Power Platform Boost Podcast

AI Anxiety (#61)

• Ulrikke Akerbæk and Nick Doelman • Season 1 • Episode 61

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Nick:

It's definitely a good thing.

Ulrikke:

And that's exactly why I go to these different things that I don't know I think about as well, because I want to have fringed competency kind of around so that I know a little bit enough to dive further in.

Nick:

Is that a real fringe competency? Is that something you just made?

Ulrikke:

up. No, no, no. I've said that millions of times. I don't know, it's how I describe my competency, because some people will have that little box that they know or that little circuit of things that they know. But my company is very fringed. You know fringes, right, you have them, the yeah, the cowboy things, right. So that's kind of how I see my competencies fringed.

Nick:

Welcome everyone to the Power Platform Boost podcast, your weekly source of news and updates from the world of the power platform and the Microsoft community, with your host, nick Dolman and Lydica Akebeck.

Ulrikke:

Hello Nick, how are you?

Nick:

Hello, I'm doing okay.

Ulrikke:

Okay, just okay.

Nick:

Yeah, okay, that's okay. Yeah, okay, that's okay, that's okay.

Ulrikke:

Some days are just okay. I feel a bit drowsy because we were at the beach and it was a lot of sun and then I went back home and then I had dinner, you know. Then you know the kind of afternoon kind of feeling. So that's where my energy level is at, so but yeah, it's a good and sunny day.

Nick:

So I'm happy yeah, we're having a heat wave here. It's like 30 celsius um, gonna get warmer and hotter, um, but that's it's. That's summer in canada, right, we get both extremes. So in six months time I'll be well not, but telling you how it's minus 30 here.

Ulrikke:

You don't need like a week of spring and a week of autumn, like they talked about. It's crazy, it's extreme.

Nick:

It's like a switch.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, it is. We had 30 degrees last week as well in Vienna, and that's one of the things about traveling from Norway in spring is that we kind of get used to the heat a little by little and then suddenly you fly to a country way more south and then you're exposed to the spring heat there, and so it felt really good to just able to walk outside in shirts and t-shirts. That was fantastic. But of course then staying indoors a week at a conference is not that fun. We went outside for all the breaks, kind of soaking up the sun, a little bit like Meerkat, just going in the sun soaking it up and then hustle, hustle, get back inside, and then we hustled back inside. We went to the next session and the next one, and the next one Because I went to EPPC this week um and Vienna, which you don't want to hear anything about, because you've turned off your phone and you had a complete FOMO and you're like don't send me any videos, don't send me any pictures, I don't want to hear about it pretty, much, yeah, pretty much Pretty much right.

Ulrikke:

So if you can just then mute yourself and I can tell everyone else about it, how does that sound?

Nick:

Sure.

Ulrikke:

No, because it was a really good conference. I know that you don't want to hear about it, but I think, for everyone else listening, I want to kind of give it a bit of limelight, because it is truly the biggest and most professional PowerPages sorry, power Platform Conference we have in Europe. So it was, I think, 37 countries represented, and Monday was workshops. I had the pleasure of having a workshop with 20 people, which I think is the perfect amount of people. We get time to kind of go around table, hear where everyone's at, where everyone's coming from, and it's fun to see how some people are coming at it from.

Ulrikke:

Well, my manager told me we're going to start doing PowerPages now, so I need to be here. And then you have someone go. No, I have two PowerPages sites in production and I'm like why are you here? Well, he's like yeah, because you probably know things I don't know, so I want to learn from the best. I'm like, oh, that's a wall. Um, yeah, and we have really good conversations and we're really, um, uh, very into it and asking all the good questions. So that makes it, makes it very special. So I am, that was good. Well, I missed you and victor for sure. Uh, but I had a little ducky to give me company, and now he's run away because, uh, I think I have him in my bag, so you I got one right there, so if you can see where I'm pointing, oh, yeah, yeah, that's very good actually.

Ulrikke:

So I wanted to say because so um bridge brought your wife brought, uh, hundreds or something, ducks. It felt like uh, and then those ducks kind of went from head to hand to hand to hand. Kind of five people were involved in getting them to me in Vienna and once I got them I was like, okay, now I have to carry them around. But I didn't get them until day two or something. So I thought, okay, I'm going to give all of them away in my session if anyone want any on Thursday. So what I did was I had, every time anyone kind of gave an answer to a question, I would throw a rubber duck at them, and we also talked about what the rubber duck was, because not a lot of people surprising to me, a lot of people didn't know what it was about. So they were like, is this some kind of weird thing in Norway, where you kind of have a bath with a duck? I'm like no, no, no, no, no. Yes, I'm all kinds of crazy, but not that kind of crazy. It is about tech and how you talk to it like, oh, okay, oh, now I get it.

Ulrikke:

And then everyone wanted one. So they're all gone, all all gone. So this is kind of a those that we have more, so we're going to give more away. We would love it if you would just take a picture of your duck, if you have one in your location, because now what we want to do is see where they end up, because it's a fun thing for us to see that, yeah, these ducks started out here and then they traveled so far. We have ducks in all kind of weird corners of the world, so that would be a lot of fun if you could kind of take a picture of it in its current environment and send us a little location to see where it ended up. That's a lot of fun.

Nick:

Yeah, and I'll have more to give out. We'll have at Nordic Summit and in Vegas. So if you're there, yeah, pester us for ducks.

Ulrikke:

Oh, yes, definitely, and they take up a lot of space and they're a bit hasslesome. We have to figure out how to transport them in a smart way so we don't have to carry that bag around with ducks. But yeah, that's a whole other thing. But yeah, I learned tons at Vienna, I mean. So I always go to different things, sessions that I don't know a lot about. So I learned from Matt Snicker about elastic tables. Do you know what elastic tables are?

Nick:

Yeah, yeah, I've looked into them a little bit. Yeah, I've played. I haven't used them in a project, but I am aware of what they were. We talked about this when they first came out, way back when, and it was kind of hard to wrap our head around what the use cases are. But now that I've seen a few potential use cases, it makes more sense in terms of so, yeah, obviously you probably learned a lot more than I have because I haven't really looked at them.

Ulrikke:

so tell the people all about elastic tables no, but it was fascinating to me because it so. The use case that much was showing was kind of logging or telemetry. For instance, you can have a very snappy and very quick query to your data. You store it as structured or unstructured. It has to be valid JSON, but you can store it whatever you want in there and it doesn't have to be the same format every time. So you showed various different kind of structures of how to how to store data in there and then you have that role, and then that role contains adjacent object which you can then query for data.

Ulrikke:

And it's a good way to store massive amounts of data where it doesn't take up a lot of storage space and it's a cheap way to store data. But also there's a lot of limitations in terms of what you can do with it. And also you can set a retainer so that you can set a timeout so for instance, 90 days or 30 days or one day, because it's meant for temporary data and it will automatically delete itself without charging any credits. It's not a Power Automate flow call or anything, it's just deleting itself. So there's a lot of neat things that goes into it. And so if you have a use case where you store temporarily lots and lots of data, then Elastic Tables is a good thing to look into for sure. So it's so fun to see those kinds of things that I've heard about but not really kind of gotten into my head, but then yeah, that's good.

Nick:

Yeah, that's the benefit of these conferences where you can actually go in and sit in to at least give me the high level details on something that I'm completely unaware of, just so at least now I have some context that I can begin to ask more intelligent questions or again just have some awareness of when I'm in a customer or something like oh okay, this sounds like this. Could elastic tables could fit. I know a little bit about it. So now that you have something tangible in front of me, let's dig in a little bit deeper. Whereas before you might not have any idea of this exists.

Ulrikke:

So it's definitely a good thing, and that's exactly why I go to these different things that I don't know I think about as well, because I want to have fringed competency kind of around so that I know a little bit enough to dive further in.

Nick:

I like is that a real fringe competency? Is that something you just made up?

Ulrikke:

I don't know. No, no, no I've said that millions of times I don't know. It's how I describe my competency, kind of if you drew, because some people will have that little box that they know or that little circuit of things that they know. But my company is very fringed. You know fringes right, you have the cowboy things right. So that's kind of how I see my competencies fringed.

Nick:

Cool, that makes sense.

Ulrikke:

I went to a session with Agnes. It showed how best practices for enterprise grade Power Automate desktop flows just to kind of see if he had, if there were some things there that I haven't talked about for Power Automate flows that I can then kind of adapt to Power Automate Cloud flows, that would be the same way, so kind of. So it's something I know a lot about, but that was good thing to kind of level set. Is there anything here that I haven't thought about? Is there anything new that I need to consider? And also how the two products differ. And there was a lot of overlap in terms of what we do with our enterprise flows and didn't learn a lot of new things. But it was a good kind of qualifier into ah okay, so we're doing this right. So that felt good as well, just to get a little bit of quality assurance on the way that we were doing things.

Nick:

Cool.

Ulrikke:

Yes, all right, so let's dive into the news and updates. We have a lot of things, but of course I've been very busy this last few weeks, so this is one of those where you have the the majority of the items on the list, um, but I think to start off with, we have the marcel 365 roadmap.

Nick:

For whatever reason, and I think this is me just putting it in there, just to let people know well, sometimes I use the, the use the OneNote as a way of oh, this is something I need to read more of. Well, I'll just stick it in the Boost OneNote, because there it's something to talk about.

Ulrikke:

Because then it'll force me to kind of read more about it. No, no no, Actually. I think this is one of those where I, because the next link is from Femke Kornelisen, and so this roadmap is right. No, sorry, it's the other way around. So you have the tech community at Microsoftcom blog about what's new for Microsoft 365 Co-Pilot, and this is from May, so it's a bit dated already. But here it occurred to me that I don't know if everyone follows this or the roadmap, so the link is to share in the show notes so that everyone can keep track of the roadmap.

Ulrikke:

It's actually published for Microsoft 365, so you can keep an eye on it. If you're an admin, then you'll get these by email anyways, but if you're not, then you can get these by email anyways.

Nick:

but if you're not, then you can still follow these news and updates um from our so 365 on the roadmap yeah, yeah, and just to kind of segue and to tie it in with a femca's post too, because her post is really about using the new microsoft researcher that we did talk about last episode, which is also listed in this um, this new thing. So like what I like about her content is she provides uh best way to call it cheat sheets for one, one kind of pager sheets that you can take, take a look at, with some examples, some structure, um, an execution plan and stuff like that. So she has a bunch of these and this, yeah, it's called a cheat sheet, the microsoft researcher cheat sheet. So this is exactly what it is and it just sort of helps you wrap your head around and how you can use these things within going beyond the Power Platform into Microsoft 365, because I think there's a lot of coverage on both in terms of co-pilots and Microsoft 365, and it's stuff that we use on a daily basis as well. The other thing from the roadmap that did stand out a little bit for me was the fact that we have co-pilot notebooks inside of OneNote, and that's really interesting to me because you and I we're big fans of OneNote. I've been using OneNote for years. We talked about this last time as well. So I think you know, and we talked last time about co-pilot notebooks. But now I actually watched a video and I'll try to find the link where they demonstrated using the copilot notebooks, but inside of OneNote completely. So again, we're not replacing one with another. It's a fact of they're kind of merging the two technologies OneNote this video said it's 20 years old believe it or not and of course, copilot notebooks are brand new. Yeah, and I know the interface with OneNote. It does seem dated at times but it is still. It works for me. I still love using it for collaboration and things like that. But of course now as we get into more of the AI world, we're collaborating. But of course now as we get into more of the AI world, we're collaborating.

Nick:

I've been finding I've been sharing a lot of my chat, gpt searches and prompts working Like I was on a meeting. I don't know I'm segwaying a little bit, but I was working on a meeting. I needed to explain certain concepts and then I realized I didn't have a ton of time to do a lot of digging into it, so I actually asked ChatGPT. It was a feature within Dynamics 365. And the results actually gave me a chart, broke down the pros and cons, broke down the different ways of doing it. So I just in the meeting, I said, oh, by the way, I cheated, I'd use ChatGPT here. Let me share you that link.

Nick:

And so, again, this, going back to these tools in terms of collaboration, in terms of notebooks in OneNote and things, these tools are becoming really powerful in terms of what you can share, but also using AI to summarize that information, to consolidate that information, and not just for yourself, but for your team members as well. So if we look at this blog post, there's at least like a dozen, if not more, new features. So we're not going to go through all of these, but it's a constant barrage of information that are making our existing tools much more powerful, using AI and co-pilots, which is a good thing. Now, that's not without its. It doesn't do everything. There's a few rough edges here and there with any new software, and with microsoft products especially, so just beware of that. So, yeah, a lot of cool stuff with all of this.

Ulrikke:

Oh, yeah, yeah, and it's worth kind of just scrolling through and to get a bit ramped up on the new things, because also, I um, from the sessions that I was in as well, and the conversations I've had this week, uh, a lot of people are concerned about the fact that we have a bad experience and then you don't go in again.

Ulrikke:

There's so many people that have tried out plan designer, which is now called planning power apps, before Christmas and now they don't realize how extremely good it's become, just because they won't click the button again, they won't try it. And also, that goes a lot for the applications we use every day Word, powerpoint, excel, onenote. You don't expect those co-pilots and those AI features to improve this much, but they do. And so maybe you turn co-pilot off in those apps and don't expect a lot from them. But there, this is a good reason why it's called through these uh release notes and they'll. That will keep you up to date on what's coming and maybe you'll be incentivized a little bit to go back in and give it another go, even if it didn't disappointed you a little bit the first time yeah, yeah, no, yeah, it's it's night and day and that's the thing.

Nick:

This is why there's that preview tag on some of these things. Um, but even if they become ga, they just keep getting better. You're absolutely right, because, yeah, plan designer was a cool demo thing and then now, the last time I looked at plan designer, like, oh, what's this, what's this? This is new. Oh, this does this better now, oh, I wonder if this is fixed. Okay, no, not yet, but that's okay, it will be there next time.

Nick:

So, yeah, keep, uh and yeah, keep, keep an eye out on the updates, because things do progress. They do get better. Like the, the table designer now, um, you can bring in existing system tables where you couldn't do that before. That was like a huge improvement. Um, that was just something else that we couldn't do, like about a month ago, but we can do now. So new stuff's coming. And that's the thing the feedback people saying it doesn't work because of X. Well, you say what X is. Microsoft takes that into account. I was on a meeting this week and on Microsoft team was demoing something that we'll talk about in a bit and I said, oh, but what about? Can it do this? And like that's a good idea.

Ulrikke:

We're going to make sure that gets added into the product, so yeah, yeah, feedback is crucial and you know the thumbs up and the thumbs down. They do look at it. So if you have feedback, please give it, because we can't expect it to be better if we don't participate. Right debate, right, yeah, okay, sounds good. And then you have a few ai items in here. That isn't specifically about power platform or our tech world, necessarily, but about ai in general. It's a. It's a much broader ai discussion.

Ulrikke:

Um, so the first one is the diro ceo, which is with simon bartlett, which is a podcast that we listen to a lot and I know that a lot of people do. I think it's the second biggest podcast in the world, so probably a lot of our listeners listen to it already and maybe have also made up their own mind about this episode already. And just to give you a little bit of a light on this, so when we were flying into london, I listened to this podcast episode on the plane over and I landed and I was in shock and I could not, and I was, I was talking at you constantly from the second you opened your eyes and we got out of the plane until we were kind of picking up our luggage and going into the metro and I was still talking to you about this because it freaked me out.

Nick:

So yeah, it's the AI agent emergency debate yeah, so, yeah, you were talking to me about it. And then you I said, okay, well, of course, send me the link to this episode and I I don't listen to all of the diary of ceo episodes like um, just because there's a lot. It's hard to keep up with all these different podcasts, but please listen to ours. Listen like subscribe right. Okay, um, but they, they talked about it was a kind of a round table. They're talking about you, a kind of a roundtable. They're talking about you know, displacement of you know been I originally.

Nick:

When we go back to the first episode of the Power Platform, boost, we talked about the first apps we built. And I talk about this wrestling simulator that I built on a Commodore 64 because I was big into pro wrestling as a teenager and I always thought, hey, I want to rebuild this. And, of course, as I go through my career, I was building stuff in Delphi and Visual Basic. In the back of my mind I'm like, oh, I'm going to rebuild this using Visual Basic, I'm going to rebuild it versus Delphi, eventually, to the point, okay, I'm going to rebuild this in Power Apps. And then I get sort of an idea. I do some rough designs and I'm like okay. But then of course day job kicks in or you work on power platform stuff all day and you're like, okay, now if I need to switch my brain to something else, and it's like one of these little side projects. So I opened up Replit, I gave it a prompt this is what I want to build. I want to build a wrestling simulator that creates events. I can you know I'm just going to act as the promoter. I'm not going to be. It's not like an action game. I want to put it all in Chug chug, chug, chug, chug. Five minutes later, a few prompts back, it generated a React app talking to a Postgres SQL database, basically envisioned exactly what I've been dreaming out for the last 20, 30 years. In 5, 10 minutes Kind of blew me away. And it wasn't just, it's all sort of behind the mirrors. I actually can see the, the typescript code and everything in the back end. So if I wanted I could go and tweak it whatever else, or even evaluate it for security and all this other stuff like it's. It's a simple game, it's a simple example, so it just kind of blow kind of, without kind of going too deep and getting into the aspects of enterprise software.

Nick:

These tools are existing now that are able to build software. This kind of rejigs our role of solution architects in terms of, yes, we still need to collect these requirements, we still need to envision what we're doing. This is the value, and this is what you and I talked a little bit before the episode as well. The value, and this is what you and I talked a little bit before the episode as well. Um, and you kind of reminded me of the value that we bring to the clients to be able to generate these. So we're not just building software, we're building business solutions, and we got to keep I think we need to keep focused on that, that we are building business solutions and we provide a value in terms of just doing coding and things like that. We now have tools where we can generate this a lot faster, a lot more efficiently, um, and it is definitely going to be changing how we do things.

Nick:

Something else I'll talk about in a little bit. Uh, we talk about power pages, about using the new um single page applications within power pages. Saw demos of that again. That kind of blew me away of how fast that we're beginning to build applications. The Power Platform will exist, but how we build apps. I think one year from now we're going to be talking a completely different story than we're talking about now. How that's going to look, not exactly sure. Are we going to go down more of a Project Sophia interface type thing or are we just going to be still generating canvas and model driven apps? But we're going to be doing it a hundred percent through, prompting through, like a plan designer. We'll see.

Nick:

So, going back to these two podcasts links, there was that emergency debate where they're talking about the creation of software and displacing. There's also the godfather of AI and what was this gentleman's name? He of AI. And what was this gentleman's name? It was Jeffrey Hinton and he talked about he won a Nobel Prize. Oh, he won the Turing Award, which they call the Nobel Prize of Computing. So he didn't win a Nobel Prize, but he won the equivalent in the world of computing.

Nick:

But basically giving warnings about how AI will disrupt society and working and things like that going into, and both in those episodes they talk about things like universal income, but how humans need a purpose on top of all this and how is that going to be?

Nick:

And how is it going to be instead of hiring a thousand people, we can now have a thousand agents doing our job for us from, you know, pennies on the dollar compared to what we would pay.

Nick:

So these are things that just again, we don't want to go too deep into these existential, you know thoughts, what you called it, but I just want to kind of bring light to that that, as we're going through all of this, I'm sure this is something that we're all thinking about and maybe worrying about and trying to find our way, and I don't have the answers, you don't have the answers, but I think I just want to maybe empathize with everybody that this is what we're feeling.

Nick:

I think maybe everybody else is feeling this as well. Yes, this is cool tech, but what's our role going to be within it? And that kind of came up in Dynamics Minds as well, some of those discussions when I was there with various people Exciting times, but also very, I wouldn't say, worrying times, but very challenging times, a little bit anxious times as well. So I just wanted to kind of bring those to light, those different podcasts, and to not put our heads in the sand, basically of what is happening with all this technology around us and also to be aware, like if you think that you're you're, you know, going to be building model driven apps the same way you've been doing for the last 10 years. In the next 10 years, that's probably not going to. That's probably not going to happen. It's going to change. So we all need to help each other out and get ready for it.

Ulrikke:

So yeah, then you realize that this is information workers, right, so the postman will still be the postman, then the guardsman will still be the guardsman, you'll have servants at restaurants, and you know. So it's in our little bubble, of course, that this is a huge thing. And, yeah, I get it. When you know factory workers were replaced by robots. They had this kind of thing because the backbone of the society back then was the factory worker and now the backbone of our society is kind of the information worker, a lot of us working as information workers, and now we will be replaced.

Ulrikke:

I think what scares me the most is when people say that sure, they found new jobs and we will too. But then the experts say, yeah, but back then it was so slow that you had time to learn a new skill and then get a new job and have a new career. But this time it's too fast for the human mind to adapt to a new skill and move on, so we're going to leave a lot of people behind. That doesn't mean that the majority of us will find other jobs or will merge into other jobs or will actually excel as a whole ai thing and move to the the top of the chain, if that's kind of what you want to do. Um, I am not as dystopian today as you, I think, and that goes up and down every day.

Ulrikke:

Um I don't think we'll be a little drip and apps the way that we do now, and also, of course, um I looked at the um, generated pages and code apps in power platform now is kind of going to replace um, some of the traditional app making that we've seen. So I guess canvas apps and and um and custom pages kind of will go away and be replaced by generated pages, which is kind of a vibe code app-ish thing where you give it a prompt, it creates an app or an interface for your data and then code apps is where you start in Visual Studio Code. You use a GitHub co-pilot to create your app and then you get to deploy that to the platform Same way as you do with a single page application in Power Pages. We've had that capability for a while with PCF components. It's not really that new, but it's kind of showing us the way that Microsoft wants to go. It's showing us the direction that things are going in. It's not necessarily that it's new. It is a way it is a push in that direction. New is just it. It is a way it is a push in that direction. Um, but as I said, business applications will still have processes. If you look at business applications and the needs and how we work in this kind of environment. It's been. It hasn't been disrupted the same way many other application types have been. But then you also beg the question I was on an AI panel at APBC with Sarah Luggerquist, joe Griffin, scott Giroux, andrew BB and me.

Ulrikke:

We talked about the AI and the future of AI and the future of business applications and where we're going, and then also we kind of came to the same conclusion that well, who's going to use these apps? Again, because of all information workers that are agents, who's going to use the business applications? So maybe we're actually trying to solve a problem that's not even going to be there in five years because there's not going to be any people working in these business applications. It's ERM who cares? Agents handle that for us, just like robots has been sorting our mail for the last. What 30 years agents is going to handle our crm system? No one's going to have an erp, no one's going to deal with the data and and all of that mess is going to be agent to agent anyways. We're going to just ask for the mail to appear in our mailbox and be sorted, for us and our packages to be living at the doors and and all the magic and the black box we don't care about. That's what it's going to be like.

Ulrikke:

So there is a fundamental kind of mental approach to this, a shift that I have yet to do in my head, but I see kind of where I need to change it up a bit, because the old ways of thinking doesn't apply to the new world, and so I see again and again myself going down this rabbit hole of trying to solve things. That is now just completely redundant. Yeah, who's going to? You know, in terms terms of power pages, where that is going well? Who needs the website?

Ulrikke:

Because you just try to be t anyways, right, so it's, yeah, the idea that you curate information and put that on a site for other people to log in with their credentials and grab that data is like, uh, no, no, it's not going to be that. It's going to be an MCP server or you know, the NL web or the whatever, an 8-way protocol, and you're just going to ask your agent to go grab or it's going to just grab it for you and have it handy when you need it. It's just such a fundamental mental shift and I think that's where I'm just now starting to realize the work that I need to do yeah, yeah it's.

Nick:

Uh. It was interesting because on the one podcast they asked jeffrey hinton. They said, well, what would you tell your kids? Because I have, I have a 16 year old trying to figure out her career and he said be a plumber. And they, and then he kind of he kind of chuckled a steep art, like kind of chuckled and like he said no, I'm dead serious, this is, this, is the, this is the and you know what, like yeah, cause these are things, cause I had to side note I had to replace some steps on my house this weekend.

Nick:

I wasn't planning on it. It was a little loose, so I was just going to go in and put a screw and tighten it up. And as going to go in and put a screw and tighten it up, and as I did it very much like thanos snapping his fingers the whole stairs just disintegrated on me. So I had to spend I spent my sunday rebuilding those set of stairs. Um, yeah, a ai is not gonna be able to figure that one out, with the uneven ground and the, the spiders underneath the deck and all the rusty screws.

Ulrikke:

It might be able to help you, just like YouTube's helped a lot of DIY people the last 10 years. It would be brilliant telling you. You know what, Nick, you need 10 times these screws and these kinds of things and, from what I'm seeing, this is for it to be I don't know the English word suddenly but for it to be, kind of hold your weight and be. This is how you make the structure the best, and you need these planks and that is good for her, but you need to put it together, right? So I totally agree, go, and I know your daughter, get the scars to prove it.

Nick:

Yes, she's the most handy 16 year old I've ever met, and and I know your daughter Get the scars to prove it.

Ulrikke:

Yes, she's the most handy 16-year-old I've ever met and she does gardening so well, she understands and she's so good with people and she's going to be fine. She's going to go into one of those handy what do you call it? Craft kind of jobs, because we have theoretical jobs and then craft jobs.

Nick:

Does that translate to think it um, like they call it, the, the trade, the trades and things like that, or trades, of course, right, yeah, so kids, so get into trades yes, right, be a plumber.

Ulrikke:

Hvac electrical um, because I think the robots to do that exactly right, gardening robots, because you saw that in Wallace and Gromit there were gardening robots, uh-uh, no, no, no, no, no. We did not want the crazy gnome to fix our gardens for us. I want to do it and I want to get dirt under my nails Right, but he has a point and I see where it's going, because some of it's, but the rest of the world is kind of leaning on their layers a little bit still because yeah, sure, but the world will move on.

Nick:

Yep, for sure, this is going to be my July, because our project is going to be kind of winding down for the summer holidays. So I've called it, I've told my wife it's July with a July AI. That's going to be my learning focus.

Ulrikke:

Oh, wow, and I was going to renew my customer service certification. I feel so old and grumpy now. Maybe I don't, maybe I don't. All right, so you put another link in here. What is the Microsoft Learn Docs MCP server? So they is the Microsoft Learn Docs MCP server. So they made a Microsoft Learn Docs MCP server. Oh, yeah.

Nick:

So I'm all about like MCP servers. Like I've been as part of my dive into all of this stuff and getting sometimes a little bit scared, a little bit frustrated, but definitely MCP servers, when I'm beginning to see this. This to me is one of the big game changers. So this is another thing to learn, like the Dataverse MCP server. We talked about that last week or two weeks ago about how, you know, using cloud or you know, github to talk to Dataverse and be able to do a bunch of things. So the team microsoft because I um did work in docs, so I do have a certain affinity to all that they built the docs mcp server, which basically means you have this endpoint that you can build an agent or an app that can actually talk to um, the, the learn docs and kind of use that as a source. So, yeah, yes, we could build a co-pilot and we could just put in the microsoft docs um url as a source. But this also this is kind of another way. You have a better high quality content retrieval, much better understanding of things um and kind of different updates and things like that. So it's just it's. I think it was more of a bit of a like you know, poc or use case of using MCP servers. But now it kind of goes to show again what you were saying about. We're going to be interacting with tool of our choice, let's say Cloud, for example. You could basically use Cloud and you can now talk to docs and it will actually talk to docs directly through the MCP server, which is pretty amazing. Or you could use chat, gpt or you could use that other client. So again, we get to pick.

Nick:

The cool thing about all this is we get, we begin to pick our interfaces. As long as there's an MCP that we can connect to, we could do these, use these other interfaces. So I saw you know, docs is for his example of an mcp server. I saw a youtube video where the guy was using cloud and he was talking to his gmail, his calendars, his slack, he talked to different things, but he was 100 using cloud as his desktop. He wasn't app switching cloud, was just talking to these things to the mcp servers. So yeah, there's a, there's an. This is something you're going to see probably a hundred different mc, very much like we saw hundreds and thousands of or hundreds thousands of connectors in the power platform. We're now going to see mcp servers. So if you're building an app or building anything, you're going to need an mcp server for it or an interface of some sort, and that's just going to open up a lot of doors to use that yeah.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, absolutely, that's going to go both ways. So you both, you want to make sure that your information is accessible through an MCP server, so that that would be something you kind of host or you do for your services. But then the other way around as well, you want to make sure that you kind of create for the ones, the custom connectors that you can't reach. So, yeah, 100%, and I love the idea that you kind of you build. So would you build a new one just to give it your credentials, because that's a bit overrated. So you create a connection and then, using that connection, you give it your credentials and then it's a safe space into your Gmail or your account here and your stuff there.

Nick:

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, but as opposed to like trying to understand the APIs for example, here's the reads, the writes the internet, because it's the AI components in there I can you know the example that I saw with the Gmail, it's sort of like, okay, give me a summary of all my emails. Of course that exists in Copilot, of course with Outlook and everything, but but now I can choose what interface. And this guy was exempt, using his cloud desktop and just saying, hey, give me a summary of all my Gmails, oh, and let me know all the messages that came up on Slack. And it knows it takes that real, that natural language, and basically creates the API calls, essentially to go to the MCP server and bring all that information back.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, and this reminds me of the there's a I put a link in here, so to another explanation of MCP and the protocol and also the capabilities and the evolution of AI application, which is really good, which is, you know, those documents that you kind of flip through.

Ulrikke:

So it's a kind of it's a flow chart diagram that shows you how it works and where, what the protocol means and how you start with the user query, then you go that goes through to the llm and then you have the tool selection and the mcplay client and then you go through to the server part of it, which then allows you to go through to the other servers and connect to the other things. So it is a very good way to, because because I love these models and kind of collecting them to broaden the way that my mind understand how these things work, because I need the visual representation of this to understand it. So the more of these I see, the easier it is for my mind to understand how it works. You know what I mean. The theory isn't enough, so I love when.

Ulrikke:

I see these things because, of course, mcp server is all about it. You have the prompts and the resources and the tools and it's not just connecting to an api. Then, like we talked about a few episodes ago, you're not then using it to its full potential. There is so much more here that you can do, and also how you structure the data is very important, because an llm won't understand the data off of an API, and that's why you created an MCP server to have all of the scaffolding around it as well, to make sure that you kind of get the best out of it. So this is a very good resource and we'll share the links in the show notes, for sure, so you can go in and play with it yourself and look through it. Yes, for sure, so you can go in and play with it yourself and look through it.

Ulrikke:

Yes, and then we had David Wyatt. You want to talk about his platform environment strategy 2.1.

Nick:

Yeah.

Ulrikke:

I love that.

Nick:

Yeah, this is pretty cool because, I mean, of course, we I met David at MVP summit. Um, he does. I love his articles. They, you know, and this is, of course, he has a whole series of them, so check out his stuff. But he talked about, um, different power platform environment strategies.

Nick:

This is something that circles back every so often and because it, um, you know, basically talks about you know, setting up. In a nutshell, all about you know, you know, setting up your dev, your test, your prod environments, or breaking it out by geographies and things like that. This one is interesting because he's talking about, in his new version, about the nuances of Copilot Studio, ai Builder and Dataverse and basically about how Copilot because there's different governance strategies around that there's obviously because you know you're building these agents, you want to make sure there's guardrails and things like that. So he's proposing I'm not just saying this isn't, this is his opinion of it, which I don't disagree with His strategy is to split the CoPilot studio from his other environments, almost mirroring what they're doing and doing in the power platform, but having co-pilot studio on its own stream, just because, for a couple reasons, he says it could grow beyond the power platform, what we are kind of seeing co-pilot does go beyond the power platform and how it could have its eventually its own admin center and things like that, separate from Power Platform stuff I'm not sure if that will happen or not but also in terms of security and governance, being able to monitor that a little bit separately from everything else, because the security consequences are a lot more, I guess, in-depth than typical Power Platform.

Nick:

So I'll definitely won't give away, I won't spoil alert his entire article, but it's really good he has diagrams there because, like you and I, like we say we like pictures, we like diagrams. So he has all that and talks a little bit about the different things. He talks a little bit about Power Pages as well in this environment strategy and kind of updating it. So definitely if you're trying to figure this out in your own projects or for your own customers, david's content is always a great resource to go through and evaluate what you're working with and get some different ideas and different perspectives on things yep, yeah, I love that.

Ulrikke:

And then just I wonder where, where he get that uh diagram from, because I like the style of it. But that's just me being such a style geek, but of course, as always with d's content, it's just pure gold. So very good job. And then I just wanted to quickly kind of go back up and then continue, because we should have mentioned Charles Mordu. No, steve, jesus, charles Mordu, steve, I created a monster. Don't tell anyone, oh, mordu, I created a monster. Don't tell anyone, oh, no. So Steve Mordu has.

Ulrikke:

When he was an MVP, he kind of regularly called up some of the hot shots and stuff to have a chat with them, as he can, because he's Steve Mordu. But now he posted a chat on LinkedIn about. Charles has a chat with someone else to chat on LinkedIn about. Charles has a chat with someone else, um, where and of course the tagline is that even even Charles Lamont himself says that, um, the business applications are dead. Uh, what is it? Final kaput sayonara. Um, and I, yeah, so it's. It's an interview with Charles Lamont where he goes through kind of actually the same topic that we started off with this conversation about and how business applications is changing and the advent of AI and the digital workforce and where it's going. So if you're interested in this topic, I highly recommend, of course, seeing that interview with Charles first and then reading Steve Morgue's blog post or article afterwards, kind of his comment on the conversation itself. So very interesting yeah.

Nick:

Yeah, Lots of yeah, Again food for thought and goes back to our thing Things are changing quickly.

Ulrikke:

Oh yeah.

Nick:

All right.

Ulrikke:

Oh, the next one's mine. I was just waiting for you to kind of segue your way into your next one because, oh yeah, this is, this is how it goes.

Nick:

I have, I have nothing, I have nothing. And then you look through like, oh, you have a shit ton of stuff here, but and I can't even get into the link of the thing that I talked about.

Ulrikke:

I think we just skipped this one. What's going on? Why can't I just oh, it's a join the call session, something, something, wow oh yeah I can't see it either, so it's mvpb is a to a and it doesn't exist anymore. Two major ai activity let's just skip this one. Things are changing this fast even our links are yeah, yeah, so the news and updates are just out of date before they're news and updated, so maybe we want to move on to the Cobalt Studio, applied Skills, because that is something we're really into, or you are into and I pretend I'm into and that eventually I'll do.

Ulrikke:

Maybe that's what I'll do instead of doing my customer service certification there. You go.

Nick:

So yeah, let's just backpedal a little bit. Applied skills so certifications within the Microsoft world still exist. You want to be certified in something? Shameless plug. If you want to get certified in PL900, come to my session in Las Vegas at Power Platform Community Conference when we're going to be prepping for that. But this is something a little bit different. So, along with certifications, microsoft has these things called applied skills. Applied skills actually, the way it works is very much like a certification, but instead of writing an exam with multiple choice and questions and things, you actually they'll fire up a virtual machine within your browser and you actually have to go and either configure or fix or debug or build something using particular tools. So of course, they have an applied skill at Power Automate. They have applied skill on model-driven power apps, applied skill on Canvas apps. They now have an applied skills on creating agents within Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Nick:

Now my plan when I put that link in, I was actually going to go through and take that assessment. I have not done that yet. I think April Dunham has a. She had a posting, or this is where I originally found the posting, or posting or a video and something on that she had actually had gone through it as well and something that she had actually gone through it as well. So again, if you think you're a, if you really want to kind of show your expertise in Copilot, studio and building agents, this is something you can go through.

Nick:

Go through that assessment and then when you assuming if you pass, then you have that as something you can add to your learn profile. It is a kind of like a credential, very much like a certification, to kind of prove to people that yes, I do know a little bit what I'm talking about. I actually have the piece of paper or the digital certificate to prove it. So definitely check that out. I think it's fairly new. Like I said, I haven't tried it myself, but maybe by the next time we record I'll have gone through it and I can let people know if I either passed or failed or how it went.

Ulrikke:

Maybe I'll race you to it. Maybe it's one of those where you know, there we go. Yeah, yeah.

Nick:

Because everything is a competition with me.

Ulrikke:

Actually, someone told me off on that this week where they said so you and Nick keep talking about the fact that you were going to do an, not an HTTP server, but an F. Oh Jesus, my mind is now mush. A component, a React component. And then you never did. And I was like, ah shoot, I hoped you wouldn't mention that. And now I mention it for everyone, but maybe now we don't have to, we just five-code it like we said.

Ulrikke:

And next I see that we don't have to. Just five code it Like we said, okay. And next I see that we kind of need to get going. You can't outsource accountability.

Nick:

Speaking of accountability, that's hilarious, it is true.

Ulrikke:

Actually a bit of a gut check, yeah, yeah.

Nick:

So maybe we can outsource it.

Nick:

So this is by Louise Freeze. Again, we talked about her one of her opinion pieces last week and then she posted another one about accountability and basically it's interesting because it kind of goes into, I think, more of an older theme that I think we've all might have been involved with who owns the system? Where's the outcome? Older theme that I think we've all might have been involved with of um, but who who's who owns the system? Where's the outcome? Um, the outcome needs owners. Um, about the vendors like is it the vendors?

Nick:

Or something goes wrong, a project goes wrong, and they and they always used to talk about how most Sierra projects fail and is it the customer's fault? It's the vendor's fault? How is it going? And now it's with AI. What's the AI strategy? Whose fault is if it fails? Who's leading this? Who's owning this? And then basically about owning the decision-making.

Nick:

So again, this is a great little converse, a good reminder, and working on projects and working with customers or the role of customers themselves, and I think that's something that sometimes we a customer just says we need a system and they kind of like hire consultants to come in and build the system for them.

Nick:

But I think the most successful projects that I've been involved with where there's a very tight collaboration, maybe either with the clients or with a very strong product owner product owner in a scrum standpoint, meaning someone who owns the project, who makes the decisions, who sets the priorities, and this is where projects become successful. And, of course, now in the whole new world of AI, where we're not sure what the direction will be or what the end in mind will be, this is again where someone needs to own that process, take ownership, take leadership around that. So good little pigeon piece, kind of nice reminder of these things. And I do like these posts to kind of reground ourselves a little bit Sometimes things that we can share with the customer as well as we're engaging with them about making projects successful with collaboration. So thanks, louise, again for the content that you produce, really thought-provoking, and I think it's very important in our space.

Ulrikke:

I absolutely agree and I had the privilege of being in the presence of the princess last week and so big shout out to Louise. She's so much fun, she abides my day. Okay, so quickly moving on to just mentioning a few things before we wrap up. I saw Extreme Makeover Model Driven App Edition. That was so much fun and I saw and he used.

Ulrikke:

So this is Ricardo Gregory, who made the longest blog post of the year, I think, with a bazillion ways that you can actually customize model-driven apps, because you hear that all the time that, no, with model-driven apps, you're so limited in terms of what you can do and the interface and I know that Sarah Lagerquist and Mats Necker have they do that session that they do so well of how you can actually use icons and fill with the ribbon and the actions that you can do. There's actions that you can do. There's so much you can do. So this kind of goes to show that this is the ultimate resource really for all the things you can do, and all the things it doesn't mean you should. I just need to add that, because when you can change the font to Comic Sense, it doesn't mean that you should. Okay, so just use it with care, and I'm a bit scared to share this with devs, because ugh. Okay, moving on, I'm going to change everything to Comic Sans.

Ulrikke:

Stop.

Ulrikke:

You're not, I'm going to hit you so hard, okay. So, sean Asterhan, I need to let him say that. Right, astrakhan posted another Power Pages related kind of flow chart on LinkedIn that shows you how you choose if a project is right for Power Pages or not, and I love that and I think we should do more of it, because this is the question we get all the time. And also he put a picture of Franco Musso's face on it and of course, anything that has Franco Musso's head on it I will share on this podcast because that's so much fun. So he's like is Bar Page the fit?

Ulrikke:

And the first question is is Dataverse your backend? If no, then it won't be worth the price and I agree it should be backed by Dataverse done. And then second is can your team handle pro code? If not, then you will hit a wall with only out of the box. So you shouldn't use it and I subscribe to that. I agree, if you.

Ulrikke:

I never say this every time I talk about PowerPages out in the open. I say if you don't know web development, you should not do PowerPages because you won't do it right. So I agree. And the third one is if internal, do you have more or less than 40 end users, because if you have less than that, maybe a model-driven app, it would be better for internal use, but if you have more than that, it's often more suitable to use PowerPages, because the licensing model is actually cheaper to use PowerPages than have a premium license for everyone. And then the fourth one is is there a minimal graphic or real-time intense operations? Because if they're not and you need or have a high demand on graphics or high demand in real-time operations, you shouldn't use it. There are other frameworks that are better, and if you do, then you get to Franco Museau, and I love that because it's so much fun. So thank you guys for that. That was a good resource.

Nick:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, it was good to see. I did see Sean and Franco in Slovenia. Always a treat then. Uh, just a kind of bit of a plug. Sean does an exclusion accelerator course. Um, he does different cohorts and I kept promising I was going to mention and shout it out for the last three months now. So, sean, definitely check out Sean's uh course, if that's something of interest. It was so good, it was such a great course and it's very interactive and Sean's just, he's a bundle of energy and I just love his stuff and such a good guy. Yeah, um, and franco too. Um, yeah, saw franco and their sylvania yeah, that's fun.

Ulrikke:

I love franco, but I don't think I would describe him as a bundle of energy sometimes who franco or sean franco oh yeah, no, yeah, you're right.

Nick:

No, franco is sorry. Uh, sean's the italian.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, very much the italian relaxed guy, uh, but yeah, yeah, let's move on. Uh, we love you both guys fun yep.

Nick:

So anyways, um, there was the partner call this past week and I believe this, this information is, is, um, you can get some of this, but basically the rundown is they demonstrated the uh, the single page applications within power pages and it kind of blew me away like I read the article we mentioned it two weeks ago about this was coming about how you can build apps and then import those, basically use power pages sort of as the framework or the foundation for this. They showed, um, some amazing examples, which the link is in GitHub so you can actually download these links, basically with those samples. One is like it was a credit card website which he demonstrated I forget who it was, one of the team, from members of the PowerPages team. So all those assets are there so you can actually go through and begin to play with this stuff. The cool thing about this is you can basically build your entire site within using React and TypeScript and those types of components as a single page application. But then you have the benefits of the PowerPages authentication, the PowerPages security, just being able to host it within the Azure web app and then also, once it's brought into the solutions, be able to ALM deploy this downstream, so it has tons of benefits.

Nick:

It isn't quite. It's still in preview, so it's not ready for production yet. There are a few things that they're trying to work out. Environment variables was something that I had brought up in this conversation, with them saying okay, guys, we need environment variables for the different authentication types. They agreed with that. They said that's coming, so this isn't something to use as a component within an existing PowerPages site as it stands right today.

Nick:

This is something you would build instead of using the regular low-code tools and components of a PowerPages site. You would build the single-page application completely on its own, but then you would basically import it into the PowerPages sort of framework and foundation, which gives you tons of benefits, like I said, in terms of security and deployments and all this other stuff. It uses the PowerPages web API, so all of those features to talk to Dataverse, to read and write to Dataverse is all there and basically it just kind of blew me away and I kind of feel this could be the future of Power Pages. Does this mean you have to learn how to code and react in TypeScript? Not necessarily, because this is again where some of these vibe code or these coding tools will come to play within GitHub that you can begin to work.

Nick:

What I see happening is the community going forward and building a list component, building a form component that you could take these components and build into your single page application to basically build the equivalent PowerPages sites that you would before with probably about the same amount of effort, but also gives you a lot more flexibility in terms of the look and the feel to match those Figma designs that your customers are going to be throwing in your face when you're in these PowerPages projects. So check out those if you're. It is still very technical, but it is something that I think they're making it more and more approachable to PowerPages builders and makers. So, yeah, interesting times.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, very much so, and also very power to the procoder right. So it is moving in that direction and it's very curious to see where this is going. I think this is a very kind of strong indication for Microsoft in terms of where everything is going in that direction. You're opening up, you have code, like we talked about earlier, the code, apps and the generated pages, and the notion of the design studio where you drag and drop your interface into your canvas, is kind of well. Yeah, we're a bit beyond that.

Ulrikke:

So it's going to be interesting to see where it goes from here. But, yeah, let's wrap it up with some of the things that are upcoming. We will have a bit of a summer break, but I think we'll still do podcasts. I don't know, we haven't really talked about it, so you'll just have to wait and see what pops up in your feed. Dynamics sorry, dynamics, convegional Rocky Mountain this is new. What are you going to do?

Nick:

What am I going to do? I'm going to talk about power pages. What, wow, exactly? Yeah, so this is happening. This is the dynamics user group in um. Yeah, they're doing a kind of a regional. It's very similar if they did here in canada, uh, last week as well, like a full day of sessions and things like that is put on by the dynamics group, same group of people that do DynamicsCon. So I'm kind of turning that into doing that session, but turning it into a bit of a bit of a bit of a vacation trip as well.

Nick:

Going to be, of course, going to that session, learning all about new things in the Power Platform for, specifically for the folks in Denver, colorado, but then I'm also going to be going to the Shaw Classic, which, for those people who know Strongman, it is the strongest man on earth. No, I'm not competing, I'm just going to be watching, and this is where all the big strongmen of the world, like Mitch Hooper from Canada will be competing, who won the world's strongest man multiple times. In all these big, huge events, picking up heavy things, this is stuff. Strength sports is one of my passions and my friend Andrea big shout out to Andrea is going to be powerlifting there as well. So there's going to be a powerlifting competition. So watching her helping her out, running her numbers, a little bit potentially so kind of turning into that trip, so that's so.

Nick:

No one cares about that. Yes, if you're in the denver area, you care about the power platform. Uh, august 21st, come to the dynamics user group um, I believe there's still tickets available for that. And then, of course, we go into the fall um collab days in finland, nordic summit. Of course, they're beginning to put the push on get your tickets now, because they will sell out. Oh yeah, so be on top of that. And then, and then, of course, they're beginning to put the push on get your tickets now because they will sell out. Oh yeah, so be on top of that. And then, and then, of course, in the end of october, power platform community conference, use boost 100 to get a hundred dollars off your ticket. So make sure you get that. I have a couple. I have a workshop, a session with eliza benitez. I'm pretty excited about that. Uh, doing that with eliza. And yeah, that's the fall. Of course, we'll probably talk about this as we're coming up over the summer.

Ulrikke:

Yep, 100% Okay, and with that, I'm sorry, let's wrap it up and yeah, good to see you and have fun and I'll catch you in the next one.

Nick:

Catch you later. Bye-bye.

Ulrikke:

Thanks for listening and if you liked this episode, please make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues in the community. Make sure to leave a rating and review your favorite streaming service and makes it easier for others to find us. Follow us on the social media platforms and make sure you don't miss an episode. Thanks for listening to the Power Platform Boost podcast with your hosts Ulrika Akerbeck and Nick Dolman, and see you next time.

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