Crafting Superior User Experiences with PCF and AI Copilots with Carl de Souza

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're going to focus on FastTrack and the distinction between the Copilots, because there are so many of them these days. We might touch on a few things like PCF controls and even contact center as a service, but today's guest is from Miami, florida in the United States. He works at Microsoft as a fast track senior solution architect. He's been an MVP, so he's one of those ones that went blue badge, joined the mothership. As we say, he's a Microsoft MVP and creator of a leading blog on the Microsoft Power platform with over 1 million visitors a year. In his spare time, he loves taking photography. He actually has a whole dedicated site towards photography, which we will discuss as well Assembling amateur videos and spending time in the kitchen perfecting new recipes. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Carl.

Carl de Souza: 1:09
Hi Mark, Thank you so much for having me here.

Mark Smith: 1:12
Good to have you on the show. I just find you, as I discussed off air, so intriguing. So many of the concepts that I believe you're ahead of your time with, particularly around how you present yourself online Before we get started food, family and fun what do they mean to you?

Carl de Souza: 1:28
Those are one of my three favorite topics, really. So food I'm a big foodie, actually my wife and I. Every weekend we make it a habit to go to a new restaurant somewhere and we'll drive or fly as far as we need to try different food. We take our foodie experiences very seriously. That's a topic that I love. Family was the other one I think you mentioned.

Mark Smith: 1:50
Yeah.

Carl de Souza: 1:50
Yeah, I got a four-year-old toddler so he takes up all my time. It's just amazing that I actually have any capacity to do anything after I interact with him, but he does energize me as well. And fun, you said, right, really, travel is that's probably my biggest passion. I try to do several trips a year if I can. That is not work related, you know, and kind of lucky because where we live in the world is close to a lot of countries, right, so we get to have a lot of opportunities. Yeah, so that's those three.

Mark Smith: 2:26
That's epic Interesting what you said about travel. Travel it's not work related. So for years, you know, I've always had a career that's involved a lot of travel all over the world. It takes me I just booked flights yesterday when I say I, my wife booked my flights yesterday to go to vancouver in March next year and then drive down, probably with Carl Cookie in the UK, drive down from the Power Platform Summit in Vancouver to the MVP Summit then in Redmond.

Mark Smith: 2:56
And we worked out a long time ago that to mix work and pleasure on travel, it doesn't really mix. To mix work and pleasure on travel, it doesn't really mix. And fundamentally your mindset is in two different spaces. And so she used to go oh, I want to go to MVP Summit. Well, you're at MVP Summit. She came once and said I'll never do that again, Like that was not for me, right. And so I go to conferences and stuff. She doesn't come. And what we've worked out when we travel, we want to travel and we don't want to think about work. We want to really enjoy that. And I noticed in your portfolio, your photography, that you've been to Mosta and we've been to Mosta. What were your thoughts of the place?

Carl de Souza: 3:40
It was beautiful. You know, we were actually in Croatia, in Dubrovnik, on that trip. Same, yeah, okay, right. So we did a little day trip Nice, the border went down to Mostar and, you know, fascinating place. A lot of stuff has happened in that place, let's say right. So you kind of feel that when you're walking around, we were there, maybe about it was probably like 12 years ago. I'm going to say, okay, there, maybe about it was probably like 12 years ago. I'm going to say Okay, but we loved it. You know, and every time I go to a country, I feel like I need to see more of it. And you know, and I know like Sarajevo, for example, the capital, has a lot to see, apparently as well, I feel like I scratched the surface with Mostar, but I really loved it. It's probably, I think, from what I've heard, it's one of the most beautiful cities in that country.

Mark Smith: 4:25
Yeah, and, of course, the bridge is absolutely famous in the center of that. We stayed for a month in Croatia, in Dubrovnik, and then we did day trips in there. We went down to Montenegro and various day trips, which were all done by the Airbnb, our host. At the Airbnb, he would then hire himself out as a tour guide for a day at a time, and so it was just amazing. Before we jump into the topics we're discussing in your role in Microsoft, one of the things that has impressed me with your body of work over your career is that it's documented. Your body of work over your career is that it's documented. And one concept that's been gnawing at me for the last 12 months and that I want to create some content around to help people is the concept of a portfolio website and a portfolio website being more than just a blog where you are going to write on some piece of tech whether that be AI, copilot Power Platform, dynamics 365, m365,. You know are going to write on some piece of tech, you know, whether that be AI, copilot Power Platform, dynamics 365, m365, or Azure. You know it's more about what I liked when I saw your website. It has an historic timeline to it. It shows your journey of learning. It shows your kind of like, your certification, how your career changed. All that is just documented there and I assume it wasn't necessarily a retrospective documentation, it was.

Mark Smith: 5:50
As it's happened, you've continued to build out this portfolio and, just as last week I was with the country provider for New Zealand for the nz domain space and I was in a consultation process with them around changes to the constitution for the country et cetera in that space, and one of the things that came out is that there is an uptick that they're noticing in people buying domain names where that had died for quite a bit with social media, cause everyone's like no, I just do social media and that's how I get my audience and stuff. And, of course, you don't own that. Somebody else owns it. It's on their platform, you're by their rules. If they're giving it to you, you're free. You're the product they're selling you. They're selling your data, that type of thing, right.

Mark Smith: 6:35
And so there's been the swing that they've noticed from the domain names types et cetera that have been purchased is people going back to hey, I need my digital place in the world that I own. That has not got advertising all over it, the data has not been sold, but it is my digital footprint online that if people are researching me or wanting to engage with me, they know about and I loved on your website. Whether it be a certification, whether it's upcoming speaking engagements, past speaking engagements, code feedback, it's all there. You get this smorgasbord and I'm actually going to do a presentation on Friday this week and I'm going to use you as an example. What was your thinking behind it?

Carl de Souza: 7:19
You know, it kind of evolved over time. I guess the reason I created the website initially was I was building something I think it was in Azure or something like that. Maybe it was dynamics related and there was no steps online that went through the process and I thought, you know what, let me capture this. And there's probably someone out there that is going through the same thing, right. And then it kind of evolved more to where, when I would run into problems, you know, I'd spend like days figuring out something that wouldn't work, right. And then suddenly I'd get the answer and I'd say, okay, I'm going to post this out there because there's at least one person that's having the same problem, right. And then it just kind of built from there.

Carl de Souza: 7:57
And it's funny because when you start and you see the traffic coming in, you're, you know, you're kind of like preaching to about 100 people in the entire world, right. And then the numbers go up and you say okay, like yes, there's a lot of people out there that are going through the same thing. That I am right. And then, when you start to build as a portfolio, it just, I think, you know, very naturally it happens because you'll do something like speaking and you'll say, okay, well, I want to share that, right. A lot of this is really naturally about sharing, sharing information, sharing about yourself as well. That's an interesting one, because not everyone's very open about sharing and some people are over-sharers, right, and so that's kind of how the site evolved to where it is today.

Mark Smith: 8:44
Yeah, I love it, I love it. I feel like I know you by being there right and then going over to your YouTube channel and seeing your videos there and I love it Very holistic and obviously you got a lot of traffic. What made you go? Blue Badge.

Carl de Souza: 8:58
I'd been wanting to do it for a while. It's funny because when I was at university, in my final year of my degree, we had to do an industry project somewhere and they basically put everyone's name into a hat and they said, okay, who's going to? And they just named a company, right, and they just started pulling people out. Okay, these four people are going to this company. Then they said, okay, microsoft, let's see who's going to Microsoft. And they pulled out my name. So I was one of the people, right, one of the four right.

Carl de Souza: 9:26
So I did this project at university where I was working with Microsoft Research for a year. We weren't there every day, we'd just go in every now and then. But that was sort of, you know, my career almost started that way, if you think about it, you know. And then I went into the dynamics world, actually, yeah, so Great Plains, great Plains, software and that was before Microsoft bought Great Plains. But they had such a tight relationship that it was no surprise to anyone. And then over the years, yeah, I just worked with so many different Microsoft technologies in different capacities, so it felt pretty natural. At some point it was always in the back of my mind like I'd love to work for this company properly. There's a lot that I could contribute, I thought, and so I just, you know, got an opportunity recently and I had to take it basically, yeah, yeah.

Mark Smith: 10:14
And I always say and the outcome is in hindsight, yes, would you still take the same opportunity? If you're, how many months in? Are you now Nearly six, okay, so six months in? Yep, if you were faced today with taking the job, would you take it? Yeah, for sure, yeah, awesome, awesome. I think always a three-month test is even when you hire staff. I always go in three months after hiring someone. Would I still hire them? Now? I know what I know and the key thing is, of course, if the answer's no, you need to get rid of them as quick as possible, because you know, I always say a problem never gets better with time.

Mark Smith: 10:49
It only gets worse. Tell me about FastTrack. When you talk about FastTrack, what's top of mind for you?

Carl de Souza: 10:55
So FastTrack is an interesting one, because the name doesn't almost reflect what we do. I like to think of this more as like product advisory group, something like that, you know. So we're really advising customers and partners like how to ensure their implementations go smoothly. That's kind of the key, and there could be many different ways to make that happen, but our job is to make that happen.

Mark Smith: 11:19
I like that and do you focus only on power or on Dynamics?

Carl de Souza: 11:23
So yes, and do you focus only on power or on dynamics? So yes, my team that I'm on, we are the like part of the we're the customer service dynamics 365 team customer service and field service yeah, both of those yeah.

Mark Smith: 11:33
And so is this how the contact center as a service comes into the mix as well.

Carl de Souza: 11:38
It does Right, exactly, yep, that's our team.

Mark Smith: 11:41
Yeah, gotcha. So tell me, you know. Let's just touch on that for a second because I'm saving the good stuff for last, which is I want to get into the copilot stories Now. Contact Center as a Service is 2024's flavor of last year's DCCP story and I could go back 17 years of iterations because I have a slide, because I've done a lot of work in pre-sales in this space. And going right back to there was a customer framework way back in the day. Cca was another, there was an accelerator and there's this whole timeline.

Mark Smith: 12:18
You know, back in the day, you know the whole this concept of single sign-on, unified interface for contact center staff. And does it matter? If you're in, you know, whatever the legacy systems, you've got everything at your fingertips. If you're in five different, you know you work for an insurer that has five different product lines that have come about because of acquisitions and you've kept all those bits of software. Not a problem, right? Single interface. Now the contact center as a service.

Mark Smith: 12:45
I find it interesting that the doubling down is happening this year because I felt that DCCP came out and then Copilot kicked its ass and it became everything went to AI kind of story. Yet of course, the whole contact center as a service has a massive AI component to it and providing, you know, much better customer experience. And about a year and a half ago I talked to the team in Israel that this is it must have been two years ago. They had 14 different AIs running in the contact center. That was all pre-genitor of AI running in the contact center. That was all pre-genitor of AI. So, whether it was sentiment analysis, whether it was, did somebody use a word in the conversation just now that was from another language and that was a nuance? They're bilingual and they switched context slightly. A whole range of things and, of course, transcripting in real time, searching for knowledge-based articles, et cetera. Tell us about how do you pitch or how do you talk to customers in this world of content center as a service.

Carl de Souza: 14:18
So I think the key thing here really is to understand how we got to CCaaS and what it means. Right? So you mentioned the digital contact center as a platform. Right, DCCP, and that's really Microsoft doing everything when it comes to a contact center. So it basically means, like so Microsoft has all these different channels that can be supported, right? So, whether you're talking about chat channels, voice, social email, SMS, that sort of thing, right, All these different ways a customer can reach your organization. Right? So that's the first part. Then you go into the next level down, which is self-service Having an issue that a customer has being able to be resolved before you get to speak to an agent, right?

Mark Smith: 15:04
So there's tools all around that, so deflection.

Carl de Souza: 15:06
Yeah, basically right, exactly, yep, Yep, right. So there's tools all around that. Yeah, basically right, exactly, yep, yep. And then you go into the routing that happens to make sure that conversation gets to the right agent so that they're able to resolve the issue quickly. Okay, so there's intelligence around that. That's part of the digital contact center platform as well. Then you get into the agent experience so and you mentioned copilots so being able to resolve issues very quickly using Gen AI, also being able to just see, have like a 360 degree view of the customer information, and you mentioned some other things earlier, right, about summarization and sentiment and things like that and then the supervisor experience, so being able to look at all of this, right, so that's kind of the digital context in a platform.

Carl de Souza: 15:50
What Microsoft did is, if you think about customer service, workspace and the Microsoft had all these things tightly coupled together. Okay, so that was kind of customer service. When you think of, so someone in, if a customer installed omni channel, for example, they would be able to set up a voice channel and a chat channel and it would all work very well together on the Microsoft platform, the differentiator now with CCaaS contact center as a service is Microsoft is basically saying you know what. You don't need to do all of those things that I just mentioned.

Carl de Souza: 16:23
What you can do is like oh, if you like conversational IVR, for example, why don't you just go ahead and use that? We'll give you that little piece of our platform and you can plug it into the platform that you already use. So if you're using Salesforce and you're using some other third party voice channel, then you can keep all of that. You could just take a little piece of ours, like the IVR. Or you could, for example, use Copilot our Copilot and embed that in Salesforce and just have the agents use it that way. Right, yeah, so it's all about the. It's just taking these pieces. So Microsoft decoupled what was one platform. They split into these different components and they've allowed customer to an organization to. You know, microsoft phrases it as meeting the customer where they are at now yep, you know.

Mark Smith: 17:13
Okay, that's interesting because it's kind of like let's make a platform all in and then now let's break it into its parts and take what you want eat. So here's a smoker's board, but you put on your plate what you want. Interesting, I hear a couple of things, and if you're not knowledgeable about these, no problem, as in if it's not yours. So you know, nuance was purchased about two years ago and Nuance was you know my understanding of how I look as an external person looking at it. It was purchased because they had some great IP in the medical space. They also had NaturallySpeak from Zero Dot back in the 80s right, which was this whole concept of using voice to type and that type of thing, which of course, then became a patient note taker when I was demoing it, just after the acquisition, I was demoing things like hey, listen, we'll call in and we'll do our biometrics on the voice That'll. You know that's a two minute process. In a standard contact center scenario we can wipe that out to sub 30 seconds.

Mark Smith: 18:13
My understanding that's been being deprioritized now from microsoft and because in the world of ai it is getting so good to even get around biometric voice prints that the confidence level is not such that you'd want to put your reputation on it anymore. And I find it very interesting. You know I've done over 600 podcasts seven years. My voice print is 100% out there, right, and anybody could sample as much or as little of that and I reckon really you would be convinced that whatever was being said was me. Of that, and I reckon really you would be convinced that whatever was being said was me. And of course, from a cyber crime perspective, that's a particular vector that they could choose to exploit. Are you seeing more and I'm going to go back to the nuance more of the nuance acquisition come into the tool set, or is it as nuanced, not even part of the mix anymore, as in nobody's talking about it. It's fully been embedded and ingested into the Microsoft machine.

Carl de Souza: 19:12
So kind of both. Right, so it has been ingested. So when you think about biometric authentication, right so Nuance has a commercial. I don't know if you've seen it, but there's a guy that calls his bank and the bank says can you tell me your third grade math teacher's name? Right?

Carl de Souza: 19:27
It's an authentication mechanism and he has no idea, he can't remember it, right? And there's another guy walking in the background and he says the words my voice is my authentication, and then Nuance is in the background and Nuance recognizes that phrase, recognizes this person and authenticates him just through that expression, right? So I think it's a bit of an arms race, right? You know, trying to stay at one technology, trying to stay ahead of the other Right A hundred percent.

Carl de Souza: 19:56
And it's hard to say, like at any given point in time, who's the winner, but you would hope that it's the server, the companies, that are winning that race. But ultimately, like a voice is like a fingerprint, right. But yeah, like a voice is like a fingerprint, right. But yeah, I mean to your point. Can you introduce fraud that way? You know it depends on the strength of the algorithm. Let's say right, so yeah, but Microsoft's taken these technologies from Nuance. They've baked that into the Power Platform. Biometric authentication is something that is in preview now. I think next year it's coming out as a general availability. But Nuance had so many great features. One of my friends works in radiology and he was telling me all about the medical history as well.

Mark Smith: 20:36
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Carl de Souza: 20:37
It's really very interesting. The company's been around for so long, right?

Mark Smith: 20:39
Yeah, Like you know, you mentioned the 80s and yeah, the stuff right that, like I didn't realize till well after acquisition that drug and naturally speak, which was, you know, quite popular back in the day for anybody that tried to use voice as a way of writing, right right yeah, and that was part of the ip of that organization.

Mark Smith: 20:59
And, of course, from a medical perspective, and they've got I forget the name of the medical product we were looking at for an australian customer that we had just put on the industry cloud for healthcare and this whole concept of a doctor being able to take medical notes using voice, but of course it has to have a lens that understands the drug names that have been mentioned and what that's referring to and being able to very articulate, write a compliant medical note. And at that time the tech wasn't even available in the Southern Hemisphere. Microsoft owned it and they're just trying to bend it down in the Northern Hemisphere, but it hadn't been available in the geo yet. When you talk about the whole biometrics thing, I find it very interesting. I feel like we've gone back to the virus scanning days where you needed your virus update each night because we forget about it nowadays because it's just built into the operating system, but back in those days, right, there was a cat and mouse game all the time through a virus or malware being released and then your software being updated to identify it and decept it.

Mark Smith: 21:59
And I feel that in the world of ai we're going into. There's going to be this whole model of is what I'm seeing and hearing? I don't think that humans are going to be able to detect that within probably 18 months, and so you're going to need software to be able to go. Is that video I'm watching really that person talking? Or is that voice that I'm hearing really that person? And I think it'll be a cat and mouse game, right? It'll be a 24-hour update cycle of whether deepfake has been, you know, your detection. Deepfake software, which will also be AI-enabled, right, is going to be that cat and mouse. Maybe a whole new industry will come about. I found interesting at the recent Power Platform Conference in Vegas a lock note in the last day was a lady, a gentleman, talking it was a panel actually and that cybercrime is the third largest country in the world based on GDP.

Mark Smith: 22:53
Right, yes, there's only two in front of it.

Mark Smith: 22:55
Right, there's only the US, followed by China, followed by cybercrime, if it was a country, the GDP, and so I think there's a lot of people don't realize just actually how much money it goes on, and I've seen big ransomware attacks that have fouled big companies, and I think that a lot of people are oblivious to the level of activity that is going on in the space. I want to switch gears and talk quickly about PCF controls, because you've done a lot in this. Sure. What's your ideas around it? What are your thoughts?

Carl de Souza: 23:26
So I gave a presentation on this actually at the Power Platform Community Conference this year and it went very well. We had 150 people in the room roughly. I think. You know there's a lot of interest in PCF controls.

Mark Smith: 23:38
Yeah.

Carl de Souza: 23:39
And you know they've been around for some years now, so they're very developer focused right, really something that a low code person would build unless they really had an inclination to want to start coding.

Mark Smith: 23:52
But they use them right. If a developer could build them and put them into a library that they could then be used by. That's true. Yes, exactly Right, yeah.

Carl de Souza: 23:59
So you know, there's definitely the two perspectives right, the building and then the consumption. If you are a decision maker, you would need to make the decision of, like, okay, do I need a PCF controlled here? Should I use one or not? Yeah, and yeah, from a dev perspective it's kind of interesting because there's a little learning curve. You know, previously we had web resources that would do some of the job of PCF controls by no means all, but they would do some of the job and it was a lot easier for a developer to just build those. You just needed to know some HTML and you could build a web resource. But these days, yeah, pcf controls steeper learning curve, but yeah, they have great capabilities, so you can. You know there's a community website out there pcfgallery. That was built by a guy called Guido and there's hundreds of controls out there. You know a new control being published every other day, so there's buzz around PCF controls. But I think, yeah, the barriers to entry are a little bit steeper than the web resources.

Mark Smith: 24:57
Yeah, Should web resources be used at all nowadays, in the context of now having PCF controls?

Carl de Souza: 25:10
I think you want to really start to go with the mentality of PCF control first. One day Microsoft might decide, okay, we're flipping that switch, no more web resources, right? So you want to kind of future-proof yourself that way and I think as a developer, I would really encourage people to learn how to use them and build them, because they have a lot of capabilities. You know you can use react, for example, and nodejs to use third-party libraries to make them really, really rich, and then when you're building these controls, you can use fluent ui to make them look exactly like the native dynamics, forms and fields. So know, that's kind of like instantly, like a kind of a nice feature right To be able to look at a page.

Carl de Souza: 25:53
And I remember actually I went to your session in Vancouver where you showed a Power App that was built, that was beautiful, right, and that's something that and I think part of your message there was that that's not really prioritized enough. When people build apps, right, and PCF controls can get you on that journey right, a hundred percent right. Yeah, when you look at Dynamics Form where you have fields on there that just don't belong there, like the user experience, and these people log into that. Every single day. Users log in every single day, right, if you're a salesperson or like finance person or a customer service rep and you know you see these like misaligned fields and things. It's like the experience is horrible, right, so why not make it as good as you can?

Mark Smith: 26:43
Yeah.

Carl de Souza: 26:43
It's part of the message.

Mark Smith: 26:44
A hundred percent in agreement and why it is so, so important. And I came across a guy in the UK that has started a company. When I say started, I'd be going. I don't know, maybe five years now and all he's done is dedicate himself to PCF and he's becoming the Telerik of PCF.

Mark Smith: 27:01
Because you talked about the gallery. The challenge with the gallery is that it's great to see the concept right, give an idea, but if you're going to put a PCF, you're not going to put a PCF control from the gallery in a bank, right, because there's a whole bunch of regression, testing, all the kind of stuff that has to happen to go. Who's going to maintain this code, blah, blah. But what this company is doing is actually building maintainable pcf controls. And you know, I always thought, back in the day of web design, telleric was just a game changer, right, and what you could do, and you needed a calendar control that was in keeping. That did you know a certain?

Mark Smith: 27:38
you know a month view, week view, you know timeline view, and it just was there right it represented data differently and I just think that when pcf controls were first introduced and I'm thinking maybe 2017, 2016, 2017, 2018 I know there was a bit of turmoil around betting it down to start with right and then it's taken off, but I just think there's such a far-reaching like. I'm surprised more businesses haven't spun out that just focus on doing these things at scale yeah and I know there's not really a marketplace and stuff for it and there's a whole.

Mark Smith: 28:14
How do you work it? You do your license per user, per org, that type of thing. I think it's challenges, without a doubt, but I just think that so many times we build software without thinking. I asked you about six months later. Would you stay in the job Six months later? If someone's using a software that you've built, whether it's on Dynamics, power Platform, whatever it is, are they still saying God bless you to the developer? Or are they saying curse this person because the way you've laid this out is just not the way we work, you know, or you?

Mark Smith: 28:43
put a compulsory field, that I have to scroll three page lengths down the form rather than putting that right up the top, where if I have to do it, you know to do this functionality it's going to take 10 clicks where it could have been done in one. And it's kind of like so many times that I've noticed on projects, developers do things to tick a box. That was required. We've done what was required, but did you do it in such a way that people don't have to think about it? It's so immersive.

Mark Smith: 29:11
That's a different story right.

Carl de Souza: 29:12
Very different, and it's a focus area.

Mark Smith: 29:14
Yeah, the final thing and I know we're over time that I want to discuss with you is the distinction between copilots and how do you talk about them? Because I see it in three broad categories. In the minute I said three, a fourth one popped to my mind right, but I see M365. Copilot, right, is prevalent across Teams, the web browser, sharepoint, et cetera. Then you've got your copilot studio studio, which, of course, allows you to create your custom copilots, which you know I'm not a big fan of custom uis.

Mark Smith: 29:51
I'd like all the ui still to be in copilot, so you're creating a consistent user experience for them, but allows you to tailor what goes in there. And then, of course, we've got ai studio Azure AI Studio, which allows for you to do the heavy lifting and build some very complex things. I still feel I'd like the UI for it to still be copilot, just for consistency and making it ease of use. On that end audience, how do you tell and why? The fourth category was then you've got your embedded right. You've got your Dynamics 365 copilot in sales. You've got copilot in finance, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm not even touching on things like GitHub copilots and things like that, or security copilots, because they're another vector, right.

Carl de Souza: 30:31
Right.

Mark Smith: 30:32
Just on the surface. How do you explain it to people? How do you, you know, remove that confusion for them? Yeah, that's a great question and you know, luckily I don't get that question a lot. It's almost like this I think you need to focus on the particular topic of where the copilot is used.

Carl de Souza: 31:03
Right, it's like what you said. There's something like 80 different copilots out there, maybe more. I've heard over 100.

Mark Smith: 31:06
or I don't know.

Carl de Souza: 31:06
I've heard over a hundred. Yeah right, you know there was 80 like two days ago. Now there's 150, right.

Mark Smith: 31:10
We added 70 in two days. That's kind of how things are going, right.

Carl de Souza: 31:13
Yeah, yeah, well, you know, microsoft's an AI company, plain and simple. Nowadays, that's right. Copilot company Yep, and yeah. So it really comes down to like what's the use case, what's the business case, right? And then that's when you say, okay, this is the copilot that is applicable to what you need to do, right, for example, like even in customer service.

Carl de Souza: 31:29
The message is very tricky, because you can have we have copilot in service, where it sits inside of Dynamics 365, where agents use that copilot to help resolve cases.

Carl de Souza: 31:42
Then you have copilot for service, which is the same thing, but it's sitting in Salesforce or ServiceNow or Zendesk, okay, or any other system. Then you have copilots that sit on a company website that faces the public right, a customer logs in to their bank and they say, hey, what's my account balance? Right, that's a copilot right there. Then you have conversational IVR bots that you can create in copilot studio. So customer calls a phone number and you get the IVR and says hi, how can I help you today? And then all of that can be built out in copilot studio and so that's another copilot. So all of that is just customer service, you know, and then you can build your custom ones, et cetera. So I think that's the message really you just need to kind of figure out, okay, what's the use case, and then you narrow down that way and then you find the best Copilot, the most applicable Copilot for the job.

Mark Smith: 32:42
Yeah, very good, I know it's a big area and it's continued to expand, and I always try to simplify any process. And for me, you know, ai, I feel, is like electricity If you use it wrong it can kill you. And I'm not saying we're having that with AI at the moment, but it means different things to different people. Right? Somebody creating an energy company, you're going to look at electricity quite differently than me switching on my coffee machine in the morning, which is still using electricity. And I wonder if there's a scenario that we get to where it's not about use cases at all, it's just in everything, right as in we won't think about is this using AI? We don't think about using electricity. When I switched my lights on this morning to my computer, I didn't think about, oh, I'm going to consume some electricity.

Mark Smith: 33:33
And I think that we're fast heading to a state where we won't think about are we using AI? It'll just be fully immersed in everything we do and every product that we have. But it needs clarity for customers, because I see this scenario happening where any mid-market company to enterprise company will have 200 to 300 applications and every one of those vendors are hard out stuffing AI into them. And so you imagine, as the person working in that company, do I have to know which AI to interact with? Do I need to do it with that one over there Because I have an HR question, so I've got to find the HR AI, or do I? I've got to understand my manufacturing pipeline. So, okay, what is it? Oh, is that SAP AI? Do I need to find the SA?

Mark Smith: 34:25
And that's why I think what Microsoft has come out with the UI for AI and why I think copilot should be the center of that, is because, as a person, I shouldn't have to know where the data resides in my organization, which kind of vendor solution it is. But I don't want 300 AI applications to learn over the next couple of years. I just want one interface. I want to be able to prompt it over the next couple of years. I just want one interface, I want to be able to prompt it, and that prompt will get a consistent response wherever the data resides. So I think Microsoft's made a good pivot with that. That only came out the week of that Vegas event right, satya announced it on the Monday of that, but I think it has a lot of traction and could be built out well.

Carl de Souza: 34:59

Yeah, definitely. And really, when you think about the like copilot service, ais, you know Microsoft's made it really easy to point to different knowledge sources, so you can, you know, really easily, so it's kind of consolidating information right. You know that's really what you're kind of saying the answer to something could be in 10 different systems and you want that one copilot to be able to get that answer from any or all systems, right?

Mark Smith: 35:26
Yeah, and I'm not saying you shouldn't have unique copilots for a specific use case. You know more power to you If you're in a contact center. You absolutely want the experience that's interacting with this customer online, but you should be able to jump into your normal copilot and ask and access any data that is you know. I shouldn't have to know. So, yeah, I think both works. Any final words for us, Carl?

Carl de Souza: 35:53
Final words? I don't think so, but you know like it's been a real pleasure. I've been wanting to come onto this show for so long and when I was an MVP I kept telling I think yourself or everybody like, oh I got to go on Mark's show and so I'm so happy to be here. You know, but thank you, yeah well, we must do this again sometime.

Mark Smith: 36:11
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?