I'm a Jason Snyder, I'm the Chief
Technology Officer for Craft Worldwide
which is part of McCann Worldgroup.
I oversee the global production platform
and the networks that connect together
about 20 studios all over the world for
high-speed transactions in the
production of video assets, audio assets,
transcreation assets, and digital assets.
So today kind of the way that the
platform exists is lots of different web
portals with lots of different, what I
would consider, middleware components
and then all the data for those things are
siloed. We have several petabytes in
blob storage and sort of in different
levels of blob storage as well, so some
is in cold storage, some is hot, and we
have years and years of video footage
that people may be looking for, and
inside of a single file, which may be
massive, they may only need a small part of it.
We really need to build a unified data model
and then we need to do all the
data joins for financial data, HR data,
and then, of course, all of the files that
are associated with the work the people
are doing all across these studios, so there's a lot of layers to it.
All of Worldgroup is part of the
Microsoft 365 program
and we are deploying that across you
know 20-some thousand people and you
know sort of we look at the different
collaboration tools that would be
available to us it made so much sense to
to use Teams and I think that the
extensibility that's been built into
Teams now in terms of the elegant way
that we can surface our really, really
complex and deep information within the
framework of the of the Team's interface
itself is really the most valuable part
of it. The first epic that we did was
around index search and retrieval of the
blob storage and so that was the ability
to locate, find, index, through AI the
video files primarily. So the idea is
that within Teams we have, we're leveraging
the bot framework and so anyone in any of
the studios globally can go in and
start to kind of interrogate or talk to,
talk to the bot, have a conversation
and say look I'm looking for these files
that we worked on two years ago or
I'm looking for this this one video that
has the you know red pickup truck you
know that was driving across the sunset.
So that the using sort of the the entire
Azure cognitive set right
and with the way that we've joined the
data and sort of managed the index in
the files then the bot can return, in a
very elegant and simple way, all of the
information associated with that project,
that file, that client, and it allows sort
of the modal nature of the cards allows
then that user to dig in deeper to
find exactly what it is they're looking for.
You know, using the the bot framework with
all the Azure AI and ML tools I mean
it's a really cool experience so
I've done lots of different scale
business intelligence builds right and
worked with many of Microsoft's competitors
inside of this as well
and the the way that the tools have
availed themselves through DevOps ,
through the way that we've been able to
partner with cloud solution
architects, the fact that you know
we're participating in the SLATE program, like everything has just been really
kind of lovely, so I think for me it's
like every day I'm learning more about
what's possible and the huge part of
what we're doing is not just that
product and that feature set that we talked about,
but the network that supports it
and so within within Azure and I think
Cosmos DB, we're able to actually
implement some SD-Wan features and
functionalities that help set the
priorities for how the data moves around
the world from studio to studio and through
into that Teams framework so
getting that stuff wired up is really
exciting so like sort of the merger
between the platform and the network.
Oh, it's early days still, so we have a
functioning prototype of some of the
things I described, we're moving on to
our next step bits which are really
going to be more business-focused so
we're looking at automating things like
time tracking or travel and meeting requests,
and doing all of that through that same
framework and within within Teams of course.