>> Hi. Welcome to Less Code, More Power.
We are so stouts today to have Philippe on the show.
He is basically the king of Power Virtual Agents.
So stay tuned, you're going to
learn so much stuff in this episode.
>> You absolutely don't want to miss it.
[MUSIC]
>> Hi there, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Less Code,
More Power. I'm Sarah.
>> I'm Dona. Today, we're going to be talking
to one of the foremost pioneers of Power Virtual agents.
On Less Code, More Power, as you know,
we bring people from all over the world who are
experts at building chat bots,
Websites, Apps, Visualization Dashboards,
and UI automation, and they do
all of it with Less Code, More Power.
So today, it is
our utmost pleasure to introduce Philippe Brissaud.
>> Hi, everyone. I'm Philippe.
I was part of the Power Virtual Agent for two years.
I joined the team two years ago after
being a consultant for many years for Microsoft on Dynamics Era,
and I decided one day to move to AI.
This is where I find myself joining the research team working on
customer care intelligence at the time which
became the now known Power Virtual Agent.
>> So what I find very interesting about your story,
and we've known each other for quite a while,
was the dramatic career shift that took place here.
Because at first when I met Philippe,
he was deeply technical. He knows a lot.
I asked him, "What team do you do Dev work for?"
He said, "No, I'm not a Dev."
>> Yeah. I used to be a consultant, and then I shift to marketing.
So basically, I lost any interest in coding.
I'm just being clear.
I am just a nice talking head and you see a [inaudible].
>> He's got a pocket square.
>> But essentially, now my job is
to have conversation with senior executive,
with customers, try to understand how they can
transform their overall ecosystem digitally.
The digital transformation, that's my geek essentially.
But what I felt fantastic about those tools that
we're bringing to the table is that someone like me,
who has no interest in code anymore,
can build something fascinating for customers and also for
partners alike to improve
productivity or transform their business.
>> Do you find it brings you closer to
the customers being able to do that too?
>> I'm sorry, what?
>> It actually brings you closer to
the customers being able to
actually build the things that they want?
>> Yes. Couple of things that is quite amazing is when
you have an ability to actually show
how fast you can bring that to market,
it creates a light for them.
Couple of months ago, I was in a conversation
with customers and we had an hour session.
The first 30 minutes was one of my friends showing how
AI is pervasive around customer service for Dynamics,
great demo and everything.
Then I was looking at the website.
To be frankly honest with you,
I was a bit late in the game that day,
not my usual prep self and everything,
and so I was like, my tools are so awesome.
I was able to build
a demo during the 30 minutes presentation of my friend.
>> Wow.
What I've done is switch gears and say,
"Hey folks, let me show you the bot."
I went on their website and the bot shows up.
>> Just right on the site with the customer?
>> Yes. Where we were just using a bit of a
showmanship JavaScript injection.
But the fact that I was able to tell
them about their own business within 30 minutes,
showing them how we can light up a bot that will
greatly change the engagement of the customer with a brand,
he was like, "Oh my God, how did you do that?"
Now, this is how I'm going to uncover the magic.
I felt like a magician showing a trick.
Now, you're like,
okay, they texted back,
and this is how you unravel the magic trick.
>> You landed the concept first.
>> Exactly.
>> You told them the story.
So Phil actually told me a story.
When I first started working on Power Platform,
he sends me over just a documentation link and says,
"You should build a bot."
I said, "I don't know AI.
I'm not a machine learning expert.
I don't know anything about this topic.
I'm not going to build a bot."
>> This is an amazing story.
>> Yes. But last night,
I realized, I'm going to see Phil today.
If I haven't built a bot by the time I
see Phil again, I'm going to feel like an idiot.
So last night at 10:30,
I'm sitting up in bed and I said, "Okay,
I've set up my own Azure tenant,
and I'm going to build my chat bot."
So I go to powerva.Microsoft.com and it's like using Vizio.
You draw a box, you draw an arrow,
you draw another box, you draw another arrow.
It connects back once you give statements.
Suddenly, I have a working bot for my side business,
which is quite snarky,
oddly, and it's
now answering questions from my customers.
It was wild that I was able to do this in about half an hour.
It did not take that long.
The hardest part was thinking of
all the snarky answers I want to give, honestly.
>> That's the hardest part because when we were
bringing actually the content,
the power of the content to
the business specialist or in your case, the CEO of the company.
So now it's up to you to think
about what is the tone of voice I'm going to bring to my bot?
What answer do I want to put?
It's not like, "I need to recognize
that specific question or I need to rebuild my model.
How do I connect that to the back end system?
Let me open Visual Studio and start, oh God."
>> It becomes so customer focused.
That's the idea that we want to get to those people watching,
is the fact that this is all about
focusing on the customer and their need. What do they want?
>> Get tech out of the way.
>> Exactly.
>> Put it back on the customer.
>> Yeah.
>> All right. Do you want to show us what you got?
>> Yeah. Let's see.
>> We make everyone bring stuff to show,
so we know he's got [inaudible] .
>> It's treats, it's like our food, I guess.
I'm a big foodie. I love foods.
Well, this is tech food or tech snacks.
>> Exactly. It's like a snack.
>> Yes.
>> I'm French. So I'm bringing the French cuisine
to the table.
>> Amazing.
>> There you go.
>> Setting a really high bar for the peers.
>> Yes, I love it, I know.
>> All right. Let's combine a few things that
[inaudible] style. So here's a bot that I put together,
which is my own virtual assistant.
So what is the job of that bot.
The job of this bot is actually to make my life easier
as one of Microsoft busy people.
I'm not a CVP.
I don't have an admin that can look at my calendar for me.
When Dona say, "Hey Phil, can we meet? "
I'm not looking into like, "No, I took that person to get know."
You're not like, "No, I want to send you a link to my bot."
You can say, "Hey, I want to book, for instance,
a 30 minute teams meeting with Phil next Tuesday."
I need to spell it right. There you go.
So what now the bot does,
it will recognize my question.
It will see the cover and says,
"Hey, I can help you book an appointment with Phil.
First, I need to get a bit of information from you.
First, what is your first name, last name?"
>> I'll ask the bot to give me $100 before I book.
>> You could.
>> For sure, your bot is very nice.
>> So now, I'm going to do,
okay, let's use that demo account I have.
So imagine this is a James trying to get a meeting with me,
putting his e-mail address.
Because I'm going to use another trick.
I'm going to use two AI technology today.
What is the subject you want to cover is demo with Dona and Sarah.
What else? Come on.
So right now, we're filling in this bot,
and you can see we have a recap here.
So just for the demo.
Typically, I wouldn't put that,
but just basically, here's like,
hey, the name is James.
I said next Tuesday.
If we look at a calendar, I guess it's that.
Duration, 30 minutes.
E-mail, demo, and location teams.
Now, here's the trick that I use.
I, asking the bot to call his big sister,
Cortana to schedule the meeting for me.
>> I love it.
>> Now, how it is going to look like,
you see this the e-mail account
from James B.
Here's what happened.
I say, "Hey, Cortana,
please book a meeting."
You see here I have Cortana here.
I have James' e-mail.
Please book a meeting with James B on Tuesday for 30 minutes,
make it a Teams meeting.
>> Yes.
>> That is awesome.
>> So we're going to wait for a couple of minutes for
Cortana to just warm up, grab a coffee.
>> Think about it, she's an assistant.
>> Exactly. She's busy with many people like us.
So within the next couple of minutes,
what's going to happen is Cortana is
going to look into my calendar,
Phil's calendar, and see a couple of opportunities.
There you go.
>> There it is.
>> Here what she says, "Hey James,
I'm helping Philippe Brissaud,
schedule a 30 minutes meeting with you both.
Below are some proposed times when Philippe is available."
"Let's do Tuesday, 2:30 PM works for me."
It's only say, replied.
"Thanks, I'm good."
Let's do I'm good with boom, cheers.
This is not Phil this is James.
I need to get into the acting.
>> The acting, you can have a German accent.
>> Yeah, German accent.
I can [inaudible] that,
but I prefer the French.
>> There you go. Pretty good.
>> Oh my God.
>> I do prefer the French [inaudible]
But this is hard for me to do that.
Anyway, [inaudible] anyone, so I'm going to keep the French word.
So now, wait for a couple of minutes,
here what happened is I'm sending you back an information to
Cortana, it says, "Good day, my friend."
Now, I'm going to actually book
something on Phil's calendar directly.
>> Yes.
>> You're going to receive the invite.
>> Yeah.
>> Because I say it's going to be a team meeting, guess what?
I have a team meeting connected to it.
Now, there you go.
>> There you go.
>> Thank you, Cortana. Meeting with James B
and on demo with Dona and Sarah.
>> Yes.
>> It says who are the two people, James and Philippe.
>> Yeah.
>> Right. Then this is the meeting, Team meetings.
>> That's amazing.
>> I love that.
>> You did nothing.
>> No.
>> Yeah.
>> No, I just run the bot.
>> You didn't do anything. All you have to
do is keep your calendar up to date,
then build a bot, that's it?
>> That's it.
>> Suddenly, you're not doing your own scheduling,
you don't harass someone else
to go look at your calendar and you're like,
actually, I'm busy, etc.
>> Exactly.
>> That is so cool.
>> So now, you're going to say, "Hey, Phil,
how do you get Cortana to do your thing?"
>> That's what I want to know.
>> So that's the other technology, it's called calendar.help.
>> Okay.
>> It's a scheduler, which is right now an exclusive preview.
Turns out, Microsoft folks,
you know folks, you know people [inaudible]
>> Yeah, you know people who know people.
>> Hey, you have a great concept. Can I be in? Yes.
>> Yeah.
>> Turns out, a lot of our HR recruiting team is using that.
Because most of their job is to [inaudible].
I don't know if you enjoy that, I don't.
>> No, I don't.
>> No.
>> So having Cortana doing this for you with different people,
this is just fantastic.
Then the cool thing is when you get into that preview,
you'll also have access to metrics.
In a regular basis,
what Cortana does when you schedule a lot of meetings like that,
every week she says, "Hey, I saved you two hours,
five hours this week because I actually
helped you book this meeting for you."
They have also that cool features that on
a regular basis, they will send you a note like,
"Hey, it's that time for you to book some thinking time."
>> Oh, yeah. I like that.
>> So you can pre-book thinking time, let's say, "Cortana,
book me two hours next week for thinking time."
>> So you can use if for yourself?
>> That's right.
>> That's exactly that.
>> Yeah, that's like the Deep Work time.
>> Exactly. Deep Work, thank you.
>> Then your MyAnalytics tool actually tells you,
you had Deep Work versus meetings, meetings, meetings.
>> Exactly right.
>> Yeah.
>> So in a nutshell, this is how it goes.
Now, you say, "Hey, Phil, this is great, but how did you do that?"
>> Yes.
>> So let's look into how I actually done that.
"So I want to book a 30-minute meeting,"
so this time, we're going to say, "in person next Wednesday."
So this is my actual bot.
That's the interface that I'm using to actually build my bot.
>> Love it.
>> So some of you may have
seen probably the demo from Dona already.
Here what happens is I have
the tracing capability on, and I'm able to see what's going on.
So okay, it's just warming up.
>> What is the tracing capability do?
>> So the tracing capability enables me to have here,
a test conversation and see
firsthand what's happening in my conversation.
So those green boxes are the ones.
Let me just do a bit, there you go.
>> Any Information that she gets is
you can really test out different phrases.
So it's as if whatever you just put
into your test gets potency,
you can see it flow through.
It's very much like debugging almost.
>> That's right. It is debugging in
real time without debugging code.
>> Thank you for that, Sarah, because
you've been one of our first,
early adopters in VB,
I remember [inaudible] .
That's pretty awesome.
So here's what we can see is,
we also have this cool feature which is variables,
and you see all the variables are put
together to create my appointment
before getting into Power VA.
You can see as I go through my flow,
I actually build those.
>> Yes.
>> Here's the thing I've done in my initial query.
I say, "I want to book a 30-minute meeting
in person next Wednesday."
Here are the things that AI already captured.
He already knows.
Okay, next Wednesday is actually the 15th.
>> That's right.
>> The duration is actually 30 minutes,
and it's going to be in person.
Now, the rest of the information or contact name,
e-mail address, meeting subject.
>> Interesting. Okay.
>> So one thing which is awesome about that [inaudible] ,
instead of asking all those questions very robotically for you,
I capture the things that you already tell
me, and I shortcut the conversation.
>> The Intelligence is able to pull it
from whatever you already just asked.
>> Exactly. So now, I'm going to do James B again,
Famous James B, and I'm going to do jamesb_demo@outlook.com.
You see my variable's public,
now like, what is the subject. All right.
>> That's cool.
So that's a fantastic video with my besties. There we go.
>> Perfect.
>> Now what is doing now is,
oh, okay. What happened?
Come on, come on, come back. Give me a sec.
There you go. Let's do this.
Yes, I'm going to follow you for a second.
Let me see this.
So typically, this is where I just [inaudible]
>> Live code everyone.
>> Yeah, there you go.
>> You know we're not making this up.
>> So here's the thing.
Actually, we're going to see the trigger phrase
in, and here's the authoring bits.
So [inaudible] factor here is,
once I collect all those data,
now I'm going to connect to, guess what?
A Power Automate. A flow.
>> I love it.
>> What is the flow? Cortana's scheduling meeting.
Essentially, what I do in that flow,
I do a bit of a cleaning up on
the dates and then I just send an e-mail to Cortana.
Super easy. That e-mail is exactly the one you've seen initially.
>> That's right, [inaudible] if I accept.
>> Right. The first one that says, were are they? Here you go.
>> Which one of these do?
>> That was the first one, I believe.
There you go. This one.
This one is actually coming from my Power Automate,
that's coming from the bot.
Because Cortana has been CC in it,
now I'm activating my other AI,
which is my scheduling [inaudible]
>> So your AIs are talking
to each other to schedule your meetings.
>> It's almost becoming quite ubiquitous.
It's almost like it's hands-free.
This is definitely the next stage.
>> Right. You just define it the way you want it to be.
>> Exactly.
>> I love it.
>> Cool.
>> That is so cool.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. So you showed us something really cool.
What is a call to action you have for our lovely audience?
>> So I've been trying to beat
the drum for the past three months on build your own bot.
>> No, no. Not three months, since I've known you.
He's been on build your own bots
for a long time. Three months, he says.
>> So essentially, now is, please go to basically this address,
powerva.Microsoft.com and start using it,
start having fun with it.
Come back to us, tag us on LinkedIn.
We love to see your creation.
We have no idea how you guys are creative.
We don't think about all the scenarios,
but if you have those crazy thought in mind,
hey, go for it because we're happy to showcase and learn about it.
>> That's right.
>> We're always looking for great stories to showcase
on our channels and have in this chair.
So if you create an amazing, cool demo,
we want to invite you,
either on the screen,
dialing in virtually or being in this chair and showing us.
>> We want to hear from you. So that could be
any industry, any organization.
It could be just something that you do personally as well,
like you see how it can be used
just from a scheduling perspective.
So it doesn't have to be these insane complex scenarios.
So yeah, go ahead, reach out to
us on social media, and we'll pick those up.
>> Yeah. We're highly findable. Yeah.
>> Thank you so much for being here with us today.
>> Thank you, Dona. Thank you,
Sarah. It was a pleasure.
>> Thank you.
>> All right, till next time. Less code.
>> More power.