AI Agents Are Changing Software Forever—Are You Ready?

00:00:06 Mark smith
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already. I do a YouTube series called how to become an MVP. The link is in the show. Notes. With that. Let's get on with the show.

00:00:35 Mark smith
Today's guest is from the United Kingdom. He was first awarded as MVP in 2024. He has a diverse background of industry and expertise and experiences. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode. As always, welcome to the show, Gary.

00:00:51 Gary Blunden
Yeah. Thanks mark. Thanks for having me on. So for the listeners, my name is Gary Blunden. I live in England in the South East in the UK I've been working in technology for about 15 years. And as you mentioned, I've got quite a diverse background across India. Street working in aviation construction, healthcare, among others, and I've been very fortunate in my career to have worked in. London and Sydney in in places in France I've done a few spells in the US. And over that time, I feel like I've gathered enough information and insight into the world of of technology and have very recently been awarded the MVP status.

00:01:35 Mark smith
Awesome. Awesome. Before we get underway, food, family and fun. What do they mean? To you.

00:01:40 Gary Blunden
Well, very big subject. I think food for me, I. I'm I feel like I'm quintessentially British with this, but I I love a roast dinner on a Sunday. I know that's an easy answer. But it it's. True for me, I I genuinely like. Knowing on a Sunday, I'm going to get a big roast and and. Oddly though, I'm not a big fan of roast potatoes, which is. Incredibly difficult for some people to understand. I I don't mind them, but I'm not not massive on them. I like. I like beef, meats and stuffing. I'd say stuffing is the one thing that I really look forward to.

00:02:23 Mark smith
It's like a. Good pub lunch. I do. Yeah, I do love a nice Sunday pub lunch also like home. Cooked roast. Of course, by my other half. If case. She listens to this. But yeah, can't be at pub lunch either. I tell you, as I lived in London for a while and. That was just such a pleasurable experience. On the weekend. The pubs are always jam packed, right? There's squeezing past everybody to get in and get your table. And for your for your pub lunch on Sunday. Just brilliant. Brilliant. Loved it.

00:02:54 Gary Blunden
Yeah, and I'm not exactly a very tall person. I'm about 5 foot 8-9, but all the pubs by me are very low ceilings, so you kind of have to crawl in, find yourself a cubby hole, sit down. You know the warm sense of a pub with a nice smell of a. Roast. Yeah.

00:03:10 Mark smith
You can't really beat it. So what's top of mind for you right now? What's your focus? What are you working on? Where's life taking you?

00:03:19 Gary Blunden
I suppose in the last few years my focus has, through no will of my own, has been on recovery projects, so working on large transformations that have launched but haven't landed well. And so a lot of my time has been coming in auditing the the, the, the health of the platform, mostly talking about power platform here in dynamics. But also as your services as well, but mostly Microsoft's coming in and and and looking at the maturity, the digital maturity of the organization, how they've implemented our platform, where their aches and pains, asking questions, actively listening obviously really important sort of seeking to understand. Before looking to be understood, you know really understanding where they're at with, with, with, with things. What's the current sentiment around the technology? And what do they believe needs to be done to to improve the situation? So it's about writing the ship, coming in and sort of supporting organizations to achieve that.

00:04:30 Mark smith
Did you see any patterns emerge? In those recovery type projects, I've been on a bunch of them across my 30 year career. And you see some patterns emerge. I'm keen to see what what your observations have been.

00:04:46 Gary Blunden
I think the common pattern is that there's a dissonance between the technology itself and what the business needs. And so there tends to be a lot of. Evangelism around the tech. You know, this is a great shiny piece of tech, does some great stuff, but actually bridging that technology with, you know, the real world scenarios that the users are facing. Tends to be where the breakdown occurs. And this can be for a multiplicity of factors. It could be that you know the requirement capture was a bit loose, you know we didn't capture all scenarios. It may be that the technology. You know, wasn't built to good spec to a good practice. It could be both to be other things as well. So it's a complicated situation which requires, you know, extensive analysis across multitude of different areas to try and understand you know how how do we improve the situation. Get into a better position.

00:05:48 Mark smith
You said you're doing a lot of those projects. Is it something you enjoy? You know, riding the ship, so to speak, and bringing things back on track or or do you prefer a greenfields opportunity where you? Get to craft. A vision of the future and then implement it and not, you know, have it go smoothly.

00:06:03 Gary Blunden
I think variety is the spice of life, isn't it? If you can get a bit of both. That that's that's good for me. I think at the moment I'm enjoying it. It can be challenging, of course, because a lot of the time a lot of the work that I'm looking at has been developed by multiple partners over long periods of time, sometimes dating back to the inception of the platform itself. So you're looking back at a lot of decisions that were made at a point in time where a lot of the information is limited or imperfect today. To understand why those decisions were made. And so I enjoy that. The deductive aspect of it, you know, trying to understand the reasoning behind the patterns that we're seeing today. So it's like putting your detective hat on and and and sort of helping. Enable organizations to understand. How we got here and where we what we need to do to move forward.

00:06:58 Mark smith
How did your career align to the power platform and dynamics? What you know, you don't. Nobody goes to university and studies for this. Most people I talked to accidentally got put on a project for whatever reason. What was your pathway to the?

00:07:15 Gary Blunden
I was quite fortunate back in 20/17/2018 around there I was working on one of the largest water infrastructure projects within the UK, a big in Europe maybe and through that project there was a very large budget in technology and a lot of that was being invested in in if if platforms and products. One of which was at that time, of course, the power platform. Coming onto the scene, so I had a lot of experience prior to that. As a software engineer, I'd spent about a decade, maybe a decade before that, on on, on building software in net. And so coming from a coding background, I was able to recognize the benefits quite early on around these. The code solutions and was willing to move to it.

00:08:04 Mark smith
Unusual because often develop, you know people that come from it develop a heavy background, don't like it because of the restriction. That, you know they have. A blank canvas, so to speak. So what? What was that? Why did you find it? Compelling. Well, I spent.

00:08:18 Gary Blunden
A long time living and existing within my IDE. That was pretty much my day today and I enjoyed it for obviously for many years and I've built some some fantastic solutions with great. I like that it moved to the web and I liked that. I felt that I'd come out of my own machine and it was more interactive as well with other people. So I was improving that dimension. I think working with others and collaborating more. I also recognized that some of the products we were using, even though they had been in. It had existed for a long time. That these products. Were better in some aspects and that they they warranted our attention. We needed to go out and have a look at these and see, you know, should we? Spec these out for the next project should should these be involved and one of those was power automate. You know that workflow automation tool. For us evolved from SharePoint 2013 workflows at the time, so and those workflows. Sure, right. Horrible to work with and and power automate done away with a lot of the complexities that we were dealing with at the time. There's a lot of composite black Box. Logic that was being held in those flows, which is quite difficult for certainly for juniors coming onto the team you know to fully understand and and get behind and and that was important for me as I'm I do a lot of work. Mentoring so I felt this was a great platform to support what we were doing now to build for now, but also to maintain in the future. So we made that decision back in 20/17/2018 to sort of. Dive into the platform and I've been pretty much in it ever. Since.

00:09:54 Mark smith
What's your vision of the future for the power platform?

00:09:57 Gary Blunden
That's a great question. I think for me. Obviously there's massive advancements being made now in technology around AI. And I'm quite excited about MCP. And agent to agents, which was released fairly recently or or shared very recently.

00:10:16 Mark smith
Microsoft has announced today that they're adopting it agents to agents from Google, yeah.

00:10:22 Gary Blunden
Yeah, which I'm quite excited about because it it opens up. It kind of reinvents the way you engineer software, and that's really exciting, you know, because this is like it feels it does feel. Like a new era of and. It you know, you've got to change. Your ways of working and way of thinking, and so for me, that's where I want the platform to go. I want it to adopt it heavily and educate and align people using the business tools already to. To recognize the value and as an MVP, I sort of see myself in that position to help translate that.

00:10:56 Mark smith
I interviewed Ryan Cunningham yesterday on the podcast. And I. I feel that. Minus are going to. Go. Away grids, views, forms over data. Why? Why will we need any of that type of stuff in two years time? Why? Why will we need to know how to create a flow? When? We have potentially a tool would have got to the point then that it understanded understand it understood every document ever written about how to create power automate flows. It has the real time telemetry data of all in flight flows, so therefore now you can Start learning from you know have create self healing systems and things like that or or process optimization, identify bottlenecks. All this kind of stuff now can be part of. How you're creating software and you know when you think of people like what we've heard in the past makers, you know, you see people with titles that they're experts on flow. Let's say they're experts on power pages. Powerapps canvas model driven does all that kind of to some degree over the next three to five years get abstracted away from us as builders. One of the things that when talking to Ryan came to me was. Is now. Is this the ultimate Vibe code platform that has got full governance and security wrapped around it, so I'm I'm not saying all that rigor goes away. The ALM, the testing, the unit testing, all that kind of smart stuff. But we have agents do a lot more of that and it doesn't forget to do it, it runs consistently. And then we come down to really orchestrating experiment experiences based on what the, you know, scenario or the work or the workload. That's that the customer needs to have designed or built. I just. Yeah. Why would you know? I I see it being weird that we'd need menus that we wouldn't say, you know, give me a list of all my accounts. Why? So you can look at them? Or are you saying, you know, tell me all my accounts in arrears or tell me all my accounts and haven't followed up in 30 days and. You got 48 accounts. Great. Uh, you said no activity to follow up on each of those using their preferred contact method. You know, e-mail, SMS, whatever it might be. What do you what have have you thought about such things?

00:13:43 Gary Blunden
I have maybe. More recently than I, I care to admit, but. Yeah, I have. I have considered the fact that you know these tools are going to transform. The toolbox that we have, I suppose for building solutions in the future. I I've been actively working with GitHub copilot for about 6 months now and I can see the potential there in the Pro code side. But focusing on the low code aspects and I was working, I was quite fortunate again to to work with Frank LAN at Microsoft on the plan designer and sort of a small cohort of of of people. They're testing it and and I was quite interested by the plan designer because of the interchange between the documentation that we generate through solution. Design and actually bringing that in to the power platform. So can we serve it as complicated document that's got all of the functional requirements? And non functional setup for a solution and serve it to some agent. Or agent of agents that can go and act on that and actually build a product. I don't know how far we are from that, but from my experience it's it's certainly improving and and progressing. I I like the idea of actually letting go of some of this because I don't necessarily enjoy going in and building loads of tables and fields. And you know that's. It's part of the job and you do it, but it would be great to give that to you. Some autonomous agent that can pick it up and run it. For you, but there are things that you know that you don't say right to the model and and so that intelligence you you you build in you draw from you know years of experience so.

00:15:35 Mark smith
100% that doesn't go away with. Without a doubt. I I I agree with you there. You know, it's not an untrained person is not going to be able to come and create great solutions. By their immaturity of prompting an immaturity, of knowing the architecture of the parts, and how it all comes together, I think you know those that have been and come through the last five to 10 years, that the power platform has been around. Almost have an unfair advantage in the next three to five years, because anybody entering in three to five years time. Will not have that legacy that not have that history. And I was on another call with the head of. Developer tools for Microsoft on the platform earlier this week and I said. With AI, we're eliminating juniors. We're eliminating mid tier developers. How do we ever get in 10 years time experienced developers when they haven't gone through debugging their own code. They haven't gone through. Something not running as intended and they have to find out why and what and and and. You know, then we're not just gonna, you know, bake and output experienced engineers if they haven't kind of beaten the trenches. So how do we think of that world in the future or or will it be irrelevant? I don't.

00:17:05 Gary Blunden
Know. Yeah, it's a valid concern. I feel like my retirement's going to be further away than I than I planned. If yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel the same. In fact. So it's. Yeah, it's it is. A concern and and I think that's why as these technologies improve and they become more abstracted, the fundamental understanding of what's actually happening under the hood goes away in time. And as you know. Those that had that knowledge. You know, place one into their careers and and and and and retire. Yeah, it's it's it's what do we do with that lack of knowledge within within the ecosystem. I'm hoping that it doesn't happen that way and that there is some planning involved, obviously structure around how we retain that critical knowledge. It may be that you know. Supersedes our seniors and. Knows more than we do because it can see what the past looked like. And you know what? How we got to where we are.

00:18:03 Mark smith
Even as I said, the question to you, I realized, you know, when I started my career, I used to teach a class called Internet Working A5 day class on how packets moved from your computer keyboard. Through your neck on your computer, through what was called the open System interconnection reference model, which is a multi layer process of ultimately getting to hardware and going out your network, cable and travelling across you know your local routers and then Internet backbone routers and and how DNS worked and how TCP. And IP and everything worked. And of course nobody cares about that these days. It just works right upon a domain number. I just go and put my credit card and they get a domain name and somebody says something about DNS and it pre populates it all for me with a few questions. I don't know how like a modern individual building a web, you know, I mean, even what the other day I'm, I'm not a developer and I I've. VS code open, I install Roo an extension, put a gateway on that that accesses every GPU. Sorry every all the different models right put $25.00 of credit down so I can take tokens in. And. Built a 30 screen web app in 10 minutes through prompting. Watch the code get. All written in front of me say get it to debug itself, get it? You know, as in, as you say with with GitHub copilot, and it's just like. I could, if I'd gone and asked somebody to build that 2 weeks a week ago, that would have been two weeks worth of work.

00:19:44 Gary Blunden
Yeah. You know, you have to stand up and take notice of that because it's. It's it's. It's a paradigm shift, isn't it in in terms of how we develop solutions, I think there's a part to play for AI, but at the same time that humans, human supervision is so critical still, because those that use this use this technology daily within software engineering will. Likely to testify as well that there are still a lot. Of. Nuances that AI doesn't yet understand, and and painfully so as well. You know, if you're building something and you're, you've got a pattern within your project that you want to align to. UM or you can't yet see your full solution, so you know it's it's really different. It's if you want to spin up a scaffolding for a new application, great. You know, AI will go and do that for you. But as you maintain that code base over time, I don't think AI is there yet to that. I would feel comfortable with too. Give it supervision, though.

00:20:42 Mark smith
And and you know, I wouldn't called what I built was a a trustworthy AI solution or anything or any stretch. You know, I'm doing it because. I'm wanting to test the limits of where things are at and I want to have my own experience of it, not read somebody's blog post about it, you know and and use second hand knowledge. But what blew me away? Is what I could prototype. And such a short time. Such a short time. And that's what blew me away because I know, you know, I've had teams of developers work for me across my career, and I know if I had asked like, I would have in the past for a demo of X to be built for a customer, you know, to show them the art of the possible, that would be a multi week thing based on the complexity of what I built the other day. Ohh, just like man, things are changing quickly.

00:21:35 Gary Blunden
We thought we had rapid app development with the power platform when it came out and now we've got this lightning fast development.

00:21:43 Mark smith
I think low code is going to go away, and I bet you're gonna hear Microsoft in the power platform space. Talk about. Vibe coding is that it's like they're gonna infer that this is the the, the enterprise scale vibe coding platform. Watch this space, see if it happens.

00:22:01 Gary Blunden
Yeah, it would seem like that is the trajectory we're on and. Notably, though, I still think, as I mentioned, I still think we're a few steps behind. But if, if if we can see improvements in certain areas like most recently we were looking at providing a proof of execution through Vibe code. So just very quickly trying to spin up a scaffolding of a project and it spit out some documentation for us as well based on what they had. And what we found it was BC and B2C now has been deprecated in Azure and it was still recommending these as identity management systems. It was still baking all of this stuff.

00:22:37 Mark smith
In. Yeah, I've definitely seen that, right.

00:22:40 Gary Blunden
And so you've gotta have a watch. close watch on what it's doing and saying, because if you just build it out and then show that to a client. Obviously they're going to be like, yeah, this looks great. Let's crack on and then when you move to a proof of value, you recognize actually a lot of the work that you prototyped isn't actually available anymore or you know it's anti pattern somewhere in in you know how it's built it. So yeah, it's one of those things I think we'll see a lot of mistakes made through through the development through those approaches. So I think it's critical to keep that discussion going, that there's a discourse around, you know, this is great technology, but you know, you still need the experts in the room.

00:23:19 Mark smith
100% How did you become an MVP? What was the process?

00:23:24 Gary Blunden
Since about 2021, I was actively. Presenting my insights around power platform D365. Lots of conferences sat on quite a few panels and I was invited to a. Lot of. Talks and I really didn't know much about the MVP program which. For someone that is now an MVP, I don't know if that's the for most, I think they obviously got great awareness of MVP program, but I was someone that was just. UM. Unaware, I suppose of of of what the programme was and, and I knew MVP's, of course, through my career. But I never really took it for some reason I never really fully understood or took much notice about the program itself. I recognised the expertise that the MVP program had, but I never actively thought that I would become one and. Over about 3 or 4 years of networking and and and working within the technical communities. Inevitably, I suppose in that period someone called Alexio reached out to me and said, yeah, you should be an MVP. He should. You should join and and and and and look at the program and see what we have to offer. It's a fantastic program. It's gonna burn your horizons. And he was absolutely right. You know, I joined the program and since then I've. Had conversations with rollout of Azure Cloud in for a large organization in Africa. I've been talking. With using our foundry and healthcare and there's just things that just wouldn't, I wouldn't have had available or had the opportunity to do if I hadn't been part of the program. So I'm very fortunate to to, to have been welcomed in. And yeah, since then I've been actively contributing, I suppose within my my area of expertise, which would be business applications. Dates are now.

00:25:15 Mark smith
Awesome. Thanks, Gary. It's been great talking to you. Hopefully we'll catch up at with you an event before too long, hopefully within the year.

00:25:26 Gary Blunden
Yeah. Thanks a lot. Thanks.

00:25:27 Gary Blunden
For having me.

00:25:30 Mark smith
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP, Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ 365 Guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buy me a coffee.com/nz365guy. Thanks again and see you next time.