ary Jo Foley (02:55):

Not that old.

Dona Sarkar (02:58):

I feel like it a bit, but this amazing opportunity came up to lead advocacy out of
the Cloud Advocates org for this new thing called Power Platform. And I was
so curious about what this even meant because I’d use Power Apps before
and of course I’d used Flow and Power Automate a few times, but that’s all I
knew about this thing.

Dona Sarkar (03:19):

So I dug in a little bit and realized the audience is so interesting because there
are really three kinds of people who use our platform that I had known of at
that time. One was the standard professional career dev who are like, yeah, I
hate writing iOS apps so I’m going to use Power Apps to do it. That was my
category of people. Second one were people who worked in IT and they used
Flow at the time, now Power Automate to automate ridiculous tasks that they
have to do all the time, like trigger a flow when this machine finishes installing,
you know, that kind of thing. So I thought that was really cool. Like, wow, what
a cool productivity hack that you’ve come up with. And then the third category,
were these people who usually don’t hang out in the Microsoft circles, which
are, we call them citizen devs.

Dona Sarkar (04:10):

It’s kind of a random term, but it makes sense in some ways. So these are
people who have a totally, who come from a completely different other
industry, like they’re school teachers and bus drivers and bricklayers and
security guards, and they work in nonprofit sector. They don’t consider
themselves to be computer scientists or techies or tinkers or any of the things
we, most of us consider ourselves and they love our platform. They said this
thing has changed my life. It’s changed the way I do my work. It’s changed my
career. I gave up my job, I’ve become a tech person. I work in IT because of
the Power Platform. And I absolutely fell in love with that idea of being able to
work on something that actually changes people’s lives.

Dona Sarkar (04:55):

So I said, you know what this is one of those once in lifetime chances where
you let go of something that you really love, to go do something that you’re
slightly afraid of. But you have a huge impact. So yeah, I did it.
Mary Jo Foley (05:06):
That’s awesome.

Dona Sarkar (05:06):

It was a very hard decision. It was an incredibly hard decision. There’s nothing
simple about it at all.

Mary Jo Foley (05:12):

Yeah, I’m sure, I’m sure. When somebody says to you, what is the Power
Platform? And they want like your elevator pitch, like something you can say
to them in 30 seconds. How do you explain this in a succinct way?

Dona Sarkar (05:27):

I love that question. So Power Platform is a low code platform that lets people
who are not software developers build iOS and Android apps, build websites,
build chatbots, build automation, and build AI without actually having to go get
a computer science degree or crack open Visual Studio.

Mary Jo Foley (05:48):

That’s great. That’s a perfect explanation. And you also in that, touched on a
couple things I want to ask you about because when I look at the power of
platform, I think I overthink it, right? Like there’s so many pieces to it. And
when somebody asks me that question, I’m like, well, there’s, you know,
Power Apps and there’s also Common Data Service and then there’s Power
Virtual Agents and there’s this and that. And I’m like, wait, I just made that so
complicated. But a couple of these things I think bear a further explanation like
Power Virtual Agents, right?

Dona Sarkar (06:19):

Yeah, absolutely.

Mary Jo Foley (06:21):

That’s an AI thing, right? But what is it exactly?

Dona Sarkar (06:24):

What is it? Okay, so chatbots and virtual agents are something that we run
into all the time. So if you go to any insurance page, insurance companies
page or a telephone companies page, there’s a little window that pops up that
says, hi, I’m a virtual agent. Can I answer your questions? And many times
you’ll have virtual agents in companies that will do automatic meeting
scheduling and all of this stuff. It just, it takes a set of data that exists just from
previous customers inputting that data and it will generate some sort of
intelligence from it that predicts that this is probably what you came here to
ask. So our virtual agent is a low code technology that’s actually built on top of
Microsoft SPOT framework. So all of the work we’ve put into with Azure AI
and building up the bot framework has gone into normal people being able to
use it to write chatbots without actually writing any code whatsoever.

Dona Sarkar (07:25):

Or even learning what the bot framework is. The goal is no one ever has to
look up what the bot framework is to be able to use our virtual agent. I think
the coolest functionality and a great starter thing for everyone to do. And you
should, everyone should go try this. It’s free and it’s easy. Go find an FAQ
page. It doesn’t matter what the FAQ page is, just choose one. It can be
yours, it can be some company and go to powervirtualagent.microsoft.com or
whatever the URL is. You can find it. Do the trial, the free trial thing and build
a chat bot using that FAQ page. There’s like three clicks. You click manage on
the right side, click suggested, put in the URL, click generate, and suddenly
the questions from that FAQ page get pulled into your chatbot question area.
And then the answers get pulled into the answer area. And it is pretty sweet
Mary Jo, because the first time I saw that I said that is such a useful, easy
thing to show people.

Mary Jo Foley (08:23):