Navigating AI Tools and Business Central with Francis Msangi Masera in Nairobi

Mark Smith: 0:06
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Niobri, kenya. He works at G Shianti I think I pronounced it right creative as a Chief Innovation Officer. He was first awarded as MVP in 2024. He's passionate about helping businesses harness the full potential of the ERP platform he works with. He's a seasoned business central developer, consultant and YouTuber. We'll make sure that we have links to his bio, his social media, youtube channel, et cetera, in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, francis.

Francis Msangi Masera: 1:10
Thank you very much, Mark. I'm delighted and excited to be here.

Mark Smith: 1:16
Good to have you on the show. Can you repronounce your company name? That I might have butchered slightly.

Francis Msangi Masera: 1:22
Yep, jishinde, jishinde.

Mark Smith: 1:24
It's a.

Francis Msangi Masera: 1:25
Swahili name.

Mark Smith: 1:26
Ah, swahili name, Excellent, excellent. So when I think of Nairobi, I think United Nations. For some reason have they got a big office in Nairobi?

Francis Msangi Masera: 1:38
Yeah, yeah, they do. There's a big office in. I think it covers. It represents East Africa, if I guess. I think it represents East Africa, if I guess. But yeah, there's UNEP, united Nations Environment Programme.

Mark Smith: 1:56
I think the head office of UNEP is in Nairobi, nice, nice. I just know my business colleague is about to go to Nairobi to do work for the UN, and so that has been in discussions recently no-transcript.

Francis Msangi Masera: 2:26
And that's what I do for fun listening to music, playing music and also maybe going to a band and all that. So music is part of fun, swimming also. And for food. In Nairobi we are great at nyamachoma and there's a lot of. There are so many food joints, local food and the Western food there's just plenty to choose from. So always trying to go and test a few great diets here and there, yeah, once in a while, but during the weekends of course, not during the weekday, yeah.

Mark Smith: 3:08
Nyamachoma what's?

Francis Msangi Masera: 3:09
that Nyamachoma? It's just roast meat. Ah. Like lamb yeah, really roasted. Well, it's our delicacy, our identity. You can Google it Nice.

Mark Smith: 3:24
Nice, Nice. So when I come to Niobri I need to have some.

Francis Msangi Masera: 3:29
You need to have some nyama choma when you come here.

Mark Smith: 3:31
Nyama choma Awesome, awesome, sounds good. How did you get into tech? What was that path for you?

Francis Msangi Masera: 3:39
All right, I had a passion for tech. So when I was in high school, that is the first time I get into contact with computers and instantly I fall in love with them. So when I was on holiday my brother had bought a desktop, this big desktop, and I spent literally my whole holiday just playing there and all that. And when I went back to school I just took the computer unit and I went with it from form one to form four for us it's from one to form four so I took it up from that point and I've never looked back. So it's been. Yeah, so I did, let's say, all level of computer. It was just known as computer studies. And then I went on to do computer science. And that's where my passion started, just on the basic level, just falling in love with computers and playing games, using them, typing, and at that time I was creating systems with. At that level it was Excel and Access. So we were using Access to create small systems for managing solutions like real estate solutions. Small, small solutions. Yeah.

Mark Smith: 5:07
Nice. How did you then get into Business Central and Navision?

Francis Msangi Masera: 5:12
Okay, so Business Central was. I got a job in 2017 that in a company that was working with Navision. At that time I was a C-sharp developer. Fully, I'm still a C-Shop developer, but so now the company was, the role was for a business central developer, but it was advertised as a developer position. But we found I eventually now started working with Navision in that company and boom, it wasn't so much of C-Shop and it was more efficient in some things, and that's how I got into Navision.

Mark Smith: 5:53
And I take it that just led to a natural progression into Business Central.

Francis Msangi Masera: 5:58
Exactly so. It grew from there. Now I grew into Business Central, smoothly sliding from Navision.

Mark Smith: 6:09
So the type of projects that you work on. Are you working, are you implementing BC for other companies or is it in your own organization?

Francis Msangi Masera: 6:20
Mostly for both, but I am a consultant also, so I also implement for other companies as well and also train Also. I'm strong in training because I'm a Microsoft certified trainer and I also have that passion in training. So, training developers I train privately, and also maybe companies they just reach out and I'm able to train their team, scaling up their development teams yeah.

Mark Smith: 6:56
Is the projects that you work on, the companies that you work with. Are they in Kenya or are they international?

Francis Msangi Masera: 7:07
Both, both. There are some which are international and others are in Kenya, but let's say 60% in Kenya.

Mark Smith: 7:15
Wow, wow, and so is Business Central, or even the other Dynamics products, power Platform and things. Is it very popular in Kenya?

Francis Msangi Masera: 7:25
Yeah, and it's growing. And also, let's say, business Central is very popular and this is what happens in organizations that use Business Central. Then they don't look back, they're just in. They're using Business Central Power Platform. It's growing. I'd say it's growing and very big organizations are already using it. But SMEs are getting to use it, let me say that. But it's a growing technology. But Business Central at the moment is really a go-to technology, especially for NGOs, financial institutions we have credit unions here, we call them SACOs. They really leverage business central. Parastatals and government institutions also use business central. Universities they use business central it's customized to them Hospitals also, and manufacturing though the penetration of manufacturing is also growing but also being used. So it's used all around here in Kenya.

Mark Smith: 8:48
So your international customers. How do they find your company? How do they come to you? Are they because they've got another office in some other location? They've already used Business Central there and now they need a local supplier. How does that work for you?

Francis Msangi Masera: 9:04
Basically, mostly for the international. They usually come in form of when they need development help or training help, mostly so they want to skill up their team. So they reach out to me via LinkedIn, mostly because they just send a chat and then we can see if there is an opportunity there, or via my website. Yeah, those are the platforms through which they have been reaching me. So mostly they'll just have support issues, a few support issues or a module that they'd like us to implement.

Mark Smith: 9:47
And is it mainly Europe, those international customers, or do you have North American clients as well?

Francis Msangi Masera: 9:54
Actually Europe a little bit, but mostly America. America, and I got one from okay, I forgot this country, peru. We were also. We were using DeepL to translate because they speak French and they are not so eloquent in English, so we were just busy using DeepL to translate their conversation and trying to get what they mean or what their query is.

Mark Smith: 10:28
Wow, that's incredible. And you're saying most of that's coming via LinkedIn. People look you up on LinkedIn, see your skill set and then they reach out to you.

Francis Msangi Masera: 10:37
Yeah, mostly via LinkedIn.

Mark Smith: 10:38
yeah, that's pretty cool. I know I'm asking you some weird questions here, but how do you transact from a currency perspective? Do you have any banking service? So let's say, as an American customer and they're probably going to go we only pay in USD. What's the currency in Kenya? Kenya shillings is the currency, yeah. So how do you do that? Do you have a US bank account or do you use some type of payment gateway service to do the transaction?

Francis Msangi Masera: 11:06
I do have a US bank account, but also any bank can transact to a Kenyan bank account because most banks have that. What is it called? The facility to be able to convert the currency from whichever currency that will arrive in For the gateway I think all the banks that are international. They can be able to sort of have a vendor who will be in between to help in the transaction, or others they prefer PayPal. Paypal is just straightforward, so PayPal will just go through automatically through automatically.

Mark Smith: 11:50
I've asked a few people recently and one that I heard that gets used is a product called Pioneer, which allows you to get an invoice in multi-currency and then it will, as you draw it across, come into your currency. I use Wise and I've used that for maybe five years now, maybe longer. It used to be called TransferWise when I was in the UK and it's been brilliant. You can run business accounts. Yeah, I also use Waze.

Mark Smith: 12:19
It's just that a lot of people that listen to the show are thinking about getting freelance work and they don't want it freelance from local, they want it from somewhere else. There's no conflict with their current employer or anything like that, right, so there's no kind of compete issue, um. And so some of those practical questions I get is around you know, how do you invoice in a different currency when you don't necessarily have a bank account, different currency? Um, because you know if you use the old wire transfer um, that could be they charge lots of fees and so you lose so much of your money in the actual cost of transfer. That's why I was asking what's your focus in the next six months? For the rest of this year, what's your focus around skills, what new skills are you focused on picking up this year?

Francis Msangi Masera: 13:08
Yeah, this year I'm focused on AI. Basically I've been looking at the open source models for AI and how we can leverage AI for data analysis, for Business Central and also just to solve the problems that we face day to day with the technologies that we work with and how we can make things better. So I'm really strong on AI in these next six months. I've already been doing it for the last three months, not yet recorded a video yet, because I need to scale up fast so that now I can be able to offer the value.

Mark Smith: 13:59
Tell me, has Microsoft brought a Copilot out for Business Central yet?

Francis Msangi Masera: 14:06
Yes.

Mark Smith: 14:06
They do. Yeah, okay, and so that's one of the tools you can leverage. Do you also use Copilot Studio? Does that allow you to edit stuff from a business central perspective when it comes to AI, or do you go straight to the Azure OpenAI service?

Francis Msangi Masera: 14:27
Yes, you can use the Azure OpenAI service. That's when there are already integrations there and the business central online is already integrated automatically and we can be able to customize and add a feature that will use the data within Business Central to maybe. So what we use is a prompt dialogue and at the moment in Business I've not in Business Central, I've not been, I've not gone directly to Business Central in terms of my learning path. I've started with AI in general at the moment. I've seen what Business Central is able to do, but I'd like to get it from a base perspective of artificial intelligence in general, the models that are available. I've been testing Phi 3 and other models, lama and all that, trying to see what AI offers holistically.

Francis Msangi Masera: 15:25
But I've seen we have a new page in Business Central that is a prompt dialogue that you can query, maybe items. You can be able to write a query like what items, do you have items? Or maybe I'd like to buy 10 items that relate to a bicycle and it will give me a list of all the items maybe the rims, spokes, that relate to that particular item and I can select and be able to automatically add them in my invoice and it will be faster, and so the behind the scenes is what you need. To have a good system message, you need to have a good prompt, so the prompt engineering there also comes into play. So those are the small pieces that I'm piecing in together, but that's the general outlook.

Mark Smith: 16:25
How did you become an MVP? What was the nomination process? Yeah, how did it come about for you?

Francis Msangi Masera: 16:36
Yeah, for me. I was nominated by a fellow MVP here in Kenya, Shedrack and um the. The process wasn't okay. He and Steve Endo, I don't know two MVPs. Like I say, I was nominated by two MVPs concurrently because they participated in helping me to fill in the nomination form. So we kind of just they were telling me okay, so what should you fill?

Francis Msangi Masera: 17:07
You know you can be nominated and you need to fill it well to suit the nomination process also needs to be filled in well. There are many questions being asked. You'll be asked to produce or to add in your contributions to this, to the community, and they need to be clear. We need, the team needs to see that there is value added in your contributions. So that is what I wanted to make sure that we got it right and fortunately we were able to do it the first time, because there are people who get nominated maybe once or twice and they get it maybe after three or four nominations. They get it maybe after three or four nominations. And the beauty is for me, thankfully I was able to get it the first time with the first nomination.

Mark Smith: 18:02
Yeah, when you filled out the spreadsheet of all your contributions, about how many line items are in the spreadsheet Basically?

Francis Msangi Masera: 18:10
not necessarily the number, but at least 10 for me. But the value in those line items is what matters. Yeah, and for my videos they are in series format, so I can have 10 videos, but I'll just fill in one line to show that this is about. This is a video, this is a series or a playlist about reporting in Business Central. So that's an example. So if somebody clicks on that link they can be able to see this is the value added in just this one line.

Francis Msangi Masera: 18:50
It's not about the number of contributions. This one line. It's not about the number of contributions. It's actually the few contributions that really add value, because you could be having so many contributions and the person doing the nomination will not be able to understand the value out of so many because you're giving them too much. So they're trying to click, click, click, click and they might get confused. So the few strong ones or maybe collectively, let me say, stacking them on If you have one good one and then you stack others on top of that that are related, to make it easier for them to really see that there's value added yeah.

Mark Smith: 19:29
Yeah, that's very insightful what you've just given there, that you point to a playlist and that playlist might have 10 videos in it, and in the past that would have been, you know, 10 contributions, but you're listing it as one, but when they go to it they can actually see it's 10. So therefore, you're right massive value. It's a brilliant tip. You're the first person I've heard come across that little new, unique nuance of the system. Now, do you also speak at some events?

Francis Msangi Masera: 19:57
Yes, yes, I do. I'm due to be speaking at Experts Live Kenya in the next two weeks. Yeah, I speak in events.

Mark Smith: 20:06
Yeah, Nice, nice. Well, it's been so good to hear your journey, your story. I can't wait to visit Nairobi and Kenya. The greater you know Kenya at some point. I'd look forward to that. Thank you so much, francis, for coming on the show.

Francis Msangi Masera: 20:24
Thank you, Mark, for having me here and welcome to Kenya. When you come here, I'll host you. You let me know and we'll show you around.

Mark Smith: 20:41
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash nz365guy. Thanks again and see you next time. Thank you.