Episode 389: Microsoft Ignite 2024: Redefining AI, Productivity, and Edge Computing

Welcome to Episode 389 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this special episode, we recap the game-changing announcements from Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft’s premier conference unveiling innovations across Microsoft 365 and Azure.We explore advancements in Agentic AI and multi-modal models that seamlessly accept and produce text, voice, and graphics. Discover how Copilot is evolving with features like reasoning over on-screen content (coming to Teams in CY25) and enhanced capabilities in tools like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel—bringing automated summaries, dynamic graphics, and effortless data analysis to the forefront. Learn how Copilot Pages enable collaborative editing, while Copilot Extensibility and Agents allow businesses to create customized AI-powered helpers with ease. Imagine every SharePoint site having a built-in agent by default, making tasks more intuitive than ever. We also cover new updates in edge AI—a “distributed computing fabric” blending Azure Local bare-metal solutions and Windows 365 Link thin clients. Innovations in AI-ready silicon underpin these transformative changes. Like what you hear and want to support the show? Check out our membership options. Show Notes Microsoft Ignite 2024 Book of News Introducing Copilot Actions, new agents, and tools to empower IT teams Redefine development: AI-first innovation with agents and Microsoft Copilot in Power Platform What’s new in Microsoft 365 Copilot in PowerPoint at Ignite 2024 Copilot in Excel: Transforming Data Analysis What’s new and coming to Microsoft Outlook – Ignite 2024 Microsoft Ignite 2024 | Microsoft 365 Copilot Innovation in Your Go-To Apps Ignite 2024 - What's new for Microsoft 365 and Copilot admins Introducing Copilot Analytics to measure AI impact on your business New Copilot Prompt Gallery helps you discover, save, and share your favorite prompts Introducing the AI-Powered Workplace: Technology solutions for flexible work About the sponsors Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

Episode Transcript

(00:03):
Welcome to episode
389
of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded
live on November 19, 2024.
This is a show about Microsoft 365 and
Azure from the perspective of IT pros and
end users, where we discuss the topic or
recent news and how it relates to you.
It's time to finally bring an episode recorded

(00:24):
live from Microsoft Ignite, the first in person
Microsoft Ignite Scott and Ben have attended since
2019.
In this episode,
we have the goal of presenting our insights
on the Microsoft Ignite keynote, but ended up
focused just on the copilot announcements
keynote.
And we'll have more Ignite episodes coming out
soon with more great announcements and our thoughts

(00:46):
about them from the Microsoft Ignite keynote. We'll
maybe even drop in a bonus episode or
2 over the next few weeks. So, enjoy
the show.
So here we are Scott, sitting
in the hotel,
in Chicago.
Is it So is this day 1 of
Ignite or day 2 of Ignite? Technically, it's
the pre day day 1 and this is

(01:07):
day 2? This is the pre day late.
Day 1 of Ignite. We have we have
we have the keynote. We we sat. We
saw. We survived.
I think we should talk through the keynote
a little bit and some of the announcements.
We should. It was a long keynote. It
was an interesting keynote this year. 2 and
a half hours. I don't know your thoughts.
I would say if somebody wants to go

(01:28):
back and watch it, so we can post
the link. I'm pretty sure the keynote will
be publicly
available
somewhere either
I don't know if it'll make it on
YouTube or if it'll just be
on the Microsoft website.
It will be. We will find it. Yeah.
We will find it, but I would say
you can watch, like, the first hour and
15 minutes. Like, Satya Nadella got up an
hour and 15 minutes, went through a bunch
of the stuff we'll talk about post links

(01:49):
to. I would say the second hour and
15 minutes,
maybe not something you need to watch
as closely.
It ended up with some repeat in it.
It was a little bit of I would
say it was an odd keynote this year
with the way the first half and the
second half went. I think you're right. Like,
if you're gonna go back and watch it
and you haven't watched it, watch the Satcha
section

(02:11):
about an hour, hour 15.
You will get all the highlights that you
need. And if you want deep dives, there's
deep dives on all of that. The remainder
of the keynote is kind of the
the repeat section where it's potentially deeper dives
on some of the announcements around, like, Copilot
and 3 65, same thing with Azure.

(02:32):
But, you know, you probably want deeper dives
on those anyway, so easier to go find
them
elsewhere. Yeah. Copilot. You mean there was Copilot
in the keynote? Yeah. I mean That caught
me totally off guard.
I'm gonna steal a Scott Hanselman here. The
the Copilots will keep on coming
until morale improves.
It's
it's

(02:53):
kind of where we're at with Copilot.
So
it's
it's a marketing term, but I do think
that some of the capabilities
there
are super interesting. So we were kinda going
around after the keynote and asking people on
their thoughts and and
and just kinda how things compose in their
head.

(03:13):
And, yeah, there's a lot of fatigue about
Copilot and AI,
but there's excitement about certain
workloads. And I think what are starting to
be some of the
canonical use cases
for
both large language models
and being able to do some of the
things that
they're good at, like a transformer is good

(03:35):
at summarization.
So let's take Teams premium licensing and the
ability
to record a transcript
in your Teams calls and then have AI
driven summaries out of that. I think we've
talked about in the past, I'm completely addicted
to those AI summaries. Oh, 100%. I just
turn those on for every single meeting that
I'm in. And you know what? They they

(03:56):
work really good, and they're great. And today,
they announced that
they're gonna have some,
computer vision and reasoning capabilities
on top of the transcription,
capabilities that are already there and and kind
of summarization. So one of the things that's
gonna come out of that in calendar year
2025

(04:17):
for Microsoft Teams
is the ability for that AI engine
to follow along with what's being shared on
the screen. So say you're sharing a presentation,
and that presentation
has I don't know. You're you're running down
the sales figures for the year and it
has the final charts
for the sales figures and things like that.

(04:38):
You'll actually be able to go into Copilot,
and you'll be able to ask it questions
about that slide
through Teams
because Teams is basically taking screenshots the entire
time, very similar to what's been announced with
some other Windows capabilities like recall,
and it's going to pump those right back
for you. So, you know, it's gonna happen

(04:59):
in the background
all automatically,
and that's just a further augmentation
of that summarization
capability that's there in Teams.
Makes perfect sense logically. Right? It it slots
right in, and I think that's a great
use case. Like, not many people are gonna
be creeped out by it because they've already
been recorded by the transcription engine for the

(05:20):
past, what, year? Right. Plus, like yep. However
long that's been, and now you get this,
like, nifty new capability. Hopefully, that nifty new
capability is built into the existing licenses, and
there's not a new SKU or something like
that. But, you know, time will time will
tell on that one. So I so I
think there's things like that, And, you know,
Teams tends to be, like, my go to

(05:40):
use case of this is just amazing, and
it just works. And it's one of those,
delightful things.
There was a whole bunch around Copilot in
general, especially in the embedded experiences across office
clients.
So that's things like Copilot Pages, the ability
to do collaborative
editing
on Copilot responses.

(06:02):
I still don't know where Copilot Pages sit
with me in comparison to things like, say,
a loop that we both share, and maybe
we both have Copilot components going in a
loop component at the same time or a
loop page at the same time. So we'll
see where some of that stuff pans out.
You know, Word is getting some new capabilities,
so you'll be able to generate Word documents

(06:23):
based on other documents and other artifacts. Like,
just from scratch, generate me a new document.
That sounds kinda cool. You've got automated summaries
in Word. I don't know how valuable those
are. I don't know that I've ever opened
one up in in a Word document that
I've seen, but, you know, some people might
like those. There's some niceties around PowerPoint with

(06:44):
Gen AI, particularly for graphics,
certainly being able to, like, generate slide contents,
things like that.
Excel is an interesting one. So Copilot for
Excel has been there for a hot minute
already. You've been able to do things like
ask it to generate formulas for you and
and kind of walk down those paths. It's
getting a little bit smarter in that it

(07:05):
can actually
do,
some more base analysis for you. It wasn't
clear to me whether it's, like, Excel is
the tool to do that in, or do
I take my Excel and maybe import it
into Power BI and then use Copilot in
Power BI? Because maybe I just wanna visualize
the whole thing. So I think, like, folks
are gonna have to rationalize which way that
goes, but that stuff was all there.
There was an interesting quote from Satcha around

(07:28):
Excel. He kinda leaned into spreadsheets make the
world go round and especially Excel spreadsheets. It's
amazing. Yeah. Continues to be a thing. But
he had this quote. He said, it makes
data analysis available to everyone with a spreadsheet,
and I think that's super powerful. Like, if
you've ever opened a spreadsheet and tried to,
say, create a pivot chart, and that pivot

(07:49):
chart just, like, doesn't have the right dimensions,
it doesn't have the right series, or you've
gotta flip something around. Maybe you're creating, like,
a time chart, and you need to flip
an axis or a line chart, things like
that. You're creating, like, a stack column chart.
Working with charts in Excel is
surprisingly hard, like, if you're not an if
you're not a chart expert. So things like
that should help. It's really democratization

(08:11):
of data because,
you know, data is good, but I think
we're seeing more and more, like, visualization and
visualization engines kinda tack onto that. So if
you can drive that into Excel without a
Power BI license
or the need for Power BI or anything
like that, which is frankly yet another tool
you need to go learn, like, if you
never need to learn DAX and all you
need to learn is Excel formulas,

(08:33):
and Copilot can help you with things like
data analysis using using Python
and Pandas libraries, like, why not? Right? Like,
you're not gonna need to be,
an expert along the way. So I I
think things like that kind of accrue to
the greater good. They're not necessarily, like, whizbang
features, but,
they are there.

(08:54):
Some of the more interesting stuff with Copilot,
I don't know how you feel about this
one. There there was a a quote about
Copilot actions.
And the way Satya described Copilot actions
is this is Outlook rules for the age
of AI.
So that's basically saying we're taking the ability
to,
you know, have automated engines like we do

(09:15):
with our Outlook rules, but then pull those
things into
other parts of the Office suite, like Excel
and Word
and things like that. So, like, for a
practical example,
I send out a business report once a
week. It takes me
at least an hour to put that business
report together. I need to go to multiple
sources, log in to multiple websites. Sometimes it's,

(09:37):
like, taking a screenshot of a thing. Sometimes
it's running a SQL query and just or
it's going into, like, an Excel spreadsheet and
clicking the refresh button. If I can have
an AI do all that stuff for me,
that just buys me back an hour, if
it works. And even if it gets me
50% of the way there, it just bought
me back at least 30 minutes a day.
Like, that is a powerful thing, and it's

(09:59):
a powerful accelerator. So I'm looking forward to
Copilot actions, TBD. Like, I think I gotta
go sit in some sessions and see
how that actually works. Like, is it computer
vision? Is it gonna be able to click
the buttons on the screen for you? Is
it more you're dependent on
an extension inside of Word or Excel? Like,
I don't know how all that stuff's gonna

(10:20):
come together and how it's gonna work. Continuing
down the Copilot path, Copilot
agents. So Copilot agents are out there today.
They're available in both the Office chat experience.
So if you go to, like, Copilot for
work, so office.com/chat,
You have an agent experience there, and you

(10:41):
also have an agent experience that's going to
come to every SharePoint
every SharePoint site automatically.
Super interesting. So you you have this capability
with Copilot agents
to basically do a low code. And I
mean, when I say low code, it's basically
no code, but it's a next, next, next
experience
where you can fire up a custom agent.

(11:01):
You can point it at data that lives
in a SharePoint site,
and
you that could be like a document library.
It could be the entire SharePoint site itself,
which is the way, like, SharePoint Copilot agents,
seem like they're gonna be working.
And you just spin that thing up, and
you have this little
custom agent that's

(11:22):
using
rag
with your documents as grounding. So it's doing
retrieval augmented generation.
So what that means is, like, the base
model is there and say you have an
e a Copilot agent that's pointed at, like,
2 SharePoint sites. You have, like, all your
sales figures go in this SharePoint site over
here, and then maybe you have some other

(11:42):
SharePoint site for, like, your road map and
upcoming features. You could potentially ask that thing
now, like, tie a custom agent together that
blends the data from those two sites. And
you might be able to do things like
reason over it and say, show me, you
know, which figure which things on my road
map or which features were released
most greatly accelerated sales.

(12:03):
And, you know, maybe that's something you already
track in your company, but I know there's
a lot of companies that don't track things
like that because it's hard to just blend
that data and put it together. So
that engine can
sit in the middle and do those things
for you. Why why not? Like, that's that's
exciting stuff.
And to be brutally honest, like, I'm not
a developer anymore, and I went around and

(12:25):
and played around with the SharePoint agent.
And
it it can do everything from, like, tell
you how to set the permissions on your
SharePoint site to go look at these 3
documents
without having to be in, like, Copilot chat.
You can just say, like, go to this
document library and tell me about this thing,
and it'll spit that data back to you.
Same thing with this the generic Copilot agents.

(12:46):
They're super easy to use.
You ground them, like I said, in in
data that resides in SharePoint today. Hopefully, they
open that up and let you just ground
it in SharePoint
plus maybe public website or other things. Like,
there's potential, like, who knows, copyright issues and
other things there.
But, you know, even just being in SharePoint,
powerful stuff. So you can create, like, a

(13:08):
custom agent.
I created one the other day for
for some supportability stuff. So I took one
of our products that we have and I
pulled the wikis together, all the support wikis
for it that we have, and I created
a custom agent that I called, you know,
like, my product help desk. And now I
can go and ask that thing questions.

(13:28):
So I can say, like, I have a
user who had this issue, and it just
crawls through the Wiki for me, and it
finds that. So I don't need to know
the specific article. It gives me the steps
to resolve it right there.
You can ground those agents even further, so
you can do things like have seeder prompts
in them. So kinda like you have just
the entire prompt engine inside of office or

(13:50):
in inside of Copilot chat today.
You know, you can seed it with your
own custom prompts and all those things. And
then you can take those agents, and you
can share them with other people. So, like,
my custom product agent, I was able to
take that and share that with all the
PMs on my team and say, hey. Here's
a new tool that we have. Right? And
for me,
the work wasn't in developing the Copilot agent.

(14:12):
It wasn't in clicking next, next, next. It
was more in, like, figuring out which data
I wanted to pull into that thing. So
that's all kinda, like, super powerful stuff. Right?
Like, I I don't know that maybe the
the Copilot stuff lands inside of the individual
Office clients, maybe other than that stuff in
Excel, which I I think is really good.
But, definitely, some of the extensibility

(14:33):
pieces, like Copilot actions and Copilot agents,
like, no brainers. Like, I think once people
use them, as long as you're licensed for
it,
you're you're you're gonna be good and
ready to go
in in that lens.
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We kinda make fun of Copilot and that
it's all Copilot, but it does feel like
Copilot this year was not so much,

(15:58):
here's Copilot and coming out with a
Microsoft competitor to the other AI engines out
there. But more,
here's all the different things we're doing in
Copilot
to to avoid whether it's extending it to
data or just extending it to different
use cases.
It's more than just here's Copilot. It's here's

(16:20):
how you can actually use Copilot to
improve your
work.
And improve
what you're doing. Like you said, Copilot actions.
There was some stuff around Copilot for Outlook
that's interesting. There's a button already that lets
you, like, respond to an email and schedule
a meeting.
But they also talked about more around using
Copilot to be able to schedule 1 on

(16:41):
ones or
to
create agendas. And it would be interesting to,
like, see if you could combine something like
Copilot actions with some of the, Outlook stuff
where you now have a regular prompt to
go schedule 1 on ones and build an
agenda based on the last week. And all
of this is kinda automatically happening in Copilot

(17:04):
behind the scenes. The other interesting one I
saw going to the team stuff. Presentations, screen,
capture, reasoning over that. But also the ability
to reason over files
shared
in chat. Yes. So if somebody throws a
word document out there or I don't know
if it would extend out to URLs

(17:25):
yet. I didn't read enough about it. But
now someone throws a word document out there,
and you don't wanna necessarily open it and
have to summarize it. You can actually ask
Copilot in the meeting, give me the key
points from this document that was just shared
without ever opening it, and it'll spit back
that summarization of the word document. So maybe
not summaries in word that are super intriguing,
but that type of stuff where you can

(17:46):
summarize the document shared in the chat without
ever having to open it or look at
it, I can see where that would be
useful. I share a lot of links and
documents and chats during the meeting,
and that type of functionality that's coming,
I'm really excited to
start trying out and getting my hands on
and playing with. I think you're gonna start
to see
more,

(18:08):
and they had a term for it,
agentic types types of things coming.
So,
you know, you have
things like Copilot agents, which are ultimately
a a wrapper for Copilot Studio. So you
could absolutely go into Copilot Studio and build
one of these things, but that might not
be, like, your jam or your jelly, and
maybe you're Right. That next next Well, in
Copilot Studio, there's certain licensing to build some

(18:29):
of your own in Copilot Studio.
Right? Like, I know agents is different than
if you're gonna go build a bunch of
stuff in Copilot Studio. So it is a
little bit different, and I I think one
is, like, I tend to view, like, Copilot
agents or at least the creation of, like,
a custom Copilot agent Yep. To be, like,
part of that m 365 stack. Right. And
I look at things like Copilot Studio as

(18:50):
more, like, the power grounded in the Azure
stack and and and kind of that pillar
that sits over there. But,
like, to be clear, like, the agentic capabilities
are
coming
from Copilot studio. Like, it's not the Copilot
agent front end. I had that.
It's the back end with that thing. Yes.
So now, like, when we talk about, like,

(19:12):
agentic capabilities,
that could be things like, you know, I
think, eventually, that gets to the point where
it can click buttons on your screen. It's
not there today, but I think that's where
they go, especially That'll be interesting. Especially where,
like, Claude has gone, like, with Sonic and
and and Claude 35. Like, they announced, like,
their
new computer
model a couple weeks ago. So I think

(19:33):
that's where some of this stuff goes, and
I don't know what that does to Power
Automate or other tools that are out there
today.
But,
you know, it's it's gonna come, but
there's also Agenta capabilities in that you can
string
multiple things together.
So I don't have a good example of,
like, a Copilot engine that does this, but
I saw it in another session

(19:54):
while I was here at Ignite,
And
that was around
was around PowerToys.
And PowerToys
has a,
capability that's being built into it that's gonna
allow you to basically pump in, like, an
open
an open AI or a chat JPT
API key,
and then use that in the background to

(20:15):
do,
agentic type things. So one of the things
that's gonna be coming in PowerToys is the
ability to, say, take a screenshot,
and that screenshot could be in another language,
and you can have it translate it for
you. Like, hey. Translate this screenshot to text.
And then the other way you could do
is you could put text on your clipboard

(20:36):
and like, in a foreign language. Yep. And
you could say, translate this text and save
it as a text document
in
my
current folder. Right? Okay. That I'm working kind
of thing. Or
you could string all those capabilities together, and
you could just ask the AI. You could
say,
AI, take the screenshot,
translate the screenshot,

(20:57):
and save the text of that translated
thing
as a text file in my current folder.
So the the agentic capability is really being
able to tie all those things together in
an autonomous way versus you having to do
it as, like, a set of discrete steps.
So is there power in doing it in
the discrete steps? Absolutely. I think of that

(21:17):
I think that's the way a lot of
folks are gonna approach it in the beginning.
Yeah. But as this opens up and as
the world of connectors
and those capabilities
kind of come come along,
I think then it starts to get super
interesting. Right? So, like, earlier, you know, we
talked through the example of
just being able to, like, maybe compare your
sales numbers to released features or things like

(21:39):
that. What if you're on the marketing side
and you have other stats that are out
there in the marketing engine,
and you just happen to be an Adobe
marketing customer? Well, how do you get at
that data?
You know, I think that can be a
little rough because sometimes you need an API
or another things to talk to it. Well,
there's also a bunch of, like, 3rd party
agents. So now you can potentially string agents

(22:00):
together because you can at mention agents in
your prompts.
So you can say at this agent, do
this, and then you guys can mention agent.
I think you're eventually, you're gonna have the
capability to just string all those things together.
And then maybe you're building agents based on
agents, and it starts to get really weird
really fast. But,

(22:21):
you know, arguably, there's some some good stuff
in there. Yeah. I think the thing folks
need to keep in mind is, like, it's
still in, like, the very early days. Like,
everybody is still in a land grab here.
Like I said, like, Claude, couple weeks ago,
just announced the Agentech capabilities. Like, click a
button on my screen and and do those
kinds of things. I think, eventually, Open AI
Open AI has signaled their intent to get

(22:42):
there. You know, when Open AI gets there,
Microsoft gets there, or Microsoft does it on
its own. All these companies do. Mistral does
it. Everybody's going to do it, and it's
gonna open up this, like, kinda
new world of stuff. Right? Like, we don't
necessarily know what people are going to do
with it, and I think that's a little
rough. And and and you can tell that

(23:03):
by the positioning of some of the other
things that were announced.
So one of the funny ones to me,
not funny
but funny, like, weird, was how do we
measure the ROI of Copilot and all the
agents that we've built? Right? So you need
you need you need analytics to do that.
So you would think
analytics for Copilot would be like, which users

(23:24):
in my organization
are using Copilot?
How often are they using it? What's the
data that they're using it against? And that's
one part of it, but that doesn't actually
tell you the ROI of Copilot. That just
tells you how much people are using it.
It doesn't tell you, like, how good it
was. So one of the things with some
of these things, like analytics,

(23:45):
is it's very early days of analytics where
they're doing things and and you you can
see this, like you know, I was kind
of paying attention while I was walking across
the Xflow floor too. There's some companies that
are also doing this analytics capability
where they are presenting analytics in the form
of,
kind of like a a secure score kind
of thing. Tell me how good I'm doing

(24:05):
against other companies that are in my segment.
How much are they using AI? And then
maybe you have a measure to say, like,
oh, is that company growing?
Is it slowing down?
Is is it actually an accelerator in that
business? We had dinner tonight, Scott. So I
was getting phone calls and text messages about
dinner here. Okay. So I was just making
sure we're still

(24:26):
doing okay.
So one thing, you mentioned translations. I'm curious
what your thought was on this one, since
you mentioned doing the whole translation thing. The
Teams
live
translations of a different language
on a call, and not only live translations
where I could be presenting and it would
be live translating into another language for other

(24:47):
attendees on the Teams call, It would also
make that live translation
sound like it was actually That's an option.
You don't have to You don't have to
do that, but it was Wait with everybody.
Some people are like, that's just kinda creepy
of it sounding like you in a different
language. But that was another one where it's
again, I think moving into practical application.

(25:08):
Because I've been on
calls before
and,
training and
people have turned on captions. Because I'm teaching
people over in
APAC or over in Europe that English isn't
necessarily their first language and they prefer
to
speak or read in their native language or
it helps them to read it in English

(25:29):
versus just hearing it.
But I think that would that's one that's
really powerful. Whether it's global companies and some
of the people I was talking to were
in that same boat. They're like, you know
when I'm regularly on calls with people from
China or from Japan and
they actually have to have translators on the
call. That can slow communication down quite a

(25:51):
bit and make it challenging.
Where I think this really has the potential
to be nice for global companies, for training,
to
help that be delivered in people's native languages
and help people communicate
better on these Teams meetings? Once you get
over the creep factor, it's an inclusivity thing.
If, generally speaking, folks are more comfortable talking

(26:13):
in their native language,
unless they've been, like, multilingual,
you know, from from early days kinds of
things. So,
you know, I I work for a global
company. Like, there are definitely times where I
am on the phone
with folks in America,
Europe,
India,
and China at the same time. And it's

(26:34):
a lot of accents,
it's a lot of
it's a lot of active listening,
and active listening can be kind of tired.
If I'm on a phone call at 10
PM my time because I wanted to talk
to somebody in Shanghai and I've got somebody
in Europe on the phone, well, 10 PM
for me is, like, 4 AM for most
of my European employees. They don't like being
up that early.

(26:55):
You know, it's it's getting to be
just weird times all around for for everybody
on that call. So,
you know, I think most folks just wanna
go through that in a comfortable experience.
I can totally see the value of that.
Folks are hopefully get get over the creep
factor. Like, I would very much look forward
to it. I would rather have

(27:16):
a native Mandarin speaker
be speaking native Mandarin rather than trying to
speak English sometimes Yes. Especially
in the tech space or I think any
kind of acronym heavy thing. You could be
in
logistics.
You could be in health care. You could
be in finance. Like, there's so many just

(27:38):
jobs out there that you get lost in
the jumble of the the actual, like, language
of the company,
let alone human language and all the constructs
and things that come along with it. So
I think if it provides that measure of
comfort and gets folks to where they need
to be, I'd I'd be happy to do
it. It's kinda comes down to how well
it works. Right? So so I worry about

(28:00):
things like
I I often speak in, like, riddles because
I'll just use little quips or things like
that. Or, like, we're we're in the South.
Right? You and I live in Florida. People
say y'all. Or all y'all. Or all y'all.
Yeah. So how is that gonna translate into
Mandarin or Japanese?
I don't know.
You know, TBD, how things like that goes.

(28:23):
Or do I have to be more intentional
as a speaker and kinda keep things grounded?
And maybe that's, like, it absolutely is something
I should probably do. Right. Maybe that's a
good thing, that it would force you to
be a little bit more
focused in what you said and not use
those
the slang that we tend to use or
the
weird catch phrases or different things like that

(28:44):
of okay. Let's be intentional about what we're
saying. So the translator works, which is probably
something we should do anyways. It's all empowering
stuff.
You know, the thing that struck me about
the keynote today
is
it was very
end user focused.
I I think, you

(29:05):
know, my meta comment on
what I saw at the keynote and and
really what I've seen at Ignite so far
is
the days of this being the IT Pro
conference from Microsoft
are well behind us. Right. Like, there's been
this general sense that it's more a kind
of marketing engine, at least, for the last
couple of years.
This year really, like, sealed it for me.

(29:26):
I think if you go out and look
at the session catalog, there are, like, hundreds
of sessions
on Copilot this, AI this. There there's not
really anything out there about how to manage
Exchange online. There's how to manage Exchange online
with Copilot,
but there's not the down in the weeds
things about, oh, I wanted to build this
custom experience using the Graph API, or I

(29:48):
wanted to build this custom experience using
Exchange Web Services,
or I wanted to interact as an admin
and, you know, do x, y, zed, whatever
it happens to be. That that stuff just
wasn't there. So it's all end user facing
things. I do
kinda wonder and worry kinda long term what

(30:08):
that means. Maybe that means AI is gonna
replace all our jobs. So
No. Maybe that's the thing. But
it's it's interesting to see the direction it
goes.
There's a lot of
I I genuinely think there's a lot of
goodness there, but I don't know that it
was, like, the goodness that I was looking
for. I I kinda wanted to walk in

(30:28):
and be wowed with a set of
capabilities that would, like, help me accelerate as
an IT pro.
You know? And and those things are out
there. Right? Like, I I think AI shell
is one of those things that was recently
announced.
There's a lot of goodness coming inside of
Copilot for GitHub.
You know, totally applicable to non developers as

(30:48):
well. Like, it'll totally help you write a
PowerShell script when you need it to.
Some of the code capabilities that are coming
to
GitHub Copilot
and Copilot in general and being able to
reason over code, like, those those are legitimately
good things. So when I say code, I
mean, like, could be like a bash script
or IT pro code is what you're saying.

(31:09):
Or, like, you know, we've talked in the
past, like, interacting with REST APIs and things
like that, I think, tends to be something.
Like, everybody know needs to know how to
fire off an HTTP request and maybe do,
like, a git or a put or things
like
that. You know? So it's a little weird
that, like, that stuff isn't there because that
stuff would have been there in, like, the
hero days.
Right. I think of what people think back

(31:29):
to, like, when Ignite was the IT pro
conference
and, you know, TechEd before that and and
things like that. Do you think some of
it, though and then we should wrap up
because we do have to go to dinner.
But do you think some of it is
even the advent of the cloud and that's
some of that stuff is still there, but
in some respects the IT pro's job has

(31:51):
changed. Because I remember, like you mentioned TechEd
or even some of the SharePoint conferences,
where you were getting 400 level sessions
on
how SharePoint stored content and databases and how
to optimize your SQL databases
for
SharePoint data storage. I remember, like, a Spence
Harbar 400 level session on

(32:12):
all the intricacies
of how the user profile service worked in
SharePoint.
As an IT pro,
that type of work, just it's there in
some companies. There are some companies I just
did a SharePoint on prem installation upgrade, like,
the last couple months. What are the last
ones? Sticking with it. But is it truly
that there's maybe not as much

(32:33):
400 level content that applies
to
the broader level of people? Because I know
my IT pro job has changed. I'm not
in the weeds on servers. I'm still doing
stuff with security, with conditional access, with Intune.
Troubleshooting that, it's different. And I there's definitely
not that level of content
here that there probably could be about managing

(32:57):
devices. I'm curious to
go into some of the sessions and read
through some of the blog posts, because there
have been some
things that have caught my eye around particularly
security and Copilot.
But I do think the IT pros job
has changed, which may also have led to
some of this. I think some of it's
self fulfilling prophecy. Right? Like, that that kind

(33:17):
of glue in the middle
is just not talked about anymore, but it
still exists.
Like, if you're gonna go out and I
I and I think the keynote today was
a good example of that. It talked about
the front end with users and Copilot,
and it talked about the back end with
things like Azure AI search and Cosmos DB
and the developer experience. Yep. It didn't talk

(33:38):
about how to bridge that gap.
So somebody needs to
before the end user can consume it up
here, somebody needs to go and provision that
infrastructure. And that's still a step that needs
to happen. And it it's very strange to
me that those things are kind of cut
out of the experience. Right? Like, I would
think something like AI Shell and the ability

(33:59):
to leverage
Azure,
Copilot for Azure, Azure Copilot, whatever they call
it Whatever. To leverage and and integrate that
in because it's part of that experience. Right?
It completes the story. You can't tell me
about the
beginning and the end,
or, you know, like, the the end and
the middle without giving me, like, how did
how did all this stuff come to fruition

(34:19):
and
and and where did it spin up along
the way? So I think we talk a
lot about, like, inner loop and outer loop
and developer life cycles and things like that,
But IT pros are largely, like, left out
of that equation. Yeah. Well, and I think
it probably does exist more on the Azure
side, to your point. It definitely exists more
on the Azure side than maybe the M365

(34:39):
side because you do have all the Azure
in front. How do you get that to
end users?
So but we have a lot more stuff.
We have a lot more stuff from the
keynote than we actually got to, Scott. Surprise,
surprise. We had a bunch of notes and
we only got to a fraction of them.
You let me talk about Copilot after you
said you weren't. So we're good.
It happens. Every once in a while, I
just let you loose to talk about what

(35:00):
you're feeling passionate about on that given day.
But we do have stuff like, I did
an interview today with someone from Microsoft about
a new device Microsoft is coming out with
a Microsoft 365 link. We have a bunch
of other Windows 365. Windows 365. I said
it wrong. Windows
365 link. There will be that. We might
have to do a few Ignite recordings while
we're here and talk about some of the

(35:21):
other keynote stuff we have and we might
line up some other interviews with people over
here. Yeah. Make it work. Now it's time
for dinner, Scott. I am looking forward to
this steak. Sounds good. Let's do it. Alright.
Well, thanks, Scott. We'll talk to you later.
If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us
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(35:42):
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