Shiny New $hit (#67)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
But I'm looking for the next evolution of this where
I can connect it to my driveand it will automatically back
up some of these chats or, likeyou said, you have notebooks,
right.
What happens Suddenly, like yousaid, legislation, suddenly I
can't access stuff.
There's a data storage kind ofseparation, something.
Something happens and it's lostin ether, I mean.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
We should be recording this.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
We are, because I hit the button, because I've
learned.
Oh, you did.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Yes, I only see it now.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Okay, sneaky Because when you started talking, I was
like, oh, I'm going to push thebutton, and I did.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Welcome everyone to the Power Platform Boost podcast
, your weekly source of news andupdates from the world of the
Power Platform and the Microsoftcommunity, with host Nick
Dolman and Lidika Akebek.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
Because I expect that when they created Plan Designer
or whatever it's called thisweek, I mean, they didn't just
start from scratch.
They started from a lot ofother solutions being made and a
lot of other data models andthey backtracked and they helped
.
You see, the manifest typeinstruction prompts that they're
using for generated pages orcode apps, it doesn't come out
of thin air.

(01:28):
They've spent a lot of timecreating that prompt and, as
we'll see in some of the newsarticles that we'll talk about
today as well, prompting is nowjust and, as we've said so many
times before, the quality ofwhat you make is really very
tied to, tightly tied to theprompts, the quality of the
prompts that you're using.
So, yeah, and with that, let'sjust dive into the list of news,

(01:53):
because we have a big ton ofnews to get through, just as
always.
Yeah, do you want to start atthe top with our good friend
Thomas Hansen?

Speaker 2 (02:02):
So Thomas, as sometimes he does, basically
just pulled the pin out of agrenade and threw it into
LinkedIn.
And this is funny because thispost doesn't seem to die, it
just keeps.
I keep seeing comments andthings like that poking out from
it, and basically it's linkingto a post that he did.

(02:23):
It's called low Code isDead-ish, from Canvas Hacks to
React Apps and really talkingabout, you know, basically
calling out Canvas apps for thewalking dead, because from here
we're going to be able to buildpro code applications using AI
and sort of getting rid of thatlayer in between, because at the

(02:44):
end of the day, like I think mypoint is, you're making code,
at the end of the day it's goingto be ones and zeros running on
silicon, at the end it's goingto be binary code.
So this is a way of our makersgoing to be able to kind of
utilize that working withprofessional developers, like,

(03:04):
is Canvas apps going to be athing?
And it is?
I think for now it is, but it'slike, in the future, is pro
code going to take over that?
And so, anyways, we'll have thelinks and I'm sure a lot of
people have seen this.
There is a ton of differentcamps appearing in this from the
.
Yes, you know, this is, this isthe future, this is the way
it's going to go.
To other folks, oh so, no, no,low code is so not dead.

(03:25):
Yes, ai is great, but we'regoing to be able to continue on
with power effects and canvasapps and this will never go away
.
And to you know, the other sideof like no, no, ai is, it's
generating garbage You're notgoing to be able to maintain in
governance and all the issuesthat we're talking about.
So it's really a great articlebut really, in terms of thought

(03:46):
provoking and basically, youknow, thomas's point is his
Microsoft is killing low code aswe know it.
I don't think they're killingit, I think they're revolving it
.
That's my take on it.
Like, yeah, the days of the.
I think we're still going tolive in a drag and drop world,
but I'm not sure if it's goingto necessarily generate that
YAML code that we're seeing.
I think we're going to see moreand more of the.

(04:06):
Yes, we could do drag and drop,but that's going to be working
with AI tools and it's going tobe generating probably more pro
code.
And I'm looking at, like youknow, react or TypeScript or
some of those existingframeworks that have been well
established and I think that'ssort of again, that's again my
opinion and we don't know.
But I think that's sort ofagain that's again my opinion
and we don't know.
But we take a look at thingslike generative pages, code apps
, single page applications onpower pages.

(04:29):
These are all kind of, and thecommon theme with them is
they're generating React code.
And I, in my video that I didlast week, I dove into it just
to try to get my head wrappedaround it and it's like, yeah,
this is very approachable stuff.
It is pro code, but the toolswe have now it's not to say I'm
not going to suggest that makersare going to be generating,
like coding, react directly, butthey're going to be using tools

(04:52):
that is going to be generatingReact code and we're seeing this
already.
That's sort of where thefeatures are.
The future, I think, is goingand I kind of agree with Thomas
on that and in his very lastline in his blog post he said
low code isn't dead, it justgrew up, and I think that's a
very powerful statement.
And it's growing up, it'sevolving.
So, yeah, that was, I think,quite the.

(05:15):
It was a LinkedIn article, itwas a blog post and there's
still comments coming in.
I haven't been able to keep upon everything like that.
I'm not sure of what yourthoughts are on this or if you
have a different opinion than Ido.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
Oh no, absolutely not .
I just yeah, just continuing onwhat you're saying, because I
think this shows that the PowerPlatform is a platform that is
evolving with the times.
So you talk about lock-ineffects and the platform.
I think this is just provingthat when everything else around
is changing, the platform keepsup.

(05:46):
So when wide coding is a thingand role-prompting and using AI
co-pilot as a coding buddy, theplatform keeps up and enables us
to create pages formodel-driven apps, new code apps
from scratch, using theprofessional developer tools
that the professional Reactdevelopers have used forever,
and also with PowerPages.

(06:07):
The same thing.
And so I'm happy to see that theYAML kind of layer, like you
said, is gone, because thatspaghetti thing we didn't really
need to begin with, and also Iexpect that we won't see a lot
of investments in the drag anddrop designer interfaces going
forward, because I think theidea that the citizen dev is

(06:28):
going to create an enterpriseapplication is kind of gone, and
if someone is going to createan application, it's going to be
for the thing that they'regoing to use it for right then
and there, and then it's goingto be discarded until next time
they'll need something similar.
They'll just buy themselves toanother application or whatever
it is that they need at themoment.
We talked about this beforewhen I read Thomas' article.

(06:51):
I loved it because it was justechoing.
If you listen back to some ofour previous episodes, this is
exactly what we've been talkingabout in the previous episodes,
I find.
So it was really nice to seethat he kind of had the same
take we did and, yeah, justkeeping a kind of a finger on
the pulse on this one really.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
Yeah, and I think you as well.
Thomas is our friend, right, sowe've had a few conversations
offline as well, kind ofsurrounding a little bit this
about the future and things likethat.
You know a few little rants andwhatnot.
So yeah, anyways, and this likewe're kind of it's interesting
kind of leading with his thing,so maybe he'll listen to the
podcast a little bit more often.

Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah, because that's also lifelong.
All of ours right To getBridget and Thomas to listen to
this podcast.
The things we do you wouldn'tbelieve.
But it's kind of segues alittle bit into another friend
of ours, magnus Satter-Suttersen.
He wrote a blog I'm sorry, alinkedin article saying that
I've written less than 10 of mycode in the last three weeks
talking about having productioncode and from, as you know, ai

(07:51):
generated production code, um,and how, and his experiences
with that um.
So this is my one, this is I putthis one in here, right, um,
and he talks a little bit aboutwhat it's like to be a coder
versus an architect as well.
So you might think that as a asa coder, professional coder you
won't be out of a job for a verylong time.

(08:13):
But also when you try to use aiservices for the architecture
job, it kind of shows itselfinto a bit of a loop where it's
it's caught in the it dependsloop that we also find ourselves
in.
But as human architects we makedecisions and we know from
experience that in certainsituations and what small little

(08:34):
detail that is that makes usmake a decision on the decision
tree kind of thing and resultsin the decision, whereas AI is
going to be stuck in that loopbecause it all depends and it
can't really find its own wayout.
And that kind of speaks to ourquality as humans in the loop
being able to actually makethose decisions.
So sure it can help us alongthe way, but definitely not with

(08:59):
everything.
And he also wrote a tour,didn't he?

Speaker 2 (09:03):
Let me just yeah, the XRM Bedrockm bedrock yeah yes,
it's on github.
I from a very, very high level.
I didn't, uh, dive too deepinto it, but, um, yeah, it looks
really cool.
I definitely I need to explorethat for some other projects I'm
working on right now.
So, um, yeah, it goes back to,I think, a lot of the you know

(09:29):
what I see with coding, and youtalked about prompting or what's
you know they call promptengineering or context
engineering.
A lot of even the stuff thatI've done lately it's been.
It's like the prompt that youstart with makes all the
difference in the world in termsof what you're trying to build,
and that was this is're tryingto build and that was this is
part of it too.
And this is, I think, is againwhat we said.
This is where solutionarchitects are so important,

(09:51):
because it's not like we'retelling AI to take over for us.
We're basically, instead ofwriting something in C sharp,
we're basically saying here'swhat I want written.
We're basically taking that Csharp, making it another layer
up into natural language, butit's generating C sharp.
And then the fact that we havethis expertise, like Magnus does
, in terms of interpreting thatcode, seeing what it does and

(10:13):
verifying that it is doing whatit's meant to do verifying that
it is secure.

Speaker 1 (10:18):
But we're doing it a lot faster because it's sort of
like as opposed to where youknow, building something from
scratch something's gettingbuilt, but we can still tangibly
look at it and make sure it'sexactly what we want and then,
if not, we go back.
Yeah, so the just reading upjust to see what the extreme
bedrock is.
It's a template for uh.
So it's a project template tomake it easier to work with.

(10:39):
Dataverse and asher together,so it shows a modern development
paradigm are applicable toDataverse.
This is too coded for me, butbetter in-code description, for
example, to increase adoption,new way of handling web
resources, cleanup Dataverseservice and deploying data.
So yeah, if that's somethingthat rings a bell in your brain,

(11:04):
check it out.
And well done, magnus.
Yeah, because this just remindedme of the post that I saw from
Diana Birkelbeck, the PCF lady,as she calls herself.
She made a time trackinggenerative pages with generative
pages in Fluidline and in herexperience, I think one of the
important conclusions she makesis what we said in the beginning

(11:27):
your app will only be as goodas your prompt was, and that is
very important.
And also it will not alwayslisten to you.
So if you want it to justadhere to FluentLine design
framework, you have to be veryadamant when you tell it to do
that and give a very explicitdescription on how to do that
and give a very explicitdescription on how to do that,
and we saw that in Scott's videowhen he created this as well.

(11:49):
The manifest, the document, thething that he gives it as an
instruction prompt, is like eonslong, and there's a reason why
he has to do that because itneeds to be so specific for it
to do what you want it to do,and so I think that just echoes
kind of what we're trying to saywith all of these posts that
we're bringing up is thatprompting is so important and

(12:09):
shit in, shit out.
I think that's the conclusion.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
But and that was the thing about, like reading
Deanna's posts and playing alittle bit with generative pages
as well Myself one of the Idon't know the blockers right
now that I see and I'm hopingthey fix this, because I saw
another post about someone kindof ranting about degenerative
pages as well as yes, you put itin the prompt, you can give it
all the prompting you want, itwill generate that code.

(12:34):
But you can't go in and tweakand edit that code directly.
If there's something not quiteright, you basically have to
reprompt and then it goes backand regenerates something.
Basically have to reprompt andthen it goes back and
regenerates something.
So which I find okay, a littlebit unfortunate, because a lot
of times it's like okay, I justwant to change that little thing
.
I see the code, I see where Iwant to change the code, I know
the line I want to change or thething I want to add.

(12:56):
But this process at this, theway it sits this time, and of
course everything's constantlyevolving we can't not yet go in
and edit that.
I'd love for it to have thelittle Visual Studio Code button
, like we have in Power Pages,where I can just click and then,
boom, I can make those littleedits, Because I did see a post
and I meant to grab the link andunfortunately, because someone
was complaining going.
Well, yeah, generated pages, yousay it's so great.

(13:17):
I tried it, but then I neededto move this and this, this.
If I did it in Canvas apps, Iwould have been able to open and
drag and drop and then andeverything would have been fixed
and like, yeah, fair enough,but if you're able to go and
edit the code, you'd be able todo pretty much the same thing
just as quickly to fix thatparticular thing.
So, yeah, this is, but again,we're still.
It's still in preview, you know.

(13:39):
So it's still.
We can't move it in solutions.
There's a bunch of roadblocksstill in place.
But I mean, but again, it'sstill important that we have
people playing with it, Peoplelike Diana creating these things
and posting it online, becausethis is the type of information
Microsoft is going to take backand see this kind of evolve, and
I'm hoping that we can at leastget to some point where we can

(14:01):
begin to apply this intoprojects, kind of that preview
purgatory that we sometimes talkabout, because I think that's
where the rubber is going to hitthe road.
Are we going to get genitivepages or is it going to be
degenerative pages?

Speaker 1 (14:13):
so hoping for the genitive pages yeah, and did you
see the latest post from yukaor not?
Probably not the the latest,but he had a post about this.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
The shiny new shit.
Yes, it's a good segue.

Speaker 1 (14:27):
Oh, fantastic.
I just I love it.
So he starts his post with it'slike selecting JavaScript
libraries in 2024.
Trying to figure out how tobuild with Power Platform in
2025.
Everything old is dead, but thenew things will be different by
next week and it's also inpreview, right.
So he has a fantastic blog postabout this.

(14:48):
Apps are dead.
Co-pilots the UI for AI.
Dendrotip pages will replaceCanvas apps.
Just chat with AI to build a UI.
Canvas apps will unblock codefor its development in Power
Platform.
I love it and also, just likeThomas' post, this is a blew up
and it has a lot of comments and, um, yeah, a lot of reactions.

(15:09):
So, um and yeah, it's, and itand I feel this personally or
professionally as well talkingto customers, because it's hard
to go in because to a customerconversation now and advocate
for canvas apps.
I find I find that reallydifficult.
Uh.
And in power pages, same thing.
Or I wouldn't advocate for yougoing in and starting with one

(15:31):
of the templates and start usingthat and build power pages on
top of that, when I know thespas around the corner, right?
So it is one of those purgatorythings where you don't want to
be an advocate for thetraditional way of solving it,
but the new way of solving itisn't yet out of preview.
So what do you do?
But I think you kind of touchedon it a little bit where we

(15:52):
need to be confident enough totry and to start using the
preview stuff without using itin production, and work with the
product to always help, pushand also give the feedback that
Marks of Need, because they dolisten to the feedback.
We talked about this so manytimes.
We have to keep emphasizing,keep using, keep testing and

(16:13):
keep giving your feedback,because that's the only way that
we'll be able to push thisforward in the right direction,
because, trust me, they willmove it in the wrong direction
if we don't.
So it's kind of on us to helpthis along, I think.

Speaker 2 (16:26):
Yeah, absolutely.
And I mean yeah, to be fair,like it is, he lists off all the
and, of course, like you, couldlike to stir the pot quite like
this way a little bit, but it'salso again, we've talked about
this exactly what you said too.
We're in a transition and it'sit's easy to dismiss something

(16:47):
like if, like plan designers orwhatever like they call it, like
creating plans or intelligentlike I'm doing a session on this
and I always struggle what itis I'm calling it this week, but
to me it's like when I firstlooked at it in the first video,
I did, like last december itwas like, yeah, it couldn't do
it but couldn't do a lot ofthings, but we saw the vision.
December it was like, yeah, itcouldn't do it but couldn't do a
lot of things, but we saw thevision of what it was coming to.

(17:08):
And I what I liked about it isit was forcing you to make sure
you think ahead a little bit onbuilding your app.
You talk about creating big,long manifests.
Um, part of you know the plandesigner as well.
You can't just like, yeah, theprompts, like create me a,
create me a, an HR app, justlike, yeah, the prompts, like
create me a, create me an HR app?
Like, yeah, don't start there.

(17:31):
Your prompt should be, or yourcontext engineering should be at
least a paragraph or two as astarting point.
You need to think these thingsthrough and then, yes, it's
still, you know, still missing afew things, but of course, we
saw this week there's newupdates, so it's already
incrementally adding thesethings just to make it better.
So that's the thing you'reseeing the evolution and the
cool thing is this is whysometimes things I believe it's
a catch-22, right.

(17:52):
So I believe this is whysometimes Microsoft will push
something into a GA mode, likeplan designer, which is
technically GA, even though someof us might feel it's not quite
ready for prime time, but we toget it's like anything, you
need to start somewhere.
You need to actually startgetting people to use it, to get
the feedback to evolvecorrectly.

(18:12):
Um, generative pages is anotherone that I think when it does go
ga, a lot of people willprobably say it's too early, but
again, we need it in somethinglike maybe not mission critical
scenarios, but some productionscenarios, to actually get the
telemetry, the feedback, to makesure that these things are
working.
I know we're belaboring thispoint.
So you see something like yourshiny new shit.

(18:32):
It's easy to read through thesethings going okay, this is all
garbage.
I'm just going to go back tocreating my canvas apps and my
model driven apps, like I didfor the past five years.
It's like yeah, no, you needlike.
Yes, it is crappy now, but itis.
It's on a path and it's,whether we like it or not, if
you're, you're gonna have to geton board eventually.

(18:53):
Um with it.

Speaker 1 (18:54):
So you say that, but I had someone bitching about the
new interface for ppac theother day.
I was like, yeah, they're stillgonna remove the old people.
I'm like what?
You're still on the old, whatyou haven't.
The toggle is like yeah, andit's going away.
I was like really, really,you're just doing the old clunky
, how it takes forever.
Okay, okay, you know, peopleare like that.

Speaker 2 (19:17):
It's gone and it's gone.
I just looked back now.
There's no way back to theclassic it is.
I think it's today's the day.

Speaker 1 (19:28):
Yeah, that's right.
He's probably crawled up on thefloor crying by now, but that's
another thing.
I have like five differentsegues in my head as you were
talking, as I'm trying to getback to my.
Okay, so we need to separatetwo things.
So something is in preview,it's not ready for production
yet, but something like plandesigner, what it is that you

(19:48):
create, it's a data model, it'sa flow, it's an app, it's a site
, but those things that youcreate, they are GA.
So when the product is releasedout of preview and into GA
meaning you can use it inproduction, something like Plan
Designer and you touched on this, I think, two episodes ago
where you need to separatebetween a product and a feature.

(20:10):
So when something's a featureand it's not, you can use it in
production because what's kindof put into production is ready
and has been ready for a whileand is battle tested.
That's another thing.
So bringing plan designer orplanning power apps, or whatever
it's called this week out of Ginto GA and still evolving, it
isn't that big of a thing for me.

(20:32):
And just think about Canvas apps, for instance.
This week.
You look at the Pulse.
The advocacy team puts up thisPower Platform, power Apps,
pulse thing.
The two things that came outthis week was the user they had
an acronym, udfs the userdefined functions, which is you

(20:55):
can create your own function,global functions and then you
can call them using otherfunctions.
So it's kind of a way to and tobe fair.
To be honest, I didn't realizethat that was in GA yet and I
kind of expected that Canvasapps were able to handle that
already, in my ignorance,because you know why, wouldn't
it?
Um, but that just goes to showyou.

(21:16):
I mean, how long have we hadcanvas apps?
Like three years, four years,five years?

Speaker 2 (21:21):
I don't know oh, longer, and it's still yeah, and
it's still evolving, right.

Speaker 1 (21:25):
So the fact that plan in power apps because that's
the other new thing that cameout on the polls this week was
that now Plan in Power Apps isable to connect to existing
tables in Dataverse.
You ask it to create that HRthing that you made before, it
would create a candidate as anew table.
Now you can explicitly say forcandidates, use contacts, and it

(21:47):
will recognize contact from thestandard data model and connect
to that instead.
I think that if they waiteduntil they had all of this
sorted out before they releasedsomething out of preview, we
would be kind of falling behind.
This is why this platform isactually pushing the bar and
staying relevant and up to date.

(22:08):
This is the price we have topay for that to be possible.

Speaker 2 (22:12):
Yeah, it would be like.
The thing is, if it's always inpreview, it would end up being
abandoned where and we do seesome of that, unfortunately
because something's been inpreview for so long that it just
doesn't get the fee andeventually dies in the vine.
Because they look at the backend telemetry and they're like
going, oh well, no one's usingthis, so why are we investing
money on it?
Well, no one's using it becauseit's not GA yet.

(22:34):
But then it's funny too,because, like when they, when
they announce something like, ohwell, plan designer now uses,
you know, tables that arealready existing, or you can
specify the tables, and it'ssort of like I don't know if
that's something to celebrate orthat's something that, ok, that
should have been there a longtime ago.
Something to celebrate orthat's something that, okay,
that should have been there along time ago.

(22:55):
So, but it, there's a balancethere, right, it's sort of like
I don't know it's, uh, it's, Idon't know.
I, this is.
I mean, I, I sit here like I'mnot, I'm not one creating the.
I know the work that getsinvolved in creating these
features more than anyone,because I was definitely heavily
involved in it on the, on thesidelines creating the
documentation a couple years ago.
So I get the, the stress andthe and the, the focus and uh,

(23:15):
where the pressures come fromand it's not always from mvps
writing a blog post bitchingabout something.
It comes from other pressuresas well.
Um, but the the cool thing withwith uh, with that, with all
right, where I was going withthis.
Yeah, there are some featuresthat, yeah, the plan designer,
but you said about the featuresthat we assume that we're, we're
um already ga, there's.

(23:37):
Sometimes I'll go doingsomething and I'm looking at the
, I pop over the documentation.
I'm like, why is the previewtag still there?

Speaker 1 (23:44):
like I thought this was I thought this was good to
go.

Speaker 2 (23:47):
uh, yeah, so yeah 100%, yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:50):
And also I mean maybe all the development juices went
into the new MCP wizard thingy.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
I saw that this morning you posted that.
I didn't know that that was anew one for me.
That's awesome.

Speaker 1 (24:04):
Yeah, I love it.
The whole new thing is now thenew MCP connector.
The whole new thing is now thenew MCP connector.
Cp Connector Creation Wizard isnow a public preview, which is
a lot of fun.
So what you do is, when youhave an agent and you go in and
you choose new tool, then youcan choose the MCP and then

(24:24):
there's a guided process thathelps you no code, just config
to create a new MCP that allowsyou to connect to an external
data source.
It just I have to have anendpoint url and then you can
connect and, uh, generate thatcustom connector.
And that's amazing news for allthe no coders that think that
mcp has been a bit too debbybecause you need a bit of

(24:47):
tooling and you need a bit ofthis and that, and then you have
to install things that NPMsomething, something they don't
really understand.
But this helps you do that.

Speaker 2 (24:55):
Yeah, from a more config perspective, yeah, and
there's a lot you can do Likethis is the thing.
Like we're still trying to wrapour heads, I think, around what
MCP server can do, but youimagine you can now interact
with Dataverse through, likethey give the example of the
cloud desktop for some reason.
But again, it's about how allof these other tools are

(25:16):
beginning to very much interactso you can truly choose the best
tool for the best job of whatyou're working on.
You don't necessarily have tobe necessarily tied to a
Microsoft tool although likethey're evolving, like all the
rest but it does kind of open upa lot of integration scenarios
and things like that.
You know there's still some,you know some limitations and

(25:36):
everything like that, and I do.
I did ask the question to theteam in terms of performance and
things like that.
Is it, how is it comparable to,like, connecting through
Dataverse to an API or something?
And they claim that it'scomparable.
But we'll see where the proofis in the pudding when we
actually begin to see these inreal life scenarios and that
kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (25:56):
Yeah, and then it kind of becomes down to the
right tool for the right jobtype of thing, right?
So if you just want to connectto data purely and then use a
data-versed API, but if you needmore kind of rag or you need
something more around the dataretrieval, you need more
intelligence in that, then maybethe MCP is a better option,
Because there is a, you have theconcept.

(26:16):
It's not just the API, it's thetooling and the resources
around it that you get with MCP.
That you don't get with the API, of course, which only has the
one thing.
So it's it depends, See.
And also this reminds mebecause did you check out the
latest episode for the localrevolution with Eliza?

Speaker 2 (26:34):
I haven't, Sorry.
I did see the link, but I didwant to check that out because,
yeah, I've been collaboratingwith Eliza and a few other
things.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
Yeah, no, that's why I thought maybe you've seen it.
Yeah, it really opened my eyesto what you can do with agent to
agent oragent or not.
Open my eyes, but it was a funsetup, right.
So you have another fellow MVP,sudeep Ghatak I think that's

(27:03):
right, sudeep Ghatak, showinghow he set up an agent-to-agent
no, sorry, a multi-agentorchestration type scenario for
HR, where you have one agentthat is responsible for
onboarding new people.
You have a list of newcandidates in SharePoint and you

(27:23):
have a list of devices, andthen you have a list and then
you have a logging system inDataverse and then it created a
Canvas app on top of it so allthe agents they report or create
log entries into the Dataversetable.
And then he had a Canvas app ontop that showed the SharePoint
lists, the Dataverse table.
And then also he had an agentthat was connected to hostelscom

(27:46):
for booking restorations, right.
So it was such a fun thingwhere he had just a trigger and
the one agent goes off, so hejust had the different
candidates on the list and he'dchoose so onboard or hire or
something, and that agent thenkicks off, hires the new person,
assigns new devices to thatperson, finds hotel booking and

(28:09):
kind of allocates all of that,and all of them always log their
interaction between one anotherand he gave the agents of
course he did specific names andyou have to be very clear and
concise with your naming andyour instructions and he shows
all the instructions and namesand what he does and very clear

(28:31):
and concise and tidy, which ispart of the success with this,
because then the agentsunderstand what the other agents
are doing and he had differentprofile pictures or icons for
the different agents so then youcan see in database afterwards
this agent said that to this oneand this one said that to this.
It became like a process.
If you've given those agentsreal names and pictures, that

(28:53):
would look freakishly likecolleagues.
I mean, the line is so thin onthis one and I just had a
conversation out in the openspace here earlier today with
someone working with an workingum at a company doing h hr
systems and HR.
For some reason HR seemed to bethe favorite use case scenario

(29:16):
for placing humans with agents.
Isn't that weird, consideringthat's kind of the most
human-to-human interaction thingwe have.
If it was finance or you knowanything but HR, but it's
because of the LLMs, I mean itfakes.
Because of the LLMs, I mean itfakes human interactions so well
, yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:36):
And I think HR, like I think finance, is the next one
to get hit, because HR andfinance they're very procedural
type things.
So you go into HR.
Here's like HR, you know theyou know for employee onboarding
every company you know, andwhen I had my company we had
this as well.
We actually got an HRprofessional to build this for

(29:57):
us.
We had an onboarding manual andit's a binder and you go
through these steps and a littlebit of that AI flavor into it
to kind of deal with a littlebit of these exceptions or the
particular set of data orsituation like okay, this person

(30:19):
is living in the next provinceover, so their tax implications
are different, and blah, blah,blah.
So having these agents kind oftake care of all that in an HR
scenario makes sense.
I think finance is the same wayInvoice processing, payables,
all of that again veryprocedural.
So I guess maybe there's alittle bit of nervousness there
because you're dealing withmoney and transactions.

(30:40):
But again, this is sort of thefact that agents can be
employees.
Like I'm looking at that for myone person business.
I'm also looking at okay, I cando things as a solopreneur that
I not necessarily could havedone before because I can now
invoke agents to do certainthings that will take it off my
plate.
That's part of what I'mexploring right now, which is

(31:02):
it's.
It's interesting, also a littlebit scary as well, but I think
this also opens up the door fora lot more other things.
So HR they can deal with, youknow, they can kind of deal with
more of those more importantkind of human to human
interactions and sort of leavethe procedural stuff to the
agents to do that kind of workand again.
So talk about agents and thingslike that.

(31:23):
Did you finish the agentacademy, the recruit section,
yet?

Speaker 1 (31:27):
No, sorry, I have another time to do that.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
Okay, so I wrapped it up yesterday actually nice
again, a nice little.
So, again, I know we talkedabout it this last episode again
, but if you for some reasonmissed that or whatever and you
want to get ramped up in agents,this content is by far some of
the best I've ever seen.
And shout out to the team.
Of course, like I know, I Igave some feedback to eliza, a

(31:50):
couple little things I ran into,and of course she got back to
me, gave some feedback to Eliza,a couple of little things I ran
into, and of course she gotback to me right away to say,
yeah, yeah, I'm going to makethose fixes, whatever it to me,
because the way it breaks downthe explanation and then gives
you that hands on stuff to try,yeah, I'm looking forward to the
next two sections and I've sentthat link to a few people that
have been like, oh, we're tryingto figure out agents and this,

(32:11):
and that Like, here, go throughthis, this is, yeah, so sorry
that was a segue there.

Speaker 1 (32:17):
No, no, it's perfect.
Yeah, absolutely love it.
So I'm it's on the books forthe next this week, actually to
get to get through it.
So.
But you know what it's like?
I have all this free time on myhands and then suddenly there's
something coming in left, rightand center.
The list of to-dos and thingsto dive into is just too long.
I need to learn how to say noto things, I think, but I'm

(32:39):
going to try to finish that forsure.
So, in terms of other news, Isee there's a few items here
that we haven't talked about.
That was on your list.
So you do want to dive?

Speaker 2 (32:50):
into one of the first ones here.
Yeah, so a little one about ourfriend joe gill in in ireland.
Uh, again this.
This to me was just sort of ayou know, as much as we talk
about ai, co-pilots, all the thenew shiny shit, let's look at
some of the the day-to-day stuffof people solving problems.
I think that's also a core ofthis, this podcast and for class
so title for sure oh, shiny newshit.

(33:11):
Oh yeah, I've already writtenit down easy, so thank you, you
got oh yeah for sure.
Um, joe joe gill, he wrote someof power apps, real-time updates
.
Um, basically, and it's true,he said power apps and power
pages specifically, they don'tsupport receiving information

(33:32):
real time and they were kind ofrely on polling, meaning they
got to go and check something.
Is there new information?
Is there new information with achecker, with humans, whatever?
But anyways, he's implemented amethod using WebSockets to have
a persistent two way connectionusing SignalR and Socketio for
Nodejs.
So this is very code heavy butit is pretty cool.

(33:55):
He supplies the code and hisuse case is interesting.
It is about parking fines, soI'm kind of guessing he might be
experiencing this directly.
There might be a story here.
Joe, did you get a few parkingtickets lately, maybe?
But anyways, let's go with that.

Speaker 1 (34:14):
Story with us, please .
We'd love to see the picturesand hear that story.
We're going to see them atNordic, I'm sure, so we'll get
the whole bang there, hopefully,yeah, oh yeah, cool, okay cool,
oh, that's awesome, yeah, so.

Speaker 2 (34:28):
And then another one no-transcript.

(35:02):
This is truly not junk.
And then there's other stuffthat I've gotten I'll get in my
regular inbox, like this is thisis garbage.
Why am getting this?
Like you know, the nigerianprince you know that has that 15
million dollars sitting in aholding account with my only I
can somehow cash it in I thoughtthat was just me oh, maybe, oh,
maybe you're lucky like so, butanyways, um, our friend, polina

(35:27):
cold she's, uh does a.
She's actually blogging a lotlately on customer insights and
journey, which, I will admit, Iam not an expert in.
I know what it does, but that'sbasically the extent of it.
But she had a reallyinteresting article on why
emails fails to deliver and whatyou can do.
So she made an email bouncecheat sheet to help those people

(35:52):
working with customer insightsand journeys make better email
email campaign capabilities andthings like that and some really
good, really good tips andtricks and things like that to
really make sure that if you'refiring off emails, that they
make sure they get to the rightpeople in the right time into
their inboxes, not into theirspam.
So thanks, polina, for that.
Like I love all your contentand I you know, sometimes I wish

(36:15):
I knew more about CustomerInsights and Journeys just to
understand a little bit more.
But yeah, she does amazingcontent, so check out that post
plus all her other ones.
She's one of these.
She's been an MVP now, I think,for one or two years now and
just amazing content.

Speaker 1 (36:31):
Yeah, absolutely, and she does amazing sessions as
well.
So if you get a chance to seeher at one of the upcoming
events I know that she does alot of events, especially in
Europe then make sure to attendone of her sessions.
It's always gold, absolutely.
And speaking of small littlehelpful things, I saw a post
from Radovan Santa I need topractice these names but that

(36:59):
was about auto-categorization.
So you have a Canvas app wherehe just had some sort of data
entry and you wanted an agent toautomatically categorize that
entry form and I find so this isone of those things where I had
an expense sheet typeautomation, where I would upload

(37:19):
an image and I wanted an agentto kind of pull the information
from that image and justautomatically edit by it, but
then also the expense type,right?
So how do you determine whattype it is?
And then, of course, you use aito do that.
So you have an agent going in,you tell it all the basic
details about the data entry andthat will automatically choose
the right category for you.

(37:41):
So this is just a small littleones, the, you know, the
linkedin, the type of thingsthat you click through, just
showing the diagram.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there aredocuments so showing kind of the
diagrams and littleillustrations of what he called
at what time and what theservices did and how.
It kind of got back to theCanvas app that he used to

(38:05):
create this.
So small little thing, smalllittle tip, but also unlocking.
If you're kind of looking atdoing this but didn't know where
to start, this is a a good way,good blueprint to adopt just to
try it out yeah, awesome.

Speaker 2 (38:17):
No, that looks cool.
This is exactly what I'm.
One of the things I'm workingon right now is just to uh
manage my expenses when I'm,because I'm gonna be traveling
again.

Speaker 1 (38:26):
Then I'm gonna get into all this expense and
following up and the whole bitso what if you could just have a
folder with images and everytime there's a new image, AI
goes in and creates a new dataverse entry just shows a date
and amount and automaticallycategorize it for you.
And then, once you have two orthree or more on a certain date,
it kind of pulls it togetherand goes did you go to Vegas by

(38:49):
any chance?
Cause this is an expense report.
All of these lines in it, oh,that's the dream.
This is an expense report andall of these lines in it, oh,
that's the dream.
And then, if I could just and Iactually I almost don't tell
anyone, but I kind of the otherday tried to hack my way into
kind of pushing data into ourown internal finance and
operations system.
I removed all my tracks becauseI couldn't do it, but I tried.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
Good, that's perfect.
So you don't even need to thinklike to me.
I just want to have a receipt,take a picture, Don't need to
worry about it.
Off to the accountant.

Speaker 1 (39:22):
Fantastic.

Speaker 2 (39:23):
I think we're close.

Speaker 1 (39:24):
Oh no, it's doable.
I mean, if we can book hotelrooms for people.
I mean, come on.

Speaker 2 (39:28):
Cool, I'm just seeing what else we I know we've
hopped all over the list I dowant to talk a little bit about
actually.
First this one about the childresponse to a parent wants to
make it faster by.
Johan, that was yours.
You want to talk about that?
That's a technical one.

Speaker 1 (39:44):
It's a small one.
It's on the same lanes as thethings we've talked about
already, because it's fun totalk about these huge AI
existential crisis things, butthen we kind of also want to
bring it down to the nittygritty little details, and this
is one of those things whereJohannes Anstrum he have a
LinkedIn post.
It's also one of thosecarousels that talks about how

(40:06):
you can actually make childresponses faster.
So you have parent and childpower, automated flows, and
usually what you do and which Ido all the time is that you call
a child flow.
That child flow runs all theway to the end and then you have
the response to parent action.
But actually what he does is heresponds to the parent at once.
That's the first action in thechild.

(40:27):
What happens is the parent getsnoticed, oh, the child is done
and it continues.
It doesn't wait anymore becauseit will wait for the child to
respond.
So then they movesimultaneously down and finishes
.
So the child will moveindependently of the parent and
they'll finish on their own time.
So it's a way to make yourchild kind of parent flow

(40:47):
dynamic go a bit faster, soit'll be more snappy.
Of course, you won't get theresult back if you do that.
So, and you won't know if itfails or if it finishes.
So it's just for certain usecases, but I thought it was
worth mentioning.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
Yeah, that's definitely a great pattern.
I definitely probably willsteal, borrow or be inspired by
that.

Speaker 1 (41:08):
Yeah, for certain scenarios it's very good, and
also something else I cameacross that I wanted to mention,
if I can, something calledmsportalsio which was new to me,
but it's a collection of linksto all the Microsoft portals.
There's a few links on thislist.

(41:28):
I'll tell you they're not few,but this is a list of all of
those.
So yeah, just a littlecollection there for you.

Speaker 2 (41:37):
Yeah, no, that's a great resource.
I'm bookmarking that right aswe speak, because that is
actually.
I do have a bookmark already.
So yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (41:44):
There you go.

Speaker 2 (41:47):
Good, good resource.
I did want to talk a little bitabout a new podcast with Mark
and Meg Smith.
I think everybody knows whoMark Smith is.
You probably, if you know Mark,you probably have met Meg or
know Meg as well, because she'sworking a lot with Mark on
things like the 90-Day MentoringChallenge plus some other
initiatives as well, and theyhave started something called

(42:07):
the AI Advantage Podcast.
Now, everybody knows Mark Smith.
As the you know, he's beendoing a Power Platform Dynamics
365 CRM podcast for quite a longtime maybe not as long as
someone like Marcus, but yeah,but still, mark's well known for
his podcasting stuff.

(42:27):
So they're doing a podcasttogether.
It's interesting.
It's all about their sort oftheir journey into AI when they
started using it.
They're different.
It's nice because they havevery contrasting approaches to
it.
If anybody has met Mark, markis already kind of his name's at
the top of the list for thenext AI implant that they're
going to do.
That Meg's a lot more kind ofon the opposite side, a little

(42:49):
bit more cautious, a little bitmore scared, but trying things
out and realizing the journey aswell.
So this is a so it's aninteresting podcast.
They're going to have a wholeseries of these.
I did reach out to both of themand kind of congratulate them
on this and they said they saidthey're stealing our format by
just having the conversationbetween the two of them.
They're not doing interviewsand things like that.

(43:10):
So I took that as a complimentto us because that's sort of
like our format there, which ofcourse we stole from lisa and
megan.
But anyways, it's all.

Speaker 1 (43:20):
It's making your own.
Oh yeah, definitely, that'swhat we're all about so check
out the link.

Speaker 2 (43:26):
The link is there, it's on spotify and all the
other podcasts.
So, again, it's like you know,there's plenty of uh, plenty of
things to do when you're out onyour run or doing your gardening
, you, you're off to the gym oror that kind of thing.
In terms of podcasts, a lot ofgreat stuff coming out to help
you kind of stay grounded andinspired and not be all doom and

(43:47):
gloom versus the.
You know, ai is going to savethe world to.
Ai is going to destroy theworld by 2050.
If you've watched the latestDiary of a CEO podcast.
But anyways, we'll continue onfrom there.
So, yeah, so check that out.
And then, yeah, we saw you sawyou posted it here, but I saw
that as well Mark Christie didsome arts and crafts.

(44:09):
You want to talk about that?

Speaker 1 (44:12):
I think Mark is already bored by staying in
Norway because we are a weirdlittle introverted bunch.
So he decided to make a posterout of his lanyards from
different events.
So he posted a big picture ofthe MVP and then kind of that
outcut of the MVP logo.
He had all his lanyards lined upand it was really cool and

(44:32):
colorful and then you could allsee all the events that he went
to.
So I thought that was a niceuse of the lanyards that we all
have hanging, like you do, onthe wall behind you or the door
behind you, which I also have onon in my office as well.
So that was just a good,creative thing and also sorry.

Speaker 2 (44:48):
Yeah, I was about to say if any of our listeners have
done creative things witheither the lanyards or the cards
or the t-shirts that we get orany of the swag, that's a little
bit different.
Um, like you talk about, we'retalking about polina earlier.
Polina is a big knitter.
I I learned this about her, uh,this spring.
Um, so if you're doing stuff alittle bit like like this, like

(45:09):
the arts and crafts stuff, shareit with us and we we definitely
love to highlight it well, yeah, yeah, 100%.

Speaker 1 (45:14):
We absolutely love that.
And, pauline, I'm just sayingmaybe your duck is going to be a
bit cold in the wintertime, somaybe it should get a sweater,
not to?
And speaking of ducks, this isdisgusting.
This is like my episode.
I saw something that I wantedto ask you about.
So on my LinkedIn feed,suddenly there was something

(45:36):
called Rubber Duck Tuesday byGitHub and it was a kind of a
live thingy.
So I looked into it and it wasone of those.
I tried to read up on it and itseems like there's just this
scheduled thing happens everyweek Open table, anyone can join
in, it's live and it's recordedand you can ask anything.

(45:58):
Use anyone as a rubber duck foranything and just, yeah, open
mic.
Oh my God, awesome.
Have you seen that before?

Speaker 2 (46:06):
No, I saw the link when you put it in there.
I had not seen that.
But yeah, I just sort ofchecked it out.
It was like live last Thursdaywas the last one.

Speaker 1 (46:21):
So, yeah, sort of checked it out.
It was like live last thursdaywas our last one.
So, yeah, interesting, it's socool, very, yeah, I know.
Oh, yeah, thursday, not tuesday, sorry, um, that's my mistake.
So anyone have anything andthey needed someone to rubber
duck it with, I guess you just,yeah, join that call and ask
away.
Hopefully, if that helps you,let us know because that would
be a lot of fun.
All right, so, um, this I justwanted to mention, in terms of
um events before we go, thatnordic summit is right around

(46:41):
the corner.
If you haven't got your ticketyet, please do.
Uh, we're both going to bethere.
Uh, I'm going to beinterviewing people, so I'm
going to run around with amicrophone talking to all kinds
of people.
We're trying to get to do alive recording of the Booth
podcast while we're there.
We're going to do a recapanyways.
So something's going to comeout of Nordic Summit for Booth,

(47:02):
anyhow, and then we're justgoing to be there and have lots
of fun and you're going to dothe closing keynote, which I'm
so excited about, which is goingto be so much fun.

Speaker 2 (47:11):
Yep, yeah, I'm actually starting my tour
tomorrow.
I'm flying out tomorrowafternoon actually, and first
stop Finland collab days, thenBaltic Summit, which will be my
first time in Poland.
I'm looking forward to likegetting to know the people in
that community a little bit more, and then an Experts Live UK
and then from there NordicSummit.

(47:31):
So a lot of back-to-back events.
But, yeah, it's going to be.
It's going to be definitely avery fun trip.
Really looking forward to itand doing a Nordic Summit yes,
closing keynote, which I'm yeah,it's going to be exciting.
It's going to be looking forvery friendly faces in the crowd
because it's kind of a verypersonal topic for me and I'm
looking forward to that supportas well.

(47:52):
But I'm also doing a sessionwith Manju Gharar Gharar on
Power Pages and we've beencollaborating back and forth and
Manju is just so enthusiasticit's very infectious.
So looking forward to doingthat session with her.
She gets so excited of thesethings within Power Pages.
So, yeah, it's going to be afun one.
So, yeah, and get your tickets.
People like don't wait, becauseGuru, two years ago she was

(48:16):
chasing people out the door thatdidn't have a ticket, so get
your ticket.

Speaker 1 (48:20):
Yeah, when we were in Copenhagen, we sold out and she
had to turn people away at thedoor.
So get your ticket.
Don't just fly in and think youcan walk through the door.
Get your ticket now.
It's September 19th to 20th.
So, yeah, definitely lookingforward to see you there and I
think that's a wrap up for thisepisode.
Thank you so much for listeningand we'll catch you on the next
one, see ya.
Thanks for listening and if youliked this episode, please make

(48:43):
sure to share it with yourfriends and colleagues in the
community.
Make sure to leave a rating andreview your favorite streaming
service and makes it easier forothers to find us.
Follow us on the social mediaplatforms and make sure you
don't miss an episode.
Thanks for listening to thePower Platform Boost podcast
with your hosts, ulrika Akerbeckand Nick Dahlman, and see you

(49:03):
next time for your timely boostof Power Platform news.
We'll see you next time.

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