Harnessing AI and Power Platform for Business Success with Vibhuti Dadhich

Mark Smith: 0:32
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now let's get on with the show. In this episode, we'll be focusing on building mega apps on the Power Platform and why it should be part of your enterprise strategy. Today's guest hails from the vibrant city of Hyderabad, india, and is a distinguished leader in the tech community, currently serving as the Manager of Technology Practice at Saxon. Ai Vibhuti is a frequent advocate for the transformative capabilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Her dedication extends beyond mere advocacy. She is deeply committed to leveraging the potential of low-code development and revolutionizing business operations. Vibhuti's mission is clear to empower organizations to thrive in the digital age, optimizing processes and fostering innovation through accessible technology solutions. For more insights into her professional journey and to connect with her online, check the show notes for this episode for her links to those and her bio social media profiles. Please join me in welcoming Vibhuti to the show.

Vibhuti Dadhich: 1:52
Hey Mark, how are you? Thank you so much for that lovely introduction.

Mark Smith: 1:55
Good to have you on the show. Why is Hyderabad awesome?

Vibhuti Dadhich: 2:00
I keep traveling to Hyderabad from New Delhi, right? So I'll tell you, I see that big city in India versus Hyderabad, that is the upcoming big city, so it's very interesting for me to see that journey, what's happening, and of course, there's a lot of spicy Indian food, so so that I may not enjoy so much, but for everybody listening that might be a good hook to come to Hyderabad.

Mark Smith: 2:23
So that leads us into food, family and fun. What do they mean to you?

Vibhuti Dadhich: 2:27
So food, sometimes it's just for me to sustain. Actually, sometimes I keep forgetting the food that I have to eat and I limit myself to coffee. When it comes to food Family, I have, I stay with my parents. I have a lovely dog, so they make me feel really awesome there. And when it comes to fun, this is fun where we are at today. So I love traveling, I keep on visiting new places and I also, in my free time, look up to new things. That's happening because in the technology space that we all are in today power platform it's ever, ever, ever evolving. So I think I would say Food Family Fund. That's for me.

Mark Smith: 3:07
Have you done much overseas travel.

Vibhuti Dadhich: 3:09
Oh yes, I was in Spain probably two months back.

Mark Smith: 3:13
Wow, yeah, can you speak Spanish?

Vibhuti Dadhich: 3:16
Hola, I think. Gracias, that's the Spanish I can speak.

Mark Smith: 3:21
Yes, yes, yes, yes, Wow, interesting, but your English is absolutely very fluent.

Vibhuti Dadhich: 3:27
But you would hear a little bit of cautiousness in my voice today because I am still under the weather. So thank you so much at least.

Mark Smith: 3:34
You're awesome. Tell me how did you get into a tech career? What was that? You know from, whether it was early childhood or what. What led you to be? You know, tech is going to be my thing.

Vibhuti Dadhich: 3:45
To be honest, that's a question for which I will tell you. The answer came in really late in my career. I did my graduation and was non-tech. I pursued mathematics in my graduation and then I somehow landed up with a big giant in India. They do a lot of mass recruitment, so it was a campus hire.

Vibhuti Dadhich: 4:04
When I joined them, they trained me on the C-sharp side of technology, right, and as a decent person I was like, okay, this is pretty interesting. I mean, I'm getting to work on something that's dynamically changing every day, and the high of actually writing the code and running F5 and you see it coming on screen. I think that was very interesting for me. So then I thought, okay, I think my backup plan should become my first, you know. So that's how I switched my plans.

Vibhuti Dadhich: 4:29
I came to tech full-time and then I continued to stay with it when it came to my journey with Microsoft on the tech stack. So I started from NET, then I moved to SharePoint. I explored that side of it like ZSOM, json, the online parts of it where we had really fancy SharePoint forms coming in, and that's when the birth of Power Platform happened. And I was right there and I think after that I feel that it was a good decision for me to actually move that decision of staying in maths and doing something I'd probably be a professor in mathematics or something like that, but then coming to do full-time tech I think that was a great leap of faith.

Mark Smith: 5:12
Nice, nice. So how many years do you think you've been in Power Platform now?

Vibhuti Dadhich: 5:16
Right from the start, mark, so I know Power Platform since the day we started plugging it in SharePoint forms Wow, so I think that was early 2020. 2016.

Mark Smith: 5:27
Yeah, 2016. Yeah, 2016 was the year that Microsoft bought it out. They didn't call it Power Platform to 2019. It was Power Apps to start with, and particularly the Canvas apps experience. So I wanted to talk about mega apps and perhaps, if you can cast your eye back across your career and talk about one or two projects that would be considered a mega-app implementation.

Mark Smith: 5:54
I commonly refer to these as anchor apps and organizations, so a lot of people use the Power Platform to do little things. Right, to build a little checklist app and to build a little an app to look something up, maybe. Um, but because I came from a background of xrm, which was the predecessor power platform, it's about built on the same architecture. I never used to sell crm. I can count on one hand how many crm implementations I did, but I used to take the platform, strip off the customer relationship management and I would build apps that after 10, 15 years, they're still in operation. Right, they're big apps operating in these businesses and government organizations that I implemented the technology in, and so, with that in mind, tell me about how you can relate to that.

Vibhuti Dadhich: 6:50
So I was talking about one of my projects that I was working in my stint earlier to saxon. So I was working with evi and we tried to come up with a power platform application primarily built on top of model driven apps for their insurance clients. So what? We packaged it as was the entire producer lifecycle journey. So we wanted to manage how you can register new producers who are going to do your insurance procurement and etc. Selling insurance, and how that can also get information real time from the National Insurance Producer Registry, which is the government body that's there in the US.

Vibhuti Dadhich: 7:33
Back and forth, a lot of API calls were happening, a lot of data was being fetched. It was a very intuitive app which was continuing to carry your holistic producer lifecycle journey because you onboard them, you offload them, you transfer them, you take care of their trainings, every module. I mean you can simply relate it to a normal HR tool, but that HR tool is just doing everything that's happening for the insurance industry and the producer lifecycle With their agents, their clients, their training etc. Training, etc. So that's one piece that I can relate to, where you said that that app which I worked on now, which was created on the power platform is still running and it's now being sold as a product by the organization.

Vibhuti Dadhich: 8:19
Yeah, so you know, there are multiple clients I know of who are really heavy on the workforce. They have huge number of producers right in the US market. They are still using it and there are multiple who are also getting on board as they speak. So I think that's where my relation I mean that's where I feel that it's relevant.

Mark Smith: 8:40
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's interesting and so that app then that's been sold. Is that you said the US market? Is it sold into any other markets around the world?

Vibhuti Dadhich: 8:49
No, not yet, Mark, because currently the integrations, what we focus for, was very specific to US markets, because you have the registry right, nipr, and then US itself has a lot of states, so there are a lot of laws, and these laws for insurance keep on changing so you have to be updated. So today you have to do three certifications to be able to sell an insurance product, but tomorrow you need four. So that's very dynamic. So we wanted to take one market at a time land and expand there and then probably started for another geography and the UK was one which we started talking about, and then I had to exit and come to Saxon.

Mark Smith: 9:26
Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. And is there any other big projects that you've been born, that you've built um you know, a maker app?

Vibhuti Dadhich: 9:34
so right now, as we speak, we are working on a full-time project with an organization. It's a construction-based organization in us again. It's massive, it has a large workforce, it has presence. Everybody knows them. Uh, we are working for them to transform their technology journey from the local platform that they are using currently and move them to Power Platform.

Mark Smith: 9:58
What's the platform they're on?

Vibhuti Dadhich: 10:02
They were using Appian and Appian. When I personally saw it it had a lot of good features. It's really very well on the model side of it, but then expensive. It's very difficult to manage. It's not as evolving, there are no much feature releases and when it comes to Power Platform, you can see the contrast right. Like I mean, I open my Power Platform some days, like twice a week, and I will see there are different features a day. It's frustrating and exciting at the same time for us.

Mark Smith: 10:28
Yeah, I'm the type of person that always likes new features. I want to always try out what's new. So I love that and I love the constant iteration and development Microsoft is doing on the platform. Give me a feel for the size of that organization that we can't mention their name. Do you have a feel for how many people they have across their, their company? How large that would be?

Vibhuti Dadhich: 10:52
okay, let me talk about this, uh, another application, uh, which we are doing for a retail customer in the mina region.

Vibhuti Dadhich: 10:59
So when I say retail customer, so you know the number of people hitting their uh website. It's not gonna be tailored or catered or limited to any set of numbers. So that's where also we are planning to do in holistic vendor management, along with external internal application users. We're also doing various sub applications under that. So when you talk about the holistic idea of a mega app, how we see it, that there will be one interface where you come, yes, it would be if I could say I think I would call it intranet of the new times. Yes, yes, that's interesting.

Vibhuti Dadhich: 11:30
Yes, it would be I if I could say I think I would call it intranet of the new times yes, yes, that's interesting so it would be something like that where you have everything together in that bundle and you can do all of your minor application accesses, uh, maintain external, internal users have launching different applications right from one home screen, and I would call that a true mega application. And since it's open and retail and it will have external, anonymous users too, so you know, numbers would not be a point that we would have to talk about.

Mark Smith: 12:03
I've had conversation with enterprise architects inside organizations and they feel that the power platform is not enterprise. And how would you answer that Power Platform is not?

Vibhuti Dadhich: 12:10
enterprise, and how would you answer that? I think, honestly, as a solution consultant and as a person who has been talking Power Platform day in and day out from the start of it, I would partially agree to that statement, but I would also say that you've not explored a lot of features to have that statement still valid. So when you talk about Power Platform not being the one that can suffice the enterprise level, you're thinking from the fact that my licenses are going to be expensive. I don't want every SKU people to be using the kind of same licenses that you want, so there are ways in which you can do it. You necessarily would not want everybody on a premium and have some access and have the minor level of privileges right, so that's where the solution designing the consultation that you do prior to getting into it would be very important in my perspective yeah, interesting, interesting.

Mark Smith: 13:03
Has there ever been, in the projects you've been on, any discussion around security implications or concerns about the security of the Power Platform?

Vibhuti Dadhich: 13:13
Security is, I think, the primer selling factor for Power Platform, given that everything stays in your tenant and it's safeguarded by Microsoft. So even with the co-pilot story inside Power Platform, now the primary thing that we are all focusing on is how secure it is, because the guardrails that Microsoft has everything stays in your tenant, nothing is going out. Even if you want to expose certain APIs, we have full liberty of containing it to the level of. You know the permissions that you have to set at the custom connector level as well and the exposure that we have to do for that. So I think security is one of the key selling factors. I would not say there's a concern for most of the people I have interacted with.

Mark Smith: 13:54
Yeah, interesting. You mentioned co-pilot, so let's talk about AI. I suppose we're about almost coming up two years now since the you know the Gen AI explosion that has happened. Are you coming across it much in your work? What are you seeing?

Vibhuti Dadhich: 14:12
I see IDP. When it comes to intelligent document processing the part of AI, it's being massively shipped right now. So everybody wants to actually have reduced that pain of right now going through several Excel's videos that they have and want everything extracted seamlessly and put in an application for easier access, bucketed. I think this is one thing that I am seeing as we speak. I have met multiple clients in the past for it. It's not even region specific, to be honest, because I saw this wave was coming in India. It was coming in the MENA region, then I saw lots coming from US, so it's everywhere. I think that's one area where people have started exploring the AI factor document intelligence, even though this was already there when we talked about the cognitive services, but with the co-pilot, I think that's one area where people have actually started being like okay, let's get our documents intelligent at least. And then another thing that I've seen in my recent client interactions when it comes to co-pilot is they're curious, they want to know what it is because a lot is happening.

Vibhuti Dadhich: 15:18
Everybody's talking gen ai, everybody is talking ai is the future, but they don't know what ai is and how AI can do something better for you. So a lot of education is also happening. When we talk to our customers these days, they want to know how we can help them. They want to understand even basics of having, let's say, a co-pilot on your Microsoft Teams. So sometimes we have to just run it out and we have to show them see how your meeting minutes can be generated because, like a CXO, a CTO or a CEO doesn't have the time to have, let's say, a particular assistant running in that meeting. So all they have to do is they just start a meeting of their own, start the recording and a transcript by co-pilot and you have the meeting notes. I mean basic AI is also something now everybody's interested.

Mark Smith: 16:02
Have you worked on any more advanced use cases for AI yet?

Vibhuti Dadhich: 16:06
We have certain pipelines, mark, and I would not be able to say that, so say more on that because it's still under the ideation phases. Yes, but document processing, getting and extracting data, then the plugin part of co-pilot Story, is again one of the most interesting things that we've worked on with the SAP database.

Mark Smith: 16:27
Yeah, interesting. So SAP integration, yes, yeah, okay. So that's a big growth area. Tell me just back on the document automation. Can you explain to me how that works, because I've not worked in that area? Can you tell me more?

Vibhuti Dadhich: 16:42
So let me talk and take an example of a sales order generation today. Right, most of your manufacturing industry, retail industry, any industry you call there is a sales order unit where order generation is a part of it. So, as simple as getting orders from our vendors or when it comes to dispatching it to your end users, you will have a lot of bills coming in. You will have a lot of bills coming in. You will have a lot of bills coming in and then passing through multiple systems, sap being one of them at some times. So one of the solutions that we are working on today is your bill comes in, we pick them up, we study your bill, we can train the models based on your vendors. We templatize it, we get the information, we get the underlining of it, we raise out certain flags. Let's say there is an error in the bill. Somebody is trying to be mischievous with you. They have five line items and the total that they show is way beyond it. So I mean, necessarily, it can still be left as okay from a human eye, but with AI and the tools that we have, we can intelligently see all those line items, make that match, add more business rules. Let's say if you want, you want to raise a flag at some other levels in that way, we can do that. So all those validations and flags are being there.

Vibhuti Dadhich: 17:55
Then it goes to your system, which is a power app. So let's say I have a Canvas app. I put all that extracted data there, assign it to my sales rep who was responsible for that particular interaction and order generation, since it's very data sensitive at the moment because your data is going to go into your SAP. Your orders will be generated and it's tons of data and a lot of money is involved. So the first three months, ideally what we do is we do have a manual approval process. We extract the data, we give you the slides, we tell you if it's okay or not, we give you all our information from the AI standpoint, but we still let you skim through it for a quick second and then, once you're okay with it, we generate the mapping to SAP, or any other ERP system for that matter. Your notifications, approvals, communication to your clients, customers, et cetera, is all taken care of in this particular solution.

Mark Smith: 18:48
Interesting, Interesting. You can see, how you know, for a lot of organizations that's going to have a massive impact. On the SAP side of things you talked about, you've obviously had to integrate. Are you building custom integrations or are you using the SAP ERP connector from Microsoft?

Vibhuti Dadhich: 19:06
Custom integrations Because sometimes, again, the ERP connectors, as much as it's readily available, but we have faced certain challenges in the past. I mean with the connection breaking in and sometimes when we are doing the direct connectors via Power Automate or inside the Copilot story, we're not getting it as right Because your integrations, it's too complicated also sometimes to write it right on the connector. So when we do a custom connector we're writing a plugin of our own and I'm writing my own integration to the endpoint that I have. It becomes a lot easier. So again, I would say it's case to case basis. If I have a very simple application, very basic SAP integrations, I would say it's case-to-case basis. If I have a very simple application, very basic SAP integrations, I would rather stick to my out-of-the-box and if it is related to a lot of complications, I would stick to the pro-code approach.

Mark Smith: 19:55
Yeah, interesting, interesting. Well, it's been great talking to you. Anything else you'd like to add before we finish?

Vibhuti Dadhich: 20:05
I think Power Platform platform now, when we will be talking about today and now we talk about power platform me, coming 30 or 60 days, there would still be a lot of change in it and I would be telling you about a lot of different use cases. So I think that's the fun of power platform and to anybody who's listening doing Power Platform, I think stay on your toes. Right to be updated and I think it's quite an interesting journey with the AI, I would say that hey, thanks for listening.

Mark Smith: 20:37
I'm your host Business Application MVP, mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash. Nz365 guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.