How AI Is Reshaping Everyday Tech Workflows

00:00:01 Mark Smith
Welcome to the power platform show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guests inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power platform. Now let's get on with the show.

00:00:23 Mark Smith
In this episode, we'll be focusing on business, central change, collaboration and career transitions. Today's guest is from Cambridge, England. He works at Wingate 365 as an information system consultant. He started using NAV in 2015 as an end user and moved at a Microsoft partner channel in 2022 where he focused on business central. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Andrew.

00:00:49 Andrew Wingate
Thank you very much. Yes, I actually work now at Venture Systems Group. So the, yeah, the Wingate 365 is kind of a, it's like a side hustle. It was, you know, it's kind of a.

00:00:55 Mark Smith
You have changed.

00:00:59 Andrew Wingate
It's. But that's been I've had that for quite some time. That's my. That's my sort of blog brand, if you like. Yeah. Wingate 365. I've had a blog for a long time. I always did a blog for odd, odd technology things. So if you go on my Wingate 365, it's all about business central now. And you look back into the archives. I've got stuff from ages ago where I was like.

00:01:19 Mark Smith
That's what it should be, right? It's, you know, I, I I remember interviewing a guy from Microsoft, and you could go back 20 years on his blog and it showed kind of like his whole learning history. He he had, you know, the certifications over time. He had the projects had worked on. He had the books he had written. And it was kind. Of like wow, this is a.

00:01:38 Andrew Wingate
That's that's I feel like massively overshadowed by that.

00:01:39 Mark Smith
An amazing woman. I I think it's. I think it's good to have that history on your blog, right? And you know that you.

00:01:46 Andrew Wingate
Some of the like some of the old articles, you go back to, they'll, they'll they'll no good because you know the old hosting site for images I use like like Photobucket or something like it does it doesn't work anymore. Those sorts of things.

00:01:58 Mark Smith
Yeah, of course, of course. Of course, I've always tried to control all that. You know the all the images and stuff knowing that. It'll be the thing like I've migrated, you know, hosting platforms at least three times. And that's always one of the challenges, right? Getting all the images relinked and stuff when you're platform.

00:02:16 Andrew Wingate
Of all the data I've got, like at home, like the photos you took of you, your family and whatnot, like, that's the one thing that's completely irreplaceable. I mean, and like documents from over the time of time, but that's that's the one thing that you if you've, if that's gone, if you, you know, if you've got on a single external hard drive and. The thing packs it in. That's it. It's gone. You never get it back like programs. You can redownload. And yeah, I mean.

00:02:40 Mark Smith
Exactly.

00:02:40 Andrew Wingate
It's. I think you kind of forget what it's like to not be like a very cloud based where you can just log on to a different computer, sign into the browser, everything's there, all your bookmarks, all your stuff, OneDrive, whatever.

00:02:53 Mark Smith
One thing that got me is I would open OneDrive accounts for different activities. So for example years ago maybe 10 years ago, our family, our wider family got together and did a big family reunion we're talking about. You know 100 plus people and everyone bought all their history, artifacts, things like that. We scan them, put them all into a OneDrive. If you don't log into a OneDrive for a for a certain period of time, there's to raise it. What? Yeah, there's in a free OneDrive account. You don't have lifetime storage. So the count was still accessible, the data's just all gone. So I'm like and that was a little gotcha for me because all those artifacts that we thought we'd stored on the family history just got a raise.

00:03:42 Andrew Wingate
Wow, I I did a it's it's hilarious how similar that I've got. Like a I've got a Synology Nas, not just down there and I've got in that I've got I've. I have got a paid like M365 home account and you get like 5 accounts. So I've got like one account is just for photos and one account cause you get like I think one terabyte.

00:03:58 Mark Smith
Yes, yes.

00:04:02 Andrew Wingate
The home.

00:04:03 Mark Smith
TB each. Yeah, totally.

00:04:03 Andrew Wingate
Again. Yes. And then another account is for the documents and stuff like that and the and the Nas. If I mean, I'm always trying to get around to sorting this out, doing it slightly better, but the NASA's got like OneDrive sink installed, so I put my photos onto the Nas and then it just pops them up into OneDrive. So it's kind of like I've got them in two places, right?

00:04:20 Mark Smith
That's smart.

00:04:21 Andrew Wingate
So.

00:04:21 Mark Smith
Yes.

00:04:22 Andrew Wingate
Yeah, status not in two places. It doesn't exist. Sort of thing like the backup principle.

00:04:26 Mark Smith
That little 5 accounts on the home is quite interesting. As in as an MVP where I would get to go to MVP Summit and at MVP Summit they give you what's called store credit, which is you get to go to the Microsoft Campus store and buy stuff. And I mean it's not a lot of credit. Let's say, I don't know, maybe 100 and. 3 bucks but. Twice now I have used that to buy 55 license like so. It's basically a piece of cardboard with the the code on it for a with a license key for the home edition. So that gave me 5 years.

00:05:04 Andrew Wingate
Nice.

00:05:05 Mark Smith
And so you can go in and you can load up to five years ahead. Of that license type, and I think we get the license and so you get 150, but the the beauty is I think we get it like for 75% off the license.

00:05:21 Andrew Wingate
That's that's handy. Yeah, I'll have to look into that. I've I I just recently, you know, like joined the programme and yeah, it's navigating the. All the benefits stuff. It's like it's a it's like a second job.

00:05:34 Mark Smith
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the crazy thing is, is that we digress slightly. That the MVP program has added more benefits than I think in the last two years that I've ever seen from a licensing perspective that the amount of light as in the licenses you get to Microsoft Tech and the ease of access to it has been phenomenal.

00:05:56 Andrew Wingate
That is, I mean, it's so brilliant when you can get your hands on the stuff. Right. I mean with. I've I kind of, you know, in my little business central world, you know they have changed the rules on customer digital experiences, you know CDX but you can basically if you're if you're working in a partner, you can set up a sandbox and you can get into business central and you can just do anything. And you can develop to it, and it's just so, you know, like that's how you. How else do you learn? Right. Like you've gotta try it out. You gotta give it a go. And I mean, that's what, like that was. That's the real reason for the blog. It's not. It's it's the real kind of. It's like I'm lazy. Right? So I want to say future Andy, I've solved the problem. It's like, oh, that was a real head scratcher.

00:06:37 Andrew Wingate
Let's write it all down in a blog post, because then you know, maybe that helps future Andy. And then you know, some other people, if it helps someone else as well. That's a that's a beautiful thing.

00:06:46 Mark Smith
Yes. I've differing in the scenario where I have Googled challenge and it's given me my own blog blog post back. Yeah.

00:06:55 Andrew Wingate
I haven't quite got to the stage yet where you know, and I think you know, I'm very I'm very impressed with the the you know like think big, they think big approach. So if I've got some I kind of my blogging time is you know like after Sunday afternoon when there's nothing much else going on, kids are all taking care of themselves and I've got a couple of hours to do a thing and it fits into that spot. But I mean listening to your you know some of your past. Podcasts and things talk. You know where you're talking about, like, well, what about if you did 10, you know, could you do 10? And then you covered for 10 weeks. You have, like, a holiday from blogging or that sort of thing. So I've I've, I have kind of moved across to doing a few pieces like, you know, like YouTube, that sort of stuff. Right. Because. You can you can just pick a thing and and showing it on the screen is so much nicer than writing about it. But you know one thing that I did do, which I thought like to save myself time be efficient is take the YouTube transcript, bug it into ChatGPT and just tell it. Turn this into a blog article. It doesn't get it 100% right, but I just paste that below the video and then. Correct it a little bit. And then, because there's nothing work sometimes when you're in the like, I need to find that answer mode and you go somewhere. It's like it's a video. It's like I wanna watch the video.

00:08:04 Andrew Wingate
Just I just wanna. Read quickly to get to the good stuff so I've, so I again. I'm kind of just doing it for myself, right? But I know that that's my like a pet peeve of mine when you've got a. Video and you have to watch all the flipping video to see the answer.

00:08:17 Mark Smith
Yeah, the the batching is an interesting one. As an you know, I always one of my kind of themes in my life is always around scale. How do I scale anything and. And get a head of like I don't. I never like doing things last minute, just not my personality type. I like to have it done because for me, I've got this concept that I learned years ago called open loops. Everyone has these open loops or bridges or part built bridges to something, right? You're gonna do something. You're halfway across the bridge and you're like, you know, squirrel, and you're off and you're on something else. And. And so if you look in your life often, you've got, you know, 1500, half built bridges, things you're, you know, partway through doing and then. This whole concept of open loops and I first saw it and the concept of, you know, you look at your garage and it's a it's a mess. And every time you open the door to go into your. Garage, you're like. Oh yeah, I've got to clean it. I've got to clean it. And that's an open loop in your brain because every time you open it, you get a little. Bit of cognitive stress about. Didn't do it. Haven't done it, haven't done it. And the whole idea was well, if you put that into a list or put that into somewhere, you've given your brain the permission to forget about it. So when you open it, yeah, it's on my. Just. I I'm scheduled to do that in two weeks time and So what I do now is that like on Tuesday this week, this is my last podcast recording after the the the well. So I've got one more show today to do. But on the first week of the month I will do 3 days and I did 14. Meetings, for example, on Tuesday podcast Recordings and Stuff. And of course. And and then you know, the lady that looks after my scheduling of my shows. She, like came to me yesterday. I was like, hey, listen, your shows are booked through to August. So like, I'm not let you know when I go to MVP summit and stuff people go oh, you're bringing your recording gear so you can like I'm like no I don't. Think about. That like I Man, I wanna be like creating. I wanna just go meet people and say hello and not feel like I've gotta produce something from, you know. It was…

00:10:29 Andrew Wingate
Gotta do a job. It was entertaining listening to you and Brad talking about the technology like Riverside and having an extra camera and all that kind of stuff. And it's like I've just, I mean, you know, I'm on, like, mode one. Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. And I've got like a real basic microphone thing here and and I've got like OBS and you know for.

00:10:47 Mark Smith
Yes man, I used to use OBS all.

00:10:47 Andrew Wingate
The for the for the.

00:10:49 Mark Smith
The time used to. I I was obvious solid in fact. The last time I used OB S was at a conference where the conference organizers got us to set up in the middle of the Convention a like a portable recording studio, which I did all off my that that laptop Surface laptop there, which is 10 years old now and and I had OB set up on it. I had three cameras, 3 just web cams, but they're high spec 4K web cams. You know, portable bikes and had two chairs and a screen backdrop and. We would just take, you know, we'd see an executive walking, you know, from Microsoft, walking would say, hey, come. And so like, I remember grabbing Charles Lamanna sat down and I did a 30 minute riff, no questions, no nothing. Just boom down. On whatever and you know, one of the reasons for podcasting is I wanted to be able to be in a position that I could take advantage of opportunities without going, oh, shoot, what do I say? You know what you know and not be come across as being jittery at that point, but kind of, you know, say, you know, I don't know, moving into muscle memory, I suppose. And this is what I do. You know, I get it and. That was the last time I used BS because I loved it. You could camera switch, you know, I just had a little switch here. I could pop, pop, pop, whatever camera. And it was like I was running my own. Studio but in. Front of the camera at the same time and I just love that with OBS. You know what you can do and achieve and look like a semi professional setup so.

00:12:26 Andrew Wingate
Yeah. The next level is I've I've started to play around. Clip clip champ and yeah like to put like the intro bit the intro bit. It's kind of, but it's again, it's the efficiency thing, you know, and it needs to fit into that 2 hour window on a Sunday. So there's it. I can't do too much. You know, I try to not do too much fiddling around because otherwise I'll be there into the into the early hours.

00:12:48 Mark Smith
Totally, totally. But you you get better, right? Clip, Champ is probably. I've spent over 150 hours editing now in Clipchamp and of that, over 80 hours was paid work. So like, I know that I've done it cause the time sheeted, you know, and it's a. The I've got rid of the the Techsmith Camtasia type products that I used to always use which became massively a heavy footprint and you've got then you know things like clip Champ which are like born in the cloud and just a light touch get it done, you know. Sure they might not have a million features but they have everything you need to do a screen. The code.

00:13:29 Andrew Wingate
Easy to pick it up and and templates like like assets. You can just use staff.

00:13:30 Mark Smith
Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. I I love that product. It's on my speed rail on my, on my computer, you know, easy access. Well, the other one I've got in too heavily. Is cap cut desktop?

00:13:44 Andrew Wingate
I've I've heard of that. I haven't used it.

00:13:46 Mark Smith
Yeah, it's it's TikTok company where they've removed the TikTok piece because the TikTok editor and the app was so good they've just said hey, let's sell it as a stand alone cloud editing tool works on the phone, works on the desktop, but it's just brilliant and speedy. You know, once again using template. Beautiful. My neighbor was away. I mean, I know we're not even on topic yesterday. Yeah, my neighbor was away a couple of weeks ago.

00:14:11 Andrew Wingate
Well, this is a great segue where I'm just gonna say in a moment, and once you tell me about your neighbor, this is an amazing.

00:14:13 Mark Smith
Yeah. Segue into. Well, we'll see. Yeah. Yeah. So my neighbor was away, asked me to walk their dog, you know, and so take the dog on the leash for I'm I'm a 1K away from a six kilometre white sand beach. And so I head off and just every now and again, I'll just grab my phone and take a forward facing 20. No, it would have been 5 second clip and the dog would come into shot and. I get to the beach. I just open up cap cart, select template, drop in all those videos and instantly it creates a soundtrack, a transition, and I'm just like, well, and I just like upload it from the beach to her. And, you know, at the other end of the country. And I was like, it looked like I'd spent like, 30 minutes editing this and literally I. I got rid of the cheesy voiceover and a day of a walk with the dog, you know? And I'm like, yeah, let's get rid of that. But the music was right on point. The transition cuts were right on point. The Fade and fade out right on point and was like, perfect. It's just tech has got so good these days.

00:15:20 Andrew Wingate
I was thinking like while we were talking about the, you know, these tools and everything like how where does AI agents, where does you know we've got a couple of we've got a bunch of out-of-the-box agents getting published. They've got one in BC there's they announced 10 right at Ignite last year quite a lot of customer service ones and I was on a call earlier today you know looking at how we can. Doing your own agents, the copilot, studio publishing it into BC for your. Customers and it's you know how how easy is it for? Where do you need to be on the scale like Pro developer functional consultants? I heard the phrase like funky Dev or Semi dev or Funky Dev recently.

00:15:58 Mark Smith
Dev, I like that sounds awesome.

00:16:00 Andrew Wingate
But you know, like, because you know you don't need to be necessarily a pro developer to to to use these tools and and they've got some pretty pretty and like you know like your comment just a second ago was like you sent that video and it it, it was really, really good polished thing and it you know it. Took you 30 seconds to do it. Hey, I. You know, I don't use AI to solve my whole day. Yeah, but I use it every day to start a task to help me in a in the middle of a task or to finish off a task like summarize, check those sorts of things and it must save me massive amount of time. And you know, there's two things there is it, you know, how much time is it saving? That's a good thing. But is it?

00:16:21 Mark Smith
I love it.

00:16:37 Andrew Wingate
Like your the mind muscle. Because I'm going to use copilot. Am I becoming less creative? I don't know. Like I don't.

00:16:44 Mark Smith
I said I I find it's the opposite because now. You know, I will go and actually before we go there, let's just get we haven't introduced like who you are, where you're from a bit in more detail around your food family fun. Let's do that. Then let's talk about AI because it's my favorite topic. Food, family and fun. Andy, tell me about it.

00:17:05 Andrew Wingate
Food. So it has to be Curry for me. Curry is is the best is the best food on. Love a Curry and my wife is a big fan of cooking and we recently got she loves. She loves cooking, absolutely loves cooking and we recently got this really amazing like Curry set that it's kind of comes in the box and it's got a it's got a recipe book and like various spice blends called the called the spicery or something like that. And the Currys in there, it's. Like they are amazing. Like I would say like you know, that's our Sunday. That's our Sunday dinner, our Curry. So that's the that's the food, I mean, absolutely. Curry is, is is, is my favorite. I love spicy food as well. You know this whole experience family I'm a dad of twins so.

00:17:41 Mark Smith
Yeah. Nice.

00:17:55 Andrew Wingate
Find a girl you know, like the. When they were young, you know, like, my mind's a blank on, like, the lack of sleep or whatever. It just. I think you just might just forget it. Right. But the one thing I do remember is, you know, like, there's in whenever you go to the baby shops for car seats or whatever it is you need, it's never 2 for the price.

00:18:12 Andrew Wingate
Of one ever.

00:18:13 Mark Smith
Yes, exactly right. Ohh my gosh.

00:18:14 Andrew Wingate
2 for the price of two.

00:18:16 Andrew Wingate
Yeah. And. And friends, yeah, I outside of work, I like to get outside fresh air. I mean, I used to. I used to live. I used to always live by the coast. So I used in the past. I've kind of done, like sailing dinghy sail. Thing and then did a bit of like yacht sailing. Once we took a sailed in a boat out of Southampton and we took it over to Ireland for Cork Week. That was an incredible experience, but I'm kind of yeah, Cambridge now. So yeah, it's, you know, all that's missing is the sea. It's South cams. So yeah, like walking. And yeah, we I've done the last couple of years and with some friends, we walked some of the Appalachian Trail in America, which was a good experience this year. I think we're going up to the Highlands, but yeah, that's a bit of exercise.

00:19:00 Mark Smith
You should do the Camino de Santiago.

00:19:02 Andrew Wingate
Well, I mean, there's a lot of, yeah, that's the is that the one in?

00:19:06 Mark Smith
You start, you start in France.

00:19:08 Andrew Wingate
Right. Yeah. OK. Yeah. And there's the fisherman's trail.

00:19:11 Mark Smith
Yeah, you start start in France. Took took me 33 days walking.

00:19:15 Andrew Wingate
OK. Yeah. Well, we're all kind of like still working with families. So we kind of we we have to kind of like we totally cheated on the Appalachian Trail. As well like. We slack packing. They call it over there. Where? You go and stay at a hospital.

00:19:28 Mark Smith
I love it. I love it. I.

00:19:29 Andrew Wingate
Love it, Dave. Just have a day pack and they drive you to somewhere on the trail and you walk for the day and then they pick you up like one of the days you might walk back to the hospital and one of the days you might walk out of the hostel, but the other days they're just driving you and you're just.

00:19:31 Mark Smith
Perfect. Yeah.

00:19:42 Andrew Wingate
Sections like interesting sections up the Nice Hill, blah blah blah, that sort of stuff. And then, but you come back in the evening, nice meal, like in America. Steaks and BBQ like massive like, amazing rides and a coffee bed, the shower. Do it all together. That's so.

00:19:56 Mark Smith
Nice. So nice. My my first day on on the Camino 14 KG pack and you learned very quickly that is stupid and I got all like I had SLR cameras, drones, blah blah blah all with me. All of those got packed into a box and sent for me to pick up at the post office in a month's time and to get my pack down to about 9 KG's to make it manageable. It's just like ah.

00:20:26 Andrew Wingate
Yeah. The the guys on the Appalachian Trail, the kind of the serious hikers they talk about like 20 lbs pack and you know like and then we're on top of that, your food and your water and those sorts of things. But they those guys on the apple, they are like they just do ultra ultra lightweight like everything is so incredibly low. Like a lot of the people that walk the trail, you know, through hikers, they call them there. They they won't take a tent, but they'll do like a hammock with a with a range sheet and all sorts of stuff there to like, just keep that weight, really. Down but.

00:20:55 Mark Smith
Yeah, man, it just adds so much stress.

00:20:58 Andrew Wingate
Yeah. No, it's it's good. It's good for you getting outside out. You know, we're all stuck in front of these damn screens the whole time, right. It's good to get out. Fresh air. I tried to go for a walk. Most lunchtimes around the fields here sometimes. You know, I'm busy. You can't always do it, but it's nice. It's it's amazing. How you. Yeah, you might 45 minute walk. Like I've lost 25 minutes not doing something. But then in the afternoon a bit more, a bit more pumped, a bit more. Got the energy. The batteries have been recharged by that sort of fresh air and sunshine.

00:21:25 Mark Smith
I I find it's a very cumulative like you it's a three to one hit walking for me in that you know we do Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we do it could be an hour and a half walk and I've got 2 mountains around me. I've got 8 beaches that I can walk to. And the mountains, of course, are. That's a full leg workout. We're talking about stairs. You know, boardwalks climb, climb, climb to the top and and then back down and so, but because? So it's all my my wife and I go together. So you get the accumulation of you get to really have. Some good chats. Over time like that, you get the physical exercise and then I reckon it creates a massive mental clarity. And that, you know, there's there are points where I'll go on ahead of her just because we're at different paces and. And in that time, man, my thinking is just so you know, I I have ideas. I'm like, it's so I I find that walking you going to get 3 benefits the health the relationship building with my wife in this case and 3rd the and the mental clarity so it's.

00:22:37 Andrew Wingate
That my my lunchtime walks like audible. So I'm the I'm listening at the minute I'm listening to how big things get done, which is quite all about big projects.

00:22:47 Mark Smith
Yeah, interesting.

00:22:48 Andrew Wingate
Yes, and and and how a lot of them. Are not successful and the and the reasons why, yeah.

00:22:55 Mark Smith
Yeah, yeah, you talked about. AI and I know we're addressing of our our original thing and I really want to explore with you. How are you using AI? Like? You know, I find now I can easily have an hour long conversation with AI and what I'm talking about not necessarily talking about audio conversation. I'm talking about a rift backwards and forwards and exploring a topic and getting deep. And we talked about before. Well is it making us Dumber and I'm finding well, my brain is. More ramped up to new levels because all of a sudden I can explore and have a what I call aspiring partner to really go challenge my thinking. Like I'll often say, where's my thinking wrong on this or what's an alternative view to the way I'm thinking. And of course it comes out of left field with all sorts of stuff. You know I'll give it something I've written. And say, hey, where's my blind spot?

00:23:47 Andrew Wingate
Nice. I use it for a number of different things, actually. You know, being learning more and being more creative that that totally is right. I've recently had a was there was a user group and I was doing the release where I was I was talking about the release rate features for business Central so it's like it's a list of features you know like how do you make this exciting? How do you make this interesting for the people? So. So I picked up my favorite ones naturally, but also a lot. And the reason I picked them out is because like there were some, you know, like what's the business?

00:24:14 Andrew Wingate
Impact like why does this matter to businesses? And for example Shopify, you know Microsoft continue to invest in the business central to Shopify Connector, which is great. You know, because often the Microsoft sometimes in the past have put a product out and then you know like never never updated it every game but with you know we're we're seeing we're seeing on business central there's a number of areas now where they're they're they're each release wave they're making it better, they're making it better. They're getting it to that really.

00:24:38 Andrew Wingate
Awesome. Products and there's like, you know, like Shopify's like, you know, like Jack, TBT, like, what's the global market share of Shopify and do and turned it into a graph and it's like boom, there's my graph. Your Shopify has got the biggest global share and it's like a little graph. I can put it into my presentation. It's like and I just did that for all the all the different things like give me some interesting facts like has the UK government done anything recently? On sustainability or E documents, that's kind. Like, I mean that was bought for Google search but the the yeah, the IT was it allowed me. I learned like I you know like I didn't know before I typed that in that chop it did actually have the biggest market share of these kind of e-commerce platforms now I know.

00:25:17 Mark Smith
Yeah, it's interesting. You talk, it's more like a Google search, but I find that. I use Google very little nowadays as in. Because of their, you know, when you said what's the UK Government done? I don't wanna look through 3 pages of Google results to find the nugget that I'm after. Right. The beauty is it distills all that. Yeah. I think the research capabilities of AI is mind blowing. What it can sift through. And of course, you do have to, you know, check for hallucinations and validate. Stuff. But man, it's so much quicker than you know, opening, you know, 20 browser tabs of websites that you've got to visually read through to find the nugget yourself, right?

00:25:59 Andrew Wingate
Yeah. So I think I find it really it was, it's incredibly useful and time saving for that and it's incredibly useful and time saving for something that I you know I would have in the past what was I doing? I was I I did like a carving A colleague there had some problem with their route cross and I was like oh. Let's. Let's do a ping trace or just do you know ping minus T and leave it for the day and see like how it goes? And then at the end of it got this like text files, thousands of lines in it, like. Oh, I wanna see the graph of when it got went bad. You know you in in, in Excel, you gotta mess around and clean it up and just put the whole thing into into into the AI turn this into a chart. Boom did it. It's like anything it's like. I don't. I didn't. I didn't. I don't need to do the clean up stuff. I don't need to do all those extra bits of OPS, and it's it's something that was, I don't know. Maybe it would have taken 10 or 15, but it's it takes a second.

00:26:45 Mark Smith
Yeah, but brilliant use case right? Of. Just like capping the time on something. I was talking to someone yesterday, and they were saying one of their prompts is 2 1/2 thousand words long that they've written for a law firm and it takes something that was 3 hours of process time that they had traditionally doing. And this one prompt. Is literally hit enter and. They've got the data and you're saying that prompt has been iterated on quite a bit, but now it's a prompt that various teams use consistently because of the coalition of data it brings together and the output it does was wiped out that previous time frame. And it's just like I think there's so many use cases. That where organisations can take a.

00:27:32 Andrew Wingate
I think that's my my that's my next personal trip on the on the AI journey. At the minute my prompt some mostly short ish. I've got a few there where it's like a paragraph or so when I'm putting in like blog articles and I'm asking to check it in a very specific way and give me like feedback in a table with bold and bold the bits where it changed so I can again make the changes really quickly. Because I don't want to kind of like copy paste it back from the AI. Just cause sometimes it like it does kind of you tell it to like check it article and it will it will go like to level 10 on the like kind of like we're gonna leverage this advantage you know that kind of stuff like it puts it into the language that's not my own so but just having to check grammar. Amazing.

00:28:11 Mark Smith
Totally one one other weird anomaly I've found is that you know, I'm feeling more and more. I can see where people are using AI, right?

00:28:19 Andrew Wingate
Oh yeah. I saw a thing recently and I'm like, oh, this is generated.100%.

00:28:24 Mark Smith
Well, so recently on one of my posts was brought to my attention because I actually don't. I've kind of left social media this year apart from what auto posts like are publishing of an episode like this and. Two different people had obviously used AI to generate their comment on the post because they were the same comment from two different people.

00:28:50 Andrew Wingate
Right.

00:28:51 Mark Smith
Yeah. And we're like.

00:28:51 Andrew Wingate
That's bizarre.

00:28:53 Mark Smith
Oh, that's an as they're obviously using an AI automation tool or something like that to to do the auto comment. But here's the thing that why my wife and I were discussing. Yesterday. We are starting to use phrases that we know are AI. Sorry it it it is phrases. It's not words, it's phrases. And you're like, Oh my gosh, it's starting to seep into the way I talk in the real world because of, you know, working with it.

00:29:20 Andrew Wingate
It's like if you've got like the all of the written, that's information in the world, you know like before.

00:29:20 Mark Smith
And.

00:29:27 Andrew Wingate
Chat TBT like that was it, someone wrote it and now like as we you know like now as we go forwards, some of the stuff that's there on the Internet that could be consumed as to train models is generated by AI.

00:29:40 Mark Smith
Oh yeah, and it's it's gonna go extreme in that respect. And but I think it's gonna get good quality too in, in that extremeness that it's gonna go. But I mean look at a lot of the latest LM's are all being trained on synthetic data. So data that's been generated by machines and stuff. And I mean the beauty of of it is that.

00:29:53 Andrew Wingate
Right, yeah.

00:30:00 Mark Smith
So much of our data has human error in it, right?

00:30:03 Andrew Wingate
Sure.

00:30:04 Mark Smith
Right. And so when we train models with that human error and it sees a human error repeated over and over again. It's like, oh, that's the truth.

00:30:10 Andrew Wingate
I like. I like. I like Scott Hanselmann's take on this, which is why you're always nice to the AI because in the the Internet, there's the nice part of the Internet where people are friendly and help each other and there's the like really bad part of the Internet where people are like trolling each other and flaming, flaming and all that kind of stuff. So if you're nice to the AI, maybe it taps into that good side, right?

00:30:30 Mark Smith
Yeah. No, I'm in agreement at that. At which point does the AI become more intelligent than humans? And if we look at the hierarchy through history of intelligence, the most intelligent species sits at the top of the food pyramid, right? And the concern is, is that if it goes well. You know, and I'm talking about humankind. So. So I think it's a. It's an interesting take. He has there and I have seen there's there's another guy called. So who's written a couple of books? And I actually read the first books, which was called Soul for Happy while while travelling through Scotland and his 21 year old son went in for an appendix operation, his only son. And died on the operating table. And he was as an engineer. He was a head of the Moon shot program at Google. You know, they're big. And his life was just, like, literally destroyed. And he was. He was like as a developer.

00:31:39 Mark Smith
Is there a formula to ever ever find happiness again and and the whole book is this journey to finding whether he could ever find joy again in life, you know, with with the loss of a son who is very close to it in such a young age. Anyhow, he's written other books now on AI, and he's very much of A.

00:32:00 Mark Smith
It's inevitable. It's going to become more intelligent, and if you as a human, look at an Ant and it's in your way, what do you do? You stand on it right? And and he is just saying, be careful how you treat AI because it's only a baby at the moment. But it's learning how humans treat babies. You know, with that.

00:32:19 Mark Smith
Direction and and and what's it learning from that? So I think Scott's got a good a good view there. One thing I wanted to ask you about particularly was the ISV ecosystem and and the reason you know from a business central point of view, I've I've always looked at business central in some degree if. Though it always been well ahead from an ISV perspective, you know. Add-on solutions etcetera, because I come from the CE side of the house, right where there was a couple of rock stars, the the number one rock star ISV undisputed I would say was a product called click Dimensions which is now called click and and the guy sold it for $65 million his exit. When he sold to a VC, right, so.

00:33:05 Mark Smith
I'd say that's successful, right? Successful ISV when you when you sell for 65,000,000 on top of you know 10 or 15 years of solid massive revenue. You know definitely global penetration of an ISV solution which handled the marketing component that was missing in in the C product. Particularly e-mail market.

00:33:27 Mark Smith
In NAV and business central, as I say, I've always noticed there seems to be a very rich ecosystem of ISV's that do some little piece that a lot of people need and it's and I always look at, you know, ISV solutions is in too, they're either.

00:33:46 Mark Smith
Is on tool right? Like that marketing solution doesn't matter what industry you're in, etcetera. You're going to do marketing or they're vertical, right? They solve. Maybe you know you have a scenario where you have directors in multiple countries and there's a shareholding split that needs to be calculated in multiple currencies.

00:34:06 Mark Smith
And multiple percentages and the director was only on from this time to this time. So therefore there's a lot. Of moving parts and how you finance. Really accurately represent the allocation if you like. Might be that Microsoft goes hey, when I'm putting that into the app because it's an edge case, right? So an ISP comes along, they have one customer that needs it. It builds, and then you find there's fifty other customers want it. Tell me about that ISV ecosystem from your perspective in BC.

00:34:34 Andrew Wingate
Yeah. I mean, the business, central, the ISV ecosystem is is essential, it's it. And whenever I'm talking to clients, I always give the example of you know, like we've got your iPhone or your Android or whatever. And then I'm gonna go and download WhatsApp. Everyone uses WhatsApp. So it's a kind of a tool that everyone uses and app source for business central like that I think there.

00:34:55 Andrew Wingate
There's nearly 6007 thousand apps on apps source for business central, and you know there's some massive, huge companies on there, repped ones and there's some very smaller. There's a lot of very small ones. So one of the part of the skill or part of the kind of.

00:35:09 Andrew Wingate
Like the black, but it's like the Black book. Which are the best ISV's to do the different thing? You gotta. You wanna have a company that's going to be reputable and that, you know, has been around for good long time and produces good quality ISV software. And there are some absolute, some absolute Belters out there. And exactly as you describe, you know, Microsoft's strategy for business central is. Invest in the core functionality. Invest in the service layer. Invest in AI. You know things that every every business will need, and they leave. They leave the door open and then they make it possible for these ISP companies to create like top-quality horizontal and vertical solutions that you align depending on. Yeah, it helps. It helps business central. Be a good fit in many different places we use, we use a needs analysis survey from a company called C365 and you know then you you get like you get it's like business process. Moscow survey, right. Yeah. Yeah. And and out and out of the back of that you get like the business central fit or the F&O fit and it's kind of like the the natural fit.Yeah.

00:36:04 Mark Smith
Yep, Yep, Yep.

00:36:09 Andrew Wingate
The ISV fit and then like what you might need to develop and it's it's incredible the capability that the the ISV's bring to the table. I mean, there's a, you know, there are. There are a few that if you're a business central consultant you've all used continue. You've all used jets. There are some of these tools where just most projects will have it and and then you get the more specialists and then you get those are kind of easy plug in and some of the ISP's take continue for example that. They do various things. One of the most common things probably that people might have used there is the document capture their optical character recognition thing, but that they've got a great product, but they they they've invested heavily also in the in the partner net, the partner model. So as a partner, if you're a partner of continuer. One click demo sandbox like live version of BC that's got all the the same demo that you did for every customer. It's ready to roll at the right rolling point. You know where you can kind of show off the stuff with a with a phone emulator for, you know, on the expense side of things. So the the really successful ISV.

00:37:11 Mark Smith
Yes, yes, yes.

00:37:15 Andrew Wingate
They they kind of go the next. Mile. Most commonly, the ISV's will, you know, they'll usually do give you like a not for resale licence to the partner and give you a demo license so that you can, you know, set it up, train your people. A lot of them, you know, like, you know, the task, it would be another great example of a top quality ISV, you know, task at university or the continuum.learnyouknowdocs.continueritsjustlikemicrosoftyouknowitsjustlikelearn.microsoft.com they they're sharing that information, they're producing good quality software. It's a, it's a good price, it does. For the you know, would you build it or would you buy it? You know, some of these things you'd be crazy to. Got it. Because they've got it sorted, they've got it. They've got it. It's, they're tooled up. And they are. They're ahead of the curve. They're, you know, every single release wave. They're following the Microsoft release waves. They've got all the documentation. They support the partner. It just makes it. It's so great interacting with these companies because all they do is make you as a partner organization. They just make you look better. Like they. Make you able to meet the client's needs. There's nothing greater on. You know, when you're having a sales call or pre sales call and the person you know like can it do this? Can it do that? It's like, oh, you know, here we go on the next demo, we'll show you that. Cool. And you know, some of these tools, if people are moving from real old systems and a lot of companies that you know in the market for basic business central, they might be moving off of Sage, QuickBooks or whatever and and some of the you know when you jump up to business central. Some of the tools in there, you know people say things like wow, that's gonna that's gonna save me a day, you know, every week, these sorts of things. And it's I think that's. There's, you know, doing professional services delivery can be stressful at times, but the the reason why I keep going at it is because it's those moments where you're you're you're, I love just, you know, solving problems for people at the end of the day, the tool is there, but it it's it's, it's that relationship and you know with the business central project.

00:39:01 Mark Smith
Yeah, yeah.

00:39:09 Andrew Wingate
Most business central projects are relatively the SMB side, so you know business central delivery team might might be two people. I'm a lead consultant, PM maybe a little bit of development time from somebody, but that lead consultant you know like you get to know all the people in. That other business you, you know? Yeah, you. Have become part of the team for the duration of the project, perhaps, and you can you can really kind of, you know, people are grateful when you're solving all their problems and, you know, making their lives a little bit easier. Right, yeah. So to answer your question, yeah, SV is essential for business central and business central compared to F&O. FAO I think you probably there's, I don't know, the stats, but there's maybe it's an order of magnitude 10. Less ISV's for for FO because FO's got a huge amount of functionality and sometimes you know Microsoft. What they they buy it for business central as well. But Dino Way Enterprise Asset management in F&O it's part of the product. They bought it a while back in business central you can. Plug it in as an ISV.

00:40:06 Mark Smith
Yeah, yeah, because not everyone's gonna need it. Right as well. And so it's, it's about that creating that clean core and and sticking to the knitting and then allowing people to fill around the edges. It's something here I want to explore a lot more because that one of the other common themes I'm noticing in the industry, particularly in the power platform space. Is that there's people wanting to produce ISV solutions, but they don't know how to license it and lock it down because the platform doesn't have any construct to, you know, it's very easy to reverse engineer and therefore and people like well, do I have to put on my? IP out there and lose it.

00:40:42 Andrew Wingate
For sure, I mean business central is not perfect in that regard and I'm kind of my background is not development. So I I I I've got an idea of the plan, but I don't know exactly but. Ultimately, with ISV's and business central, you can, I'm not sure if it's actually released yet, but it you know, but certainly very soon you know you can you can monetise through appsource automatically you can you can make your extensions like so that you can't so that people can't download the source code which is a which is a problem in itself. I'm sure when you spoke to Brad last you might have.

00:41:07 Mark Smith
Yes.

00:41:11 Andrew Wingate
Like the source code, there's nothing worse than going and trying to support a customer and their previous partner stored a bunch of extensions just for them, and there's like and you can't get the source code. And if it was NAV on Prem like, yeah, you could get into the database and you kind of maybe you could get it. It's not great, but in the SAS, no, you like if it's, if they've marked, you know you cannot download.

00:41:18 Mark Smith
100.

00:41:31 Andrew Wingate
The source code you have to recreate you have to recreate functionality. It's a bit of a nightmare.

00:41:32 Mark Smith
Yeah. Totally, totally, totally right. And then and that's man technical debt and extreme. Last question cause we're well over time. Tell me about change management from your perspective.

00:41:49 Andrew Wingate
Sure. Change management for me is again people and communication is the number one factor there. And you know like there's various models, you know like the change curve and all these sorts of things and. You know it, it gives it's a kind of an approximation to the psychology that's going on in your average group of people, right? No one person, you know, you can't read a book and then and then understand how all different individuals will work. Everyone's, everyone's different. Everyone's got their what they can accept in front of them, you know, like we're gonna do this. Does it make you happy or sad? You know, some people. More nervous than others. And there's, you know, early adopters and all that good stuff. So for me, it's getting to know people getting under the skin a little bit, if you can understanding how. How you can give a benefit to people trying to think of some examples, but you know on one project it was one of the one of the end users and and she was very nervous about the stuff and it was a case of, you know, well, where can I if we could generate some goodwill somewhere else? Well, this area or this area is really gonna, you know, this is gonna make you a lot easier. It's gonna make it a lot easier and do these things and trying to sort of. Generate generating the goodwill. There's always, there's always bumps in the road on every project, every you know, in when you've got a difficult chain. Process I think if people are being honest is incredibly important. You gotta have and that means sometimes having the difficult conversation straight away, you know you, you know, the people are gonna get not they wanna hear this at all. But if you build that reputation for honesty right on the word go you know that is I mean that absolute must for me because.

00:43:20 Andrew Wingate
I think, yeah, it's people have to trust you if you're. You and as you like, you know business Central project now as you as you go towards the end of the project you've got the like the go like the financial cut over and as a business central consultant we've done this many times. So we know exactly how how the how the deal works but for the finance teams that you're bringing through this there maybe they never did an ERP project before right. And they're like Oh my goodness, how's this gonna work? And well, the number you know like they're.

00:43:39 Mark Smith
Exactly.

00:43:44 Andrew Wingate
Something that could be super, super stressful, right? And so, yeah, you've gotta you've gotta have that trust. And you know, we do we. Do. Things mock go lives, dry runs, and all the testing that you do and all the rest of it so that you so that the real go live is, you know, super dead boring. And it's like, oh, is are we done? Is it is it live? Yeah. It's live. Yeah, everyone's fine. Yeah. So yeah, people, you've got to, you've got to. You've got to make a connection, I think. And and and do and to have the answers. And if you don't have the answers, be honest. I don't know. That's a great question. I'll go and find out and do the research. Do your.

00:44:04 Mark Smith
Perfect. Perfect.

00:44:15 Andrew Wingate
Homework. Gosh, here's how we're gonna solve that problem I love.

00:44:18 Mark Smith
I love it. Andy, we're out of time. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I like we got to obviously talk for hours. Hopefully we'll catch you. You're gonna see it. Alright.

00:44:26 Andrew Wingate
I was a bit too late to the to the to the thing, so I missed out on the ticket, but I will. No. Oh no. I'll dial in on one of the days.

00:44:32 Mark Smith
Here's here's the thing, right? And this goes back, you know, years of doing this. I used to get up because back in the day, right, everything just worked on Seattle. Time and and and so I would get up at 2:00 AM in the morning just to make sure, because if maybe your interation slot there was, there was a limit, right? Because you're dealing with every in the world. And I tell you what, like, my alarm would be set, I would be there, I would be logged in and waiting because it be it was such a competitive thing that kind of went.

00:44:40 Andrew Wingate
So.

00:45:00 Mark Smith
But I can see it's now come back because they're limiting. But so it's. Yeah.

00:45:05 Andrew Wingate
It was, yeah, I think, I think I like Chris. We were talking about this earlier. I think he's I think he's heading there. He doesn't have a ticket, but he's just gonna hang out and have a great time.

00:45:12 Andrew Wingate
You're kidding. I think. Well, maybe he has got a ticket. I don't know. Look, you.

00:45:12 Mark Smith
You. Never really know me, Chris. Ohh no, no, but that could be Chris. I'm gonna ask him. And now it's time. Man. That's nuts. Cheers, Andy. Thank you so much.

00:45:25 Andrew Wingate
Awesome. Thanks so much for having you on the show. Really love chatting.

00:45:29 Mark Smith
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP, Mark Smith, otherwise known as the nz365guy. If there's a guest you would like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buy me a coffee.com/nz365guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the.