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Scaling Environmental Solutions: Intricacies of managing large-scale environments

Scaling Environmental Solutions: Intricacies of managing large-scale environments

Scaling Environmental Solutions
Kenric (Ken) Auguillard

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https://podcast.nz365guy.com/596  

Prepare to be inspired as we sit down with Kenric (Ken) Auguillard, a principal program manager from Microsoft, who unveils the secrets behind his meticulous approach to leveraging the Power Platform for environmental strategies. Known affectionately as "DrNo," Kenric shares the journey that earned him his nickname and how his methodical mindset has driven success. Outside the tech world, Kenric wears many hats—he's a Texas-style barbecue enthusiast, an autocross racing aficionado, and a devoted family man. Get a peek into his personal life, including his daughters' impressive strides in tech and his wife's unwavering support over three decades.

Next, we explore the intricacies of managing large-scale environments within the Power Platform, an area where Kenric's team excels. Supported by coaches like Ryan and Zohar, Kenric discusses the importance of understanding and embracing problems to discover real solutions. We shed light on the surprisingly low adoption rates of managed environments and the continuous need for education on their benefits. Through examples from Microsoft's internal environment, which boasts over 25,000 environments, Kenric illustrates the Power Platform’s robustness and scalability.

Finally, we delve into the crucial role customer feedback plays in the rapid development and enhancement of the Power Platform. Kenric tackles common misconceptions about the platform's enterprise capabilities and emphasizes the importance of staying informed about its evolving features. Join us for an episode filled with insights, personal stories, and a look into the future of tech innovation!

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Chapters

00:01 - Innovation With AI at Microsoft

14:21 - Exploring Managed Environments Adoption Trends

20:29 - Unveiling the Power Platform Benefits

33:13 - Connecting With Microsoft Experts for Innovation

Transcript

Mark Smith: Welcome to the co-pilot 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'll be focusing on environmental strategies with the power platform, managed environments and the like. Today's guest is from Richmond, texas in the United States. He works at Microsoft as a principal program manager. As always, you can find links to his bio, social media, et cetera, in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, kendrick or Ken.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: Thank you very much and thank you for pronouncing my first name correctly. Most people just butcher that, even though it's a very, very simple name my first name correctly Most people just butcher that, even though it's a very, very simple name.

Mark Smith: Wow, yeah, now I noticed that and of course the audience can't see this. But on screen we have your name and you have got Dr no in it, and I don't know the story behind it, so please enlighten me.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: So many years ago, we admin, if you will, working for an organization. Many years ago, we admin, if you will, working for an organization I had this tendency of always really challenging the business and everyone, and my answers almost always started off with no, we're not doing that. So I picked up the nomenclature of Dr no, that's just you know. Whenever the business would come to me, it was that of Dr no, that's just you know. Whenever the business would come to me, it was that. Now, truthfully, those who actually knew me and worked with me knew that Dr no usually said yes, he just wanted to know K-N-O-W, why you needed this, how we were going to implement it, and so on and so forth. But that's how it all got started. In the first BizApps conference, I even had Charles LaManna calling me Dr no a few times. It was pretty funny. That's epic.

Mark Smith: Before we kick it into things about food, family and fun, who are you when you're not at Microsoft and what do you get up to?

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: Well one. I'm a father and husband. I love my wife and my two girls. My oldest daughter is going to be getting married pretty soon. She just got engaged. So hey, kelsey, how are you If you're listening? Wonderful human being can't say enough good things about her. I never thought she would actually be in tech, but she actually is a senior data analyst. I'll have to make sure I say that. And my youngest daughter is making her way through university right now. Her name is Kaylee. Kaylee is also just brilliant, fun and basically a mini me. My grandfather calls her my sidekick. She's in university. She's studying artificial intelligence with applied robotics or something like that. I think she's got like a year left robotics or something like that. I think she's got like a year left. And my wife and partner of 30 years this year I might not look like it, but her name is Erica and like I honestly probably wouldn't be much of anything without my wife, so I like that.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: I like that, aside from the family, I enjoy barbecuing, texas style barbecue. So a lot of folks who know me know that I can go on for hours talking about the science of barbecue and what would, and smoking, and oh, have you ever baked inside of a smoker and baked apple pies? And have you ever smoked the cinnamon roll? And or you know like. I'll go on, and on, and on and on those types of things. I also like doing autocross, so I recently bought myself another well, a new toy, if you will for doing autocross and I've been thoroughly enjoying that. So it's a little bit.

Mark Smith: I have never heard of autocross. What is it?

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: Autocross is on a closed road course, right, so think of racing, but you're racing against time. So what they will do is they'll set out a course for you and the course can change throughout the day and there's various different classes. So, you know, someone might be in a Miata, someone might be in a Porsche 911 or GTRS or whatever. So I have a new Mustang, so I think I'm kind of like middle of the pack or so something like that class wise Cause they also look at your horsepower and things like that and you basically do time attacks. You can do time attacks or you, you know, you go through the road course and it's very, very interesting and challenging because you know it's not just racing in an oval nothing against NASCAR or anything like that, or drag racing or anything. It's actually like you're driving the heck out of the car right and twist turns and so on and so forth.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: My first time out there, I went through my set of tires. When I got home, I told my wife I needed new tires and she was like wait, wait, hold on a second. You just got this car. How do you need new tires already? And she was like wait, wait, hold on a second, you just got this car, how do you need new tires already? And I was like, well, you know? Because, yeah, that's the best way I could explain it, because yeah, so it's a blast, it's really fun that's so cool.

Mark Smith: That's so cool in new zealand, you know, we always fancy ourselves as being good at barbecue, but now I've done some time in America. We know nothing compared to you. Know what I see Americans and, as you say, texas. I've watched just recently on Netflix I think they had a barbecue series man, wow, amazing, amazing, what's involved.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: Yeah, it absolutely is. So I'll say this. So one year actually it was about four years ago now my family asked for me. You know, we have Thanksgiving here in the United States. So we decided that we were going to have Thanksgiving at my brother-in-law's house and I got asked hey, cook all of the protein. I was like okay. So I'm like what do you want me to cook? He's like up to you, how many people are we having? At least 50. Wow. So I was like, okay, I cooked I don't know how much turkey. I know I cooked 10 slabs of baby back ribs. I mean just an absurd amount of food, right, and at the end of the day it was all gone. But I had one person just never met her before. She walked up and she's like who cooked these ribs? Who cooked these? And it's like they pointed at me and she came up. She's like do you cater? Do you do any? I was like no, I don't cater. I'm sorry, I only do this for the family, but apparently it was good.

Mark Smith: Nice, so good. How did you get into Microsoft?

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: Very, very long and not necessarily tedious process but a lot of patience. Truthfully, I will say, where I was before, I was very, very comfortable, and you know I tell some folks this, especially my kids. Comfort is sort of the enemy of progression, right and evolution. You get real comfortable and just sort of just settle for things. And also I didn't feel I was quite up to the task of being a Microsoft employee. You know I had this sort of persona, this air about oh, like I can't join the proverbial mothership, if you will. Yeah, yeah, right.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: So I was talking with some folks on different account teams and things like that. Just, you know, chit, chatting and whatnot, and what would happen is they would ask me hey, can you come talk to this customer? Can you come talk to this customer, and so on and so forth, right, so next thing, I know I'm getting asked so, hey, like, why don't you come work for us? Like I'm not understanding, right? Either way, it took me about 18 months roughly. I said I was very comfortable and I was still very hesitant, but I joined, I got the role that I wanted. So I'm here on the power platform right now. I work in the thing that I actually like just love to geek out and talk about Right and I kick myself a few times a week and tell me like why didn't I do this sooner?

Mark Smith: Yeah, Interesting. So just give us a calendar timeline. So, was this in? Did you join in James Phillips time time or is it more recent? Great, yeah, great question.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: I actually did join in James Phillips' time right, so I think, james, I was there maybe almost a year before James exited.

Mark Smith: Okay, yep, yep.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: And so you know, the transition has been very smooth and very interesting as well, right. But yes, I did get to experience sort of both dynamics of James leading and now Charles leading Charles, yeah, and vastly different styles. You know, I can't say that one may necessarily be better than the other. Admittedly, I am biased towards Charles. Like, I just like talking to the guy. I mean he's just a great dude, right, you just sit down and just chat with him for a few hours.

Mark Smith: Yeah, it's interesting because you know I've been in BizApps since 2003. So MSRM, like back in the day, and started going to Seattle every year since 2012. And sitting with the product team, you know, as part of the MVP program, and so I've seen the transition. So a due job before James Phillips, which was not in the same, it was just a different world back then. And then going in with James and what James did with bringing in the in, the people he did, and, of course, the massive expansion of the org, yeah, under his leadership.

Mark Smith: But I've noticed and I've had, I've had james on the show. He was one of the first people I got on seven years ago when I was starting out type thing, and it was probably the smartest thing I could have ever done because that opened up or made it possible that everyone in his org were comfortable with me coming on the show, because he said go out, get them all on your show, type thing. But Charles had him on the show, maybe once, maybe more than once, but he has changed a lot since taking on this role and it's kind of like I understand it from your CVP, it's kind of like I understand it from your cvp. Now there's all these responsibilities and he's not as approachable as he was back in the day. One thing I give a massive kudos, so every time I email him it's not an ea that responds to me, he will respond to me and respond with generally within 12 to 24 hours, and i'm'm like that.

Mark Smith: Full respect for that man. That's quality, as you know, at the level he's running now inside the organization with Microsoft.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: I'll tell you that hasn't changed at all. I remember when I was a customer, I'd drop an email to him Ryan Cunningham, someone like that writing the leadership and I'd get them, especially from Charles. Just get a response back just so dang quick. Yeah, I heard you say something and it made me kind of snicker internally just a little bit. You said you've been in BizApps since 2003. And I was telling someone recently. I was like you know, it's funny how things sort of come full circle, because I can remember using Navision way, way back when yeah, 90s, right, and I'm like, okay, well, that's kind of where I am right now, you know, because that got bought by this and that and so on. Yeah, exactly.

Mark Smith: It's incredible. Eh, that's why I like people go. You know, I had this conversation the other day would I ever go to Salesforce? And for me it's just a solid hell. No, I had this conversation the other day would I ever go to Salesforce? And for me it's just a solid hell. No, because I've even noticed Microsoft FTEs that leave and they will go to that competitor, and for me, I don't know. It's in my DNA. I was brought up in BizApps, fell in love with that product way back in 2003. And I use that phrase very intentionally I did fall in love with it and it transformed my life and career and opportunities that are bought with it, and I could never imagine transferring that to any other brand in the market because it's just so epic.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: I'm glad you said that because you know I definitely resonates with me. I take a lot of the learnings and things that I've had over the years with Navision, great Planes and all these different things, and then moving on into SharePoint and all these other different technologies, and there's always been just one common theme and that is the opportunity and the level of growth that these technologies give to people and how it can change their lives. And the technology just allows these people to grow and sometimes even get brand new careers.

Mark Smith: A hundred percent. I've seen this choice of career put so much bread on the table for not just the individual but their families and their extended families. I started I was a groundskeeper. I was in a manual labor role and was able to transition into this whole tech career that I have today, and I have seen that time and time again in different countries all over the world. People are afforded an amazing opportunity by picking up the skill, a product inside BizApps and have allowed them to just go so far.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: Yeah, I've had some really interesting prior jobs. I was a butcher at one point in time for a while, right. So yeah, I know how to butcher pretty much everything. Yeah, and then my dad owned this let's call it a construction company, right, but they did primarily concrete work, so I used to work with them and that was hard work, but I was in really great shape though.

Mark Smith: Yeah, I bet, I bet, Wow. So let's get on to the what you do now, environmental strategy. Just give me some. Are you in? How are you associated with Ryan Jones?

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: Great question. So Ryan is, I guess, Zohar's boss, so Zohar is my manager and thus I report up to Ryan Jones. Gotcha, you know I don't want to make it a whole podcast about the team and talking about how great they are, but I mean Legends right, you're right, though Say it they are phenomenal.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: Right, ryan's super approachable. Like I pinged him just yesterday, I was like, hey, you got a second. Yeah, you know, I just needed to bounce something off of him and he's like yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm thinking about this, right? Okay, maybe you might want to tweak this, and so on. Right, zohar has been an incredible coach Always encouraging me to like he told me something recently and I really took it to heart.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: He says I need you to fall in love with the problem. I love that and I sat down for probably a good I don't know six or eight hours analyzing all of that problem and things that we were trying to face and whatnot. And then you know my peers on the team too. They're just, they're great folks. So that's really my relationship to that.

Mark Smith: Yeah, so Ryan owns I guess you can almost say you know all of managed environments, because that pillar right there is what sort of became out of when once we split out of what used to be known as development and admin experiences under Julie Strauss, and then we got reorg and Ryan took that over and it's been pretty dang good so far I responded like I did to your statement about falling off of the problem is because I, literally 10 minutes before getting on this call, I'm completing a blog post where I say about consulting and understanding clients problems is that when you understand a problem, you really need to stick your finger in it and see what the pain level of it is. Where I see too many people hear a problem and then they're onto the next thing and then I talk about the Toyota way and the five whys and uncovering. You've got to get to what the real problem is and it's often not the one that was presented.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: Yeah, and that's a great point, like I was actually talking to a customer today Account. Yeah, and that's a great point, like I was actually talking to a customer today account team asked me to just listen to and talk to them because, admittedly, the customer was dealing with a little bit of outdated information Let me not say a little bit very outdated information, right? I mean, this platform moves at light speed, right, so you've got to be able to keep up, and so on. And I got on the call. The call was only supposed to be for 15 minutes. I spent 55 minutes with them because they wouldn't let me go, just kept asking more questions.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: But the way the call started off, you know, I introduced myself and I said all I want to do is just listen, tell me what the issues are. And I sat there and they talked for about a good 12 minutes I think is what I saw and me what the issues are. And I sat there and they talked for about a good 12 minutes I think is what I saw and I just listened to everything. And then, you know, I started digging in and asking more questions and trying to probe and understand and so on, and the thing that they thought was the problem. I was like that's not really your problem. So yeah, your point about you got to stick your finger into it. You really really do, right.

Mark Smith: Yeah, and it's that dwell time. I think you've got to dwell on something to really flesh it out. But this call today was going to be around environmental strategy and, of course, managed environments make up a big part of that, and managed environments has now been out. I think my first conversation with was Zohar when it first came out, before Ryan then moved over to this team, and one of the things that I am constantly surprised in the market when talking to learned people, other MVPs et cetera around it doesn't seem to be the adoption level of managed environments that there should be, and I often drill it back to total cost of ownership. They don't understand the total cost of ownership of you adminning, band-aiding, doing all the kind of stuff manually because you don't want to go premium with managed environments and get all the benefits.

Mark Smith: And I feel like the last two years 18 months to two years is a constant re-educating, re-updating, because the changes that are happening with managed environments are frequent this whole concept of you know your personal environment being like your personal OneDrive such a brilliant analogy for people to understand, but a lot of people don't understand that right. And environmental routing and like the cleanup that's happening in default environments what's on your radar around these things at the moment? What's the top of mind? What's the? You know I see this podcast as educational. What are people that are listening to this need to go do and re-educate themselves or bring themselves up to speed on what's changed. What should they be indexing on? If you're in doing anything around this governance space of power platform, if you're dealing, you know, in a large environment I'll talk about enterprise, where we're talking hundreds of environments, you know, within a tenant and we're talking a lot of the focus I have had lately is on organizations that are upward of 10,000 seats maybe 20,000 seats on the platform and therefore staffing. What's top of mind for you?

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: Well, the way you just framed it and some of the keywords that I picked up on, especially when you started talking about large organizations. What many folks don't necessarily realize when I say folks, I'm talking about our customers is how we actually sort of test things. If you will, and believe it or not, our first test bed is us. So we are our own customer, so we have our own power platform tenant, and when I say we, I mean Microsoft, not my department, right, microsoft as a whole. So, to give you an idea of some of the scale, you can look up how many employees Microsoft has. But in terms of environments, just within the Microsoft tenant, there are over 25,000 environments within the Microsoft tenant alone, right, and that number is growing. Yeah, right, and I'm not really even including the developer environments and everything else that is now internally called them customer zero. So customer zero has started using all these brand new features that we're using and embracing all of these things. Now, what's the benefit of that One?

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: We get a lot of quick and hard feedback. They are extremely critical of us and the features that we put out, and there are a lot of tough requirements and, honestly, we listen to them, but we also listen to our customers as well. Some folks know that, for example, like we have different office hours and so on, I myself run an office hours that's not public, it's NDA only, so you have to get invited into it and we are open book pretty much. But we really really take the feedback and whatnot to heart the things like environment routing and some of the other things like environment groups and the rules and advisor and all of these other things that you are seeing and they're coming just so fast, right, fast, but really really fast right now. You're seeing that because that's what you know. We're hearing that from the customers that this is what they need. The reason why I brought up customer zero is because you know we sort of test things at hyperscale, if you will.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: Granted, they are not the largest, I can't tell you who it is, but the largest has 800,000 employees their tenant is massive, massive, and they are now starting to use all of the tooling and whatnot that we're developing and reaping the benefits of it.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: So if they can use it and see why it's so beneficial, then why can't an organization that's got a hundred environments or a hundred employees or a thousand or 10,000 or so on right, it just makes things so much easier. Admittedly, look, I've been doing if I go back to customer days and whatnot right, I've been doing power platform administration and whatnot for quite some time now. Right, I was doing it before they had DLP we call it DLP, let me say that and it was painful, really, really painful. And you've seen tools come out like the COE toolkit and things like that to sort of augment some of the pain. But now I mean, we're really doubling down and investing in the platform. Not to say that we weren't before, but you know we have a dedicated governance team that is just building all of these things. A lot of goodness coming out of there.

Mark Smith: So a couple of key takeaways I took from there. One a large custom has 800,000 staff, and why I wanted to emphasize that is because and I highlighted this with Ryan Cunningham in a side session I had with him in Seattle earlier this year is that because the power platform has been sold as a citizen development platform. I'd come across an enterprise customer had 44,000 seats of premium who had the enterprise architect had mandated the organization that the power platform wouldn't be used for any enterprise application, because if citizens, if Susie and accounting, can build something on here, there's obviously no ALM rigor, there's no data rigor. We will keep SAP as our enterprise platform and I was involved in running an innovation challenge with this organization where 69 requests came from the business for solutions to be built, of which all of them mapped to the power platform. Over 50% of them had a line put through them via IT because they were deemed enterprise requests and they would not be built on the power platform.

Mark Smith: And I was like angry because of this misrepresentation of the technology in that when I started in dynamics, I wanted a headless platform. I didn't want the dynamics piece I wanted. I used to take it and turn it to something else, and so we got that with the power platform, then we got it on steroids. So much more enterprise features built in.

Mark Smith: And yet this perception that has happened is we've kind of left that enterprise architect out, who's not in the details. They're just reading what the analysts say they're reading, they're not going in, they're not understanding, and then their cio turns to them and says what's your thoughts on this? And they're like and I'm like and just that head shake is like in that use case I just gave you play it forward, they weren't using the application, anything like it could be. Because of this misperception and this is what concerns me right now is people make a judgment call of three years, five years, ten years ago and they've not revisited and realized that the world and you know the speed of change and I think it's something that came from James Phillips as well With Power BI what you saw is release cycles happening multiple times a month.

Mark Smith: Yes, it was ridiculous, and that product was through the roof and I don't think people realize although we've got tube wave releases a year, just how much stuff is constantly being baked in and being released. It is a wave, it's not a point in time. It keeps cascading in and the need for people to go back and revisit their preconceived ideas on what something was like in the past.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: It's interesting, I think, that we run private previews, public previews and so on. The world knows this, but what they don't know maybe is like, when we're running these private previews, just how much tweaking and so on that's going on. Right, it's just in that stage. And then when we move to say public preview, right. And then even when we move to G8, globally available, there's so much that needs to happen and sort of keep the train moving forward. Right, enhancements and tweaking and so on.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: Now, platform itself, the different portals, right, if you want to call them there. Right, the Power App Studio, power Automate Studio, co-pilot Studio, all of those things. They get a lot of press and FaceTime, if you will. The problem that I usually find is behind the scenes is that the blocker that organizations talk about is well, I'm not going to use this as a development platform, because some of the reasons that you said, right, but also they think that the platform is wow, wow West, unsecure and so on and so forth. Right, and typically that's because they're dealing with a lot of misinformation Right. Now. Admittedly, all products have some gaps and things that you know need to be filled Right, ours is probably no exception, but I like to think that, at least you know, for our team and my teams around me, we really listened to you, listen to the pulse, the voice of the customer and try to react and fill those voids where the customers sort of scream the loudest, if you will, or even sometimes whisper to us Like, for example I know we started off kind of talking a little bit about environment strategy.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: We have this feature called groups and rules and at first it was, you know, it was just an idea from myself and my fellow PM named Mick, great guy, and you know we iterated on these things and talked about it for a little while and then it moved at like pretty much light speed. And I'll tell you how it kind of went about. We had zero code written, zero. We made some figmas if everybody's familiar with figmas, yep, love it. We made some figmas of what we thought that it might look like and what it might work, how it might work, and we just made a little movie of it, if you will, and it got shown to Charles. And then it was kind of like build it, I of it, if you will. And it got shown to Charles and then what we? It was kind of like build it. I want it Right. So we had to quickly pretty much, you know iterate on this and so on. It was kind of funny for me because, you know, mick and I kind of joke about a lot of these.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: Things sort of happen with us when we have to build products. It's sometimes by pure coincidence Mick's going on vacation, okay, and when he comes back the whole thing has changed, yeah. So this was no exception. He got back and like the whole world that changed, right.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: But anyway, you know groups, when I look at this, the adoption of this has been just absolutely ridiculous in terms of like feature adoption within the management environment suite, faster than anything that we've seen thus far, and honestly, I still don't think that it's moving fast enough because folks don't understand what the power of it is. You have all these folks that are being customers, that are being reactive and complaining to us about oh, I need to control the sprawl of my applications or I might need to set backup limits and all of these things. That's what this is for, right, it's for controlling and governing the platform again at any particular scale, and I don't want to give big spoilers away because I value my job here. But admittedly, customers have also given us feedback and said hey, I'm using this now, but you don't have enough rules, I need more policies. It's coming and it's going to come in like a pitcher overflowing and then getting knocked down.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: I like it. I know I keep saying this. There's a lot of goodness coming. I would encourage folks to dig in a little bit more and sort of educate themselves. I mean, we have some great people in the community as well. I mean, you know not unlike yourself, mark that are making videos and whatnot and really trying to spread the word about a lot of the things that we're doing now, and I think that it's great and, like you know, part of this success that we're having with these features is heavily attributed to the community spreading the word and then also giving us feedback. Yeah, I tend to talk a lot, so let me take a pause.

Mark Smith: It's awesome. It's awesome, it's good for people to actually go revisit. As I said before, I think that's insightful about those changes that are coming and that's a great example the overflow and therefore's a great example the overflow and therefore a lot is changing, which is epic.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: A couple of things Are you going to be at Vegas event? Of course I am going to be at Vegas and for the third year in a row I've been given the privilege to sort of lead the admin workshop, if you will. Awesome Folks, this year, I promise I am not doing a whole lot of talking. We have a lot of folks coming in this year heavily focused on governing AI. Nice, look, let's be honest, it kind of almost came out of nowhere, right, it's moving at light speed and the number one thing I hear personally is how do I govern it? How do I control it? How do I know what's going on, like the five whys inside of, like Copilot?

Mark Smith: and AI.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: I hear that every day and we have an incredible amount of features that we're going to be showing, especially in the workshop. So if folks are in the workshop, I think we actually upped the limit from last year it was 250, which was sold out. So we said this year we're going to do 400 customers.

Mark Smith: That's a big workshop.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: Yeah, so the cap right now is 400. Yeah, we have 42 proctors right now, so it's a big deal. I'm definitely going to be there. Zohar, mick, ryan Jones you mentioned several folks. They're all going to be there as well. We've got some great sessions. If you're interested, find me. I'm very tall. I'm very hard to miss. I might look a little intimidating, but very easy going and nice to talk to you most of the time, unless I haven't eaten or something.

Mark Smith: If you're listening. If you want a discount code for that event, hit me up. I can provide one to you if you haven't registered already. Kenrick, at the start you mentioned a podcast, your own podcast. Tell me, is that a public or is it a Microsoft internal, Because I know there's lots of Microsoft internal podcasts. Or is it a public thing and if so, where can people find it, what's it called, et cetera, so they can jump on?

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: Great question. It's probably the most unofficial official podcast that we have. It's not a Microsoft podcast per se, but all the folks who are on it myself, sean and Wendy, our three hosts we are all Microsoft employees of various different backgrounds and so on we interview pretty much anybody folks from the community. We will interview Ryan, cunningham or Charles. If you want to talk about something, we will talk about it. The name of the podcast is called the Low Code Approach and it's on Podbean, itunes pretty much all major podcasts.

Mark Smith: The Low Code Approach. We'll get that in the show notes so people can click on it and go start listening. Kenrick, it's been awesome to have you on. Can't wait to see you in Vegas in probably only about four weeks' time. Thanks for coming on.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard: Thank you very much, appreciate it.

Mark Smith: 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?

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Kenric (Ken) Auguillard

Helping organizations transform their business by strengthening digital culture and capability. Kenric (Ken) Auguillard is focused on extracting value from an organization’s digital investment and realizing full ROI by driving adoption, supporting the platform, and educating stakeholders on the capabilities of new digital tools.