Exploring the Heart of SharePoint's AI Transformation with Amarender Peddamalku

Mark Smith: 0:37
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 Richmond, virginia in the United States. He works as a proficient practice lead and architect. He was first awarded as MVP in 2023. He has over 15 years of experience with Microsoft technologies and works with every single version of SharePoint since its inception. I'm going to look forward to unpacking that. He leads technology implementations from sales to delivery. You can find links to his bio, social media etc. In the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Amarender. Thank you, mark. I'm glad to be here. I'm pleased to have you on the show and to really I found that interesting that you've worked with every version of SharePoint since the get-go. What year was?

Amarender Peddamalku: 1:58
that I worked on SharePoint 2001 in 2011 or 2010-ish, so it's not like I've been working with SharePoint since 2000. So that would put me at 25-year mark. But I worked with the older version of SharePoint through migrations and whatnot, when we had to help the clients out with migrations and kind of modernizing them back in the days, right from 2001 to 2007 days. So I just happened to be lucky enough to get an opportunity to work on all the opportunities where you know I saw the growth of SharePoint right from 2001 days to WSS, which was 2003, and then Moss, then SharePoint 2010, when I personally think Microsoft found its footings in the enterprise world with SharePoints and intranets, and then 2013, 16, and SharePoint Online came along the way. So I just happened to work with all kinds of projects because I was a consultant and I'm still a consultant.

Amarender Peddamalku: 3:08
That's the beauty of being a consultant you get to learn a lot really in a quick, short time span. So I've been just like it's coincidental that I work with all the versions of SharePoint. But I'm amazed at the pace at which Microsoft arrived today with where they are with intranets and SharePoint in general. You can think of last 10 years as a long time, but if you compare Microsoft SharePoint to where it was about, 10 years is a long time. But if you compare Microsoft SharePoint to where it was about 10 years ago to now, that's quite amazing. Where we are today with innovations and co-pilots, especially Microsoft Syntex and intelligent intranets, it just blows my mind away. So I'm just glad to be part of the journey, and I've been lucky enough to be part of the journey and I've been lucky enough to experience all of that change myself and I help my clients on the journey as well.

Mark Smith: 4:04
Nice. Tell me about food, family and fun. What do you do when you're not working, when you're not focusing on SharePoint? What does your life look like?

Amarender Peddamalku: 4:18
Absolutely. I have a beautiful wife and with two kids, two boys, seven-year-old and a two-year-old two and a half and when I'm away from my desk, which usually happens around 5.30 every day, and then I won't open my laptop until the next day morning, until unless the roof is on fire. So family comes first to me. I'm passionate about technology and that's why I've been doing this for 15 years, but I'm doing this for my family, so that comes first. So when I'm not doing work, I love to spend my time with family and kids. I go out, see new places, travel to new places. I've traveled quite a bit in the United States because that's where I live at the moment, but I'm born and raised in India. I've been in India for the first 23 years of my life before I moved to the United States. So I've traveled not too much in India, but fair enough, fair bit in India as well. And last year we went to Europe to explore new places like Italy, some islands like Capri. I love the history, rome and all that. So I love to travel to new places and explore new places with the family. That's my time off.

Amarender Peddamalku: 5:39
And every now and then I watch. I used to watch a lot of cricket, but not with kids' activities anymore. Now I switch to highlights from the live matches and at times it just goes down to the scorecards, just checking the scorecards online. But I love cricket, I love watching it. I never played it at any professional level, I just like played with friends for fun. And then I love watching tennis. I was a huge Roger Federer fan. He retired. In cricket, I'm a diehard fan of Sachin Tendulkar, coming from your place of the world, new Zealand, and I'm guessing you follow a little bit of cricket maybe. But yeah, I follow it pretty closely.

Mark Smith: 6:28
Yeah, I've definitely been to a few matches, that's for real.

Amarender Peddamalku: 6:33
Yeah. So, coming back to food, I love Indian food, italian, uh yeah. I'm from a city called Hyderabad. It's known for a biryani. It's made with rice and chicken and other meat, so I love that. And, um, my wife prepares an amazing biryani, so I don't have to. I mean, we do go out to taste, but nothing like homemade biryani.

Mark Smith: 6:57
So yeah, I'm interested in getting your lens on SharePoint and you mentioned syntax or syntax, sorry in what you said. Now, is my understanding correct that that's already been renamed? Is my understanding correct that that's already been renamed? Because I'm seeing this ADA A-I-D-A AI document automation. What are you seeing in that space of where you know AI is becoming part of? You know auto-tagging documents, building out the metadata based on its content, making it much more, you know, searchable, being able to surface it at the right point for the right people that need it, and then even things like purview. And you know classifying documents based on their content, not leaving it up to humans to, if you like, misclassify the confidential nature of, potentially of documents, the. You know how it either stays on network or can it, you know, be attached to an email, can it be offloaded to a private cloud storage location, all those type of things that I'm seeing in the SharePoint realm becoming much bigger deals. What are you seeing?

Amarender Peddamalku: 8:22
Completely agree with you. Ai is going to transform the way that we've worked so far and, as I've said, I've personally been working with Microsoft technologies for decent 15 plus years of time. I've never seen a product as exciting as Copilot is. So back in the olden days, you know, when you ask a person to create a SharePoint page, they would have taken two to three days like solid two to three days to come up with a decent page. With Copilot it happens under a minute and the quality goes above and beyond. You can just go to Copilot and say create a SharePoint page for me and that happens under a couple of minutes with an amazing quality. So it saves a ton of time. And Copilot is there everywhere, no matter which tech stack that you work with in Microsoft 365, it may not be there today, but it will eventually get there. So Copilot is there in SharePoint, copilot is there in Dynamics, copilot is there in PowerPoint, word Office Suite, excel, etc. And if any of the Microsoft product doesn't get it, that means they're working on it behind the screen. So eventually it'll be everywhere, whether you like it or not, and I bet 99% of the people would love it, and I'm one of them.

Amarender Peddamalku: 9:50
So, coming back to your question of syntax or automatically classifying the information, I've worked with a couple of Microsoft syntax projects in the past and what we had traditionally was human-centric AI when it comes to classifying the content or tagging the content and all of that. Where syntax differs from it is it's a human-centric AI, whereas machine-centric AI, which was the classic. Sorry if I flipped the order around, but what we used to have is machine-centric AI. You used to see, ai was more like a black box for us, right? So we didn't know what happens behind the screens before you get the certain data out of it.

Amarender Peddamalku: 10:45
But whereas Microsoft syntax is human-centric AI, you can use intelligent automation to process the document, to tag the documents, to create the documents based on certain templates. So, for example, I had one of my client. Their data was sitting on eight floors, over 10,000 square foot of office space, and they had data in all shapes, sizes and formats. They are handwritten papers, notes, digital documents, physical papers, shelves, storage areas everywhere that you can think of they're like how in the heck can we recognize what we have as data? That's where these tools like Microsoft Syntex comes into the picture, where they'll use intelligent, automated AI capabilities to process the data that is much larger in a much more intelligent way.

Amarender Peddamalku: 11:47
So we came up with a methodology of an intern going in and scanning all kinds of paper into Microsoft Syntex Center and Syntex takes it from there by building models to extract key pieces of content from the documents and then have them as metadata and then you can have it. Then you can have all sorts of like power, automate workflows, let's say, based on the data that you extracted, to run some automated process and whatnot. So we had petabytes of data that was processed using Microsoft syntax. Imagine doing that manually, how many errors that you would have run through or how many resources that it would have taken to process that kind of data, and still your quality would have suffered. Because we are all humans, we make mistakes and we are prone to make mistakes with that kind of large volumes of data. And that's where the technology can help you. Like with the human intelligence, you build the models.

Amarender Peddamalku: 12:50
So we bring the content authors or the knowledge workers into the mix and say how do you recognize this document? What makes this document a contract or a proposal or an invoice? And they give us key clues, like if this word exists in a line three. And if it's, you know if you can look at the position of certain words in a document to define what kind of document that is. So you can build all kinds of models based on the location of certain keywords or how close a couple of words are to each other, or whether you have a table. Let's say, if you have an invoice, you typically see some kind of table structure.

Amarender Peddamalku: 13:35
So, depending on what kind of data that you're looking at, knowledge workers can come into the picture and say these are the factors that makes this document a contract, and we define the models or we develop the models based on those facts by getting the knowledge from content workers and then build the models. And those models would extract the information from those documents and store it as metadata. And once you have the data in SharePoint, you can build applications, you can run Power Automate applications, you can do whatever with the data right, and the beauty of it is all it takes is 10 documents to train the model and then you can upload hundreds and thousands of documents after that. So it's quite amazing at the pace at which it transforms your data and classifies your content. Um, I've I've used it firsthand and I love the technology you know with you're talking about petabytes of data.

Mark Smith: 14:34
Um, are you getting into the scenario where your customers are buying then a lot of? Is there like an add-on skew for storage, like as you store more for, specifically for sharepoint? How does that work?

Amarender Peddamalku: 14:49
so sharepoint does a great question. So syntax in itself is an add-on. Um, they used to have, like you used to have, they used to have a requirement such as you need to have e3 and it's a special licensing five dollars per user. And initially they said whoever is consuming the data as well that's processed by syntax, you need to buy the license. And then they took it away. Then they said then they, as in microsoft, right, and and they said whoever is building the models, only they have to have license. They kind of scraped all of that and now it's pay as you go, right, so you process a certain piece of information or certain size of information and you're charged by that amount.

Amarender Peddamalku: 15:35
So storage is a thing. So usually for Microsoft syntax to work, all of the documents have to live in SharePoint boundaries. So whatever SharePoint Online costs you is what the storage costs you. And then Syntex is an add-on. It's by how much ever data that you're processing using Syntex. You pay that amount using pay-as-you-go plan. So you can start small and you can expand as you go, and it's not too bad. It's like I'm not a licensing expert. I have to refer to the articles all the time, but it's like five cents or something for a document if it's a known document of PDF or Word stuff like that. So licensing is not that crazy to me.

Mark Smith: 16:27
So is there a scenario, though, that the amount being stored gets expensive.

Amarender Peddamalku: 16:33
Well, so again, that falls back into SharePoint kind of world right? So no, I wouldn't say so, because you're already storing a lot of data on SharePoint and you can look up the storage limits of your sites and you can buy additional storage. So it's cloud storage anyways. So it's not that expensive even to store that kind of volumes of data. And again, like storing the data, once you process it, you might want to retain or backup the data. It's not like once you extract key pieces of information, you still want to have that in a SharePoint, right? So once you extract the information, once you're happy with what you're extracting, you can build whatever applications or power automate processes or whatever you want based on that data. And if you're happy with what you extracted, you can simply archive the data to microsoft 365 archive storage.

Mark Smith: 17:35
That way you pay much less and so what that's putting it in kind of into, like a blob storage, cold storage type setup.

Amarender Peddamalku: 17:42
So it depends on what you want to do with the data, right? Or if you want to have the data still those documents stored on SharePoint, you probably want to pay for them. But if you extract the data and you're happy with it and you can just build applications on top of it.

Mark Smith: 18:02
Right, and so just that whole that lifecycle management of information in SharePoint is that something that you would typically build into your solutions as well as in? What I mean is like let's say it's an invoice, the invoice would have its. Let's say, there's a legal requirement for seven years storage, but at the end of seven years you don't need to keep it in. Let's say, hot retrieval it might even be way less than that, but you would hand it off to cold storage or something. Do you then fully script that process so that people are not having to think about it? So only what's kept accessible right now is available on SharePoint. Everything else has gone to a cold storage scenario based on business rules.

Amarender Peddamalku: 18:53
Yeah, in fact, that would be my recommendation, because you want to keep your internet fresh all the time, right? You don't want to inundate internet with a bunch of data that's not, you know, it's not fresh anymore. So a content lifecycle is really important and, like everybody, should implement automated retention policies and then to backup or archive content and then you can extend, you can build, like you can build solutions or extend on the data that you extract. So, like, one of the key principles of user adoption in intranet is keep your content fresh. Just because you did something five years ago, that doesn't mean you still need to store it in SharePoint, right? Move it off If you don't need it. Put it on the back shelf, like cold storage that you mentioned, and use the applications or whatever wherever you want to use the data. So, absolutely, once you process the data, you can, after a certain number of years, whether for legal requirements or for retention purposes, you can move it off to the backup solution or cold storage.

Mark Smith: 20:07
Nice. So my last question I've we've already consumed quite a bit of time um, for you is is copilot, copilot and sharepoint? Is that part of the m365? If you've got that add-on that you allows you, of course, uh, copilot for the productivity apps like outlook, powerpoint etc. Does that automatically give you copilot for SharePoint as well, or is it a separate licensing?

Amarender Peddamalku: 20:31
So Copilot? That's a great question. So Copilot, have you seen the Copilot cheese meal? Copilot is there for it has probably 100 flavors at the moment and all the flavors has different licensing right. So Copilot for productivity tools is a certain license and then I think it's Copilot for M365 is what gives you SharePoint access and they used to have 300 seat minimum, which they took it out, which is amazing Small businesses $20 per user per month.

Amarender Peddamalku: 21:09
right it used to be is it paid up for 30 or 20. I thought it was 30, is it 20? Maybe they dropped it, I don't know I don't know.

Mark Smith: 21:16
I don't know, I might have that. Yeah, I don't know.

Amarender Peddamalku: 21:18
I could be wrong too. I did again licensing. I'm not an expert, but uh, if you look at the whether it's 20 or 30 whether you look at the cost, when you look at the cost versus the value that it's adding on a daily basis, it's just quite amazing. So think, even if you go by like a typical bill rate of hundred dollars, united states dollars, and on an average, if it saves you four hours per, say, per month, it's four hundred dollars versus thirty30 or $20 that you pay.

Amarender Peddamalku: 21:52
But the thing is you cannot have every single person in the organization licensed for Copilot because they don't have the right skill set for it.

Amarender Peddamalku: 22:02
So you have to be selective and only in that case it would be impactful and effective. It's like if you have 10,000 people, you cannot buy 10,000 Copilot licenses because everybody has different skillset. Not everybody might be primed to use Copilot, but whoever can use Copilot, I would absolutely recommend organizations to at least start small, pick your pilot group and see what difference it's making and how it's improving the productivity on a daily basis, and then they can do the ROI return on investment calculations and whatnot. But Copilot simply is amazing to me. It can, as you know, in the office suite. It can create a PowerPoint deck from a Word document, a PowerPoint deck from a Word document, and it's just like, imagine like we all spent numerous days, like at least two to three days, to come up with a decent deck, you know, from a Word document to summarize it, and Copilot just does that in, like I mean again the name itself is Copilot Phenomenal and it's going to be interesting.

Mark Smith: 23:07
It gives you a great head start when the space goes in the coming years. Agreed, Amar, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Amarender Peddamalku: 23:14
Absolutely man Anytime.

Mark Smith: 23:20
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 you.