Trailblazing in Tech: Dipti Jaiswal's Journey from Bangalore to Microsoft and the Unveiling of Power Pages

Mark Smith: 0:33
Welcome to the Power 365 show. We're an interview staff at Microsoft across the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Technology Stack. I hope you'll 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 the Power Pages Customer Momentum, low Code and Pro Code, development Capabilities, platform and Security and Administration for Power Pages. Today's guest is from India. She works at Microsoft. There's a principal group engineering manager. She's passionate about leadership, mentoring and career coaching. You can find links to her bio and social media in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Dipti. Thank you for having me. Mark, it's good to have you on here. I always like to kick off by getting to know guests what part of the world they're from. What's the things to do in that location? What do you do with the food, family and fun the three headings I come under. Everything that you do that's not Microsoft related at this time. Yeah.

Dipti Jaiswal: 1:38
I'm from Bangalore, india. I was born and brought up in the northern part of the country and I moved to Southern India for my engineering degree. As you may be knowing, bangalore is one of the major technology hubs in the country. It is famous for three distinct things. One tech talent and technology hubs the Silicon Valley of India. It is booming with tech talent. You'd find a lot of startups, some of them unicorns big and small technology companies out here. Second, culture and food. The city is mini India. You'll find people from all parts of the country who come to work and settle here, so you see a mix of traditions and can taste that fusion in food as well. Number three and I think this is the one that stands out is traffic jams. They're the easiest and most common excuse for being late for an appointment or a meeting. On the flip side, someone says I'm almost there. Never trust them. You can never predict when they will actually show up.

Mark Smith: 2:44
That is fantastic.

Dipti Jaiswal: 2:46
Yeah, switching gears from Bangalore traffic to food. I enjoy cooking and reading in my free time. I'm a foodie at heart and the recent, or the latest dish that I'm in love with is samosas. They're crispy fried snacks wrapped in flour and stuffed with a spicy potato, chilies and masala mixture. Best enjoyed with a tangy, sweet and sour mint chutney, they're yummy. Have you had any food, mark?

Mark Smith: 3:18
Yes, I was blessed to be brought up with a lot of Indian neighbors where I lived Because a lot of Indians had immigrated to New Zealand and ran market gardens. So all the food bowl, the area I lived in, had all these market gardens where vegetables were produced. So it meant a lot of my school friends neighbors were all Indian and therefore I got to go to their places and eat a lot of Indian food right from very young.

Dipti Jaiswal: 3:47
Wow, that's so lovely. Which is your favorite Indian dish?

Mark Smith: 3:50
Oh, I'm not going to say. And the reason I'm not going to say is because I'll be judged, all right. And I'm going to say and I will be open to the judging, I'll preface this by saying I grow chilies, I grow hot chilies. I don't grow them to eat myself because I don't like hot food. So my very white Indian dish is butter chicken. Wow, yummy, I love it. I love it. But every now and again I go a bit. You know, as in we've, there's at least three Indian restaurants close by and I explore. My favorite piece of the Indian dinner, though, is is is naan bread, particularly garlic naan. Oh, I love garlic naan and poppy domes.

Dipti Jaiswal: 4:44
Yeah, very nice. Garlic naan and butter chicken. Heavenly that sounds. Yes, yes.

Mark Smith: 4:50
Yes, so keep all your comments. Those people that are going to hate on me for having such a mild Indian dish. How did your, how did your career take you into Microsoft?

Dipti Jaiswal: 5:02
Yeah, my first job was that of a technology innovation engineer with one of the top European electronic goods and healthcare solutions company. My first industry project was programming boards and chipsets to build mood lighting, and then it evolves to form one of the first home automation and lighting products. I shifted my technology domain several times in my career across consumer electronics, healthcare, telecom and fraud detection, where I was designing and building compelling digital voice and multimedia solutions for leading telecom providers around the world. But six and a half years ago I joined Microsoft to lead administration and governance for portal ad on for Dynamics 365 customer service, and I fell in love with the product. And what a journey has it been to scale and grow portals for the past six years. Today Power Pages, as we commonly know, it is the fifth product in the Power Platform suit and I'm so humbled and proud, as an engineering leader, to lead the technology innovation for Power Pages. I've always loved programming and problem solving. You know finding simple and innovative solutions to problems across technology and business is my passion and I'm lucky to pursue a lot of this passion as part of my work.

Mark Smith: 6:31
That's that's so. That's so cool and such an interesting journey and I love all the home automation and and and. That area is so exciting. As you can see by the backdrop in my room, everything is voice controlled in here in the way I run my life. So do you know Shan McArthur?

Dipti Jaiswal: 6:51
Yes, I do know Shan. I walk with him a lot very closely.

Mark Smith: 6:55
So I I've known Shan before he joined Microsoft and when he he used to be an MVP and he used to be one of the toughest MVPs on Microsoft PMs he was always but he, course invented ADX Studios, which Microsoft acquired, and the and the journey of portals from I don't know. It was a long time ago it's been. I just worked out the other day that I've been working with Dynamics CRM or, sorry, ms CRM for 20 years. So I've been with the BizApps Microsoft BizApps suite of products for that entire time. I've not gone to any other technology in that time frame. So, yes, it's a long journey and, of course, power Pages is an amazing product. Generally, anytime we're doing projects with the government that are interfacing with citizens, power Pages is a go to right. Anytime that we want customers to be able to access some type of information that the organization has on their behalf, it's a great, secure solution. I've had to convince a lot of people not to use Power Pages to build informational based websites right, because it's not designed for that. It's designed for interacting with data sets that the organization has about me. To make the process simpler In your perspective, what is Microsoft Power Pages? How do you explain where it's sweet spotters and where it shouldn't play. It's not designed to be a WordPress or a content management platform for a public facing website, so how do you tell that story?

Dipti Jaiswal: 8:37
Absolutely, mark. You're so right. Power Pages is not a good fit for brochure sites, as we call it, like the WordPress of the world or so on and so forth. Power Pages is an enterprise grade, low code SaaS platform that empowers people with different technical fluencies be it business users to professional developers, to build scalable and secure data centric sites. These secure, enterprise grade, responsive sites that can be rapidly designed, configured and published can be built in a matter of days or hours, as opposed to weeks or months with custom development. With Power Pages, one can build sites by using the same shared business data that you were talking about, which is stored in Microsoft Dataverse that you can use for building apps, workflows, intelligent virtual agents, reports and analytics. Prior to becoming widely available in October 2022, as the fifth product of Power Platform, pages was nested as a feature within Power Apps for creating externally facing sites. The pandemic created an urgent demand for that feature, as health, work and economic conditions changed rapidly. Government agencies had to launch websites quickly for vaccine registrations, partner portals, government aid applications, and corporate decision makers were asking their IT departments and web developers to build sites fast, with complex requirements that would normally take months, and this is sort of that sweet spot or that domain that Power Pages really plays in. If you have to create business data centered websites, powerpages is a go-to secure, enterprise grade solution that you could leverage at ease.

Mark Smith: 10:39
That's a really good description and a really good example of the use cases and that speed of deployment, I think is so important. What are you seeing from customers now, as in particularly, what industries are you seeing? Are there any kind of that stand out more than others? I'll give you two use cases that I have that just pop to mind. One was water utility, where they wanted their customers to be able to come in see their bill, create support tickets if they had a water leak. If they had five properties within the one login, they should be able to see all five properties. That was a very common use case. We did it multiple times. Another one was a local government sports grounds. Anybody in the public could book a kind of a local field for their game. Once again, we built a portal that allowed any citizen to log in and book, make a booking via the portal for a local sports field. The other one was visits to prison to see inmates and it actually had the scheduled time that you could go in. And the actual other one that comes to mind is one where I used Power Pages with an organization. I was flying from Seattle to London after being at Microsoft and my plane got delayed maybe eight hours and we were on the plane Virgin Atlantic and when I jumped into their website because under EU law you can make a claim and get refunded I could tell that was a Power Pages portal used by Virgin Atlantic to run the entire process of getting a refund for that delay. So those are a couple of industries. What are you seeing? Do you see any particular sectors stand out from others in the market?

Dipti Jaiswal: 12:27
Yeah, that's a very good question, mark. So, because the nature of Power Pages, like the product, anyone can design and develop modern, secure, responsive websites to even serve millions of customers to access various services like visa applications, appointments, permits, tickets, faqs, grant distribution, parking tickets, student loans, et cetera. We are seeing strong customer momentum across a variety of use cases, with over 100% growth and usage across several industry patterns where these industries are running mission critical workloads and services on Power Pages. An interesting insight that I just found about was that 72% of Fortune 500 use Power Pages. The top industries where we've seen increasing growth are government, and this is across local, state and federal professional services. Industrials and manufacturing in the form of FAQs or et cetera. Financial services, primarily B2B customer service, customer journeys, healthcare, beat vaccinations, inventory management, et cetera. And automotive and transport, as you shared that example of Virgin Atlantic using Power Pages. So, yeah, these are a few industry examples where we are seeing tremendous growth and then these pop out.

Mark Smith: 14:06
Yeah, that's an interesting stat around the Fortune 500 are using Power Pages. I think that's phenomenal. When we look at the capabilities of Power Pages, what are the core building blocks do you think about and are built into the product as the core component? And, of course, one of those is the ability for dataverse, for accessing client data or customer data or any data and data, first Presenting it in a secure way in the portal. What are the other capabilities? Do you see that the Power Pages hasn't really stand out and differentiate it?

Dipti Jaiswal: 14:47
Yeah, as you rightly said, that Power Pages is primarily used for data business rich, data centered websites. The beauty of it is because all the business data actually sits in Microsoft Dataverse. It becomes easier for organizations or governments to use the different tools and products available as part of Dynamics and Power Platform to leverage Power Pages and reach out to their external customers and partners. That ecosystem of products, which are very closely knit, is a compelling USB or a differentiation for Power Pages. The second thing I talk about is that the security that Power Pages offers out of the box by default in many cases, and the tools and capabilities that it offers for its makers and admins, for the security livers, for them to take control, is also an important core promise or core value prop of the product. It is extremely hard to build secure applications. It is extremely hard in this ecosystem or in this age where there's increase in cyber criminal threats and people are just figuring out or just struggling with all the different attacks or attack vectors that face them. In this age and era, Power Pages has a unique proposition that it provides you a way to easily and very securely deploy a solution or a website for your business use case and get it out there in front of millions of users or customers or partners. I'd say those are the two core areas, but in addition to those core value props, I also want to speak about a bunch of upcoming investments that we are making on Power Pages which will really resonate a lot with our customers and accelerate their journey on building with Power Pages. The first thing that I want to talk about in this segment is that this is the age of generative AI and we've been incorporating AI in pages across multiple dimensions of website building and usage as part of our investments. We are focusing on three different co-pilots, one being the maker co-pilot. Second being a pro developer co-pilot. The third being a C2 co-pilot With the maker co-pilot. Our goal is to enable makers accelerate their website development journey multi-fold. We recently announced upcoming capability that allows makers to describe the site they want to create in natural language, where Power Pages internally leverages these large language models to translate those natural language prompts to actual HTML pages, controls, sections, theme images and creates a website for them. This truly revolutionizes website building. It's like each customer has their own agency of designers, low-code and pro developers. In this case, ai is the agency. This capability enables makers to get to their first iteration of their website at least 50 times faster, if not more. In addition to being able to create sites rapidly, makers can also use an interact with the maker co-pilot to again using natural language prompts to add forms, sections, images, style, generate themes, etc. What's interesting is that these natural language instructions translate into multi-modal experiences, which is text, images and code. Let's now talk about the pro developer co-pilot. That takes inspiration greatly from the GitHub co-pilot. Use the pro developer co-pilot as a coding assistant that helps you with complex customizations on your site. This co-pilot translates natural language prompts to JavaScript and HTML code that can intelligently map to the schema of our pages. Third co-pilot is the end-user co-pilot. Just recently, we launched this capability that allows makers to add chatbots to their site with two simple steps. This chatbot provides such a productivity boost for end users visiting the website, as they can easily interact. The bot, which uses GPT under the hood to share responses to users' queries and questions just as a human would. This is really powerful.

Mark Smith: 20:14
Incredible. So is that chatbot functionality using Power Virtual Agents to do that. Is that an embedment? It does.

Dipti Jaiswal: 20:21
It does use Power Virtual Agents under the hood and all the goodness that comes with Power Virtual Agents can easily be leveraged on the Power Pages website. We're also closely working with the Power Virtual Agents team to build in-context integration between the two products so that the responses that the user gets when they are using the chatbot is more in context of the website, their session, their data, and that makes it extremely rich and powerful.

Mark Smith: 20:52
Yeah, it's interesting how, years ago, when I started in web design this is over 20 years ago, back when the internet was coming out is that there were a lot of when e-commerce platforms have been explored. This is before Amazon was the name it is today. There used to be these FAQ, knowledge-based type tools on websites which, if you're looking at the pink dress in the shop and you asked a knowledge-based question or did a search on it, it would give it to you in context of that dress not everything on the website, but of course, it had a lot of maintenance to maintain that. I see that with the large language models and an agent like this, as changes are made, if it's got that data set there, it's always going to be accurate. It's always going to be precise. What's the matching shoes that go with this dress? It's such a powerful, powerful story to bring that to the customer and let them interact with the data Exactly.

Dipti Jaiswal: 21:57
Then this just unblocks our path for a variety of scenarios, For example, what's the state of my application or where are my orders and what was the total cost of my orders. Tracking a bunch of all these business data statuses would become such an easy task, and it'll greatly make the end user who's interacting with a website or an application, their job or their work so efficient.

Mark Smith: 22:30
Yes, Tell me about PowerPage's security administration. What do we need to know? What's important around these areas?

Dipti Jaiswal: 22:39
Yes, let me talk about governance security. Governance and security translate into admins having better observability on their website inventory and usage analytics across multiple sites and environments where admins are able to gauge a security measure across their sites. We are making a bunch of investments in this area, where our goal is that, as an admin, we enable them to be more confident and in control of their website inventory and website data. We launched a bunch of capabilities recently and one of them, which the team worked on, was DLP policies on PowerPage. Dlp is Data Loss Prevention Policies and we shipped a capability that allows admins to block access, anonymous access to websites across their environment. This is powerful because there are certain environments where there might be data that you do not want to expose broadly and, as an admin or as a large enterprise, you're always looking for controls that you can pass this guidance down to makers that, hey, use these tables or don't use these tables that may contain private or confidential data, because, powerpages being so powerful, it allows makers to expose business data to external users, either anonymously or via configuration of a wide variety of authentication providers, so that control is absolutely essential. The other area you know, as we were talking about, that security is such an important concept in low-code application platforms as makers using this platform because could easily fall into traps and make configuration errors or take certain design choices that will inadvertently end up into configuration mistakes which, if exposed or exploited, can result into data exposure or vulnerable applications. So we are investing a lot in tools that can enable and empower makers to make secure choices as they build sophisticated PowerPages sites. That's good.

Mark Smith: 25:09
That's good. Tell me about what's next for you. We're just around the corner from the Power Platform Conference. I am sure that you've got some exciting things that you plan on sharing there, but what can you talk about today? That's coming next.

Dipti Jaiswal: 25:21
Absolutely so. I talked about all these upcoming AI investments. Some of them are capabilities that are available in the product today. Some of them, like using natural language or describing your site to create it are things that we will launch over the next few days or months. The Pro Developer Copilot that I talked about. That also launches really soon before MPPC. We are going to make increasing level of investments in AI because that's a big area that greatly democratizes, or revolutionizes in many ways, website building. So AI is a stream, governance and security at scale. That's another investment stream that's really important for a lot of our customers and people who are implementing on the platform. So that would be a constant stream of investments. The third area would be connectivity to external data sources and data integrations. Just recently, we had launched a native integration of Power Pages with Cloud Flows, which enables the Power Pages makers to configure Power Automate Flows to be invoked directly from their website, and this capability opens doors for makers to leverage the thousand plus Power Platform data connectors out there, which will enable them to build sites they interact with and use the data where it is. So we are going to extend and build on top of these capabilities that were delivered to make all these data configurations and data integrations pretty easy and seamless with Power Pages. The next area that we are looking into is also powerful product integrations, where we are exploring such useful product integrations several of them which will enable makers to seamlessly integrate capabilities like e-signature and payments.

Mark Smith: 27:33
Awesome, Awesome. That's got to be one of the big requested areas that PDF documents or accessing documents online, Dipty. It's been absolutely a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for coming on the show Before I let you go. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Dipti Jaiswal: 27:49
Yeah, I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank the Power Platform and Dynamics community. I'm proud that we are a family of a million people and we are more than the sum total of our collective experiences. It is very important for me and my team at Power Pages, as product builders and engineering leaders, that we tap into the collective insights, feedback and ideas from the community, and I really appreciate the effort and passion from each pages community member. Please keep the feedback coming. Your feedback and ideas are very important to us at Pages and Power Platform to build the next innovation. We can only build it together. I also wanted to take this opportunity to thank you, mark. I love your podcasts and enjoy listening to them, and I'm very appreciative of what you do for the community and the richness and wealth of knowledge from these podcasts.

Mark Smith: 28:53
Thank you so much.

Dipti Jaiswal: 28:54
Thank you.

Mark Smith: 28:57
Thank you.