes Molnar, talking about going to a customer and searching for the word salary and up popped an Excel spreadsheet. So yeah, that concept of oversharing is absolutely right. You know, there's two things which we do need to do is we do need to make sure that we've got a good information architecture, um, and you know, one of the ways which we recommend people do it is that you have um. You know, if you're using sharepoint, you've got a public department area for your sharepoint content which you're using to share the information with the rest of the organization, but then you use Microsoft Teams and an internal team for that department's inner workings and using that to keep those two sets of information separate and not in the same site, because often that's where those mistakes happen and something gets shared by mistake because it's you know, um.

Simon Doy: 24:32
So but yeah, it certainly is something, uh that we it needs to be looked at oversharing um and making sure that people have the right access to things. And again it comes back to the graph because if you've got the department information filled out for your users and job roles and you can start leveraging dynamic groups to build up these security groups. Based on those things. You can start sort of as people join and leave jobs, you can use those to make sure that people have the right access to the right information. And the other aspect of that is getting rid of content which is no longer relevant because, again, a co-pilot may bring that out as a result. This is the problem with these LLMs is that they can look, the result looks brilliant, but you actually need to reason and go. Does that make sense? Does that make sense? Still, you can't take it as verbatim, I guess.

Mark Smith: 25:30
Yeah, so how much is your work then extending across more into the tailoring side, where you say those custom use cases, so you're using Copilot Studio and then, even for more advanced situations, going into the Azure AI Studio side of things?

Simon Doy: 25:48
Yeah, that's where a lot of our work is. My background is development and my business's background that's where we do a lot is building applications, business process automation. So yeah, we're doing a lot around that space and because we are building all these custom co-pilots, we're then able to make sure that the customer gets a good experience and the experience which they want. But we do quite a bit of consultancy on kind of tidying up Microsoft 365 environments and Teams. There's some great you've got SharePoint Premium on that side, which I don't know a huge amount about, to be honest.

Speaker 3: 26:34
So that was what Synapse was, wasn't it? As formerly Synapse?

Simon Doy: 26:38
yeah, that was Synapse, that's right, yeah, yeah, we do love in the SharePoint Premium side is I don't know if you've tried any of the auto generation of metadata, where you give?

Speaker 3: 26:49
Is that like a touch of purview? No, no, it's separate than that no, no, yeah, it's separate.

Simon Doy: 26:55
So let's take you do a sales proposal, so you do a proposal for a company, and you store those proposals in a SharePoint document library and you've got columns. It might be what the company name is. They give us a summary of what the proposal is about, what the cost was, and you can then just use an AI prompt for each of those columns to say in this column, extract this information, tell me who the customer was, tell me how much the proposal is worth, tell me how many days this proposal is for, and it will then just use that to populate that column.

Mark Smith: 27:29
That's a really smart bit of functionality Powerful and it's something that people just don't bother doing right, doing the metadata on their documents right.

Simon Doy: 27:38
Exactly, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Simon Doy: 27:41
So, yeah, I think oversharing is a big problem, you know, on the sensitivity labels, I think you're talking about where you're categorizing content and securing content, yeah, we have a model for that where we sort of have four different tiers.

Simon Doy: 27:58
So the idea is that you're marking content with a sensitivity label to A tell the system where that information can go and what's in that content, but also you're allowing people to tag it up as well, so we have a public tag. So it might be that that's our marketing, social content, internal and NDA. So any partners, any customers we're working with, and we will tag Microsoft Teams with that as well, so the content then gets tagged with that content and then we'll have internal and then confidential. That's kind of where we get to. But yeah, what's nice then is when you're generating content with Copilot in Word, for example, and it's pulling content out of those documents with that sensitivity label applied, it will also then apply that sensitivity label to the content that you're creating as well, so it's not going to leak that data, which is a really nice feature.

Mark Smith: 28:58
Nice, I've got one question before we jump in and just do a quick chat about your book, and that is For years, the M365 story, and previously Office 365 story, was all around productivity. That's how Microsoft went to market was a productivity story. Yes, now we have co-pilots. I don't think productivity is necessary. They can't reuse that in this realm. How would you say what's going to be that kind of core theme from a co-pilot or maybe even an AI? Because you know terms get tired over time in industry and then people switch off to them Like digital transformation is one of those tired terms. Now, right, people are like, yeah, you know, agile, I feel is even becoming a tired term as a methodology because people have seen so much failure in business around it and stuff. So what do you reckon that label is going to be for the era of co-pilots?

Simon Doy: 30:01
Yes, I think AI is a problem label already. It's got quite a negative connotation to it, hasn't it? So in the maturity model, which I think we're going to talk about later, we call it sort of cognitive businesses, so businesses which are using AI to have that extra cognition. So what do I think we're going to call it? I think the agents and that side is where is where I think you know there's some interesting terms. I'm trying to what label I would apply, but I think that's where we become this orchestrator of, uh, ai, which is doing work for us, and is then I think we have to remember is you know these agents which are doing this work for us? They are still working as us, you know, so we still need to QA and check on their work and make sure that they're doing it as a manager would do with their team, and so you know, I think that's sort of you know the interesting area and where we're going.

Simon Doy: 31:07
But the thing is, is all of this it's got to be applied at a business level. So the bit for me about Microsoft 365 is how can you use it to really transform and improve how your business works and how you can make your business more successful. Well, you know we're talking about just coming back to themes, the other thing we're seeing a lot of is using ai for email triage. So in customer support, we've seen recently people looking at it for lead generation and emails coming in and being able to categorize whether they are of interest to the sales team or not and getting rid of the. You know, we all get endless emails, probably, or LinkedIn messages about you know, do you want to partner with this? Because we do development, you know? So being able to kind of make those teams more productive, and that's something we're seeing a lot of over the last month.

Mark Smith: 32:05
Maturity model for Microsoft 365. Let's talk about that.

Simon Doy: 32:09
So maturity model for Microsoft 365. Let's talk about that. So maturity model for Microsoft 365. So yeah, back in 2020, my business, I think 365, I was looking at how can we talk to business owners, senior management teams and sort of kind of explain to them where Microsoft 365 can help them run their business. And you know, I was sort of pondering this over. I was chatting with my friend, simon Hudson, who I run, m365 North, the user group I work with, and we were on Twitter and Mark Anderson, who's based over in Boston, was tweeting about he was looking to do a Microsoft 365 maturity model based off some work done sort of 2010 to 2012 with a lady called Sadie Van Buren did one for the SharePoint maturity model and I'd been thinking about something similar or the fact that a maturity model for Microsoft 365. And so we all met up and we started it and the purpose of it is to help us, help consultants be able to talk with business leaders and senior management teams and explain to them in business terms the value that they can have by improving how they do certain business functions. And so we have this concept of competencies. Those competencies might be communication, management of content, governance, collaboration.

Simon Doy: 33:34
I think there's about 11 competencies we've got now and for each competency we started looking at how you could, how business could, go from kind of that default position, a level 100 position.

Simon Doy: 33:50
Business could go from kind of that default position, a level 100 position, up to this kind of nirvana panacea of level 500. So the maturity model runs from level 100, 200, 300, 400 up to level 500, building on each level and you know. So, fundamentally, level 100 is, yeah, just that default position, level 200, very chaotic, but you're making progress. Level 300 is kind of our sort of standard, uh, that we think you should be at if you choose, if you know, if you think why my business needs to be good at that competency, because not every business needs to be good at all competencies. But level 400 is where you're learning, evolving um, measuring how you're you're working, and then evolving that through to level 500 where you've got this panacea. But nice, when it came down to it, it was all about how can we help consultants, uh, developers, pitch an idea, get buy-in to be able to do cool projects. That that's how I see it.

Mark Smith: 34:49
So is there content online? How can people find out about this?

Simon Doy: 34:52
Yeah, absolutely yeah. So it's all on learnmicrosoftcom and if you just do a search for maturity model for Microsoft 365, you'll get introductory page and then link into all the different competencies. We run maturity model practitioner sessions, part of the Microsoft Patterns and Practice Group, so every just the third Tuesday of the month. So we've got one coming up on the 17th of September and Sharon Weaver is doing one on Copilot and the practical scenarios in Copilot.

Mark Smith: 35:28
I'll be at the Power Platform Conference in Vegas for that date.

Simon Doy: 35:32
Oh, yes, yes, that's right, yeah, yeah, and but yeah, so that's great. And then we meet up every week. So we meet up every Tuesday and we you know the big thing is it's a community effort. So we've had speakers from all sides. It'd be great to get you, mark, to come and do a rock star session for us on, you know, sort of on the business process competency. Maybe. I don't know if you'd be up for that. Yeah, fit it in with your podcast. But yeah, it's a community effort. We get people bringing in their ideas. Some people start writing different articles and we are looking always for new blood to help build out that content. But the latest one a big area with Microsoft 365 has been before Copilot was Viva and the employee experience. It's something which we're very kind of passionate in and about and you know we've just released a competency around that how to improve employee experience and kind of what that means.

Mark Smith: 36:39
I think that the maturity model for AI is going to be and that's why I found it very interesting in what you've done, because I feel that a lot of stuff doesn't necessarily need to be reinvented, it just needs to be repurposed, and even the PMP side of things, I think a lot of that applies as well.

Mark Smith: 36:59
But a lot of people and this is why AI is just such as you're saying it's already got a bit of a taint with it, because there's already I wouldn't just say charlatans, but there's all the snake oil people out there dealing every new tool on the face of the earth and I'm like, but a lot of them don't have any of that kind of rigor, business rigor or anything behind it, and I think I mean that's obviously going to come, because there's people like yourself and stuff thinking about these things and that have a history in other areas that now apply to this new space. So I think it's exciting times. We're well over time, simon. Sorry, I could just carry on. There's so many other things I'd like to discuss. We might need to do another episode sometime.

Simon Doy: 37:43
It'd be fantastic to do another session. Yeah, yeah, I thought it might be. It's been absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much for inviting us to your podcast. It's great. I always love listening to it and it's been great fun talking to you and I look forward to seeing you in person. Hopefully you'll be an MVP somewhere next year, so it'll be good to catch up with you there.

Mark Smith: 38:06
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash NZ365 guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.