How One App Transformed a 65,000-User Bank

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 the fast track program and large scale power platform implementations. My guest is from Greater Toronto area in Canada. He works at third floor solutions as a principal consultant, he's deeply committed to helping people understand the transformative potential of the Microsoft Power platform, as am I. He believes that the power platform is a game changer that can redefine how businesses solve complex problems and increase productivity. You can find links to his bio, social media, etcetera in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Michael.

00:00:57 Michael De Abreu
Hey, mark. Pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

00:01:00 Mark Smith
I'm excited to hear your story about your experience, particularly in the fast track program and the projects that you've worked on. But before we go there, tell me a bit about food, family, and fun. What do you do when you're not working?

00:01:11 Michael De Abreu
Food, family and fun. All three things that I love to do and and love to share. Yeah. So UMI guess food. First of all, if anyone knows me, I'm from South Africa. So Brian or as we call Brian and everyone else calls it, barbecuing is near and dear to my heart. It's something I do at least four times a week and I. I have many friends come over for various meats that I have to barbecue. And yeah, I would say definitely barbecuing bring and putting some nice steaks on the BBQ, smoking them and doing all kinds of, you know, creative things, family. I funny enough, I just had my third child. We we finally got our little girl. So I've got 3 kids love spending time with them, trying to get my oldest into to the power platform actually so we've. We can touch on that Nice and for fun. I enjoy soccer or. Football. So if I'm not playing it, I'm watching it and yeah, just having a lot of social time with friends and family.

00:02:12 Mark Smith
It's cool. What's that? Big sausage that you have that is in a circle that's round, round, round.

00:02:18 Michael De Abreu
Burgos.

00:02:19 Mark Smith
Yeah.

00:02:20 Michael De Abreu
Yeah, yeah. Funny enough. I may I. I make my own as well. Here in Canada. I mean, there are some South African stores that you can go to, but yeah, there. I've got a few recipes and so on. So get get the friends together, get a couple drinks going and make some, you know, some good butterballs and throw it on the on the barbecue. And I've never had anyone tell me they don't like it, so.

00:02:40 Mark Smith
Yeah. I I feel that you guys nailed jerky or what? Is it biltong?

00:02:45 Michael De Abreu
Fulton. Fulton. Yeah. Yeah, I makes makes about that, too. And. Uh, yeah, anytime that's the best snack to have, no matter time of day, you can always, uh, challenge peace. It's so good. Ah, man.

00:02:56 Mark Smith
It like do you use chili on it as well?

00:02:59 Michael De Abreu
Yeah. So there's they have the chili bites, as they call it. Uh. Yeah. Because I give it to my kids. I guess I haven't put on any, but I mean, I personally do love chili bites. It's it's definitely any anything hot? Actually, I do Enjoy.

00:03:01 Mark Smith
Spices. Nice. Nice. It's. Yeah, I'm. I'm very partial to dried meat. I just I find it's a great snack. You know, you're getting a protein hit off it. It's generally, you know, quality. So I'm there with you. Tell me about, how did you discover the power platform? Like, where was your first like? Do you have a memory of how? How? That came about.

00:03:40 Michael De Abreu
I remember the night actually. It was a Thursday night, so I used to work at a large engineering firm and work my way through the, you know, traditional it if you will. And I I kind of took a pivot. I needed a change. I was there for around 8 years, pretty much from a Co-op student through various levels. And I joined a small construction. From here in in Toronto. And me going in there thinking, oh, I'm going to help them bring a couple of their on premise servers to Azure and kind of do that traditional system admin and infrastructure work that I had been doing. I was like head first into SCM and all the system centre modules, if you will and long. Story short, one of the directors over there who led the service division came to me and said, hey, I've got this Excel spreadsheet that we use for estimating. I need to automate this. How do I get it out to people out in the field? Basically, we want to be able to spit out an estimate anyway. And I'm like OK SharePoint list came to mind. I've dabbled in SharePoint and stuff before, so I I jumped into that, but I'm like, uh, you know, this is not doing what he wants. So my very good friend Dave, actually my best friend who's my business partner today, I give him a shout. And I'm like, Dave, I need your excel magic. I need a VBA script.

00:05:03 Michael De Abreu
That does a whole bunch of estimating in this spreadsheet and I need to upload it to SharePoint and dates like this is a really good use case for power apps and I'm thinking scratching my head like OK, what's power apps? I know power BI, what's power apps, so he brings up power apps and he shows me. And I said, OK, I'm going to take it away. So on the Thursday night, I'm tinkering there with power ads, and I'm like, OK, I'm going to spend so much time trying to learn this to do this estimating tool. So I closed power apps. And I would say I kept launching it. And then I watched a couple YouTube videos. I'm sure everyone knows Shane Young so pulled up a Shane Young video, and I the idea behind this estimating tool is really a shopping cart. People needed to add labour and material and equipment and build a estimate. So I went down the path of creating a shopping cart in power apps and I was struggling so hard like it just didn't draw. I couldn't grasp it and I always wanted to be a programmer and I just it was I could never grasp some concepts again. It just turned into one day. I got it. I'm like, OK, a collection. OK, you know. The variable, and so on and then. I have pictures of it actually. We had just had our first. My first son. I have pictures of him at like 2:00 in the morning. He's sleeping on my one leg. I got my laptop on my other leg and I got addicted to the power platform. At the time, I wasn't even really called power platforms. Just so you had flow, which was now power automate and power apps. And I was just building so.

00:06:27 Mark Smith
Yes.

00:06:29 Michael De Abreu
So. I end up building this estimating tool that a whole department end up using at the time. Premium licensing wasn't really a thing because you could use SQL for free or in the seeded license. So I started building on a SQL database. I start calling SSRS to spit out PDF reports and then convert it to a Word document. For them to actually create the proposal. So and like I'm like, I bought this full blown application with version control, they could like, uh, do what? If scenarios with the estimate very quickly change things and there was close to 6570 people using this application and yeah that's I mean sorry for the the the rabbit hole there but that's how I started on the power platform. And I would say in the first year at the at the company we went from no power app to close to 70 apps within the space of like 8-9 months.

00:07:23 Mark Smith
Wow, that that is epic. Awesome, awesome story. Tell me. Tell me about third floor solutions. How did that come about?

00:07:32 Michael De Abreu
Yeah, great question. So my friend, I was just referring to the uh, David, David, God's name. Uh him. And I've met each other. I was just, uh, I just graduated, started working and uh, so did they. And Dave was on on the 3rd floor. So that's how third floor came about. So they sat on the 3rd floor and I was in the third floor in the IT room. And I'll be honest, Dave used to frustrate me by coming and knocking on the door and always had some new software to install or system admin privileges he needed. And I was just the IT guy. He always bugged so. Yeah, Dave and I just started working with each other and that side projects and just stuff came about. And our first project, I won't forget was a a small trucking company here in Toronto. Basically they they got soil from construction sites and they had this card system where the people would buy. You know 100 loads of sand that they could drop off at this site. So Dave and I built an excel.

00:08:35 Michael De Abreu
App that people had a mag strip kind of card would swipe it and like a whole point of sales system within Excel using VBA. Again this is back in 2014 2015 so pre power apps like now I keep wanting to go and rebuild that for them in power apps but yeah, so the funniest part of this whole story is we end up selling this little Excel spreadsheet. Like $5000 and at the time we like high fiving, we entrepreneurs, we're gonna make it. We split the five grand. I actually used my half to buy my wife's engagement ring that. She wears today.

00:09:07 Mark Smith
Nice, nice.

00:09:07 Michael De Abreu
And yeah, that's how third floor came about, Dave and I during COVID really got a huge ramp up in people just asking to. Digitized and all this, and by word of mouth, Dave and I just got so busy that we left our full time roles to pursue consulting. And I remember our first name where we were actually going to call ourselves alum and alum is Latin word for I think being different because Dave and I always said that we just want to provide value. We don't want to go and. Blow out a statement of work just to make some money. We want to bring value and be this like boutique service kind of thing. And yeah, we registered a company and I was taking a shower and I'm like, what should we call ourselves? And I'm like, wait, we met on the third floor 3rd FLOOR solutions and it's stuck and that's what it is today.

00:09:52 Mark Smith 
I love it. I love it. So obviously you've grown and and and the topic of the show is going to be the fast track program. How did you come across fast track? How important has it been for you to, you know, work with tooling like success by design and the Microsoft internal Fast Track team, and then getting recognized as a well fast track recognized solution architect? How much has that been pivotal and what you've done?

00:10:19 Michael De Abreu
I would say it definitely helps. Credential yourself in front of a client or in front of people. A lot of folks know about the power platform. I'll be honest. What frustrates me about hearing someone speak about the power platform is when they just brand it as a low code, no code or citizen development. I like to put it into 3 buckets. You're either the low code, no code citizen developer that is basically just like you would open a spreadsheet and build something to solve your problem, or an access database health platform is now another tool, and that's a citizen developer. Then you've got a fusion developer.

00:10:51 Mark Smith
Yes.

00:10:57 Michael De Abreu
Where you know, hey, I know how to build things. I just need a connection to something. So I raise my hand and tell it, hey, I just need a read only connection in there or hey, can you help me build this API? And then you got your mission critical, which is like game changing stuff. You can be building on the power platform. So everyone is talking about the power platform now. So if you come to a call and you can say. Hey, I'm you know, I got my fast track people instantly know some people don't know what it is yet, and they're still learning, but they instantly know, OK, this is someone that's got their PL. 600 at least. So you've got that education behind you or or that that experience to get your PL-6. I remember the first time I got my fast track. You also had to show proof of three projects where you architected at least four. I think it was around 1000 more users or in large scale enterprise. So it already also shows that, OK, it's not, you're not just one hit one that's done one solution that you've architected and and and so on. And then you also have to show some proof of work that you've done on architectures and so on like that. And then you also get interviewed. And I was fortunate enough to get actually interviewed by Reza Dorani, someone that I've looked up to. On social media and so on. So you actually vetted by the product team and the platform team as well. So it's not like you know, a lot of the other designations they were, you're not vetted, but you it doesn't mean you don't, you don't have that skill set or anything like that. So yeah. So to answer your question, it really helps credential yourself on a call. Helps people listen a little better that hey, someone's seen it at other organizations on how things are being done. So it definitely helps and especially if Microsoft are on the call with you bringing you to a. Plant it gives them some respect that they bring someone to a call. That's again, not just here to try and solve your problem, but it's someone who knows how to solve your problem.

00:12:48 Mark Smith
I like it. I like it. So one of the reasons this call came about was around large scale projects. And you know, I've got a pet peeve against the concept of citizen developer as well. And and I I suppose the reason for it is is that the power platform, if you look at the history of it came out of a concept in Microsoft. Would XRM, which is anything relationship management which was their CRM product, and you know. I, for many years implemented that product never as a customer relationship management system. I would build totally different type of applications that are still in production today and because they used the model driven capabilities, really what we call that we we didn't use terms like that then but you know for example the entire Border force operation of Australia runs on that for all.

00:13:46 Mark Smith
The air and sea cargo crossing the border. So we're talking about. You know, 10s of millions of products traversing the border a year, going through an application that was built many years ago on that XRM type concept. And so when the, you know and I requested for years from Microsoft and as well as many other MVP's and stuff for a. What we called a headless version of CRM don't give us. You know, customers and accounts are like we're going to build something different. We don't need that. We need the idea of an activity type and an entity. But we'll label the entities, you know, we don't we don't want your logic. Let us build power. Platform. We're like, wow, this is amazing, right, all this stuff we've been doing in the enterprise. Using XRM and you know the dynamic skew to do that. Now we can do it without that dynamic skew. We can do it. The power platform skew amazing and then. I started headbutting enterprise architects and organizations that were going well. If citizens can build on it, there's no way that has a LM or as enterprise or listen. We will keep it like Excel and SharePoint. We'll let people do what they want, but there's no way it's going to be on power integrated. SAP or Oracle or ServiceNow or any of these because they're the big. They're the heavy. You know, they're the central applications for an organization. And so I had this. You know the marketing of the power platform. I felt devalued because now we had a platform much more powerful than I had back in those days with with the XRM story. But it was being perceived as a platform for children. In other words, for the the people wanting to do a little doodle. You know, I remember going to financial institution and then building a power app with XLS the database behind it and I'm just like. Scratch my face off right? This like oh, citizen developer. Look what they can do. Yeah. No understanding of enterprise architecture or or architecture, data models, anything of that. And and I just felt like we've been done a disservice because even I remember working on one large project in this case. Over 40,000 premium power platform licenses are being sold. And it's coming up for renewal and they're and the organisations going, why do we need this like we're never going to use it for enterprise? It's a why are we paying this money for this amount of seats? And we've only got 1000 under consumption because nobody's really adopted it because IT wouldn't allow anybody to adopt the enterprise workload. And so that's why I did this whole series in the podcast on Hang on, let's talk to some people that have done some big stuff, you know, what are the what's the what are those big projects for you that you've seen over your career? What industries have they been in? How have you really seen that, you know, like I said, the the product I was talking about in border. Course there it's still in use today. 10 years on. You know it it they they couldn't RIP it out because it's so critical to the orc.

00:17:03 Michael De Abreu
Yeah, I I mean I I've got some really good stories about some power platforms, uh solutions that we've built over the over the years. There's there's actually so many to talk about. In almost every sector I can think of, I mean there's mining, there's healthcare, there's actually an app that one of the first apps. Actually I I built was actually to track and uh, like at a dentist, you go for anesthesiology or anesthesia, I should say. So they were literally tracking the anesthesia on a canvas app. So.

00:17:28 Mark Smith
Yes.

00:17:33 Michael De Abreu
The the heart rate and medication being given and all that wasn't in in terms of a big implementation, but using a gallery to actually track the heart rate with some SVG image in it and all that which was which which was really cool, it was again. Really Edge case, but I would say the biggest solution that actually was part of my application becoming a fast track initially was for a large bank here in Canada and hopefully someone from Microsoft can Fact Check this. I've been told it still remains the largest implementation of a power platform solution in Canada. And there's around 65,000 users globally that use it. It's a it's it's on the data. Worse. And really what it is, there were around 350 InfoPath forms to start off with and this was ever growing where they needed these forms to have some sort of solution. InfoPath is going out of support and so on which funny enough has been extended I think till next year now. But anyway there were these 350 forms.

00:18:33 Mark Smith
Is that right?

00:18:37 Michael De Abreu
We actually had a Bake Off between ServiceNow and a canvas app or a dataverse back end with canvas app and model driven. And really, what the the the requirement was we need. A form builder that has really complex logic, meaning drop downs affect how the form is at the bottom and so on. And there's 350 different forms. So what we did was we built, we architected a very nice schema on data versus really the app was run off 4 tables that basically had. Attributes and then one had business rules and so on. And all those 350 forms were then presented in a single canvas app. So you select your form, it goes to the database and collects all your attributes and then those attributes have business rules so that you know if I select USA, the next field will pop up would be state and it would only show you your states. And if you select this state then it will show you your branch locations and so on. That one was huge because once the the the application or the the form is filled out, it then goes to a whole fulfillment process where there's auditing there's approval process. If your manager is on vacation, it jumps to the next person and so on. So there were so many complex rules around each one. Auditing was very important. Because this is access to really sensitive data at times, so it was all full request performance and access at the end of the day. I would say that's probably the biggest and most complex solution that I've built and then the framework. It was just so reusable. Anytime I have a form today or people have forms to build this frame framework is so reusable. You basically I almost don't build tables wide anymore. I build them wrong with just attributes that. I can give now to an end because the biggest thing on the power platform. Is ideas come so fast and furious? You need to think how do I build but give the user control to maintain and administrate it versus hey, I've got a new field I need to add to this form and now I have to jump in pop open the table again and so on. So a lot of what I've been building is how can I build this but move on to the next thing. That someone's going to need me to build without having to maintain and support this, you know, with such white glove service all the time. So yeah, so and and I mean, there's been other solutions around warranty management for some big car manufacturers. Uh, there's been mining. Dave and I actually built a really cool mining app that people took underground to do drill logging for the mines. Uh, here in Canada, offline capability. So basically tracking every time they would switch a drill they would. It was basically raised boring. So they first bore hole. Well, drill the hole and then ream it from the top. So we would be able to track every time they changed the drill, what the ground was like. So once they were drilling, then when the ream was coming back up, they would know when they were going to meet tougher ground and so on. So very complex app because it had. Uh. Offline. Uh offline was a requirement because there's no service in a lot of the mines and I'm talking 2019 time frame 2020 time frame. So offline capability T was still hit and miss on the canvas app. But yeah we got it working and it's, you know just some really cool use cases and. I I love hearing these use cases that uh people have, UM, current ones that I'm working with is, UM, leveraging copilot. So I have this, uh, kind of vision of changing the way people fill out forms to be more of an experience. So. A lot of. Business case forms, for example, where people fill something up, but then it goes back and forth with whoever fulfilling or triaging that request. So now I'm tagging copilot with some knowledge and as the user is entering a field, copilot is almost like an assistant saying oh, you're missing 2 aspects into your answer, because now I can trigger a copilot.

00:22:33 Michael De Abreu
API call to like hey, how is this answer like a custom prompt? So, UM, some really cool things coming down the pipe with copilot that I think can take use cases just to another level where you kind of tagging that knowledge of an SME's all the time you know.

00:22:50 Mark Smith
I love it. I love it. I just want to focus in on offline that you've mentioned. Where is it from? A maturity level. Now, in your perception of the platform and even in that use case in 2019, kind of what did you do? One of the projects that we did back in that XRM days is that I don't know if you're aware of this, but dynamics CRM used to have this before the 365 was at a dynamics CRM used to have a com object in outlook that used SQLite. On the device which gave you offline capabilities and then when network connectivity was restored. It would go through a bunch of business rules around, you know, last edit blah. There's a whole range of rules around how it would update and we our use case was main roads and WA W Australia. It's like 11 times the size of the United Kingdom from a a geographic perspective, over 70% of it has no mobile coverage whatsoever. And these were Rd. working trucks, you know, with big toughened devices that were inside.

00:24:01 Mark Smith
The truck and the road workers. In many cases, this is a first computer they had ever seen in their life. Right? And so all touch screen. You know, experience arc, GIS integration. But one of the big things was when you're in the Outback of nowhere and you're assessing a damage to a piece of infrastructure where it be a bridge, whether that be. Even power assets or surface of the ground. You needed to be able to have all this input and then at the end of the day when you went back to base and it got a Wi-Fi connection, it would upload all those defects and automatically create work requests. You know, service orders, that type of thing and assign them to contractors to go fix. So that's how we did it. And those days, and of course, I've seen the journey for a long time, people wanting in the power platform, that type of full offline capability. Where is it now from your perspective?

00:25:03 Michael De Abreu
Yeah. And and I, I think that there's two ways to look at it. So when we were building this mining app that I was referring to, I looked at the model driven app kind of a route where you had the dynamics app you could download on the phone and and and so on. And there was actually a sync button which was amazing like you offline you you create your offline. To file and so when you capture the data and then when you got when you go online, you can kind of like hit that sync button and you see all. The records writing like you. Described but we were building a canvas app and this just purely on the layout and all the data they were capture. If I could, I would have built the model driven app at the time custom pages wasn't a thing. Embedded power Canvas apps was still kind of coming out and we didn't want to like kind of venture out into new territory just yet. So we just went full blown canvas app and painful story. We initially started with a SharePoint back end because the IT organization there.

00:25:43 Mark Smith
Yes, yes.

00:25:59 Michael De Abreu
Again, was, you know, against Power platform, which Long story short, we eventually got into Dataverse, which was amazing. But umm, we yeah, we were using the offline capability. The within a canvas app, which was really kind of rudimentary because you kind of like you jump in when you have a connection, you download all the collections you want. You kind of save it locally and then then they can go off and be offline and that's how it was kind of we both and left it. I understand now I haven't built an offline capable app at least for maybe a year or two. But I do believe there is more offline features that were recently added about. I wouldn't say 8 months ago now that I I haven't personally thinking around with them, but I'm hoping there's more of that. I think feel where it's more like the previous one. We were literally just saving a collection locally to the device and. Loading It back up so you kind of didn't know where it went kind. Of thing it was. Just there. Uh, in the back, in the background. But yeah, I I do know there's. I mean, Microsoft have been making so many strides in all the different features on on the power platform. Sometimes I feel like some features are left behind and then out of nowhere they come swooping into. You know, updated, but there's yeah, there's been definitely a lot of push on even responsiveness. Canvas apps used to be really frustrating to kind of make response of where these containers now help help a great deal. I mean, there's still quite a bit of work on the Canvas app side, but yeah, I I.

00:27:07 Mark Smith
Yeah.

00:27:25 Michael De Abreu
Personally kind of veered towards model driven apps first before canvas apps like I need to hear really good use case of why you need a canvas app because so many things out-of-the-box are just there with the model driven app like just the grid feature for example comes to mind. Like I hate seeing a gallery with labels at the top trying to make. Like a table. It's really frustrating. Like I know the Creator Toolkit now has a new grid feature or even the model control. There's a new grid feature but. I still feel. Like it's if we could have the grid feature. From a model. Driven app in a canvas. App that would be game changer.

00:28:00 Mark Smith
Yeah. I think even with PCF what you can do now in side grid and and options is pretty pretty amazing why I was laughing about the grid. You wouldn't believe the as an MVP that heated discussions inside of Microsoft, I'm talking about Pre 2016. Around just getting an editable grid back then was just man it was, yeah, very hard, but a different, totally different organization now.

00:28:23 Michael De Abreu
Yeah. I find that the editable grid today still needs a lot of work like it it's it's there and it's great. It's good for some use cases, but when you need to have some business logic behind it, you have to revert to JavaScript. So much to kind of do what you really wanted to do. But you run into a few limitations and.

00:28:33 Mark Smith
100% yeah.

00:28:45 Michael De Abreu
I'm very excited for the day where you don't have to revert too much to JavaScript and so on and and I mean even plugins have been made a lot easier to use where?

00:28:55 Michael De Abreu
A lot of folks don't actually realize the power behind the plug in on data versus or something, and they're trying to kind of code this logic through either JavaScript or with or they go to a a canvas app because they can create a formula that's going to do what they want to do, but they forget that if if data is imported through some sort of other mechanism, your business logic. Does not run.

00:29:16 Mark Smith
Yeah, I I think that data versus probably one of the most undervalued or under understood from IT folks and developers. Of its capability. And like if I look at where we're going in the next 5 years, it's almost like I feel that's the piece that will survive and all the interfaces and stuff like in five years time, do we need the concept of a menu in software? I don't know that we will right, because I think that one, we're going to have interfaces that are going to form on the. Fly based on the data types that you're requesting, so it'll be. In other words, the interfaces I think will be a lot more data-driven and how you'll interface with them with AI and I I've got this concept of like even the form factor. You know if you had a a projection screen or a television screen. Computer monitor the iPad or whatever I think.

00:30:07 Mark Smith
The potential with interfaces and stuff would be like. I need such and such display it on my phone or display it on my computer monitor or and it would know the form factor that was dealing with it would or would hey give me the answer I just wanted as auditory. I heard an example the other day. If I needed to specify a colour. I shouldn't need to know the hex code or whatever. I can just like it knows that I'm talking about colour now, so therefore the best way to visualize colour. You know, maybe a colour picker or something, whatever it would be. Or I just want to sample it off my screen and it would know that. That I I think that interfaces are going to get really interesting of the next five years, but I think the big building blocks behind the scenes like power automate and and data versus and stuff are going to be so much more critical. But I don't think we're going. To have so. Many consultants interfacing directly with that going forward.

00:31:01 Michael De Abreu
Yeah. No, I I tend to agree and that's why I was saying earlier like I have this kind of like vision of changing the experience of a form because at the end of the day a form is there because you're trying to get information from someone or update. Right. And umm, I constantly see people say I'm going to use case for power platform and they bring me this like. 400 field. PDF form and all they want to do is move the fields from the PDF form to the power app and I'm like we what's problem is getting this data right and now you're just transferring your problem from a PDF. To a power app. How about we rethink it? And that's where we kind of want to get is like the data you're requesting. Does the user even need all 400 fields like no. If they answer these top 10 questions, you know these five at the bottom go away great. So those are the things where you, you know I always related to when I I did my taxes before and like it would ask you like did you do your RSP contribution for example? Time and contribution, and if I said yes, it's going to prompt me for uploading a receipt or something. But if I said no, it doesn't prompt me. So kind of the same thing. Ask some qualifying questions and. Kind of as people are going through the wizard, if you will, because at the end of the day you are answering 1 field at a time anyway. So how can you change that experience, you know? And and copilot obviously comes to mind a lot and still frustrates me a bit to think a lot of people just think copilot is a chat bot. It's more than that. It's that's like that. Data retrieval spot. There's like tasks that it can perform autonomous or you triggering it, you know, and that's where you know, you have to kind of crawl before you walk and run. But we're getting stuck at data retrieval. It's more than that. Like, like you say.

00:32:41 Michael De Abreu
It can, you know if if if you're prompting it something, it can start visualizing things for you to get information from you that you ultimately are going to either use or have it do something.

00:32:53 Mark Smith
Yeah, Michael, it's been so good talking to you all. Well, over time. It is so interesting to tattoo. And. And you got such brilliant insights. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

00:33:03 Michael De Abreu
Mark, thank you so much for having me and I'd love to be again one day, but yeah, go, go catch the other the other folks out there who are passionate about the power platform and look forward to hearing from them.

00:33:16 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 stars.