From Data Enthusiast to Microsoft MVP: Julie Koesmarno's Journey in AI and Enterprise Data Management

Mark Smith: 0:01
Welcome to the Copilot Show, where I interview Microsoft staff innovating with AI. I hope you will find this podcast educational and inspire you to do more with this great technology. Now let's get on with the show. In this episode, we'll be focusing on the integration of custom Copilot experiences with Dataverse and Power Apps. Today's guest is from Washington in the United States Well, not originally, but she'll tell you about that. She works at Microsoft as a principal product manager in Dataverse. She's also a co-author of SQL Server 2017 Machine Learning Service with R from way back in the day. Shaping Copilot experience within Dataverse, powerapps and Copilot Studio is one of her missions. You can find links to her bio, social media, etc. In the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Julie.

Julie Koesmarno: 0:52
Awesome. Thank you so much, Mark. Thanks for having me.

Mark Smith: 0:56
It's great to have you on the show. I always love for guests to tell a bit about their story outside of work, and of course work does encroach over into a lot of what we do outside of work. But tell me food, family and fun what do they mean to you?

Julie Koesmarno: 1:13
Oh, food, okay, I like ice cream, so I'm going to talk a little bit about that. But there's a new one. It's funny because, since we're talking about family as well, so a lot of my family members are scattered around the world, some in the UK, some in Australia, and then here I am in the States. From time to time. I do get you know friends visiting. Some are MVPs, like yourself, right? So some of my fun memories of that having ice cream is when, like my friend Heidi actually, who is an MVP in the data platform side, we go to like shop around this like ice cream aisle and we look at this Mochi Boba ice cream and yeah, nice, nice. So that's my favourite one right now. That's awesome.

Mark Smith: 2:04
That's awesome. That's awesome. And what do you do for fun outside of eating ice cream?

Julie Koesmarno: 2:10
Kind of have to work it off, don't I? So, yeah, my favorite is actually to be able to do it in. You know quite a bit for work, but in general way, when I was younger, I was traveling a lot more than I do now.

Mark Smith: 2:35
Yeah, yeah, do you have a favorite country?

Julie Koesmarno: 2:38
Oh, that's a tough one. Well, I cannot not mention about my what I consider as my home country now, which is australia. Well, now that I've lived here for a long time, so it kind of gets a bit confusing like where is my home country? But I grew up in australia, so that has to be my favorite, because most of my family members is there. But if I I were to visit somewhere else, I would have to say maybe Holland mostly because also for the got a few friends there really good friends there and food's pretty good yeah.

Mark Smith: 3:20
Very cool, very cool. How did you end up being in Microsoft? I know you're an MVP at one point, but how did your life path take you to Microsoft, and particularly even to Microsoft Redmond, being that there's 14 subs around the world that you could work within, but you're working, as they say, for the mothership?

Julie Koesmarno: 3:59
Yeah, yeah, great point, great question there. So I started my career actually in the database area. So know, some of you are probably out there that have been in the database world probably kind of knew that, but anyway, so I ended up somehow landing in the database space more, which is SQL Server or which was SQL Server at the time, yeah, and then I got awarded MVP through all the community work, the community work, um, and I figured out like hey, it's actually really good to, you know, be able to advocate for microsoft products and solving customers problems with the, uh, you know, with the, with the microsoft spec. Some of you this is kind of dating me a little bit some of you probably remember of the bi burger back in the day with the ss, with the SSRS and all that kind of stuff like the data we have in Slack. So I used to kind of recall like, oh, that's kind of fun. I do wonder, like how would they do that? Like how would Microsoft actually think about coming up with all these different features or products?

Julie Koesmarno: 5:01
So I decided one time just to apply and got to meet with a few Microsoft folks and yeah, and then I applied and then they let me, you know, choose which team I wanted to be part of. And then I decided, since my background was actually analytics, I decided to join the SQL Server telemetry team. That was an amazing space to learn about how SQL Server was built, because I had to figure out all the different features that are available out there. So, yeah, I got to work with a lot of telemetry, so it was kind of fun to work with a lot of telemetry, so it was kind of fun.

Julie Koesmarno: 5:46
And then I decided, hey, I want it to be more of a front-facing product management sort of role. So how do I get into that? And eventually landed in Charles' org Charles' awareness org, which is Business Applications Platform Group, and I've been very thankful of that because there's a lot more exposure for trying a lot of new things. Like you know, some of the things that you kind of mentioned during the introduction about, you know Core Pilot. My team have been able to kind of work on that, so it's very exciting stuff.

Mark Smith: 6:19
That's awesome and so, specifically, are you well, what area are you working in? You know the Power Platform is a big product. Well, it's many products. It's an interesting ecosystem. Are you specifically because of your database background in the Dataverse area of things?

Julie Koesmarno: 6:38
Yeah, great question. It somehow sort of morphed into beyond just the database aspect of it, but essentially just working with data overall. Now this is a bit of a fun story. I recall the first time I had my Power Platform, the MPPC, the Power Platform Conference the very first time I joined I was co-presenting with Tim Solenik. You probably, I think you've had him on the show right?

Mark Smith: 7:09
Yes, yes, I have James.

Julie Koesmarno: 7:10
So we're just having a chat and I was saying like, hey, you didn't realize that in SQL I could do this really fast because I know the syntax of SQL pretty well.

Julie Koesmarno: 7:22
And so since then I was thinking about, hmm, maybe the user experience for, you know, creating tables in general or bringing data into Dataverse for especially for enterprise data or for business applications, could be way improved. So it's just taking you know from some of my background, as you know from the pro code, but how do we introduce it so that if or when you are low-code developers, or even if you are pro-code developers, it should be pretty easy for you to create tables and bring data in? So it all started from there. Some of the thinking that I had at the time was can we use something like GPT? This was before the open AI. You know big announcement on the chat GPT, so we're exploring that. And then, sure enough, within weeks, that announcement was there and we were able to leverage a lot more on the large language models for a number of things that we are enabling for makers. So I have to say I'm very, very fortunate to be part of this journey, being able to enable for our local makers.

Mark Smith: 8:33
Nice. So your day-to-day role involves what? Are you just focused now on Copilot, or are you focused on Copilot in the context of data, which? You know, every AI needs data to operate. How do you explain that?

Julie Koesmarno: 8:53
So the team that I work in, we ensure that you can bring knowledge easily. And if you are to use knowledge for your Copilot, you can do that easily as well, and if you are to use knowledge for your co-pilot, you can do that easily as well. So, essentially, everything that I'm working now is about knowledge.

Mark Smith: 9:10
Okay, so let's expand the concept of knowledge. What does knowledge mean to you?

Julie Koesmarno: 9:15
Great question. So knowledge right now to me means enterprise data. Enterprise data could also be general knowledge as well, you know, like what's available in the public out there. But for the context of most of the time, I'm thinking about more in the enterprise data side of things, and it's actually beyond data first. So some of the things that we are enabling for within the Copilot studio where you can ground your own custom Copilots with enterprise data it's cross-collaboration with a lot of different teams, of course, but one of the things that we're enabling is not just being able to allow makers to grant their custom co-pilots with data versus enterprise data, but also some of the other what we call third-party connectors right, the co-pilot connectors which actually technically, under the hood, is leveraging the Microsoft Graph connections. So very exciting space.

Mark Smith: 10:13
So just because I haven't fully got knowledge nailed down in my head, because are you thinking or are you meaning like, let's say, as an organization, we have all our enterprise data and they'll be, you know, distributed across many systems. So, you know, from a file share perspective, we could be on some HP trim type environment or we could be in, of course, share do have a lot of SharePoint repositories. You know that data would sit in, but it could be various SQL systems, it could be, you know, anything from POS systems to ERP systems. When you're talking about the organization's knowledge, are you talking about all their data?

Julie Koesmarno: 11:08
That's the mission, yeah.

Mark Smith: 11:09
Yeah, awesome. So here's one of the things I've been discussing with friends lately, which is the minute you light up all that data to the graph. Any data sloppiness is potentially going to be exposed, right. Right, and for years people have not known that data was accessible because they didn't know how to query, right? Because day-to-day you know, individuals are not experienced queries as in. The best they could do is probably do a search engine search, and most people have used search engines way below what their capabilities are.

Mark Smith: 11:51
I remember back in the day reading a book when I was in web design, and this was a very long time ago. There was a book called Google Hacks and it was basically designed to allow you to do search querying, you know, through just the standard search tool that Google had, and, of course, you could extract all sorts of things credit card numbers, passwords, all different types of file formats, etc. If you knew how to create a really robust query, you could access that data. Now, with the graph the Microsoft graph coming online in the context of co-pilots, in the context of all knowledge of an organization, there's potentially a massive amount of data sloppiness and governance standards that perhaps haven't been implemented because no one's known how to find that information.

Mark Smith: 12:42
And, of course, in a world where you can, you know, ask an LLM that has reasoned over that information. Ask an LLM that has reasoned over that information, even PII data, you know, where it might not contain the full data set of an individual, like their name, their date of birth, their address, but there might be fragments of their data all over the organization. All of a sudden, llm, brilliant at finding patterns, can all of a sudden start bringing together a lot of information that in its individual formats would be meaningless but as a consolidation would be very interesting. Yeah, what are you seeing in this space? Does a co-pilot implementation really needs to carry out a security sprint following to actually do some housekeeping around the data that is now exposed?

Julie Koesmarno: 13:37
Yeah, a great point. Actually, that's one of the things that we have discussed before. You're actually bringing a fresh perspective from the other dimension. You're actually bringing a fresh perspective from the other dimension. So a lot of the discussions that I've been into recently it's kind of like garbage in, garbage out, Like how do you?

Julie Koesmarno: 13:55
make sure that the data is clean enough to be consumable. So that's one aspect, but you're also adding that dimension of the security. So garbage security in, garbage security out. So definitely those are the two things that we are considering as well. So something for, as practitioners or, as you know, customers are adopting this, we highly recommend to kind of think through how you organize your data before, of course, you know the whole.

Julie Koesmarno: 14:28
data governance is an important concept, but now it's even making it more important or prevalent to all enterprises. It's very important to kind of look into it. Especially if you're I mean especially when you're building apps, you should look into it. But with Copilot, of course, it makes it super easy. So therefore, there's much more kind of care need to be uh given to, uh to the governance of data in itself.

Mark Smith: 14:58
Yeah, nice, you talked about grounding your information, and can you explain what you mean by that?

Julie Koesmarno: 15:32
yeah, so with um, with gpt. So if you are actually using the um copilot that when you go to like Bingcom you can ask you know the Copilot version, like you know search stuff right. So that is typically when the answer is provided. It's usually grounded with some data In most cases when you ask kind of generic questions like where is Gold Coast? And then it kind of answer like Gold Coast is in Australia. So it typically sort of like sources and provides citation hey, you know, this information comes from this. So that's what we mean by grounding with the data, so that it's specific to what the co-pilot can answer. It doesn't use like Bing today or the co-pilot that you can use from Bing. It doesn't actually use enterprise data on your local machine.

Julie Koesmarno: 16:25
So because you don't set it up that way or nobody set it up that way. So when you build a custom co-pilot and this is an experience that already existed even prior to build where you can build a custom co-pilot and you can say, hey, I just want to ground it or I want to use it as a data source for the code palette, just maybe only from this website or from this SharePoint site or from this file. Just making it super easy to illustrate. Say, if I was to upload a file that discusses onboarding guide, then if and I add it to my custom copilot so that copilot is grounded with that onboarding guide, so if I were to ask questions like where's the best sushi, then it shouldn't answer that, right, because it's just answering based on the data that I've provided it as a maker.

Mark Smith: 17:24
Nice. So, with the connectors that you're talking about, is the idea that if enterprise data is available or knowledge is available that you will be able through. Are you more focused on Copilot Studio, like as in custom Copilots, or are you more in the concept of M365 Copilot and bringing the data in and making that available to the organization?

Julie Koesmarno: 17:52
Yeah, great point there. So the ones that we are releasing or that we have released in Build is related to custom Copilot specifically, and there is also a Copilot extension that you can do, and that is usually done via plugins, so we're working on improving that, so hopefully it's more of a seamless experience. So when we talk about co-pilot connectors in general, it means it means knowledge, but it also means plugins, which essentially is connectors or actions, right, so yeah, yeah, and role-based access control.

Mark Smith: 18:31
Is that all part of the thinking here? Because you know, from my history in dataverse and pre-dataverse one of our big selling points to customers was this you know that we could secure down to a field level whether someone was allowed to see it edited, updated, that type. You know the normal current type processes through the ui is this do those you know what you're producing therefore honor that type of role-based access? So we don't have people, for example, say, you know, let's say, a data set in Dataverse that their role doesn't give them privilege to.

Julie Koesmarno: 19:04
Yeah, so if you're using Dataverse as your knowledge to your co-pilot, then it will honor the role-based access, the RBAC, for sure. Excellent. Yeah and including, even if we talk about you know the graph connections. It will also honor that. You know whatever data access that you may have. Obviously, you know whatever that is set up from Microsoft Graph.

Mark Smith: 19:28
Awesome. What are you most excited about the next 12 to 24 months in? What you're working on and what you can working on, what you know and what you can share around you know, and why I? I don't even think 24 months probably nowadays is too far ahead to be looking right because so much change is happening in the 12 month window. We're in what, but what's exciting you?

Julie Koesmarno: 19:50
I mean it's it's. It's hard to, uh, you know, predict what the future is like in terms of technology perspective. But I think, um, this, uh, you know our our journey in CoPilot. I think it's just begun. I know that we started it over a year ago, but I think there's more to come. Some of the things, like you know, we discussed about the data governance that will become more important. I think people are going to care more and more about their data. Yeah, lots of exciting things to look forward to.

Mark Smith: 20:22
Nice. Now an exclusive on the show we're going to do a demo. Is that right as in? We don't normally. So if you're listening to this, the demo will be over on YouTube, on my channel. But, Julie, do you want to go and show us a few things?

Julie Koesmarno: 20:39
Yeah, I actually want to show you a couple of things, and I'll try to do the kitchen show, you know, or the cooking show method, where Nice, let me show you, like, how you get started. And then here's one that I kind of created earlier. So let me start sharing my screen. The first one that I wanted to talk about is how, as a maker, you can get started with data modeling and inserting or creating data or creating tables rather really easily with the help of Copilot. If you want to try this at home, and depending on when you're airing this Mark, there is a few settings that you have to do, because at the moment it's still in the early preview sort of stage. We will make it public preview very soon when you create a new environment or if you already have an environment where it's in the preview region. So that means you have to go to the admin center and look at your environment settings to make sure that it's in the preview region. You can see this.

Julie Koesmarno: 21:35
Try the New Data Experience. Now, when you click on the Try new data experience, either you can tap in from here or start with data, or this is actually to build app. But if you want to just stop at the table side. Then you go to the tables and then click on this beautiful button called Create new tables. Here you'll be presented what I would say as kind of like a blank canvas where you can start doing some data modeling with Copilot For the purpose of the discussion.

Julie Koesmarno: 22:06
I'm just going to start using the start with Copilot. So essentially, using natural language, we'll start designing or modeling data using Copilot with the help of Copilot there. But you could also do similar things with SharePoint and Excel file, where you bring in your existing data to create new tables. I'll go ahead with clicking on the start with Copilot For the purpose of this demo. I'm just going to say student accommodation reviews. So essentially, what I'm providing here is just like a prompt hey, I want to create a data model or ERD diagram, really to like a system to store student accommodation reviews. So I can do some you know optimization in terms of like hey, do you want just the one table, or multiple tables? What table size, et cetera, whether to include relationships or not, and then I'll click generate. So it'll take a few seconds to create.

Mark Smith: 23:09
That's pretty cool because I remember a year, almost a year and a half ago in Charles Lamanna's session, when this first came out, you could only do a single table. You couldn't do anything like relationships or anything like that.

Julie Koesmarno: 23:21
That is cool to see that that new functionality there yeah, because my data set, or I guess not that I said um domain that I'm actually talk about. You know what? I absolutely relate to student accommodation reviews. That's why it comes up with two. You can add more tables, by the way, after as well. Like, within the same experience, the same canvas, have you put?

Julie Koesmarno: 23:42
I think some of the ones that I find interesting when you ask your pilot to do is like hotel registration systems. Usually it comes up with about three, uh, three tables or so. So let's take a look here when you click on student accommodation, it gives you some sample data, and likewise, when you click on accommodation reviews, you get some sample data as well. So that way, as you as a maker, as as you're creating or designing your tables, you can kind of roughly, especially if you want to create apps after you can roughly start testing out your app with some data, right, because it's usually pretty helpful to do that In case you want it to be a bit more relevant to you, in case you want it to be a bit more relevant to you.

Julie Koesmarno: 24:23
So for me since we talked about Australia earlier, so I could ask Copilot to help me you know, change this value of CTA to CTE. It just doesn't make sense. So I'm going to say hey, change location value in student table, two cities in Australia, so fingers crossed, hopefully it works. Again, just to want to reemphasize this is still in early preview, so hopefully it works. Ta-da, locations all changed to Sydney, adelaide, and I can ask add five more rows in student. Sometimes I'm not good in spelling, but the good news is that GPT usually picks it up pretty well. It's not like ah, you know, you have a typo here. We roughly know what you're talking about.

Mark Smith: 25:19
I found that too. I found that too Brilliant. I tell you what I wish I had this like 15 years ago, when all the demos I've done in my career and the hassle always of getting sample data that was meaningful. How quick is this? Amazing.

Julie Koesmarno: 25:34
Yeah, so when you click on save and exit, then tables will be created. So I actually already created the table, so I won't click on the save and exit because otherwise I'll create duplicated tables, which I don't want to do. But yeah, it's pretty straightforward and you can keep adding tables as well. Now the next one that I wanted to do. So you've seen how, as a maker, I'm getting help from Core Palette to help me design my data. Now the question is what can I do with it after? So if you're familiar with Power Apps, like Canvas apps specifically, then when you create these tables and create an app, you have the whole Copilot sidecar that you can start adding. So that way, you can make your app to be Copilot-ready, so to speak, for your end users. Now, speaking for end users, now we're talking about how makers can create their own custom co-pilot so that their end users can start asking questions against this co-pilot. So you can think of this custom co-pilot like as if it's a perhaps a bot that you want to add to your own website, or maybe to Teams as well. So here's one that I actually prepared earlier. So let me just make the real estate a little bit bigger here. So I've created a student accommodation finder custom code palette. It's super easy to do. If we have time I'll show you the flow. But once you create it you can keep adding knowledge. So in this case I've already added a few different knowledge sources. If you want to add a new one, you just click on the plus add knowledge and then you can specify public website files, sharepoint Dataverse Fabric is coming soon or any of the enterprise data that you have your graph connections set up already by your tenant admin. So just for simplicity, I'll show you Dataverse, since we love Dataverse.

Julie Koesmarno: 27:39
Here you'll see some recommendation regarding what table should we use. Here we go. So it suggests student accommodation. The way it's suggested, it is based on the co-pilot name. So if you give meaningful co-pilot name, your custom co-pilot, a meaningful name rather than just co-pilot one, two, three, usually the recommendation here will be a little bit more tuned to that copilot that you're creating. So I've already added this. But just for the sake of demo, let me just show you what that looks like if you were adding from scratch.

Julie Koesmarno: 28:15
You can add multiple tables up to 15, whether related or unrelated, it doesn't matter. Under the hood, the system or the core pilot will figure out the relationships. Interestingly, and a bit of, I guess, lifting the details a bit more here, we use what we call a natural language to SQL. So that's our reg or Ritu for augmented generative or generated method. So under the hood, we will translate your prompt into SQL, so your natural language to a SQL statement. From that perspective, the system will just figure out what would be the relevant tables to use to answer your questions. So once you're happy with the selection of the tables, you get to preview it, just to make sure that these are the right tables. This preview is just showing you a few columns, it won't show the entire columns.

Julie Koesmarno: 29:17
Once you're happy with it, then you click Next and then you can also provide things like synonyms. Here, as an example, you could say let's go to the student accommodation one. Here, for example, accommodation name. Maybe you want to add things like dorm name or whatever colloquial names that are applicable to you or to your enterprise. We can also add glossary as an example, colloquial kind of names that are applicable to you or to your enterprise. We can also add glossary. As an example, we can say hey, akomu, sorry, not accommodation. Let's say housing is the same as same as student accommodation or maybe hostel or something then you click back and then you click Add. Once you click Add so I won't add it for now but once you click Add, it will be added to the screen here where you can also navigate to knowledge. You can edit it further. This is the one that I've created before. Previews, synonyms, glossary, it's all the same thing.

Julie Koesmarno: 30:24
Then this is where I can start asking questions which is earlier asked, like hey, which DOM has rating of more than four? We can ask it again. Oops, not represented. Let me just click allow. Oh, my control, see, control fee works. There you go.

Julie Koesmarno: 30:46
Yeah, so it can start asking questions and it will provide citation as well. So in this instance it will. It will take a little bit, I think, to answer, but in this instance where, oh, there you go, it comes up with the answers already. In the instance where, let me just go back to knowledge. In the instance where, oh, there you go, it comes up with the answers already. In the instance where, let me just go back to knowledge. In the instance where I ask questions related to who wrote a book about, you know, australia's dangerous snakes, this question is best sourced from the PDF file that I've provided, then it also provides that citation as well. So if you click on it, you get to see the preview of that, a simple preview of that PDF file.

Julie Koesmarno: 31:26
Yeah, so this is how you test your core palette and eventually, once you do the publishing which I haven't done for this environment yet in case you want to do publishing sorry, let me just go to channels rather than publish. This is an area where you can control or you can manage the channels that you want to enable this co-pilot for. So one of them is Microsoft Teams. So this is one that I've created earlier. So a similar co-pilot that I've published to Teams, where it actually just grounded with the accounts table, I can ask questions like where's AdventureWorks located? It's okay in Santa Cruz. So this is how we think the future will be, where you can now start asking co-pilot questions, not just from, for example, just from your website as a chatbot or so so, but more in the productivity tools like microsoft teams.

Mark Smith: 32:25
So there's a lot of powerful things that you can leverage from co-pilot studio I see that, um, audio queries are going to become the norm, right as in. Like, you won't even have to necessarily go through an app interface, you'll just be able to query and get answers. It's an awesome change for me. You know, dyslexic typing spelling is always an issue I don't have. I have a lot less issue with that now in a co-pilot world, so it's definitely an enabling type tool.

Mark Smith: 32:56
Before I let you go, I wrote a post in 2018, 2019, and was controversial. Um, and it's something that I like to do every now and again, I like to be controversial to get a discussion going. It was around a lot of people were complaining around things like diversity and inclusion and things like this that you know, in my case, if you're a middle-aged white guy in tech, they don't want you to front any events anymore or anything because you're not, you know, diverse enough. And so I wrote something with a headline to that effect and, of course, a lot of people only read headlines they don't read the blog post and, of course, all the people that read the headline agreed with me were all those people that were anti this type of sentiment. But as I go down there, as I drilled into the topic.

Mark Smith: 33:47
I said the importance of when somebody looks up to somebody presenting in tech leadership and of course, I'm only focused on tech because that's what I'm in it's important that they see somebody like me and so, therefore, if it's a teenage girl looking, they need to see female role models. If it's any across the inclusion or diversity landscape, people need to see role models that they go. You know what. I identify with them because they're similar to me. I can see, you know, and although middle-aged white guys have had the stage for many years, it is time for change. What are your thoughts around that? Women in tech what are your thoughts?

Julie Koesmarno: 34:29
Yeah, that's very interesting. So here's what I will say, with a little bit of, I guess, caveat, like I cannot represent the entire women in tech, but I can share some of my perspectives, which is, I would probably say, to a certain degree, unique on its own, but maybe some of the learnings can be useful for somebody out there. So a bit of background. I do, or did have the privilege of having quite strong role models. So, for example, like my mom, mom owns a business and it's in the hardware sort of. When we talk about hardwares we're talking about like nuts and bolts, not software, software, not computer or anything like that. So it was pretty uh interesting to see. So it's sort of like, oh, mom can do that. So I think I could probably kind of get into more on the technical side of it as well, like if needed, and there's a lot of business thinking as well as math thinking around that. So that's one aspect of me. The other aspect of me like you know how I grew up that I also consider as privileged too, is that I did grow up in Indonesia when I was much younger and studying computer science was mandatory. Everybody got to learn it and I just happened to love it. So I usually kind of like ace the class. So, coming to a more Western country so as an example, australia I found myself a little bit dumbfounded in in which I chose my elective, my computer science, to be my elective, and I was the only female. Also, non-english English is my second language too, yes, so I was like, oh wow, like the world is very different. Um, so I had some of the things that kind of helped me think a little bit more that the world is just outside of me, that there are a few different sort of like diverse perspectives. So what I from personally, from myself, I try to, I strive to give different perspectives to all, at least my perspective to other folks, and also to welcome others as well. Now there are lots of articles, discussions out there where women are struggling in this space. I'm not discounting that, definitely it's there. So I wanted to give a bit of different perspective what it feels like to be supported, and just to a bit of a disclaimer, what it feels like to be supported, and just to a bit of a disclaimer as well. It's not like all through my career I'm always supported. That's not the case. It's just that there are a few points in the career that in my career that I noticed oh, I know when I think I feel at my best, where I feel supported, and that looks something like this Usually the discussion within the team everybody feels like it's okay to make mistakes.

Julie Koesmarno: 37:30
So we, and it's okay that we are on the basis of learning, we didn't know, we didn't know about something, and then we use it as a learning experience. Sometimes it's to do with technical stuff like oh, I'm sorry, I'm kind of new to this. Can you help me understand X, y and Z? It could be about co-pilot knowledge or whatever, or what RAG means or what LLM means, and then being able to do kind of like active listening and learning from there. But in some cases it might be a behavioral thing.

Julie Koesmarno: 38:01
So if somebody said something a little bit, maybe a little bit hurtful, if you can and this is very, I would say, depending on the power dynamics and your situation right, if you're in a situation where you can feel safe then you could say hey, you know, can we talk a little bit? I think that the stuff that you mentioned before could be interpreted differently for other people, so how do we think about rephrasing that? Also, what's the intent behind it? Another thing that I wanted to bring up is just because it's not your intention. So if you say hurtful things it's not your intention, though, but it doesn't mean that it's less hurt for the recipient.

Mark Smith: 38:45
A hundred percent.

Julie Koesmarno: 38:46
Overall overall. A couple of things that I would say I draw from this experience is that when I'm in the team setting, when it's not zero sum game, so when we do we play win-win, I think it's, um, not just from women perspective, but I think from the team all around. We feel like we are respected, um, we can be put into a position that, hey, I'm accountable for this, my teammates are, know, making me accountable for this too, and you actually, you know, become your better self too. So those are some of the things that I've learned so far. Where I started picking, you know, some of the behavior not behaviors, but some of the symptoms I don't know what characteristics, characteristics of when I feel a bit more supported. Um, then some other experiences. So, and I have to say, where I am right now, I happen to get to witness that a lot. So very, very thankful of of that too yeah, that is so good.

Mark Smith: 39:57
That is so good and I love that story, particularly starting with your mom and having her in business. That's phenomenal, Julie, it's been awesome to have you on the show. Thank you, I look forward to having you back again in the future.

Julie Koesmarno: 40:11
Awesome. Thank you for having me.

Mark Smith: 40:14
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host, mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. Is there a guest you would like to see on the show from Microsoft? Please message me on LinkedIn and I'll see what I can do. Final question for you how will you create with Copilot today, ka kite?