One of those (#57)

Welcome everyone to the Power Platform Boost podcast , your weekly source of news and updates from the world of the power platform and the Microsoft community , with your hosts Nick Doelman and Ulrikke Akerbæk . Hello .

I usually have a pretty good idea where I'm leaning towards , but this time I use well , I use ChatGPT and other AI tools to kind of , more than anything , dispel a lot of stuff that people were saying , including the news , saying , well , they said this and they said that . And what I ended up doing was the two main political parties here in Canada .

I took their websites and I fed them into chat GPT and I said do research on both of these and give me unbiased opinions on what their policies are and how they compare and contrast .

And it was really cool because , with the co-pilot the research it comes back and ask some clarifying questions , saying , oh , do you want to do this , do you want to focus on this ?

And I answered I know this and yes to this and whatever , and a little bit of back and forth , and said okay , and then , 15 minutes later , it gave me this whole big report , basically based on the campaign promises , of what each party was doing , how they compared , how they contrasted and things like that , which study was quite a bit different than how the

news reports certain things . So I did find that this is pretty interesting and pretty enlightening , and I did post on Facebook . Just I didn't actually get the results or anything , but I just sort of reminded people . We have other tools . That's not just reading the news or listening to your crazy uncle of who to vote or not vote for .

We have ways to get sort of unbiased information . So , anyways , that was that's a little aside of me . You know , embracing AI and using it in sort of something . That I think is something that's pretty relevant to a lot of people .

So yeah , I find it both refreshing and also very scary Because , at the same time , if that bot is then grounded in data that is biased towards one or the other , you see there's a big right-wing movement blowing through Europe and Elon Musk is very much playing into the right-wing parties of Europe , and then so maybe your Tesla car will start feeding you

right-wing information at the top of the newsfeed or emphasize things . I don't know what the car can do , but I mean those kinds of things . So I get a bit skeptical when I look at technology and politics and how much it mixes and also how vulnerable we are to the you know , unbiased . What does that actually mean ? But it's nice that you explore that .

If I had just asked ChatGPT just give me who should I wait up , give me , yeah , well , not who should I vote for , but just sort of give me the straight up goods , then for sure it's gonna go and it's gonna like , and again , chat tpt in theory , in theory , doesn't care about by like , it really doesn't care about all this stuff , it just processes data

right . But of course , if this data is kind of leaning towards one direction or the other and that kind of thing , that's one thing . So that's why I basically gave it . Here is both . Like political parties here is their website .

Use that as information to do this deep research to compare the two , because in that way I , yeah , political parties make promises all the time that they can't keep . So these promises sometimes are worth . I'd say worth the paper they're written on , but worth the digit , worth the characters that are on the web page .

But at least there the idea was I was telling it to ground itself Like don't look outside . Because it even asked me do you want to kind of research other news sources and reports ? No , no , just focus on their websites and their platforms only like what is published and give me the sources and things like that .

So I totally get you , and this is it is dangerous to use these tools as well . I totally get that , but it is . You know , there is something I would see on Facebook Well , such and such said this , and then I would kind of like , yes , because the data is six months old .

It's hard to get that , but there are ways to kind of okay , is this really true or what's , what's the opposing ? And then you find out that a lot of these things are blatantly not true or blatantly they're perceived or reinterpreted a different way as well .

So , again , maybe it makes things more confusing , but in other ways , using some of these tools that aren't yeah , anyways , we could probably talk .

And then in that post on LinkedIn or that video , he you know the AI says you're I would . Then you could hold your petty little elections , but I would be essentially running everything . You know what happened when Trump was elected a few years ago . The rumors that was that social media was maliciously trying to move the public in one direction or another .

You know , have that in the mix . But then what you did is you actually just ask it to help you summarize the data out there , and you don't ask it to make a decision or to weigh the things one way or the other .

There's a give me the information and I'll be the human in the loop , I'll decide what I'll do with it , and so that's how you have to approach these things . I think your approach is really good and I think that's kind of what we need to remember when we use AI tools .

Yes , prompt me , give me ideas and let's iterate and brainstorm on session ideas , for instance , but the second , you just take that and copy and put it into session submission . It's no longer yours . It's someone else's voice , so just making sure that there's a human in the loop . I like it definitely . Keep going .

something that looks like from a real person but it's actually not a real person , it's more put on by an organization . And I see this , I still see this in Facebook . I see friends posting . It looks like they're posting something from a person , but then you realize that person's not a person .

It's actually a special interest group that made it look like a person and that's what the danger is with all of this . So again , it's sort of like . Again I asked ai so if , if you were to trick people , how would you trick people ? Or you know , or how are people tricked by this ?

And it's just sort of an awareness of like anything you've said this before almost don't believe anything you see online these days .

So in a sense , we are we're not fake

accounts but we are kind of part of that as well , that individualization . So now listen to Stephen Bartlett's Diary of a CEO podcast where he talks with people that don't understand where business is going , and so you can look at the history now . For the last 10 years there's been a shift from you subscribe to a brand to you subscribe to an individual .

That's why we know the names of the leaders of OpenAI . That's what we know . Satya Nadella that's what we know . Bill Gates he's what we know . Satya Nadella , that's what we know . Bill Gates he's seen that change .

It's been the tech companies leading that change for it to not be about the brand anymore but about the person , and you can see that on the fake accounts as well , because brands have less of a value now than they used to have and personality and individuals hold more power , and so it's easier to subscribe to that . So it's part of the change , I think .

Yeah , so speaking about rah-rah , all this stuff , you were like , before we started recording , you were like , yeah , because I'm a bit short on time , because I have to go pick up my son in about half an hour . So you're like , yeah , let's get going , let's dive in . And then , 10 minutes later , well , this is us right , this is what we do .

So in terms of interesting things and I'm going to jump around a little bit because there's been a lot of stuff , of course , over the last two weeks but our friend , Lisa Crosby , posted a video this morning about all the new Microsoft 365 co-pilots changes that are coming and it's funny because it's sort of you know , you see , like yeah , there's release plans

every month or you know there's release plans every quarter or every sorry , every half year , but then things get released every month and she went through and gave it's really an interesting video because she gave a very high level summary of all the Microsoft 365 co-pilot things are coming out .

A lot of these things we've seen before in other competing products , specifically like notebooks , the ability to create a podcast from from a document . We've seen that . We talked about that quite a few months ago already from Google Notebook but these are things that are now coming into Microsoft 365 Copilot . So it's not .

What's cool about this is it's not so much Microsoft playing catch up . It's basically taking these things but incorporating into your own business data so you can create a notebook but then you're bringing in stuff from your business data . She went through like you just watched the video because she just there's so many things or it kind of blew me away .

But even you know , getting AI to create drafts , instead of going into Word or PowerPoint , you basically can say create a draft and then from there go towards the tool of your choice , the navigation , doing the deep research , the reasoning . So we're now going beyond of just looking at just kind of data and stuff , but reasoning behind that data .

So check out that video , it kind of it . I I didn't I didn't think I'd be blown away , but I actually kind of was of all the news , the stuff that's coming , and immediately I could see how I could apply that um to my day-to-day stuff . So that that's that's pretty cool uh stuff . So thanks lisa for doing that video .

Yeah , and I think this ties into one of the the to my day-to-day stuff . So that's pretty cool stuff .

Yeah , and I think this ties into one of the links that I have in the show notes as well , where Femke Cornelissen shares a post on LinkedIn where she talks about the Copilot waves waves that are coming a spring release right from Microsoft 365 Copilot it's the same thing , where she kind of details out the different points of when things is coming out and what

it's going to do . So and the multilingual Copilot in Teams that can automatically translate between what you speak . You speak French and I hear Norwegian . That would be fantastic . And also the people skills . Did you see that ? It says find the expert in your org without asking around ? Copilot knows who knows what I mean .

Come on , how many organizations in the world has a skills database that's trying to get competence ? It's up to date and is outdated by miles and is also now the source of the CVs , because we're you know , we're consultancy . We do that . That's our core business . I'm just .

That is just going to first of all put a few people out of work and then also going to kind of get that CV base finally up to scratch . It's going to be the salespeople's best friend .

And also , right , this also wanted to kind of segue into , because you said we were going to jump around .

So now I'm really going to jump around , because I saw something else from Steve Mordew this week that I thought was amazing , because now Salesforce is coming out and the CEO of Salesforce is coming out and actually putting the finger on something that Microsoft and other people kind of danced around a little bit , which is the digital workforce .

Right , so from Microsoft's marketing perspective , it's no , no , no , no one's going to lose their jobs . You're just your best friend at work . It's going to be an enable .

You're going to save so much time , and then everyone's going and it's going to replace people , um , and so finally now someone's in sales first kind of getting out there saying , no , no , it's gonna .

Managers are not no longer just going to manage your , manage people , it's managing also the digital workforce that you have , and that's , of course , the autonomous agents they're talking about . And then someone in the comments section went like I think people have been managing other things other than humans for a while .

And one of my old colleagues are like , yeah , you put a horse in front of a plow . Isn't that kind of the same thing ? Just like decades ago , so kind of having that wide discussion about what is a workforce and management and all that . But also someone kind of honed it in and talked about applications , how UIs are no longer

needed , how CRM is obsolete . Why would you need a CRM system ? Actually , what you do need is you need backends talking to backends , and then you need an agent frontend for you to interact with . Who cares ? Because the CRM system in the back is just populated with data that the AI sources as needed and it talks to other databases .

So maybe integration is where everything's happening . Right , that's the important layer . And you look at the news from last week with the MCT servers and you're like , well , they solved it , so now everything can talk to anything . Anyways , interaction , or integration , suddenly just became unlocked . Like all right , let's just plug it in .

Every now and again he adults people , but then he'll also bring it back and he goes actually talking about serum systems being obsolete and that AI copilates the UI for AI . 99% of the world is outside of our little bubble . This is just 1% of the world . We still have customers that are on-prem . Hello , just reality check people .

It's not going to happen overnight . There's still people in the world that deploy plow and horses , even though it's kind of evolved beyond that . Yeah , sure , in big farms in the US it has , but there are still farmers in Asia that do horse and plow . So I mean you'll always have everything .

It's not going to just replace all of the workers or digital workers overnight .

It's going to , but of course , in our world , a lot of our jobs aren't going to be replaced and I like the fact that someone's actually now starting to talk about it and being honest and actually talking about moments yeah , it's a scary , but also it's a good , yeah , to stay on top of it and it's funny .

I remember working for a company where they were implementing , you know , still on the on-prem , their sales department , without asking anybody , went and bought Salesforce licenses and so there's the concept of shadow it , there's shadow ai going on . This past week I've talked to different people like even outside of our industry .

There's one , one lady I know , who has to kind of write up assessments for different um like caseworker kind of thing with social , like social services . She's doing her reports now in ai , like getting chat , gpt or one of these tools to generate the report .

Of course she goes through it and corrects it and makes sure , but she said she is saving so much time doing this now and the way I don't want to throw anybody under the bus , but it kind of looked like her bosses didn't even know she's doing it now because it's these tools are so available .

It's scary and this is where companies need to be on board because you want those governance , those data controls in place . So the data is not being used in tools outside of the organization , used in tools outside of the organization , and that's the yeah because how does she know ?

I'm like what it's like oh shit , and my daughter is so proud of herself because she has an AI app . She's like no , no , no , don't worry , mom , I did not create an account . It does not know my name . I'm not logging in , I'm just feeding it things .

I'm like oh , no , no , oh , because she thinks she's doing it the right way , because we have all the other apps , like Don't see your birthday , don't tell them where you live , because she has a very unique name in a very small country , you know . So she thinks she's doing it right .

So , yeah , and I also talked on that topic , talked to a teacher , teacher at a high school and he's like yeah , so I use AI all the time because I can't be bothered reading all those reports anymore . So I'm just so happy you have AI , I could just throw it in there .

And then they also continued the conversation to say how they're now blocking students from taking exams using AI . So they've now stopped the ability to copy and paste on the computers that they're doing their exams on , because then they can't use . Okay , sure , you can use copilot if you want to , but you have to transcribe it with your own by writing it right ?

So then that's their way of ensuring that it's their words . Sure , um , but I find it fascinating that that person can say this is my , my job . I'm using AI for my job , but then we're going to prohibit the students from learning the skills with this new tool .

It's like I can use , you know , the nail guns , but the apprentice has to nail it down with a club , right ? Why don't we just teach them how to use the phone ? Oh , sorry , I can't stand that . You have to beep it out , and then you know , and then everyone's more happy , right ?

Why don't you just teach the students how to use AI instead of making software that's prohibiting them from copy and pasting ? Come on , it's so backwards . I'm just oh , yeah , sorry . Oh , this is going to be one of those episodes , isn't it ? Yeah , no , okay , we said we weren't gonna do this anymore .

We're not hating on ai , though we're kind of looking at the freaking fine line . That is now the balance we have to be on to get this right .

that is not AI ?

This is the first blog post that I've read word for word , from start to finish , and I can't tell you how long Because it's so short and it's so to the point , and I've been down that rabbit hole before and I just love that . I learned a lot . So thank you to the other , nick from Canada that does power pages . Yes , so Nick K Duke . To the other .

This particular post , you're right , it's probably going to save a lot of people like I wouldn't say hundreds , but it's probably going to save quite a few people hours and hours of researching and work trying to fix all this um and not realizing , you know , oh , shoot , like this isn't being loaded anymore the jquery library , if we're doing these little drop downs ,

basically , um , so , without getting too technical , it's it's really about fixing a custom lookup , which is something I think anybody working on a power pages project has probably run into at some point and getting client-side console errors , comparing about the particular uh built-in plugin , uh , not working anymore because there's a particular library that needs to be

referenced .

That's going to be a little bit before the jQuery library , and also you can't find the jQuery reference because it's bundled in a bigger JavaScript file or on a CDN somewhere .

So it's one of those cases where he had someone testing the application Some people it worked , some people it didn't work , and actually it was the administrator role that was a drift differentiator , which makes no sense whatsoever , but that's how he figured this out .

So it's one of those pretty niche , pretty deep things , and also it's funny because I think they spent a lot of time before they brought Nick into the picture and then suddenly he just does it and he finds it out , and it's fantastic to also see how he reasons to get to the uh , because it also shares a bit of the path he followed to figure this out ,

which I also like when people do that in blog post is not . This is a solution , but also gives you an idea of what I had to do to find the way down this rabbit hole , to find that little solution , because that is also a workflow and a process that everyone else can adopt , because we're all troubleshooting .

So I really like , I appreciate that blog post , nicholas .

For anyone developing PowerPages using Visual Studio Code for desktop , it's great . You download the code , you make your changes and then , because it's in Visual Studio Code for Desktop , you have access . There is the PowerPages Copilot that they've created a little over a year ago .

But using Visual Studio Code for Desktop , you can use GitHub Copilot like the actual GitHub Copilot using the App PowerPages kind of chat experience , and I've been playing so . So , anyways , all that being said , the tool the actions that the team released allows you to basically very easily upload and download the um .

The website allows you to preview it and when you preview , it actually clears the cache for you , and then you even have some shortcuts into the power pages design studio or the power pages management app . So it allows you to switch environments pretty easily without having to learn all those pack commands .

Now I I've , you know I anytime I go on the pack commands I'm very much . I go pack page , it power pages or pack pages now and then I'll hit enter just to see the commands , to get reminded of what they are all the time . And I used to feel a little embarrassed .

But I was actually on a call with someone very prominent in our community , that's very well known in ALM circles , who may or may not have written a book about ALM , and he was doing the pack commands and he was making mistakes and I'm like , ok , I don't feel so bad anymore . He's like , oh , I forgot the pack commands and he was making mistakes .

And I'm like , okay , I don't feel so bad anymore . He's like , oh , I , I forgot , I forgot how this , I forgot the parameter for this one , and do , do , do , do , like still anyways . So these little shortcuts and these tools make it a lot easier .

And , of course , using the github copilot , um , again this one I said we said we weren't going to talk about ai and then here we are again , um , but using that to create code and fix code and stuff like that . I am going to .

I have a video formulating in my head of using that and it's just , it's amazing of how that works and how it can fit , and I actually it saved me hours this week developing some power pages code , so all within the visual studio code for desktop and being able to upload and preview all that , so it's pretty cool .

So , yeah , check out my blog and video and give me any kind of feedback or questions .

So you preview the PowerPages site in the past , when you've downloaded your portal to your local machine , you haven't seen because it hasn't loaded the PowerPages context . Does it do that now ? So it's actually representative of what you see .

Because I find this has been the reason why I haven't used it in Plinter now , because I have to upload the code and see it in the rendered PowerPages site to see what I'm actually building , because I'm styling PowerPages . I can't look at that half-assed . Maybe this is what it looks like , kind of preview . It doesn't help .

I must say it's like , oh , so you made a low-code way for coders to upload and download your site . It's like I'm underwhelmed . So I was actually annoyed when I saw that and I was like , oh , this was the freaking RAROS about . Give me something that actually helps .

And then I also saw a little comment going oh and by the way , this isn't the preview thing doesn't work for for customs themed sites . Show me a PowerPages site in production that is using default out of the box theming . Show me one and I'll . Probably there will be more . But I mean , come on , so yeah , ok , I'm done , thank you .

I can use GitHub Copilot and I can use all of that because the upload , download , the kill cache and the preview that has to change for me to be able to use the local version the local dev tools right yeah .

So it's for me , just because I work in the styling and branding space so much it doesn't help for me , but I see for all other use cases it's great . And speaking of kind of GitHub and co-pilots and stuff , I saw that now the GitHub integration is now finally generally available . That is where Power Platform , yes , is GA .

But also I saw that the Visual Studio for the browser for Power Pages is still in preview . I did not know that . So it says do not use in production , which we have been for the last , I don't know , one and a half years or something . Yeah , so that's awesome .

Oh well , we're not coding directly in production , which we have been for the last I don't know , one and a half years or something . That's awesome . We're not coding directly in production , we're using it in dev and removing the code to production . I can't really see why that wouldn't be production ready . That's not .

So a feature , something like the , you know , something that's built into Model Driven Power Pages , like I'm just trying to think like the doc or the Stripe integration , for example , that's a feature that's in preview . You can't even use it in production because it's not even pointing to a production stripe . But that's something no , don't use .

That Support will stop you where . I think , if you're , like you know , using XRM toolbox tools , like , in the grand scheme of things , most of these would be preview , because whoever developed it is still , you know , tinkering with it , whatever . So , yeah , that's it Tools versus features .

And then kind of the after , with the , the kind of shortened down , and I'm looking at this going yeah , that's very cody , code centric , but but in a good way though , right , yeah , about kind of summarizing all of this and again showing the , you know , creating the activity row and all that kind of other stuff .

And she , like Amy's amazing in terms of her screenshots , how she draws and relates to things . She's showing the , actually showing the bits of code and how it's working of all the power or sorry , power automate expressions , networking .

Of all the power or sorry , power automate expressions , um , and she even has the code , the sample code , that you can cut and paste for yourself . So , amy , keep the code coming yes , keep the code coming .

So next time I'm going to just grab Amy by both shoulders and go . We need

to sit down and talk , and talking about the two of them just reminded me that we need to share something's really important um , for those of you who aren't aware , uh , on um outbound , the old way of working with marketing dynamics , usually by marketing outbound marketing that was um is going away .

So they're going to actually deprecate it and they're going to remove the whole thing and it's blowing up across the board because a lot of customers aren't ready and it's a huge shift for a lot of what is now called customer insights . Of course , customers to shift to real time . They've had their time .

I mean , come on , it's been years and years , but of course some of these big ones need a bit of time to adjust . So what Amy and Megan has done is to create a kind of a webinar . Open webinars set up a few opportunities for people to come on a call and ask their questions . So they'll talk about what's going on .

They'll talk about the transition and their best practices and give people a general idea of what to do , and then they'll take questions . They've had two already . There was one at the time when this is released on Wednesday . They already had one in the morning at 7 am . There's another one at 4 .

So if this is of interest to you , you have a few hours to find that through the link in our show notes and sign up and also just calm down . There's going to be another one on May 7th and another one a few weeks after that . So it's not the latest chance .

It's not the last chance yet , but make sure that , if this applies to you , that you go on one of those webinars and also they've recorded all of them . The recordings are available .

So if you have questions , go back and kind of go through those recordings before you go on the webinar , if you have time , so you don't kind of repeat the same questions over and over .

But you'll get a good sense of what's going on if you look back on those recordings and also , I mean this goes to show how important community is for both Amy and Megan , and we know this because we know these lovely ladies .

But I mean they are putting this , they're essentially just grabbing all across the world and Megan says we can't help you all individually , we don't , we , we cannot . So we try to help everyone by just opening up and allowing that . So this is their way to give back .

And I just want to give a huge homage to them for like going okay , how can we reach as many people as possible ? But it's good quality , because we can't be consultants and go in and save your assets or everywhere , right ? So how do we reach as many people as possible ? Uh , to help as many people as possible , all right . It's huge respect .

You guys do an amazing job yes , absolutely .

I think a lot of people in the community this is I like answering questions by pointing back to a blog post or a video , whether it's one of my own or one of my other friends . This a couple times this week going , hey , I'm really stuck , I don't know how to do this . Blah , blah , blah .

I said , oh , here's a video I did on it three months ago and then getting the response back perfect , that's exactly what I needed . That , yeah , that's the cool feeling .

But I fortunately for you I had a conversation with a friend and then we could kind of talk about the things that I got help with in terms of security and accessibility and all those things . So I mean cause none of us can know everything about everything in this community . It's grown so big that's impossible .

So just having that network of friends to rely on when you need help , and also , of course , your past self , like you always tell me right . Write love letters to your future self in documentation , in descriptions when you configure things , but also in blog posts . Right , I saw this today .

I'm going to help myself six months from now because I have a goldfish memory . So when I Google something , I'm going to find my own blog post and so many people in the community have the same story . That's what we do . So , yeah , it's a long way of saying that . Yeah , contribute because it will benefit everyone .

We're just as smart as the collective knowledge we accumulate , or something .

And then this is from Pauline Claude , which I also saw this week one form to rule them all reuse marketing forms across pages with JavaScript . So this is yours , I believe .

If I was new coming in , they'd be like , well , why can't I do this ? But apparently you can't . But of course , polina , she's an amazing person , super smart . I love her presentations , the way she presents and carries herself and everything . A very interesting person to talk to as well .

But in her blog post as well again , very much like like Amy and those others very clearly goes through step by step . She's got step , how you know . Gives a good intro , talks about the different marketing forms , adding the JavaScript to a marketing form . So there's JavaScript there , which I love , and the code is there .

We can cut and paste it , how to embed the form into your website and how to check it all out and things like that , and then basically how it all works and how to incorporate that into the marketing journey . So , again , another great resource and if you're into customer insights and journeys or in a project .

Um pauline is another one of these people that you need to bookmark her website because she has a lot of amazing content on that .

and I saw announcing new computer use in Microsoft's co-pilot studio for UI automation . This is one of the articles from Taras Limana , corporate vice president of business and industry co-pilot , which is now called which I find is interesting . Yes , yeah , so did you have a chance to read up on this ?

The idea there is you can do that . So it's kind of like when I first looked at that , it's like oh , this is just power automate desktop with , you know , some co-pilot steroids added to it , um , but basically , and it and it is really , at the end of the day , um , but it is kind of going , I think , to look at it from another aspect .

This is power automate desktop also . This is different from power automate desktop , but it's the same kind of concept and , of course , showing how we can begin to use like ai agents .

Of course we have have the MCP servers now and we can talk to a lot of different things , but if there is something that doesn't have a proper AI or sorry , a proper API , that doesn't exclude it from doing these agents , things like that .

So immediately I can think of a few use cases that I was thinking of using Power Automate Desktop for , but I might actually , when this actually is released or in a preview mode that I can use . I might try using this feature instead .

So and again , like everything , we're continually learning more and more , but to me this was significant enough to have its own big blog announcement and because , and then looking more into more third party AI stuff , computer use is a thing across the board , even outside of the Microsoft ecosystem .

He won't break , because it's smart enough to recognize objects , even though it moves around on the screen , for instance , or kind of reason over UI , to understand what's really going on , whereas an RPA would just , yeah , the button moved or changed its name . It's like , oh , I don't know what to do , oh , a button gone , I don't know .

But this actually is smart enough to recognize the changes and still be able to run .

And this is the big question that keeps coming up Do we automate it or do we write an agent for it ? And this is going to be , I think , a big question going forward as we do agents , because a lot of the use cases I see , uh , for using agents like , oh , we could do an agent for this , you do an agent for that . I'm like ,

couldn't we just do a power automate to do the same thing ?

Um , and even within power automate itself , um , I have a video blog post I'm going to probably post and either later this week or next week , where I'm using AI builder within a power automate flow , but to me it's still more of an automation using AI features , but it's not an agent and it probably could be an agent . But what's the where's the delineation ?

So at least Anna goes through and she has a good post and she's talking about , she has a whole flow chart of and it's called automate , agentify or nothing , and it's . It's great because it's like , is this test done more than three times per month ?

And then yes , and there's a structured process yes or no , and then it goes through and it helps you decide whether you should be . This should be an agent or an automation , or just do it manually .

Right , maybe it's simply just a part of my flow and for me , using agents is the autonomous thing , right ? An agent should be able to go off and reason and do things on its own , but not all use cases are fit for that , and some things actually , it's way better to just have , like I said , an old approval flow .

She talks about the never-ending travel request or whatever . It is right , it's just . Yeah , do you have an existing process for it ? Then just continue using it . It's fine , you don't have to AI it , just to do it , right , yeah , fantastic .

And we also have a blog post from Karsten which is revolutionizing digital workflows traditional automation via AI-powered agent Isn't this kind of the same thing ?

We're comparing the different automation traditional automation , AI-powered automation , AI-powered agents pros and cons . So it's a pros and cons list for all you . How I Met your Mother fans where Ted gets out his yellow pad and does his pro cons list . Carson has done it for AI agents versus traditional automation . So check that out . It's it's .

There's a ton of information here . It's really good . And again , there's another one of these great tools and resources as we're , as we're navigating our way and figuring out all of this stuff and also helping advisor clients where they might be all about , but we need to build all these agents and you kind of hold back .

Well , do you , you know , or will an automation work ? Or maybe , yeah , maybe , an agent would work . So , again , tons of this is a . I think we're going to see probably more information on this because , like everything , it depends and there's also differing opinions and different approaches and things like that .

Maybe we should do a flowchart of preview feature , use it or not use it . So , anyways , going through this , this we have different environment types talks about the , the billing process , talks about the fact that uh , fno , uh things are not supported um enabling , how to enable the disaster recovery . So turning that

on and how it will all work . So , if you're interested in this or if it's something that you're um , and also it shows here , to do a disaster recovery drill . So that's something I find with disaster recovery people don't necessarily do . They have a disaster recovery plan but they don't actually run through the disaster recovery .

So this reminds me of a horror story going way back in the early days of my career , where I still had a full head of hair and I was a systems administrator and basically the company I was working for had retail stores and they had a core server that would and this is back in the day before virtual private networks and everything .

Now I'm really dating myself . But basically the server would call up the retail stores through a modem Modem is what we used to talk through the telephone lines to get information and it would upload all the data from those retail stores into a core server so they could do reporting and things like that and ordering and all that .

I wasn't in charge of the software on the server , but part of my daily routine was to swap out the backup tapes . So every day I would go remove the backup tape , put the other one in . There was someone else who was managing that server , um , and then what happened ? Once the server blew up , it crashed , the hard drive failed .

No problem , we have backup tapes . We had someone come in . It was a unix system . I was more of the windows nt administrator , so we had to get a unix guy come in . He came in basically one couple hours later , rebuilt the server , rebuilt the you know , restored from the backup , launched the console .

Yep , you're back up and running , the tape's been restored , all good . And then we talked to the person who was in charge of the retail stores . Yet the server's back up , all . And then he gives me a call . About half hour later he goes we don't have the last six months worth of data , everything works , but the data has gone from .

I was like , oh what , that can't be . We took a look and , yeah , the backup tape , the backups , had failed , the backup job had failed , but the job that would eject the tapes kept working . So every day I would see the tape was ejected and swap it out and put in the new one , and all it would do it would take the tape in and eject it .

It wouldn't do the backups . So they're able to recreate the data because they had to re-upload from all the retail stores . But there was a case of we never bothered to actually look even at what was stored on those backup tapes and never did a disaster recovery test run .

Of course now , with the days of the cloud and other environments , we should be able to do that . So , yeah , run . You know it's great to have a plan , but execute the plan .

It's why in school I'm not sure if they do this in Norway , they do this in Canada but every couple months they have a fire drill , fire alarm goes off , everybody in line , everybody lines up and goes outside to their designated spot . You need to do the same for your systems , even if they're in the cloud .

Do disaster recovery drills and make sure you can recover and everything's in place .

No , every two months I'm going to just pull out the plug and see what happens . Oh , I'm going to pull this random plug right here . Oh , is this a server plug ? Oh , I'm sorry . Oh , let's see how many disaster recovery is , can you imagine ?

And then the second thing I'm thinking that , yeah , I think this goes back to something we said just a couple of months ago when we talked with someone or there was a blog post about that exact thing . You need to test it . You actually need to go in and mess with it to see if it works , because in theory it should work .

But also , doesn't this speak to how I mean your story ? It kind of grounds me when I'm fussing about connection references not being what I wanted to be in ALM with Power Platform Pipelines .

I mean , then it's kind of sobering what you just said , because I should just shut the beep up because it's pretty damn good compared to what we used to have just a few decades ago . So it's like it's so sobering . So thank you for that little history lesson .

It's a collection Power Platform and Copilot Studio Architecture Center for architects and it's a collection of the white papers and the well-architected documentation and it also shows you how there's a difference between Power Platform and Copilot architecture and we have people now coming into the platform that is raw , raw Copilot . And what is this Power Platform thing ?

Because , there are people now coming into the platform that is raw , raw co-pilot . And what is this platform thing , you know ? Because there are people now coming into the platform through co-pilot um , so it's going to be interesting to see how that evolves .

But this , because in this also , like they put it it is both power platform and co-pilot studio architecture center I think that is kind of showing you also that there is a difference or there is a kind of a I don't know , it just caught my eye . But also , this is a good place to be if you are an architect , like we are for a pilot platform .

There's a lot of good resources here . So , yeah , check that out , cool , and I think that kind of summarizes everything . I think we're at the end . Yeah , because we've jumped around so much , I tried to kind of mark the stuff that we talked about and I think we got all of it , yeah , yeah .

So now just a quick reminder the Customer Insights webinar is in a few hours .

Check out Megan Walker and Amy Holden's blog post to find links and our show notes as well , for where you can find that online . You have Dynamics Con coming up in May 13th to 16th . If there are still tickets at this point . Please make sure to get your tickets .

Join the Top Gun pilots and get all ramped up on Power Pages at the workshop we're doing at EPBC . I'm so excited and we haven't done the three of us together , so I've done it with Victor and Manco Victor and Vanco Franco .

Yeah , Victor and Manco Franco , victor and Vanko Franco yeah , victor and Vanko Franco and Victor and we you , me and Franco did it without Victor at Nordic Summit , so you , me and Victor haven't done that yet .

So it's going to be a lot of fun to see how that evolves , and it's different every time because we all bring different perspectives into the mix , and so , yeah , and things have changed as well since the last time .

So if you need to know the latest and greatest of PowerPages and AI , just yeah , get to that workshop for sure . Do we have some giveaway ticket ? 10% discount . Use Nick10 at checkout .

It's going well , touch wood , nothing's hurting , everything is on track . Spoke with the team coaches earlier this week , so , put in a play , it was kind of cool because I was telling them all about Norway and how to get around and make sure you buy your beer before eight o'clock in the stores , and how the trains work and everything like that .

So I'm , I , I think I'm , I'm the official team local expert on norway , uh , for the event .

We're going to create ponpons and be all whoop whoop because I know that there's not a lot of that , so we're going to have so much fun cheering for you .

Make sure to leave a rating and review your favorite streaming service and makes it easier for others to find us . Follow us on the social media platforms and make sure you don't miss an episode . Thanks for listening to the Power Platform Boost podcast with your hosts , ulrika Akerbeck and Nick Dahlman , and see you next time .