Microsoft Ignite with Lori Beck

Switched On with Paul Modderman and James Wood

Podcast Episode! Microsoft Ignite with Lori Beck

James and I spoke with our highly-esteemed colleague Lori Beck about the recent Microsoft Ignite virtual conference. Lori leads our Microsoft consulting practice, and has great depth of knowledge and insight into Microsoft Dynamics. We had a great time talking about Logic Apps, Power Apps, Teams, and OpenAI GPT-3 (find below the poem that the AI wrote for us).

Highlights

• I love the Ignite book-of-news feature. Super slick. Other companies should absolutely copy this.
• Power Apps pay-as-you-go plan, making things palatable for a certain class of customer
• Dynamics SCM
• Azure Communication Services now more tightly wound with other things, like Teams — and getting SMS short codes
• Logic Apps can now run fully disconnected in Azure Arc
• OpenAI ALL THE THINGS! New Azure OpenAI Service, Power Automate helper, GitHub Copilot (not part of Ignite but too cool not to mention)
• Listen to me nerd out for like 10 minutes straight on GPT-3.

Money Quotes

Lori

Collaboration and presence awareness and that kind of interactivity, even among developers, is increasing everywhere.

They’re doing everything they can to break down silos in the enterprise.

James

At the end of the day, the customer wins here. In a big way.

The story of ERP up to now has been: I enter the transaction of whatever I’m going to do, and then I turn around and do the real thing [in some other system or platform].

Paul

Red Vines are superior to Twizzlers in every way.

I would estimate that the chances are that almost all of us have read a piece of content GPT-2 or GPT-3 generated, and not known that it was.

OpenAI Enhanced Poetry

Below is the poem I generated from the OpenAI API with GPT-3. Above the dashes is the original poem, and below the dashes is what GPT-3 output.

And what it generated still kinda haunts me.

i shall imagine life, a poem by ee cummings (augmented by GPT-3)

i shall imagine life

is not worth dying, if

(and when) roses complain

their beauties are in vain

but though mankind persuades

itself that every weed's

a rose, roses (you feel

certain) will only smile

------------

to better days

and there are, you are sure,

no better days to dream

about

and there are, you are sure,

no better days to bring

about

and there are, you are sure,

no better days to lie

about