Microsoft AI 30-Day Cloud Skills Challenge: Day 1 Getting Started!

Hello everyone, good morning. It is around the first of the month, we are going to be doing today a 30-day challenge. Hi everyone, I will open up the chat so we can say hi. Um, and if you are catching this live, feel free to hashtag live in the comments so I know that you're here. If you are catching this on the replay, you can hashtag replay. Um, I am coming to you live on a bunch of different platforms, so it is totally up to you how you decide to engage with this program. But before we get started with all of that, I want to share why we're here. Miami Dade College in my hometown of Miami, Florida has created a Cloud Skills Challenge and it's actually, it's incredible. There are tons of other skills. I, as you might have guessed, I'm going to focus on artificial intelligence, but there are 4 or 5 other challenges that you can do all around cloud skills, whether it's learning about cloud or cybersecurity, right? Or all these different things. So you can go and, and decide. Um, I will post the link. Oh, let's see if I should do that right now. I'm going to post the link in the comments. I don't know which platform it'll show up on, maybe all of them. Oh, I can't post it to LinkedIn. So LinkedIn, it's in the event, you can go and click on it there. But if you are watching this on Twitch or Facebook or YouTube, uh, you now should see that link in the comments. This will send you to the Miami Dade College website. I will not go through this every single day. It's just day 1. So if you haven't registered, today is the day. We have 28 days, I think, or 29 days from today, and we are going to every single day go through artificial intelligence, uh, content to help you get certified. I think it's Really exciting. 30 days, 30 minutes, and you end up with a certification on Microsoft AI. Now granted, it won't be as easy as that. You don't get credit for just showing up. You don't get credit for catching it only on the replay. You do have some work to do. There's about 30 minutes to an hour of work every day watching the videos and really thinking about and applying what you're learning to every day. Here is the good news. AI is everywhere, every day. We use it now more than we have ever used it in our consumer lives. Everything from, you know, the way that things work on Amazon to the way that which we, most of us probably shop on, um, to the way that we navigate our entertainment on Hulu or Netflix, to the way that we even consume information in our inboxes and, um, through social media or WhatsApp, right? AI is in all of these things. And what I want to do every day for the next 30 days is take what we're learning and apply it to some real-world activities. But before we do that, let me go ahead and I'm gonna see if I can share my screen. Thank you so much for being here. Again, if you're here, just send me a quick chat. And I see a few of you, so, so grateful that you decided to wake up and and win this morning with me. Hi everyone. So I am on Instagram Live. They are not friendly in the way that I can integrate them into my other live platform. So sorry, I'm not looking directly at you all, all the time. But let's go. Oh, I think I'm going to try and paste that comment into this. Ah, it didn't work. Okay. So Instagram Lives, I will, it's actually in a comment on my I Heart AI post. So you can go see that. I did that post a couple of days ago. It's very big. It says, I heart AI. And if you want the link to this challenge, just comment on that post and I'll send it over to you. All right. So I think we're ready. Let's go ahead and get started. The first thing I want to do is if you have not done so already, let's go and take a look. And I don't know what this is going to look like. I've never— normally it's just me. I just talk to you all on these LinkedIn Lives, but I am going to shift to a different view. Let's see if I could do it. And I'm going to share my screen. So it'll be a little bit of, of like Inception as we watch my screen. It's kind of like, oh, unable to share. Oh no. Okay, I'm not going to share my screen then. All right, that all works out. So what I'm going to do instead is just encourage you to go over to that link on Miami-Dade. When you get to that link, it's going to ask you to register or join the challenge. Here's the kicker. If you have not worked with Microsoft technology before, you may not have a login for this. Thank you. A login for this screen. If that is the case, you'll want to go and create one. You can create a personal one. It's free. You can also use your own email. So you will have to set that up just to get started. Once you do that, you'll be able to log in, register for the challenge, and it will tell you how many days are left to the challenge. And this is a self-directed challenge, though I'm here to help you. But it's a self-directed challenge. And what that means is no one's going to, you know, call your phone or text you or send you an email to say, "Day 2 content's ready. Let's go." It's up to you to do this content every day. It's why I thought it would be fun to do this together in a live setting. So I'm going to go through— oh, you know what? I'm going to try and do this on a different browser. I'm going to be super technically, um, fly by the seat of my pants here and see if I can pull this up on a different browser. Because it's telling you— some of you in technology that do presentations all the time— I forgot to allow permissions for this specific app to access my camera. And when you do that, unfortunately, it makes you restart the browser, but that would kill our session, so I'm not doing that. So while I'm doing this, you can go ahead and take a look at the Miami-Dade website that I put in the comments or that's on my Instagram post. I'm @noelle.ai on Instagram, if you did not know, and register for the challenge. It might take you a couple minutes because you might have to, you know, build, uh, create your own account. Um, but once you're in, I will meet you there. So let me, uh, yes, cool. All right, so I'm gonna try and share this. We'll see if it— oh, it might not let me share. Oh yeah, here we go. Entire screen? Nope. We're gonna go to the window, see if I can share it. Cloud Skills Challenge, please let me do it. Okay, I'm gonna try it. Um, System Preferences. We're gonna try and do it on the fly and see if it lets me do it without, um, me doing it. Display. I know I should have done it before, but I thought I have so many apps that I thought I did this already. Um, let's see, screen sharing. Privacy is good though. We like these systems that are like, you should disable anyone being able to share your screen. So I think that's probably in my best interest. All right, here we go. So I'm gonna do screen sharing, click. Um, that seems like all I have to do. Oh gosh, no, you cannot control permission of my screen. All right, let's see if that worked. I'm gonna go try it again. Share my screen window. If it doesn't, then we'll, we'll have to do it again tomorrow. Um, all right. Oh, see, it's screen recording because my screen's going to be recorded. Okay. All right, awesome. Thanks, Frank. So glad you're here. We are just getting started with the program. So once you get onto the Cloud Skills Challenge, you will be able to— and for my friends on Instagram, I will see if I can— oh goodness. Hi, everybody. Let's see. Oh goodness. I'm trying to get back to my screen. I don't have a comment. Just take me back. Okay. I don't know if I could do that. So I'm live on a bunch of different channels so you can catch the replay. We're gonna do this every morning, sometimes earlier than others. So don't be sad if you have to catch the replay because I am traveling a bunch this month. Of course, the month of our challenge. I'm going to be in Vegas next week and then in Prague for the Web Expo. And then I will be actually at Miami-Dade doing an AI bootcamp for high schoolers, which is phenomenal. So really exciting stuff. Okay. So when you go to the AI Skills Challenge on that page, you are going to see a bunch of challenges. So as I mentioned to you before, there's the— oh goodness, there's the, um, AI Fundamentals Challenge there, which is just— or I'm sorry, Azure Fundamentals Challenge, which is all about cloud. How many of you have wanted to learn about cloud? Well, if you've wanted to learn about cloud technology, now's your chance. In 30 days you can get certified. And here's what certification does for you, right? It elevates your ability to get seen by people. I'll tell you, in our organization, we're hiring 450 people in Microsoft technologies, but we're only looking for people who have taken the initiative to get certified. This is the first step. And so you instantly hop on the radar if you wanna get a job in this industry. You instantly hop up on the radar to a place where you can get noticed, where you can get recognized, and most importantly, where you can get contacted for opportunities. And here is the second bonus of that. Concept is that there aren't enough of us. There are not enough of us to do the work that's needed to help companies, both small companies, nonprofit companies, big tech companies, to do the work that's required to do digital transformation, get into the cloud, and leverage artificial intelligence to stay competitive. So every company is going to be looking for these skills if they are not already. And this 30-day challenge we are about to embark on is going to give you a leg up against all the competition because because not many people take the time to get this certification, or some think the certification is easy. They go take it and they actually surprise themselves and fail it. So I want— I'm so excited for you to start this journey. It's going to be really exciting, really fun. And like I said, you can check on the posts and in every one of these videos. They're going to be on YouTube, on Facebook, on my page if you want to go check it out, as well as on LinkedIn. And in each one of those, I will place in the comments the link to the challenge and to the content for that day. So really exciting. So today, of course, I am focused on artificial intelligence. It's my passion. I'm a Microsoft MVP, which means I'm a community champion for artificial intelligence. Microsoft recognizes a few of us every year to say, wow, you love this technology, you're good at explaining it and talking about it to people. We want to give you a whole bunch of resources. So I get to meet privately with owners of the products. I get to hear about things before they happen. I get to go to events that no one else gets to go to and talk to the product owners. It's really exciting. And this is just part of me extending what I get to learn from them with you. So I'm really, really excited about it. So when you go to this page, you'll notice it'll say, choose your challenge. When you choose your challenge and you could be on this page right now, like I said, I copied that link in and you could join this at any time. So if you're not in front of your computer right now, don't worry, you can go back and join it. You can select Azure AI Fundamentals. Like I said, there's Cloud Fundamentals if you want called Azure Fundamentals or Azure Data Fundamentals. I will tell you data and AI go very closely together. I do encourage you one day to do both. So exciting. Thank you, my Twitter fans have shown up. I'm also live on Twitter. It used to be Periscope for those of us old enough to remember that platform, but it's now just broadcasting on Twitter as well. Thank you all my Twitter fans who just said hello and are interested in joining the challenge. So there's Azure Fundamentals Cloud AI, which is what we're going to do, Data Fundamentals, Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals, and Power Platform. Now Power Platform is an incredible tool. It is empowering people like us who do not necessarily know how to code, who don't necessarily want to learn how to all the ins and outs of how technology works. This gives us a Power Platform to leverage our ideas. If we have a good idea, if you're an entrepreneur, if you are— I mean, gosh, I wish I could do one for all of these. But Power Platform is really interesting because it allows you to use tools, technologies, including artificial intelligence without having to learn all the nitty-gritty details of artificial intelligence like data science and machine learning and algorithms. We're going to be getting into some of that in our challenge this month. But don't forget, one of the most important things about it is that this is fundamentals. We're just getting started. So if you all, you know, if any of you have a PhD in data science, you know, you might be a little bored with what we're going to go through, except it's going to be on Microsoft, so it will be a little bit different. You might even find some fun things that we talk about there as well. So Power Platform Fundamentals is another challenge you could take. And hey, some of you might be like feeling it and wanting to do all of them. Go for it. Or two of them. Go for it. But I'm only gonna talk about the AI challenge today. So it starts today and we are going to be driving our train in the direction of the AI-900 certification. So everything we talk about will be, and all the examples and stories I give you will be to help you anchor in the ideas you're gonna need to pass this test. I love certifications. For many of you, you already know I never, you know, didn't graduate from high school. I didn't really like college, so I didn't finish that. I went right into technology. And the reason I liked doing that is because I actually went to IBM back in the day and I took a ton of certifications. I had more certifications than every one of my peers. I think I had 7 at one point in IBM. And it's all they've looked for. They were like, can you practically use this technology to solve our customers' problems? Yes, I can. Okay, you're hired. And that's what this certification does. It propels you to a point where whatever your past is, no one's asking for your GPA, no one's asking what school you went to. They wanna know, can you solve customer problems with this technology? It is the missing link to almost every company. So let's go ahead and get started. Once you start the challenge, you'll notice I click on, it'll say, it'll give you a list of challenges. The second one is the Azure AI Fundamentals Challenge. Every day from now you will be able to see my screen. I'll just have to change my permissions to record it. But today you'll go to that challenge page. Once you select the AI Azure AI Fundamentals challenge, you will see a challenge timer and it will tell you that we have 28 days, 14 hours, 37 minutes, and 20 seconds in order to finish the challenge content. The reason they're giving you that timer is because you are self-paced. Moderated. You are going to have to go and do this technology stuff by yourself. It's not hard. You just have to remember, which is what I'm here to do. I'm going to help you every day remember to go and do your 30 minutes of learning inside Microsoft Learn. Now I have lots of video content on Microsoft Learn around artificial intelligence. I don't think you'll see any in this, but I will be sharing it in our lives every day. So you can see I did a, a, a 4 or 5-minute video on computer vision, on Custom Vision. It's so fun. On natural language, on building chatbots. So all of those things I'm going to share with you. And again, the intention is so when you're in that test and they ask you a question, you're like, "Oh, I remember that story. I remember us doing that," right? And so you'll have an opportunity. There are 16 modules in the challenge. Some of them are longer than others. Most has Microsoft has come to understand, as well as most edtech technology teams have come to understand, is that we as humans, we don't have a long attention span, right? I mean, I'm here talking to you for 30 minutes. It's probably already too long. But because we don't have a long attention span, they've broken up the content into little bite-sized chunks. I call it snackable content. It's my favorite kind to deliver, right? So snackable content. So in that snackable content. You will be able to in 3 minutes learn about AI, in 3 minutes learn about computer vision, or how computers can detect what's on a screen or in a video or in an image. Um, we'll talk— everything is like 3 or 4 minutes long, so it's really easy. It's almost like binge-watching, right? Except at the end you get to take a certification and actually pass it. So really exciting stuff. I'm so grateful that you all decide to take this journey with me. If you know anyone, it's not too late. Today's not the only day to sign up. So if you know anyone who's interested in getting certified, getting on the radar in the tech industry, or just getting started with artificial intelligence, this is a great place for them to come. So we'll do this every day. You can have them sign up. Uh, it's an event on LinkedIn. I'll probably go ahead and create the event on Facebook too. I do have quite a few followers there. So I'll go ahead and put it there as well. And if you wanna learn about artificial intelligence and get certified in 30 days, that's the journey that we're on. So once you sign up, you'll see a button that says continue learning. And when you get on and say continue learning, it's gonna start with your very first module. The first module is, it's about 30 minutes long. It says 34 minutes. Not every module is a video. Most of the modules are reading. However, there's really cool tools today that can actually read the text to you if you're that kind of person and want to do that. The first one's getting started on Azure and AI specifically on Azure. It's just going to give you a lay of the land. That 34-minute module has about 10 3-minute videos in it. So very quickly to walk through that, it's introduction to AI and then understanding the difference between AI and machine learning. Then we're going to talk about anomaly detection. I just I just mentioned this yesterday in a workshop that I delivered on responsible AI at scale, is that anomaly detection is one of the easiest ways to bring value to customers, right? Because oftentimes what anomaly detection does is it finds patterns and then it notifies you when there's things happening that are outside the patterns that you typically work in. So imagine, for example, you are monitoring a, distribution warehouse, right? And you're monitoring supply chain. I actually am not as concerned when things are going well, right? When things are selling, things are leaving. I am more concerned when there's a certain product that's not selling at all, or I'm holding inventory for a product that I'm not selling, right? I want to know right away, like, that's an anomaly. Why isn't that selling? That usually sells. Why isn't it anymore? Or a customer like this. All of us are going to start hopefully with some excitement and start learning, um, AI. And then there's going to be a certain point where everyone's excited and then some of us are going to stop. It's just human nature, right? How many books do you have that you finished cover to cover? I actually challenge myself to do it, but 90% of people who start something don't finish. It's kind of sad. I shouldn't end with that, um, but 90% of people who start something don't finish. So that's why this 30-day challenge, if you finish it, not only are you a step above by getting your certification, but you're a finisher, and that will set you apart. And so I'm really, really excited about it. But that anomaly detection piece gives you this capability to find problems without actually having to do— look for them yourself. It'll accelerate your ability to solve problems for customers. And some of you are entrepreneurs out there. It's exactly what we do. As an entrepreneur, I'm always looking for the problems I can solve, and AI can amplify your ability to do that more quickly. So we'll then talk about the different types of machine learning available: computer vision, natural language processing, which is my favorite, knowledge mining, which is phenomenal, responsible AI, of course, challenges and risks of AI, as well as of course taking a little test to make sure you're getting prepared for that certification. So that's just like today, and it's awesome. It only takes, like I said, each one of those videos is about 3 minutes. The only longer video, it's 10 minutes, is Responsible AI. Of course, it takes a little bit more to set that context. I just did an entire 4-hour workshop that's actually part of a whole week workshop on responsible AI at scale because I've worked on, you know, products like Amazon Alexa, huge AI model at scale, as well as Cognitive Services at Microsoft, another, a whole collection of AI at scale. But it's not enough to build AI that scales with use. It's more important. It's critical that we build it responsibly and that we understand the impacts of privacy and fairness and robustness and transparency and all of these, what we call pillars of trustworthy AI. So I'm going to share all this with you. That is day 1. I'm going to encourage you to sign up for the challenge. Use the link, sign up for the challenge and go through it. Spend 30 minutes. Here's what I do. I have 4 kids. I understand some of us are very, very busy. There's this concept, I think Tony Robbins had mentioned it to me first, called no extra time. Meaning many of us kind of think we have no extra time to do this stuff, but here's what I do. I put on my headphones, and while I'm washing dishes or making dinner, or really anytime, like go for a walk— you should be getting out into the, you know, outside, into the fresh air, and doing— getting a break from your day. Use that time to consume this information. Most of it you don't need to see. It helps to see it, but listening to it is just as impactful, especially especially as an alternative to not doing it at all. So use that no extra time in the morning when you get up, right, and you hop on a treadmill or a bike, or you go for a walk, or walk your dog. Put in that headphone, listen to a couple of these sessions. Find pockets in your day where you can just clip in, right? I'm— I ride a Peloton, so that's what they say, like, just clip in. The hardest part is going to be getting those headphones in your ear or pulling up the screen and watching. Once you watch, you can watch 4 or 5 at a time. Do it in the morning, in the afternoon, and be done for the day. But the most important thing is to keep your eye on the prize. As I close today, remember, this skill set is important. It's going to help companies do more. And there's companies probably that you care about. Maybe they're nonprofits, right? I care a lot about National Public Radio. How do I help them use AI to do better work? You're going to hear me talk a lot about them. During this session. So really excited about this. If you know anyone who wants to get into tech, who wants to change the pattern or trajectory of their career into, into a technology field, especially women, especially, uh, people of color, have them sign up, send them this link, or just send them my way and I will, I will talk to them. So it's been awesome. Happy day 1 of this challenge. We are going to have a really good time, and tomorrow I will show you all the content from today and give you a little bit of insight into what you have to learn tomorrow. So I look forward to it. Thanks so much. Hi, Veronica. Hello, everyone. So great to see all of you. I'm really grateful that you're here and it's going to be a fun ride. So see you soon. Okay, bye.