Azure AI Skills Challenge! Final Days! Document Intelligence

Hey everyone, it's Noelle Russell Russell. I'm actually going to spend the first minute or two trying to ensure that my team knows where I am. I was trying to see it come up on LinkedIn, but I don't see it right now, so I'm just going to keep flipping around till I find it. If you are here, say hello. I am actually doing something a little bit unorthodox right now. I am coming to you live in portrait mode, and I actually am trying to find it on LinkedIn. I don't know. I see some of you are here. My— no, you know, the number of people watching is going up, but I don't know what platform you're watching on. So come on in, say hello, throw a message into the chat. So I could see you all. It would be amazing to see you. There's some really great, exciting news going on today, but most importantly, I want to give you all a last-minute chance to be part of the Azure AI Skills Challenge. Pardon me while I look right over here because I'm just trying to find my livestream. If not, it is definitely on YouTube, so I will go that direction. Um, because maybe it's not live streaming on LinkedIn. I don't know. It should be. It should be. It says it is. Um, I'm gonna go in and take a look really quickly and see. Uh, yeah, it says streaming, so I don't know. I don't know where it is. Um, but it's so great to see you all. Uh, happy to have you here. Um, let's see. So what we're gonna do today is focus on the Azure AI Skills Challenge. I may have to restart my stream, but we'll see what happens. Hopefully we won't have to do that. But it's so great to see you all. Thank you for joining. Uh, it's going to be an amazing day. If you are in the I Love AI community, this is a chance for you to learn a little bit more about what we do. If you're not yet, you certainly have an opportunity to do so. You can see You could actually go and see that right below. Oh, you know what? I wonder if— I think I just realized something that is happening right now. I'm going to check it out really quickly. So we have a process that we use in our family every night before— oh, good. Oh, yay. Awesome. Kim, what's up? Okay, cool. Thank you for saying that. Amazing. It's working. Awesome. Good to know. So great to see you. Okay, great. So I just would love to get like a link to where it is, but I guess it's because I didn't do it in an event. Oh well, next time. Next time. So great to see you all. Okay, so let's get this party started. If you would like to catch this on the replay, so I'll say it a couple of times as we go through. But if you end up being here and want to catch this video from the beginning, you will be able to do that very easily. I'm going to grab the link, copy, and throw it into my LinkedIn and my AI school while I talk to you about the school. So we have a community. We actually have passed 1,000 members, so we're like almost at 1,100 members. Very exciting. One of our members is pending right now. Oh my gosh, it's Kim. So let me let you in. I know you. Welcome, welcome aboard. You just got accepted. So we have an I Heart, I Heart AI, or I Love AI community. And in this community, the goal of the community is to bring together people from all stages of their career, regardless of their technical background. We have very experienced data scientists all the way down to high school students. So the entire gambit of, you know, from people who are in a job and have been in a, in that job, in a career, in a company for 20 years, all the way to those who are maybe currently in career transition. And that's why this skills challenge is so important. Now, granted, I didn't give you all very much time to be able to participate in it. So there's that. It's been going on for about a month and a half. However, I've been traveling like crazy. So many of you know, I spent 2 weeks ago I was in Sydney last week, uh, or was it last week? Uh, no, 2 weeks ago I was in Sydney. Last week I was at the DC Startup and Tech Week, followed by, uh, going to Yankee Alliance in, in Rhode Island and had an amazing time talking to the medical practices and pharmacy practitioners there. Um, and then this week I just came back from Voice and AI, uh, Summit, which just finished day 2 today. And so it's been a crazy whirlwind week, which is why I haven't had a chance to really share this with you. So I thought in maybe hopefully a way of providing some reciprocity to not being able to tell you about the skills challenge earlier, I'm going to speed you through part of a skills challenge that I'm going to be on. So I'm going to share my screen and show you what the AI Skills Challenge is. It happens 2 to 3 times a year. It's your chance to get a badge to credentialize your knowledge and practical hands-on keyboard experience with a specific product in the Microsoft portfolio. I don't know if there's anything similar on Amazon, though you can definitely do similar activities on Amazon, Google, and NVIDIA playgrounds. But not everybody is the same as Microsoft in the sense of the democratized AI projects that certainly I've been a part of, but that have been released over the last 10 years at the company. And so I'm going to share with you a little bit about that history and what it does. So really quick, I'm going to throw in— I'm going to go ahead and post this link, AI Skills Challenge. If you're here, feel free to send me a note. You can ask questions through the chat. I'm happy to answer them. It should be a really fun time. We'll see what happens. My goal, though, is to explain to you a little bit about these challenges so you can keep an eye out for them. And then for some of you, you may want to go ahead and try to attain the first badge that we're going to talk about today. And some people get kind of addicted to it. You can go in, there's about 9 different badges, I think, that you can get. Um, and that's just to, uh, recognize your knowledge in a specific space. On the other side of that, though, is the opportunity to actually get an enablement badge, which is— I think that I'll show you what it is in just a moment when I share my screen. So I'm just going to do this right now. Hit post. I'm also going to post it in our AI Leadership Institute. So I do have two communities. The I Love AI community, home to 1,000+ AI enthusiasts, all learning and growing together. I do have an AI Leadership Masterclass that I provide as part of that experience. But we also have a very cool fingers-on-keyboard build, learning-by-doing community, which has a lot more time with me. And that is the way to get to be a part of that is to become a member of the AI Leadership Institute. And I encourage you to just start with the I Love AI community. Come, See what we're like, see what the vibe is like. And if you want to get your hands on Keyboard, if you want to do some of these live labs with me and with the other practitioners, it's a great opportunity for you to kind of upgrade into that experience. But to start right now, I would just become part of the I Love AI community and kind of see how things go. We host calls every single Friday and you are welcome to join us. So let me, oopsie, once again send this over. Live AI skills challenge. We're gonna do today document intelligence, and this is— I like this specific applied model, one, because I watched it kind of grow up about 8 years, or I guess 6, 7 years ago, I don't know, a while ago before COVID It all blurs after that. But I watched the product grow up. I watched it evolve through product feedback and client and customer feedback. So I'll share some of that with you as well. I think it'll be a great opportunity and it's also one of the easier ones in my opinion to really understand. So if you want to get this badge, this AI Skills Challenge badge before November 1st, which is the last day of the challenge, 2 days from now, this will probably be a really a good one to go and attain. Okay, so I've now alerted my communities. We are live on YouTube. I'm going to go back to you all in— there we go. There we are. Hello, Janice. What's up? Good to see you. Marcus in the house. Nice to see you all. Welcome aboard. So good. I have YouTube and LinkedIn. Everyone's here. Good to see you. We have about, I think, 9 platforms that I'm live streaming to. So as people join, it'll be great. Okay, so what I'm going to do now is I'm actually going to demonstrate exactly what I do. And so in order to do that, first I'm going to share my screen. I'm going to open up a tab. Let's see what tab I can show here. I'm going to go with the AI Leadership Institute. There we go. So that's the post I just did about our live challenge. So I'm going to go ahead and open up a browser and show you exactly what I do. So I just type in AI Skills Challenge. And when you do that, the Microsoft Learn Skills Challenge will pop right up. Now, again, it'll end in November, but they'll start a new one likely in March, just in time for the Build conference. So many times these challenges align with Microsoft Build, which happens like in the May timeframe. And align with Ignite, which happens— well, now, right around the now timeframe. So you get a couple times to do this. Now I'm going to go ahead and take a look at it and explain to you what the process is. But you can see every year they have a different theme. Every year they provide different benefits. This year you get the benefit of getting a cool badge. But sometimes— and this is why I keep an eye on them— every time they launch, sometimes you get a free certificate to get one of the paid credentials, so like Azure AI Fundamentals or Azure Fundamentals. This is like $150 certification, so you get a free certificate if you finish a challenge. That is not today. If you look here, it really— the AI Skills Challenge really recognizes the fact that everyone needs to learn these skills. And so Microsoft has put together a bunch of different learning paths. So I'm going to go ahead and scroll through them. The first thing we need to do is kind of pick a path. The very first one is Document Intelligence in Azure AI. So I'm going to walk you through that first so you can see what that looks like. I'm going to even try and get that running on my machine live in front of you. I don't have it preconfigured or preset up. I'm going to attempt to do it as if you would be doing it, which you never know how it's going to go. It'll be entertaining, that's for sure. But you'll notice some other ones: building intelligent apps, creating agents in Copilot Studio. Some of you are going to be all about that. Microsoft Fabric, which is the opportunity to integrate data sources. In the world of AI, you're going to want to ground your model, right, in datasets, in specific truth, organizational truth. That organizational truth could end up spreading across multiple types of data sources. It might be, who knows, it could end up being a little bit on SAP, a little bit inside of SharePoint, a little bit in Google Docs. It could be any number of sources. Fabric is a great technology to understand and use because it weaves, of course, all of those data platforms together and makes it easy for you to create a data access layer to access those data systems especially for your AI applications, but not uniquely so. You'll also see GitHub. So GitHub has massive updates. As a matter of fact, I think I posted it. If not, it's in draft. Oh, I definitely posted it on my YouTube channel. GitHub Spark just launched, which is very cool. I tried it out right away. And GitHub Spark allows you to use your voice, your natural language to create applications. So it— before, what used to happen is we'd use our voice to describe how to build an application, but it would be about a 70% solution. So GitHub really spent a lot of time kind of fine-tuning the art of building software. So now you could literally describe what you want, and a lot of the pieces that were missing in the past are now populated based on pattern recognition. It won't be 100%, but it'll be in like the 80th or 90th percentile for you, which means that you can focus kind of on the more, the more important things, right? Rather than the scaffolding logic, you can focus on building the user experience, building the value, the business value in that application. So if you wanna learn a little bit about how GitHub works and how the new GitHub Copilot works, which is the Codex model implemented and productized, you can see that there. Of course, my, probably my favorite challenge, and I do these, over and over again, and I learn new things every time I do them, is securing your data. So as we all know, you could do a whole lot with no data at all, or even bad data, but it doesn't get really production ready until you start to take care of data, data privacy, governance, sovereignty. Like, how are you going to make sure that whatever data you're using is secured. And this is less again about AI specifically and more about getting your data ducks in a row and ensuring that as your model grows and builds and takes on more capability and more users, that you've done the necessary work to protect those users, to protect the system. And so I think this is a really critical one, especially as, you know, we see a lot of these um, you know, different types of data challenges companies are going through when it comes to security and cybersecurity vulnerabilities. So that being said, once you go through these— and so I'm gonna— we're gonna go through Document Intelligence just to see what it's like. But if you're here, feel free to— I mean, you don't even have to stay. Like, go and dive into one of the other ones if you want to do Document Intelligence with me. I'm just going to walk you through what it looks like and it's, it's pretty quick. The thing I, I love about the, the Microsoft Learn challenges is that they're all text-based and therefore if you're a quick reader, you can kind of flow through it. What I've found is a challenge is that I have a lot of foundational contextual knowledge about these services because I was on the Cognitive Services team in the beginning. So I know a lot about kind of how these things came to be, and that's not really easily seen in these. And granted, that's not their intention. Their intention is to onboard you quickly and get you building, and that is amazing. But I thought it might be fun and entertaining and maybe a little bit educational to actually tell you a little bit more detail about what's happening in some of these services and what my personal experience was. And of course, I encourage you, if any of you out there have experience in any of these technologies, that you do the same, like be willing to share how you are leveraging some of these tools. And when you get a badge, as you'll see in just a moment, when you do get a badge, which you get in multiple stages of completion, I encourage you to share it with your network. Again, it, it's not really for you. I always say this to myself. I'm not sharing it for me. I'm sharing it for that person who's maybe a chapter behind me or a book behind me, a volume behind me going, oh my gosh, like, can I do this? And when I post something like I just got my— I mean, I've, I've posted my AI Fundamentals badge probably 10 times, but every time someone comments on it and they're like, oh my gosh, so cool, I want to go do this. So you could be an inspiration just by learning and continuously learning, being curious, constantly developing your skill set, and then being willing to share that with the world. I'm gonna flip back and forth, um, to our, uh, let me see. Yes, here we go to our thing. Yes, awesome. Okay, Benito's in the house. What's up? Good to see you, my friend. Danielle, Daniel, it's good to see you. Is there a way to make the video full screen? There might be. Hold on. Um, let me see here. Uh, not sure. See, okay, so this is what happened. Um, let me go back to— I'm in the school tab here. Okay, so what I'm gonna do, I actually opened up a new tab and you guys can't see any of this, so I'm gonna move over here and I am I think they asked me when I joined, Restream said everybody wants to see this in portrait mode, would you like to do it in portrait mode? And so I said yes. But Daniel, it sounds to me like you can't really see it well in portrait mode, so that's not really good. So I mean, I don't know, I might— should I— can't— should I like re— Restream in non-portrait mode? Um, y'all let me know and I will like hang up and come right back. Um, hold on. Now we have to do, okay, so let's see, because it might be easier to see, right, if I'm not in that mode. Let's see here. Oh my gosh, I'm trying to find my screen. Where are you guys? I hope you're even still here. It says I'm recording, so I must be live somewhere. Um, oh, oh, oh, I'm trying to find you all. Oh, that's Tab. There we go, I got you. Okay, here we go. Uh, Command tilde. Oh my gosh, tab. No. Okay, I got another idea. Hold on, hold your horses. Let's go. Here we go. There we are. I found you all. Oh yeah, because I was in full screen. That was my fault. Okay, so what I think I'm gonna do— I'm debating whether I should— what do you think? Um, I'm gonna go back out of full screen. Is there— yeah, vertical. There is a vertical layout. Oh, oh, on iPhone, that's true. Maybe you could like tilt. That's a good point. Maybe you could like tilt it to the side. Great idea, Sarah. Hey everyone, ask who's on the phone and who's on a laptop. Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. Thanks, Jacob. Jacob's always super helpful. Um, anyway, yes, you always give me like helpful props during our sessions together, so thank you for that. It is hard to see, join from a phone. All right. I'm on a laptop. Larger view would be better. Okay, friends, let's do this. I hope you rejoin, but I'm going to end the stream and I'm going to join right back. So check out wherever you are. If you're on YouTube, it'll be easiest because you'll see me live right there. If not, the sad thing is that the link I just published won't work anymore, but I'm going to end it real quick and come right back in normal mode, which I should never listen to these marketing guides that tell me to do it in a different way. Anyway. All right. I'm ending it now. I'll see you in just a second.