AI For Your Business - With Peter Shand at Microsoft

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Welcome to the did you know Podcast by Varisource, where we interview founders and executives at amazing technology companies that can help your business save time and money and grow. Especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business. 1.3s

Hello, everyone. This is Victor with Varisource. Welcome to another episode of the Did you know podcast. Today I'm super excited to have our guest, which is Peter Shand. Peter is a principal cloud architect for Data and AI for Microsoft. Peter is super busy, so I really appreciate you spending some time with us, Peter.

Well, thanks for having me, Victor. I appreciate the invite and hopefully we can have a good conversation.

Yeah, I think everybody, especially in the last couple of months, AI is literally taking over the world. It's in the news everywhere and obviously Microsoft has really taken that virality and done a lot of really interesting things. So we're so excited to ask you tons of questions on what Microsoft is doing in this AI space. But before we start, I'd love to learn a little bit more about your background because before Microsoft you were ten years as a CTO, so you really have, I think, a great view into the technology world as a customer, right. Not just a supplier, but really a technologist. So can you give us a little bit of your background and story?

Yeah, well, my story depends on how much time you have, but I'll try and sort of compress it as much as possible. But my story starts in Jamaica. I'm a Jamaican and spent many years in Jamaica working as a Microsoft partner, sort of building applications from remittance to sort of mobile phone applications that ran on the Microsoft stack. 1.6s Moved to the Cayman Islands for a while, spent some time offshore working with a lot of legal firms as well as public sector, primarily focused on Oracle SQL infrastructure, and then moved to the States maybe ten years ago, 1s where my role as CTO kind of that was the genesis of my role as CTO. So I worked 1.6s alongside 1.1s a great team doing a few things. Things one, focused on sort of creating. 2.9s Flexible data architectures for financial services and hospitality. And then two also creating a security operations center and building a security practice, a cybersecurity practice for the organization that I worked for before. So, yeah, fairly multifaceted. Interesting. And then I joined Microsoft a little bit less than two years ago.

Yeah, that's amazing. I think it's a great time and world to be a CTO. However, it's also the most challenging because there's so many new amazing technology at your disposal, yet at the same time there's so many amazing technology and it's hard to figure out what and who is the right partner solution to work with. And I think that's what you do very well at Microsoft for your clients, right? So obviously you're the cloud architect for Data and AI. And the last again three months or four months. Everybody's talked about artificial intelligence, but last three or four months, because of Chat GPT, because of OpenAI, it has really gone mainstream. Where everybody from students in school, in middle school, all the way up to business professionals, to every person you can imagine are thinking about AI, using AI, and really at least starting to imagine what's possible. So what do you think about as a technologist and obviously supporting enterprises, what do you think about the interest in AI in the last couple of months? Is it shocking to you? Were you surprised or what's kind of a year's thought. 1.1s

I think, to be honest, 1.5s it was a little bit shocking in terms of the breadth of how broad the appeal was. Not just for sort of technologists techies or 1.6s computer geeks, but across the board, just regular people 1.5s in different roles, you know, from finance, accounting, management, whatever you can think of. People have heard about Chat GP and are interested in it. Interestingly enough, just a few minutes ago I went to get lunch nearby the office and two people that were sitting right beside me were just talking about Chat GP and things that they were experimenting with at home. 1.8s I think the breadth and the broad appeal that it has to people and the broad interest in terms of sort of demographics and groups and so on, is what is a little bit surprising to me. But it's definitely 1.3s great technology, it has great applications, and the way that it was implemented by OpenAI, I think, allowed people to sort of tap into it easily and sort of experience it for themselves. And I think that is what is driving a lot of the buzz. Yeah. 1.4s

Yeah, I think 1s when you look at Siri, you look at Amazon Voice and all of these things that was supposed to be AI, or our kind of like, view into well, you talk to Siri as an AI, but obviously when you start using it, it's just really a voice assistant. It really can't do too much. And I think that's why those things haven't taken off, because actually, 1s I guess you could call Chat, GPT and AI yet. It gives you answers, it gives you things. It do things for you, right. More than just giving you a bunch of links again. But yeah, it's really fascinating. We'll definitely come back to this topic later again. But as a CTO for ten years, right. What's been the biggest changes that you've seen in the last few years in this whole technology world? 2.1s

Well, I think number one would be the importance of cybersecurity and a strong cybersecurity strategy for all organizations, whether it's public, private sector, 1.6s and even in our personal lives, how we sort of protect our assets that we have in our homes and our data. 2.7s Just as a CTO, one of the things that I was tasked with was, one, how to protect our organization from cyber threats. Right. And then two, how do we help other organizations to protect themselves from cyber threats. And, 1.1s you know, in terms of selecting partners to work with, selecting products to sort of. 1.9s To achieve that goal is one of the sort of more difficult tasks because everybody says that they have a great product, right? And then there are so many aspects to cybersecurity, from the endpoint to the data, to the server, to the cloud, to 1.7s all of the different aspects, email, whatever you can think about. There are products that are going to be able to assist in some way, shape or form. In fact, I think a lot of my 1.1s introduction to artificial intelligence came from that stint in cybersecurity and data associated with cybersecurity. Because some of the better tools that I encountered integrated models and AI into the whole process of essentially analyzing events and logs and helping to determine what events would constitute a cyber threat or not because you just don't have enough people. Or the human 1.3s resource is just not capable of sort of determining what's going on in real time because there are just so many signals coming from the different assets that organizations have to manage. So that was one thing that I think was. 1.2s You know, really, really a big change for, for technologists and CTOs and, and how to sort of help organizations grow. And then the other thing is, is just the amount of data that organizations produce on a daily basis and 1.4s the fact that now that you have this data or you know that this data exists, how can organizations start to extract value from that? At one point, it was just throwaway data. You just kept it because you had compliance requirements and you got rid of it after seven years or whatever it might be, depending on what sort of regulatory regime you fall under. But 1.3s with the advent of the cloud and cheap compute, or relatively cheap compute, it's now possible for organizations to really start to extract value from that data, to help them to sort of deliver insights on data that never used to be as useful or thought to be useful or was too expensive to take advantage of. So I think those are the two sort of things that I think really impacted 1.5s my role and my time as CTO.

Yeah, 1.6s we could probably talk for hours about those two topics alone. But I got a fun question for you. Fun question? It's a trillion dollar question, because 1s if you were talking to, you were CTO, you were partnering with CEOs and CFOs, kind of the executive teams of companies. They may not know technology, but they understand the importance of cybersecurity. However, like you said, cybersecurity, you could literally have cybersecurity for every 1.3s thing you have in the company. And that's a lot. Meaning you got to spend a lot of money. You do spend a lot of money, and then you can never stop spending to buy every solution possible to cover everything. But I guess one question is it's not really possible to cover 100% of everything, right? And if that's the case, whoever figures it out is probably a trillionaire, right? But okay, it's not possible. How should a CEO or CFO who are not technologists really expect from their cybersecurity strategy what they can best expect? You think? 1.2s

Ah. It's a question of risk, though, isn't it? I think 1.4s within

the role of 1.8s a CEO or a leader or COO within an organization and the other members of the C suite that are going to be responsible for that organization, you have to at all times be sort of evaluating risk to the business, to the organization. Right. And in many cases, we have 1.2s a difficult economy. So CEOs, CFOs are evaluating risk associated with loss of revenue, changes in buying patterns and so on, or competition. All of those things are going to be affecting the top and bottom line. Right. But then Cybersecurity is this weird sort of stepchild that 1s can, if done incorrectly or if not implemented, to cover 2s the business in such a way that the organization is not exposed, could lead to risks for reputational damage, which could destroy the company. So one Cyber incident could 1.8s do what? 2.3s Two or three economic downturns might not be able to do so. It's how they evaluate the risk and how much information CSOs and CIOs are able to share with them to help them to understand 1.6s what the risks are that are associated with the data assets that are within the business. Right. So so I think once CEOs have a good understanding of that, I think the decision starts to make itself. 1.4s I'm seeing more

cybersecurity organizations or organization cybersecurity departments within organizations having more access to funds to be able to protect those assets from the endpoint all the way to the cloud to 1.1s even extending into some extent to the homes of employees because of sort of this remote work 1.6s situation that has come about because of the pandemic. So it's extremely important, and I think people are getting to the point where they're making the right decisions. Yeah. 1.6s

Yeah, I think a lot of executives obviously look at technology oftentimes as utilities, meaning you have to have them, you got to have an email, you got to have these things in place. But I think sometimes maybe they overlook some of the impact technology itself has on top line and bottom line. Do you have the right marketing software? Do you have the right software for your people to be productive? All of those things matter in the bottom line and the top line, if your people are not productive, they're not supporting customers, well, top line gets impacted. 1.1s That actually brings up to the next question, which is a great fit. Microsoft actually provides. A lot of people think of Microsoft, obviously you're talking about the Office suites and those type of things, but Microsoft, especially through Azure, it's not just cloud hosting, but there's so many other feature functions and value that services that it offers that I think sometimes most companies don't even know right to access it. And one of the service I want to ask you about is Azure Data Services. And can you kind of give us a few minutes on what it is and how does it benefit companies?

Yeah, that's a great question and you're right. Lots of organizations don't know the breadth of services that Microsoft offers within that category and. 1.9s Um, 1.3s let's dig into it a little bit. It can be broken into sort of two main categories. You can talk about operational data services as well as analytical data services, right? And within those two categories, there are different point services that may address different sort of challenges. So from an operational perspective perspective, you have things like online transaction processing type platform as a service, offerings like Azure SQL database, you have Azure database for Postgres, Azure database for MySQL. So some of those databases that are essentially running applications 1.6s on premise could be leveraged as platform as a service, essentially extracting that management component away from the organizations that used to be responsible for those in the past. So you have that operational situation where data is coming in, there's transactions, it could be a website, it could be some sort of ecommerce or whatever it might be. And then there's the analytical component. So you need to start to analyze that data to provide either reporting insights for line of business sort of personas within the organization. So you have services like Azure Synapse Analytics, which is an integrated analytics platform that provides things like Elt services, data warehousing services 2s and those types of things, azure databricks and so on. And then within that portfolio there's also a special and growing because we touched on Cybersecurity as well. Sort of era called Observational Analytics, where that's focused on what we call Kusta clusters and that is Azure Data Explorer which allows you to start to do, you know, sub millisecond analysis of. 1.2s You know, billions and billions of events coming in from things like IoT, or events related from a cybersecurity perspective, so that you can do sort of real time sort of 2.9s research 1.1s on what's going on within those types of environments. So the Azure Data Services portfolio is really broad. As as I just named a few of the products. You have things like Cosmos DB that I didn't touch on, which is a no sequel sort of offering that allows you to sort of do things like shopping carts and all of those things as well. So as I sort of got into it, you'll see how broad it is and you see how many sort of point products are associated with it. And then that also equates the number of use cases that you can really start to address with leveraging the Azure Data Services. And the great thing about it is that all of the services integrate. So you can pick and choose what you need for a particular use case, but you can integrate it, you can extract it, push it for analytics, then on top of that, use Azure Machine learning to start to extract, to do predictive analysis and so on and so forth. And cognitive services OpenAI. So all of the services 1.1s have a path for connectivity and integration that simplifies 1.1s the choices and the options for organizations to really start to extract value. 1.5s

Yeah. I think one of the biggest 2.2s challenge or gaps that I've seen working with a lot of clients is that there is I don't think sometimes it's not about the technology value. It's more how can a company fully understand the bridge between technology, what it can do, and then the impact for the business? Because really, until they bridge those two things, do change start to happen? Change management is never easy. Right. And as part of that next conversation is you obviously work with a lot of clients, the technology to do transformational things are out there. But why do you think companies, a lot of companies, I would say majority of companies out there still haven't gone into data digital transformation. What do you see usually as the biggest challenge or roadblock within a company to actually even utilize these technologies? 1.3s

There are a couple of things that affect it. One is. 1.9s Some. In many cases, there are shortage of the necessary skills 1.4s out on the market as well as within the organizations to be able to help to determine 2.6s the use cases that are going to be drivers for digital transformation, because you have to sort of be able to take the business challenge is and then essentially translate those into 1.3s use cases that you're going to apply technology to to transform the business. Right? So you need people that can see that can envision, that can see past what is their know into the future of the organization, and then essentially leverage that insight to be able to drive use cases that are going to drive digital transformation sort of strategies. 2.3s Three would be, 1.3s in some cases, the availability of data. How are people storing the data that they have? 1.1s Is this data accessible? Right. Is the data, um. 1.7s Trustworthy are people applying things like data quality policies to the data that they do have 1.1s to the extent that they can use it to make good decisions. Right. And 1.1s the other thing is, you have that data. Do you have the architecture in place to be able to protect that data? Because if the business starts to depend on it, it becomes absolutely critical for business operations. Then it can disappear if a server goes down or something similar. So you need to have the architecture and the planning and the structures in place to be able to host the data in a way that's safe and secure and available. Right. And then, thirdly, 1.6s it's a cultural thing, and that comes from transformational leadership. You have to have a culture that understands the need to become data or insight driven. Right. And if that's not there, then all the other things that we talked about previous to that are not going to be able to make a dent in digital transformation because the culture has to transition to one where I'm. 1.4s You know, your line of business people, your personas within the organization believe that they need that data and trust the data to help them to make better decisions to drive the company forward or the organization forward. Rather

yeah, 1.2s I feel like we've been talking about Digital Transformation for ten years. We're still Digital transforming still today. 1.3s Obviously every part of the company can see Digital transformation in different ways, but I totally agree with you. And that's why I think it's so fascinating with OpenAI or the virality of it, because it's through those virality that you're seeing. There's more companies in the last three months integrating AI into every product from phone systems to contract management tools to anything you can imagine yet, 1.8s even though that technology was actually available three years ago through OpenAI, nobody thought about it. And through this virality, now literally last three months, there's hundreds of companies I can think of that are already doing that. So sometimes it's a timing thing, sometimes it's a virality, it's just a combination of things external as well that kind of spur up that urgency to implement. But yeah, obviously you're Microsoft. That partnership between OpenAI, Microsoft has been in the news, obviously, Bing is really in the news. But can you give us some 1s your personal thoughts at least on the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI? What have you seen even internally? Has that been as exciting internally as Microsoft it is external to the rest of world? Or how has kind of things been going last couple of months since the partnership? 1.4s

Um, you know, 1.1s what I can say is that internally the level of activity associated with 1.5s the Azure Open AI service 1.4s is through the roof. And rightly so, because Microsoft is dedicated to sort of ensuring that organizations and people do more. And 2.5s Chat GPT OpenAI 1.8s are giving or provides a foundation on which more organizations, more people can do more of the things that they want to do. And the buzz is the platform on which that that is being built because the more people know about it, the more 1.2s having worked as a mentor for the Microsoft Startup program as well, 1.3s you kind of see that if. 2s Provide people with information right on the art of the possible and that information is distributed broadly. More people are going to see what is possible and more people are going to try and I think that is what we are seeing. So our internal activity is equivalent to what we're thing out on the street where everybody is interested in this thing. Every organization is asking us questions about how they can leverage it within their business or within their organization to do more 2.4s from sort of 1.5s people management, human resources, connectivity, communication, collaboration. How can we use that internally to drive that? Can we use it to enhance the learning and the skilling up for people within an organization? And then from a customer perspective, how can we enhance the customer experience when they decide to log on to our website or whatever it might be? So those are 1.4s our internal activity 1.9s is paralleling what we're seeing from our customers and the people that interact with Microsoft on a broad basis. Yeah. 1.3s

Yeah. So the last question for you and you don't have to give us any secret insights or anything but I am curious to find out from you. And again, I know being with OpenAI there's been a lot of marketing and 1.3s information on that but that's still B to C. But how do you see Microsoft products will change in the future are for everyone through AI? And of course we already know about things like integrating it with Teams, integrating it with Word and Excel and we can only imagine the possibilities. How do you see maybe on a broader level as a CTO, let's say, let's say you are a CTO of a company how would you think Microsoft through AI, the traditional product that they can think of will really change? You think

it's a great question and I think 1.8s the activity and the buzz associated with OpenAI sort of brings the question to the fore. However. 2.7s I'd have to say that Microsoft has been building AI into its products for some time. AI and models exist within existed within Bing before just for 1.5s things like sorting, ad placement or Autocomplete. Those are models, right? But generative AI and its ability to to sort of take this learning data set or learning sample and then based on input and prompts to generate 1.5s new content 1.8s is something that I think is going to help people to do their jobs a lot more efficient and essentially helps in many cases people to have 1s a better experience in the work world within their lives in general. Because some of the things that. 1.6s We can we can generate in terms of I've heard organizations using 2.1s generative AI to help with 1.2s releasing newsletters internally to their staff and so on. And it was time that would have been taken by a person. Right. But all that can be done. Or there's summarization. You might have a whole ton of events that come in for a particular engagement or with a customer or a particular project. Can you leverage generative AI to sort of summarize that and provide an overview to a decision maker so that they can quickly sort of scan it and determine what needs to be done as opposed to pouring through 1.1s an exhaustive list of reports? Right. So it's those things that 1.4s materially affect the amount of time that might be associated with doing certain tasks where 1.9s generative AI, open AI are going to be able to assist and help people to do more. So I think wherever Microsoft sees that. 1.7s There is a use case where there is a broad sort of general way to make things more efficient. Leveraging this technology. I think you'll see it being implemented within those products, right? 1.2s

Yeah, super exciting. I mean, I'm just glad soon, hopefully I don't have to spend so much time learning Vlookups and and I can just have AI help me become an Excel expert. Those are things, I mean they are small, but it helps with productivity, right? You save an hour doing something or learning and now you can go do something more strategic, productive and those are little things, but I think it can transform 1.1s complement everyone in so many ways. It's 1.1s pretty exciting. And one other thing I want to get your thoughts. I think one of the reason has gone viral is because if you think about AI and all of these things, I think a lot of companies are executive. They might want to do it or think about it, but there was never a way to kind of try it. In a way, it's kind of like you have this vision, but then you have to hire a consultant. You got to hire all of these very expensive companies to come in and show you how it's done yet. Really now through chat GPT. And obviously that format, it's the possibility of, oh, let me just test it and see what's possible, and I can see the results. That makes me want to pay for it because I can see what is already happening. Kind of like try before I buy, in a way, versus investing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yet I'm hoping I'm buying a vision. Like I don't even know what this vision is or could be. Do you kind of find that as part of maybe why has taken off because you can actually kind of try it? Do you feel like that?

100%. I think that is 1.5s absolutely 1.5s critical in terms of why there's so much interest. It's how easy it is to sort of 1.3s there are definitely paths where you can build complicated pipelines and and applications that leverage the APIs associated with OpenAI and chat GPT and so on, but. 1.5s Anybody can 1.1s ask it a question or feed it a command or a task that you wanted to help you to complete 2.2s and you will be able to see the results in seconds. And 1.6s that's amazing to people. I think it draws people to the service and it draws people to Microsoft 1.1s and the OpenAI partnership as well because it's visible to you. So I think you're right on the money. That is absolutely why there's so much interest.

Yeah, it's super exciting. So no, first of all I really appreciate you coming on, you're busy but you gave us some great insights from a CTO point of view, but Microsoft point of view. And the last question we always ask our guests is you've seen a lot and 1.4s if you had to give one advice, which is a personal advice or a business advice that you're really passionate about, what do you think that would be? Peter,

that's really tough question. And the truth is. 3.2s I'm giving you today's answer, because tomorrow's answer could be slightly different. Right. Or if it was ten years ago, it would have been completely different. But I think balance is absolutely critical in terms of how you approach your work and your life in general, 3.3s essentially dedicate time to learning, always be learning, especially about the things that you really enjoy or are definitely interested in, and sort of balance 1.5s that work life situation so that 1.7s it helps to reduce the level of stress. And then I think ultimately, I am far more innovative and far more engaged with work when I'm sort of fulfilled in other ways as well. So I think that's my sort of guidance to anybody that in the business and elsewhere.

Yeah, I love that. 1.3s Life and work balance, definitely easier said than done. But no, that's fantastic. Again, thank you so much for being on, and I can't wait for our next conversation to see how AI is helping you in your personal life or how you're using AI in your personal life. But thank you so much for joining us. Peter all

right, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Victor and looking forward to our next one.

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AI For Your Business - With Peter Shand at Microsoft

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