Agnius Bartninkas' Blend of Automation Insights and Mixology Magic

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 Lithuania. He's the Chief Operating Officer at Definra. He was first awarded as MVP in 2024.

Mark Smith: 0:42
His main hobbies are traveling, reading books, playing board games and making cocktails A man after my own heart when it comes to making cocktails, we'll be able to talk about his bar and my bar. He makes them for his family, friends and I bet she samples one or two himself. He is also a top-time solution author and top all-time most kudos to author in the Microsoftrosoft power platform community forum for pad um let's uh. If you. If you want to check out his social media his content he's got everything from discord channels to to blogs, to um uh social media. You can check him out. He's on quora as well. Even so, there's plenty of content out there about what he does. I've had the pleasure of seeing him speak live recently in London, at the Microsoft office in London, and I even stole some of his cartoons that he had representing databases and the relationship between Excel and SharePoint, as if they're a database or not. So with that, Agnius, welcome to the show.

Agnius Bartninkas: 1:55
Yeah, hi, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure and, yeah, that's a lot. I actually forgot I'm on Quora. It's been a while, but yeah, I did a couple of gigs there as well. So, yeah, it's great being here.

Mark Smith: 2:12
I love it as in if I've got this right, your secret skill, your wizardry, is around. Power Automate Desktop Is that right?

Agnius Bartninkas: 2:23
Yep, yeah around. Power Automate Desktop Is that right?

Mark Smith: 2:24
Yep, yeah, nice. I'm looking forward to unpacking that. Before we do Food, family and fun, tell us about your cocktail making. As a mixologist, what do you get up to, what's your favorite drink and what do you do when you're not doing RPA stuff?

Agnius Bartninkas: 2:40
Okay, so well, basically it's a hobby. You know, mixology. I've only started a year ago or something like that, because I was previously just into. Well, a couple of years ago I loved having craft beers. Then I kind of switched to whiskey and then, you know, a couple of years ago I switched to gin tonic, which was a lighter drink, you know, especially in summers. And then I was in the European Power Platform Conference in Dublin last year and I was introduced to a shot called Baby Guinness.

Agnius Bartninkas: 3:22
Not sure if you've heard of that. It looks like a tiny pint of Guinness and it's basically a mix of coffee liquor and with a float of Bailey's Irish cream on top. So it's very sweet kind of a thing. It's kind of strong, but it goes very well when it's chilled and in a small batch.

Agnius Bartninkas: 3:45
I went back home and I introduced my wife to that because she likes these sweet liquors I don't really, but she does and that kind of got me into just experimenting with stuff, and initially with these sweet liquors for her, but then kind of switched to more stuff, these sweet liquors for her, but then kind of switched to more stuff that I actually my team in the office actually gave me a gift of uh, you know the whole cocktail maker set thing and that got me hooked. Uh, and the. My favorite cocktail right now is a mai tai uh, but but the with a traditional might I would know pineapple juice, it's, it's very strong when you make it the right way. So you can't really do a lot of those, you know, but maybe a couple of them a night is usually enough.

Mark Smith: 4:35
Yeah, I personally love a Mai Tai myself and I feel that the best Mai Tai, which is not the OG Mai Tai, but was from um waikiki in hawaii. We went to there's a mai tai bar there and even on their website. I went back and because I tasted a few mai tais that I made myself and I'm like man, none of these taste like that mai tai that I had at that bar, and so I went to their website and, lo and behold, they had the recipe for the way they make it on the website and it has about three different rums in it and it's just. Every time I serve it up to folks they're just like this is amazing, this is incredible. So that's the Mai Tai version I've settled on.

Agnius Bartninkas: 5:22
Can you share the recipe?

Mark Smith: 5:22
with me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that would be awesome. I'd love to try it, I'll find it and I'll share it with you. Yeah, I'll share the recipe page with you. Have you gotten to tequilas at all?

Agnius Bartninkas: 5:36
A bit. Well, I've experimented with all sorts of margaritas for my friends, but the last time I did that they all got very drunk, and then probably because we were just kind of doing lots of different cocktails and that just you know, it gets exciting, but then, you know, it goes sideways very quickly.

Mark Smith: 5:59
It does, it does. When you finished your tequilaquila journey, then you want to start your mezcal journey yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that I've.

Agnius Bartninkas: 6:11
I've tried a couple of those, but but, yeah, I think I'm not. I'm probably not there yet, but uh, or maybe it's just that. Yeah, well, I'm more of a rum person, I guess I I never thought I'd like rum. I usually just thought, you know, whiskey and gin is my thing, but now I'm really into rum and rum-based cocktails. I love those.

Mark Smith: 6:35
Very nice, very nice. You want to try a spiced rum daiquiri at some point? That's another crowd pleaser. Everybody I give a spiced rum daiquiri at some point. That's another crowd pleaser. Everybody. I give a spice from daiquiri too. And I learned that recipe from a doctor who, through med school, was a bartender and he goes. I said, because always when someone comes to my place, I'm like there's the bar, let's create your signature drink. What is it? And you know, especially if I've no people have been mixologists in their past. And he made this spiced rum cocktail so simple. But boy, everybody that tastes it just cannot believe how smooth, how easy it is to drink and how tasty it is.

Agnius Bartninkas: 7:15
Yeah, well, I actually. I love daiquiris as well. They're great and I love the simplicity. I usually make the standard one. Or it's the summer and we're with my wife. She loves the frozen strawberry. So that's basically you add strawberries and you blend it in a blender. It's a bit lighter and very fresh summer drink.

Mark Smith: 7:38
Agreed. Well, I think we could talk for ages about cocktails, but this is not why we're here. Tell me, how did you get into tech? Why did your career go this way and not another way?

Agnius Bartninkas: 7:53
Yeah, so basically some years ago I was actually working in finance. Actually, my formal background in education is in economics and finance and I've been working in finance. I think I started like in 2012 or something like that and I worked there and, yeah, it was kind of boring, I didn't like it. I learned I don't like it after working for a couple of years in finance and accounting couple of years in finance and accounting and I kind of just, you know, my main passion at that point was just trying to make my work as simple as possible by, you know, building simple tools that would at least make it you know, make me have to do manual work as little as possible. And I usually started out with just building some fancy Excel files with macros and funky formulas and so on, or just maybe revisiting the processes themselves and trying to find some ways to make them simpler. And my boss at that time kind of noticed that my bit of a knack for this improvement and I was actually starting to reskill myself on my own. I just had been taking online courses, trying to learn Python, programming and so on. So I had a bit of a background in programming, but it was very minimal and I had started and then basically they noticed this and this was an international company with headquarters in Denmark actually, and we just had a service center in Lithuania and there was a decision made in the headquarters that we need to start using RPA to automate some of our processes, initially in the service center, then maybe globally as well.

Agnius Bartninkas: 9:54
And I was just kind of selected to do this as a POC and he basically approached me and said, would you like to do robotics? And I'm like no, I have no idea what that is. My initial thought was that they are talking about actual industrial robots, the physical stuff, because that was a manufacturing company. We were actually assembling stuff, it was manufacturing beer dispensing equipment and I was like no, I have no idea what that is and I don't think that's my kind of thing. I don't think that's my kind of thing. But then they kind of explained it to me what they meant with the word robotics, that it was actually robotic process automation and that it was actually software robots. And it got me interested. So I participated in a few demos in the vendor selection process of who to work with. We then actually selected a company called Softomotive, which doesn't exist anymore because they were acquired by Microsoft in 2020.

Mark Smith: 10:59
I had the old CEO of Softomotive on the show in the past.

Agnius Bartninkas: 11:02
Yeah, okay. So we started with that, initially did a POC with their desktop automation software called WinAutomation and then moved on to the more enterprise-level software called ProcessRobot. In our organization I basically received a single session in training from an employee at Softomotive. That was like a maybe two to three-hour session where I basically had selected a process I would like to automate. They showed me how to start working on it the next day. I continued working on it on my own and basically finished it off and just kind of was a one man show for for a few years in there.

Agnius Bartninkas: 11:45
Just, you know, basically discovering stuff to automate and then automating it, initially my former tasks that I had been working on and then, you know, tasks for my colleagues and people in the other branches of the organization, and that worked out quite OK, except for the fact that, you know, I was self-taught mostly. There was no community, almost no community when it comes to soft emotive tools available. You know there were very few resources available and obviously I made lots of mistakes. I built stuff that were not best practice things because I did not have any peers to learn from. But it works, it was okay. And then I started freelancing a bit on the side, because someone approached me and asked me if I could help them build up a few things and that kind of grew into my own company.

Agnius Bartninkas: 12:44
Then I quit the former organization and opened up an agency where initially I was the only one doing it and then also hired a few more people. We initially worked with partners that would help us make sales and also consult some clients, especially abroad, because they were physically closer to the clients, they could visit them and so on. I was traveling a lot to Denmark because that was where we have a lot of clients and our partners were there. So before COVID hit, I was there on a monthly basis basically. But yeah, it's a bit different now.

Agnius Bartninkas: 13:22
We switched to Microsoft in 2020. In 2020. But I think that because of my background in software models, tools, and that you know how much I've worked with it one of the probably most experienced Power Automate desktop developers and because of how many projects I've built different types of projects for different organizations it's just you know lots and lots of things come naturally to me by now and I've also had the pleasure of working with other developers that I've actually hired that would come from other organizations where RPA was more established and they brought best practices to me. I taught them how to use Power Automate Desktop because they were originally UiPath or Automation Anywhere developers or something like that, so I taught them how to use the tool. They brought in some best practices, taught me how to do that and now that there's a huge community around Microsoft Power Automate a huge community around Microsoft Power Oats mate, I think we're you know, kind of setting the example of how to do it properly.

Agnius Bartninkas: 14:37
Now, even though I started as a one-man show doing lots of things wrong, so is it your company still. Yep, well, it's a family company actually, so I'm not the only owner. There's three of us owning it, but yeah's, it's a family company actually. So I'm not the only owner. There's three, uh three of us owning it, but yeah, it's a family business nice, nice that, uh, and this is robo virgin.

Mark Smith: 15:01
Is that right? Is that the company?

Agnius Bartninkas: 15:03
uh yeah, robo virgin is actually a brand name that we had established. Uh, the company name is is the fin. That's the name. It has a bit more than just RPA. There's another service that the other owners are responsible for, but one of the business services that we work with is specifically process improvement consultancy and then process automation solutions and also training and so on, and that's the business that I'm responsible for.

Mark Smith: 15:59
This is awesome. So tell me, I feel RPA personally in what I've read, not through technical books but other discourse on where AI is going, that RPA is going to become a massive deal in the ai world and that is rpa is that I think microsoft were very strategic in deploying it as part of the desktop, right on the operating system and the current builds. And I wonder at the moment, I think it sits there dormant on so many people's machines and they don't know what it's there or what it can do or what's enabled with it. Have you lit up for yourself personally, because of your passion in this area, any kind of personal automations around automating your life on the desktop? Let's start with um, that um. You've almost forgotten about them because they're just running all the time or doing what you want them to do.

Agnius Bartninkas: 17:03
Well, I actually did some of those things mainly as parts of demos for my sessions where I speak at events. So I don't think there's lots of stuff that I do daily on my computer that could actually be automated. My main things that I do are actually consulting clients or building stuff that's supposed to automate things. So those are not things that you could actually automate easily, but I have a solution that can give me cocktail recommendations for what to make based on the ingredients that I've got.

Mark Smith: 17:49
Nice, nice. So my use case is this I want AI to understand my email, everything about it. I don't want to think about it, I want to only action the stuff that really needs my eyeballs on it, type thing. And so I would have thought there would be a use case hopefully not too far away, where it doesn't take a genius to actually configure. But this whole interception of my email understanding everything about it's like this whole. You know, you've I don't assume you've heard microsoft start to talk about this concept of agents becoming a more prevalent thing, and I think that this concept of a personal agent that really gets to know me it knows my schedule, um, it knows my my email, it know it could read my email, understand what I need to take like this is a critical email.

Mark Smith: 18:38
You need to do something about it. It's got a time limit on and not based on anybody putting that on it, but because it's read and interpreted and understood it and auto drafted a response and even categorization over time, rather than me creating my folders of categorization, it will understand and logically categorize things and train me on why it chose that. Because it's full of wisdom, um, of knowing everything you know in the universe about best practice, productivity and things like that. Do we? Do you see that being in the realms of reality with the next three years?

Agnius Bartninkas: 19:13
uh, yeah, actually I do. Uh, it's probably gonna come in the form of, uh, of these, you know, co-pilot tools, of that Microsoft is talking a lot about. I don't think it's actually going to use RPA that much, because most of these things can and should actually be done in a cloud-based kind of an interface. Rpa is usually used for things that are where you either don't control the input system, where, know you need to interact with some third party things. You know, have this agent actually build a desktop flow for you based on natural language, because you need something done automatically, like some data entry into some application or something like that that doesn't have an API and so on. That would be awesome, but generally, you know, this sort of email handling agent could easily I think it could be a reality would probably not involve RPA, though.

Mark Smith: 20:33
Interesting. I just thought the reason RPA is one it has access to the operating system in a way like it has. Right, there's a whole piece around. It could change environmental variables at an operating system level. Potentially isn't that right. Like I've demoed RPA from a web scraping perspective for a what was the use case that I showed a real estate agent that needed to get an environmental report on a property listing from a U S government agency and it would go out. It would hand up the property address and do the query into the, the EPA tool I think it was on the on the U S gov website and then it would hand back if there was any filings or reference on it and allow that to be extracted back into the application that the real estate agent was using. And it's it's. It works so effectively in that scraper type scenario. Have you done I know we're well over time already, but have you done anything in that scrape scenario where you've gone up and used it to enrich a data set with a data set that might be online?

Agnius Bartninkas: 21:44
Yeah, and that's a very frequent use case actually, and we actually have built a few related to real estate.

Agnius Bartninkas: 21:51
In fact, there's a couple of use cases like that.

Agnius Bartninkas: 21:54
For example, we've got a client in Denmark that's not really a real estate agent, but like a company that provides services related to real estate like evaluations, damage reports, energy reports and all sorts of things and they usually provide these services to actual physical people not to business clients, but to actual people who want to maybe sell their property or maybe have an insurance claim and so on, and when they have an order coming in for a certain service on a building, they create that in their CRM system and then we've built a solution that basically picks that up and then pulls all sorts of data and documents from these web resources local authorities, regional authorities within the country, or more like actual national-level authorities.

Agnius Bartninkas: 22:58
I think there's like 10 different web pages or something like that that we needed to scrape to build this. Some of them had APIs. That was cool and we built a direct integration, but some of them didn't because local authorities they don't usually build APIs. So they've got some very old legacy web pages and we got that. You know, basically scraping that, downloading documents from there and, you know, saving all of that, you know basically kind of digesting it and pushing it back into this urm system awesome, obviously, like being that.

Mark Smith: 23:34
We're well over time already. We could talk for ages, uh, on this. Um, my final question for you is how have you found becoming an MVP?

Agnius Bartninkas: 23:49
Yeah well, it was extremely exciting. I did not really expect this to happen so quickly. I did not expect that the things I was doing were actually valuable enough for me to become an MVP, because I only started speaking publicly like autumn last year and I had already submitted my application for an MVP by the time of my first speaking gig. But apparently the stuff I did before that was already great enough, because I was doing lots of content on LinkedIn. I was doing all of the community stuff there is a Discord server where I'm the top user in there, specifically consulting people on Power Automate and so on and apparently that was enough. And I did not expect that. I thought you have to do YouTube videos, blogs and lots of them on a weekly basis or something like that. But yeah, so apparently what I was doing was actually enough and it was exciting.

Agnius Bartninkas: 24:49
And now I'm obviously being spammed a lot because there's plenty of information channels. Some of them are very useful. I had to filter out those that aren't. But there is great content made available for me right now and I think it's also made me more attractive to event organizers to actually accept me to speak at their events. Now, because I'm an MVP, I've started getting accepted to lots and lots of events. I did not expect that to happen, so so that that was really because I love speaking. I found a new you know love for, for speaking at these events you're good at it.

Mark Smith: 25:30
You're good at it as in. Like. Of all the sessions that I watched on that saturday at microsoft, I mean yours was the one that really stuck with me the way you broke down the subject lots of humor in your presentation. I think that was on point. It was really well done.

Agnius Bartninkas: 25:48
Thanks, I appreciate that and basically, well, I do love it, I like it and I enjoy the fact that me being an MVP has now opened some doors to me to actually getting more of these speaking gigs and events that are actually interesting.

Mark Smith: 26:05
Agnius, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Agnius Bartninkas: 26:07
Thanks for having me.

Mark Smith: 26:14
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 NZ365 guy. Thanks again and see you next time. Thank you.