Malcolm McAuley on The MVP Show

[Mark Smith]: 2:35
Today's guest is from Ontario,Canada. He works as a senior business solutions analyst at C5 Insights. He was first awarded his MVP in 2021. I've met him before. In fact, the last time we met was in Orlando before COVID. So it's been some time. You can find links to his bio and social media,et cetera, in the show notes for this episode.Welcome to the show, Malcolm.

[Malcolm McAuley]: 2:59
Thank you so much, it's great to be here.

[Mark Smith]: 3:02
to have you on the show. When I last caught up with you, you weren't an MVP.You've become an MVP, probably mid-COVID by the looks. I always like to kind of get a background on people so that those listening can understand where you're coming from. And so I start with three crisp questions, food, family, and fun. What do they mean to you?

[Malcolm McAuley]: 3:29
Oh man, what do they mean to me? Well, family means everything. That's that I have two boys, my wife and I have two boys, 13 and 15. And so they are still we're still cool enough that they talk to us. So we're trying to cherish that and take advantage of that because the day will soon come when when that perhaps isn't the case. So yeah, we try and center everything we do around around our family. We all love food. So that plays a huge part in in everything we do really. And then fun, we all love to have fun. Again, as they're getting older, it's very clear now they have different interests. But the one thing we do together as a family, we actually just got home, we pretty much every weekend head up to a vacation spot a couple hours north of us, little beachside town on the coast of Lake Huron, which is one of the large great lakes. And that centers,most of our fun centers around that spot for a good chunk of the year.

[Mark Smith]: 4:23
Nice, nice. It's funny, the minute you said beach, in my mind I was like, there's no ocean around you, because for me, beach always means ocean,but I hadn't thought about it as beach meaning on a lake, which of course it does as well.

[Malcolm McAuley]: 4:40
Yeah, yeah, and Lake Huron is massive. The Great Lakes Hall are very,very big, but it's not like your little traditional inland lake. It's,you can look as far as you can. You're not gonna see the other side. It borders the Michigan on the other side of it and is just massive, which means it's freezing cold.So we don't get in as often as we probably want to, but it's, yeah,it's a great spot. I mean, it's something about water. We're all just drawn to water and walk the beach and have a good time and it's always enjoyable.

[Mark Smith]: 5:06
Nice, nice. Does it freeze solid?

[Malcolm McAuley]: 5:09
It doesn't just around the coast areas, but the core doesn't. It stays,you usually get these huge ice flows. So they actually, some spots that are real close like walking trails and stuff can be closed year to year because the big flows come up and wreak havoc on the coastal walking trails.But for the most part, the main core of it doesn't freeze over.

[Mark Smith]: 5:29
Well, well, have you heard of Lake Baikal?

[Malcolm McAuley]: 5:33
I have not.

[Mark Smith]: 5:34
Lake Baikal is in Russia. It's the largest land water in the world.I think it makes up something between 20 and 25% of the entire world's freshwater resource.And I've been to it and it freezes.They can build railroads, like rail lines across the lake in the winter and it'll hold a train. That's how solid the ice is.

[Malcolm McAuley]: 6:06
wow well there's a show here in northern that a way northern part of canada for the record canada is massive as you know and so way way north there's ice road builds that get put together every year same idea because that's how they get most of their resources up there and that that blew my mind i would have never thought of a train that's that's pretty exceptional those things are not they're not small

[Mark Smith]: 6:26
No, no, I wanted to dive it under the ice but my wife was like, we don't know the safety standards here, you know, and rather you didn't.

[Malcolm McAuley]: 6:37
Yeah, fair enough.

[Mark Smith]: 6:38
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so, but it's a phenomenal place. Tell me, what are three things top of mind for you at the moment? What are you working on? What's your focus?

[Malcolm McAuley]: 6:48
Well, so AI, we were talking a little bit before we kicked off, right? AI is such a huge component.So really trying to get my head around how,how we can leverage it in our organization. Um, you know, we know how sometimes to advise on some of our customers who can use it, but even that is an evolving space. Uh,but we've been really trying to dive into how,how can we leverage it? How we can benefit from it. And the same here at home, we've been talking about that again, to, to teenage boys, they're intrigued with all things online. So AI, they've been seeing this, you know, frequency of AI talk and how chat GPT and all these other tools can help them. So that's been a huge focus. Um, you know, I don't know if your question was pertains strictly to work, but just in general, it's that time of year here in Canada, it's starting to get warmer. Finally,we're starting to see nicer weather. So we head up, as I said, a lot of our fun centers around that beach town. So that becomes a priority for us. We intentionally try and make sure that we're spending lots of time.Outdoors and up there just to just to get out, you know And it gets real cold here in the winter and we're not real good winter people So perhaps not great Canadians because we don't venture out as much as we should in the cold weather So we try and get out as much as we can spring through fall and then third thing I would say you know on a personal level just trying to be healthy It's just such a challenge because especially this time of year as it gets nicer You want something quick and on the on the go and so you you tend to be like I'll work out later. I'll I'll go for that jog later, I'll do the walk later. So trying to keep that away from happening so that it's part of my day today, but that seems to be a constant struggle at all times.

[Mark Smith]: 8:24
yeah, interesting. On the AI front.you do you see what you know what's your practical application what are kind of the things if you look back since let's say December time when it really became a big deal in the world with you know chat GPT and of course now with Google Bard been being available as well I always have both tabs open when I open my browser both those two tabs come up and I'm comparing them and things what do you what are you doing what are you doing first of all let's focus Are you doing anything in your personal life that you're using AI for?

[Malcolm McAuley]: 9:04
Not as much as we should be, although as it's been emerging and we've been kind of putting it off,not putting it off, but we just haven't found time. And so just just last weekend, actually, I was my wife and I were chatting and, and I was saying we were really look at this in terms of how it can help us. She has a ton of food intolerances, just things that she can't eat makes her feel not great. And so we were using it to ask it like, Hey, here, make us a menu plan for five days that

[Mark Smith]: 9:29
Nice.

[Malcolm McAuley]: 9:29
avoid the following foods,right.And that was cool. That was it. she has so many that she posted a whole list in and I think it just got overwhelmed that it was like no because it started popping up stuff that had those foods in it but on the whole you pick the ones that are really troublesome for her the ones that really impact and bother her and it was starting to give us some good ideas that we never would have thought of because you know meal planning especially as much as we love food it's easy to get into a rut you know you have busy schedules and so you stop thinking about the creative things you could be doing so that was one neat application. And another one was I actually we were on vacation a couple weeks ago, I guess almost a month ago now we went down to Jamaica and in prep you know you get all the things you tie up all your loose ends you get everything ready so you can leave the house for the week. And one of the things I maintain our family finances and I paid our MasterCard and while we were away. All of a sudden was like oh right I got to pay our MasterCard off so I paid it again a substantial amount twice in the span of a couple days because I just was on vacation mode and so it caused a little bit of a. you know, a hurdle. Now all of a sudden we've got this huge negative balance,which isn't a bad thing.But, uh, but we were looking for ways to have, you know, what can we ask chat GPT to help us with?And so we asked it, what should we do? Right?We overpay our math car. What are some things that we could do to help balance things out? And

[Mark Smith]: 10:44
Awesome.

[Malcolm McAuley]: 10:44
it came back with a few suggestions on, you know, you could ask for a refund, you could just track your purchases,you know, and, and spend in the negative and then eventually you'll catch up. And it had a few other ideas. I didn't love them all, but, but it was a neat. neat perspective to get on other things you could be doing with the application.

[Mark Smith]: 11:02
Very cool, very cool. That resonates with me because I was being in a similar situation last year where I wanted to overspend on my credit card because it would take me through an air point balance point that would make a status there. My question was around what could I buy that I know I'm going to need in the next two months that I would normally put on the credit card and also do is buy it early,as an example.

[Malcolm McAuley]: 11:25
yeah, yeah, totally makes sense.

[Mark Smith]: 11:28
Some of the options that I looked at was even shares. could I buy shares via my credit card?Because I know I'm going to put money in shares every month because it's part of the financial habit of our home. We do that right?A portion every month goes to shares.So could you just, you know, stop doing that incrementally for the next three months, just buy it as a lump sum now? Those are like, I didn't actually do that. That was just one of the ideas on that scenario.The idea that actually won was we had scheduled a big holiday and we paid the whole lot off before. you know, three months before taking the holiday.So we knew it was going to come up. So, and that worked. Tell me, tell me about work when it comes to AI. What are you thinking and not necessarily what have you done, but what are you thinking in concepts of, you know, there's been a lot of talk that it's going to impact our work and you know, what work will look like in five years, what work will look like in 10 years, I think will be drastically different than where we are now.If you contextualize it to today though, it starts with today right, or those steps that you're already taking. What does it look like for you?

[Malcolm McAuley]: 12:38
That's a great question.And it's timely because we've been talking a lot about this at work and with other colleagues that I interact with,both for work and just in the space. And so we've been thinking a lot about, I've actually been asking ChatGPT how to use it.And so in this specific context,how should I use this? One of the conversations we're having coming up here in a few weeks is exactly this topic, right?How could we as an organization be doing this? And so this actually, this weekend,I was having a conversation with AI saying, asked me some questions about our business. So it asked me five questions and I answered questions and it created some new questions to ask. And then we eventually essentially got it to a place where it understood my current context. And then I said,okay, now based on the positions I just explained to you and the roles and the responsibilities everybody has, give me an agenda for a discussion that our organization could have around how to leverage your service, ChatShapet.Right? And it actually did a great job, gave me a fairly robust agenda of things we could talk about,gave me some ideas of things that each of the roles that could be doing.And so that's one area. So that semi answers your question, I think, because it's,you know, we're, we like many organizations, I think we've seen this evolution of AI come out and we're now sitting there saying, we've got this amazing, this tool set at our fingertips, but we don't necessarily know where to even begin and how to leverage it. And so that's one thing.My children on the other hand, they've actually been getting into it too and just trying to see what it can do. And of course at their age,teenage boys, they want to earn money. And they're at the age where they still are fascinated by the concept of easy money. And so what can we do real quick and easy that will make us so they're using it and looking at it. And they're coming up with some neat ideas, but it's actually

[Mark Smith]: 14:21
That's awesome.

[Malcolm McAuley]: 14:21
helping them realize there is no such thing as quick money, right? If there was quick money, then we'd all be rich because we'd all do it. And so I think that's an amazing lesson. It's fascinating for me to sit back and watch them go through this because when I was their age, it was like,I'll go and deliver newspapers.And if I deliver a lot of them, I'll get more money than if I do a little bit. And they're looking at it like maybe I could do, maybe we could use AI to give us travel itineraries and then provide that as a service to people and help refine it and do some further research, but it at least could give us the baseline of what information somebody could benefit from. So that's an interesting way. But I think to me, the biggest interesting part about all of this,and we said it earlier, we're preparing for jobs, they in particular, our children are preparing for jobs that we don't even know about. And so I think asking it like you did in your example, what should we be thinking about? Hey, what seems to be taking hold in society that I could start to train toward?and help me give me the skills and ideas and pointers. And I think that's one way organizations could be leveraging the application, to just help them get a sense of what's coming, what might be coming, what are the trends in the space, you know, in whatever industry or space you're working in, just to help me identify and be aware of what those trends are.

[Mark Smith]: 15:41
Yeah, so good. In the context of the Power Platform, are you focused more on the dynamic side of the house or the Power Platform side of the house?

[Malcolm McAuley]: 15:49
Primarily Dynamics actually do a lot of work on the Microsoft 365 too.So SharePoint teams and some of those things. So seeing Copilot coming out and starting to plug into all these things and things like VivaSales from, you know, essentially bridging all of these applications together, we're seeing a lot of that. But my primary role is workshops on either that Microsoft 365 side or the Dynamics side. It's pretty much even right now. And it's really helping organizations craft a plan. for how to either adopt or how to modify. Some of them are on-premises clients who are looking at migrations and things like that.So that's really where we're focused today.

[Mark Smith]: 16:27
interesting really really good to hear and I think that the blending of M365and D365 and Power Platform underpinning it of course seems to be blending so much more these days right there's it's almost

[Malcolm McAuley]: 16:46
absolutely.

[Mark Smith]: 16:46
like where does one stop where does the next one tell me about Teams. specifically,what are you doing in that space that's like, have you looked at the new teams that's coming out, are you using it, you know, what are your thoughts?

[Malcolm McAuley]: 17:01
turned it on a few weeks ago just to give a shot and I didn't love of all the things as minor as first you know minor as this is that the notifications I noticed a big difference right it then blended itself into the Microsoft notifications and so that trademark you know noise that you hear when you get a message was now gone it was replaced with the out-of-the-box little panel that shows that actually bothered me more than I should admit. I couldn't get over how much I didn't love that.And I don't know if it was because I was just used to the team's one and that was,you know, my brain is paying attention to that noise, which sounds silly to say out loud, but I don't know what it was that was that. Everything else about it though seemed pretty good for the most part in terms of, you know, they said it would launch faster.I had been having a really hard time when I joined meetings. It just takes forever to load. That seemed to go away. So that was promising.But in the grand scheme of things, it was minor improvements. But when you add them all together, I think they end up giving the user experience a decent facelift. A facelift is, I guess,one word, but also just it felt a little more user-friendly and functional,other than the notifications.Again, don't know why that bothered me so much.

[Mark Smith]: 18:19
Yeah, interesting. I tried it and I've actually switched back because it broke the API integration to Elgato Stream Deck.And the Elgato Stream Deck integration,what it allows me to do is to have a whole bunch of buttons that allow me to give my thumbs up, my reactions, turn my camera on and off, mute the mic.all that through the API. So Microsoft developed this connection to it as part of Teams. And I tell you, you know, for someone,you know, part of one of the things I moonlight I do is a lot of work of training Microsoft staff. And therefore I will do a four hour session at a time in Teams with 80 to100 people on that call. And you want those efficiencies that you can get using tools That's why I've had to switch back because I've, you know, I've got used to now the Stream Deck, easy access,give a response, camera off, whatever. You know, you're gonna cough. You wanna just be able to hit a button to mute,not faff around wherever your mouse pointer is now to get to that mute. Of course you can use shortcut keys on the keyboard and stuff like that, but yeah,that's the change for me. Tell me on the Viva side of things, and we're seeing,you know, Yammer being renamed,we're seeing... so many elements that are becoming part of that Viva story. Is there,apart from Viva sales, because obviously it's associated with Dynamics 365 sales,something we've worked in for some time, any other of the Viva products that are your kind of go-to?

[Malcolm McAuley]: 20:04
we don't actually use it as much as I love it, primarily because we're a smaller company,but I have long been fascinated with Yammer.So now it's transitioning down the Viva path, but to me, it's just such a functional tool, right?The collaboration is the name of everything nowadays, has been for a while. And with so many people, even COVID aside, so many people working remotely or just on the fly,the ability to have interactions with the whole company that get us away from emails because, yeah. goodness, I can't stand email, I despise it.And I'd much rather have an inline right inline thread that I can see who else is commenting.If you're in a large company,you see other other people commenting on things that you maybe wouldn't normally come across in your normal day to day and so that you start to form some relationships and things which is such a huge part when you have a remote workforce,giving them tools to be able to get to know each other and collaborate because they're going to work more effectively together if they're familiar with each other and know each other. So I think that's a huge one. But I love where they're going just in general with the Viva focus. Even all the employee, just your own insights, right?I forget what they used to call it, analytics, my analytics. And now it's the Viva components that kind of help you see like, wow, I've been spending a lot of time in meetings.I really need to be more mindful of my calendar or I'm collaborating with this group, but not these people. And I probably need to up that. collaboration a little bit because we could be moving things further together or something like that. So that

[Mark Smith]: 21:32
I like it.

[Malcolm McAuley]: 21:32
that's a fascinating one for me too. And quiet days. I'm a big life work balance guy. And so I always enjoy looking at that and seeing how many days I wasn't, you know,that I truly was unplugged, that I didn't interact after hours or on the weekend and things like that.Sometimes you have to and I get that.But I try hard to make sure that, you know, that when I'm on family time,we're on family time,

[Mark Smith]: 21:56
good.

[Malcolm McAuley]: 21:56
not pseudo family time.

[Mark Smith]: 21:57
It's good. It's good. Last question for you, Malcolm, which is,what's the best thing about being an MVP?

[Malcolm McAuley]: 22:07
That's a great question.I think it's got to be the ability to interact and get some inside information,if you will, right? The ability to hear what's coming, give some feedback,you know, collaborate with others in the space and share some thoughts.And I applaud Microsoft a great deal for that kind of environment that they've cultivated there because It's really good. I've been a part of a few sessions where you hear some really good feedback on some of the things that they're thinking about coming out with and then to see it. Now, having done this for, you know, you mentioned a couple of years now and been able to see some of those sessions happening and then see alterations to what was going to be rolled out before it hits preview or GA. That to me is mind blowing because that I've always maintained that it's very clear that Microsoft listens to customers. I'm sure there's many people who would disagree with that because they've made lots of suggestions and they don't get picked up, but there's thousands of people using these tools and giving ideas, but they do. They legitimately listen. Myself and Heidi Neuhauser, I think you know, and Kylie Kaiser, we do a sort of a pseudo podcast kind of video every couple of weeks. And we have multiple times, we've had commentary on those videos from the product team. And this really is,this is just general YouTube. This is even MVP stuff,where they're clearly saying,hey, that's a great call out. Thanks for that.Or yes, what you talked about is coming. Thanks for the ideas. We'll kind of more that into what we're doing. Not to say that we're driving it, but I think it's a collective. And that's the whole point. It's the community is driving these tools forward based on what truly is going to meet the needs of organizations that use these tools day in, day out.