This Week in Generative AI with Noelle

Hey everybody, welcome. I haven't seen you all in a while, so I just wanted to say hello. I'm super excited to be live with you. I am hoping audio is good. So as my friends, as you come online, I would love to see you type in like #live if you're catching this live. Actually, if you're catching it on the replay, you can put #replay too. I would love to know. I see a couple of you, so this is amazing. Nice to see you. We'll give everyone a couple seconds to jump on in. One of the things— hey, what's up, Vijay? Good to see you. Thank you so much for being here. Oh no, I'm going to try and reload my chat. Oh goodness, it seems very slow. What's happening right now? Okay, there we go. All right. So I am going to try and keep an eye on the chat as we go. Oh, there we go. Um, oh no, it's bueno. Okay, you said good. Cecile from France, thank you so much. I'm trying to look at my chat, uh, conversations and bring them up at the same time. Tamara, hello, thank you so much. Oh good, yay, my friends are all here. Um, so great to see you all. Uh, I am here because I haven't done a live in so long and I really do feel like this is the moment where I feel like I have real friends in the world and that I'm not alone. Um, and Nikki, what's up? Oh my gosh, John, this is so cool. Thank you for joining me. I have some really fun stuff to talk about today. I want to give you some examples of the things that I'm working on, which in my mind, I don't know, a lot of people seem to think that generative AI is just an idea or that we're doing a lot of talking and not a lot of doing. And I will tell you, I don't know if you could tell by my eyes, but we are doing a lot of doing. And so I wanted to share with you some of those cool things. Um, Roger from Texas, what's up? Oh, that's great. If you want sharing where you're from. We've got France in the house. I know a few of you where you're from, but that's great. Thank you for sharing that. James, good to see you. Thank you so much for coming. I can't help it. I see your names and I'm so excited to have you here. So thank you. But so many fun things that are happening in the world of generative AI. You'll notice I actually named it This Week in Generative AI because I, as I always do, have the intention of actually coming and talking with you weekly. It is the most fun I get to have. Sometimes I just have to post it as a LinkedIn article, but I love it when I can actually make time to come and talk to you live. I haven't actually been able to talk to you live so far as I've been from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed just booked solid talking to people about how to implement generative AI at scale. And so very exciting. What? Alicia from my, my friend We're like right next to each other. Um, so, so great. Charleston, uh, South Carolina is in the house too. So good to see you. Um, so I've been working on so many different client opportunities. I've had over 120 conversations that I have tracked. That's not including the random ones that just pop up, um, with C-level executives in the Fortune 500, but really primarily in the Fortune 100. I'm talking about What is generative AI? How do we use it? How do we use it for real? And while this session today is not about how I answer that question, though, if you're interested, let me know. I'm happy to do like the pitch I give to our executive clients. I'm happy to do for you on a LinkedIn Live so you all know kind of what we're saying and, and how it's resonating. But I do wanna share with you some cool stuff that I am learning from those projects that we're implementing. I also wanna share with you a learning path that over the last couple months I've just been collecting these different classes that I've been taking. I documented some of them because I was like, oh, I should probably put this on a website. So I put some of them on the website, but I'll continue adding to that over the weekend and you can follow it. Doesn't require you to sign in or give me your email or anything crazy like that. You could just go to the website. I'll put it up here towards the end of our time together. Wonderful to see you all. Oscar is in the house. Good to see you, my friend. And Juan, thank you so much for joining. So I will give you kind of the first thing I said, the learning path. I'll give you that towards the end. Hopefully you'll stay. I'm not planning to go more than 20 minutes. That's usually about as long as people can hang out with me. So, and take my effervescent excitement for this wonderful world of technology that we live in. But one of the things, the other things I want to share with you is some exciting news. So next week, Accenture, Lan Guan, actually one of our incredible leaders here at Accenture, who is the founder of the Center of Excellence for Generative AI, of which I am a part and excited, happy leader to be a part of that program. She actually has been working with Stanford University on a Foundation Model Scholars program. And so we have a small cohort of us headed over to California next, next week to actually take part in it. So I will be one of the first to go through the program. I'm hoping many of you will have an opportunity to do the same. But we'll have a chance to kind of vet out the content and give our feedback. And many of you know, this is, this is the way I like to run. I like to be the first. I like to test it out. I like to put my fingers on a keyboard and kind of really test out the ideas that we're going to teach and then scale it. So you can guarantee that I will be doing some play-by-play action of what I have learned throughout the week next week. So that'll be really exciting. So the Stanford Scholars Program, super excited about it. I also recently launched a couple of exciting things. Many of you remember I did a LinkedIn Learning course on deepfakes a while ago, maybe 2 years ago, right? We recorded it. It was with Ashley Kennedy, one of my best buds in the LinkedIn Learning space, and she ended up focusing on a time— remember back then we were dealing with a crazy election year, a pandemic. And we were really worried about misinformation. I was working with National Public Radio at the time, and so we created this course and 3.2 million people took that course. And it really was the foundation kind of of some of the things we're talking about today with generative AI, but now at massive scale, right? Anyone can do the things that were really limited to a few labs just a few years ago. As now we've launched a new course, it's actually part of a learning path called Career Essentials with Generative AI. And it's good for everyone to take it. You don't have to be super technical. And honestly, if you are super technical, it's still good to understand the language because one of the things I have learned with generative AI is that this is a business-driven technology. It is very exciting to talk to C-level executives and boards of the largest companies in the world and them say, okay, we wanna move forward with this. And then the technology, of course, has to kick in. Someone has to know how to build the thing, but it's the business that's driving this innovation more so than I've ever really seen in the past. And I think that's pretty important. So super excited about that. And Camila, hello, good to see you. I know I get so excited when I see some friends on here. And hi, hello as well. Thank you all for staying. It's so cool because The only way I know you're here is because you're telling me, because my everything inside my Restream says zero. The timing is zero. The number of watchers is zero. So I'll go back later. I am streaming on all things Noelle Russell Russell. So that is my YouTube channel, my Facebook. Uh, I'm— some people still use Facebook, I know. My Twitch stream, um, and two more, I think my LinkedIn, of course, uh, live, and then one other location I can't remember. But, um, so this will be available for recording. Maybe I'll even edit it. Who knows? But if you wanna catch it or if you wanna share it with a friend, because there will be some really cool stuff like the learning stuff that we'll share in just a few minutes. So that is cool. Stanford Foundation Model Scholars Program, super excited to be part of that. My LinkedIn Learning class is part of the Career Essentials for Generative AI just launched. I think we have 15,000 people that have gone through and gotten the certification. So that's pretty good for the first couple days. I'd love to see it hit, Millions like the last course did. We'll see what happens. I also, though, super exciting, just signed a contract with PACT Publishing to author my first book. Eee! Sorry, super exciting. I am, you know, I'm always very concerned about things that take a long time to do, like books. However, passion is a huge part of why I think it's time for me to do this. I have so many ideas, so many little productivity hacks, little leadership hacks. That I've used in order to, you know, many of you have known me for years, like going from Amazon Alexa to Microsoft AI to being at National Public Radio during one of the most critical times when we had an election year and a pandemic to showing up and leading generative AI at Accenture. Like, I always seem to be at the right place at the right time, and I actually think it's intentional and I can teach you exactly what that is. So super excited about that book. Thank you so much. Very, very excited about it. And so it's called Empowering Success with Generative AI, and it's an executive field guide. As you know, one of my philosophies is I like to go from the boardroom to the whiteboard to the keyboard, right? I like to start with an executive sponsorship, but I want technical leadership to be educated and informed. But at the end of the day, nothing really happens until you put your fingers on a keyboard. So how do we become that unicorn skill set of people who understand the business but also really understand the technology. And that's, that's my mission. So we'll see what happens with that. It is scheduled to come out towards the end of this year, but hopefully within just a couple of weeks, you'll see the, you know how they do this. It's a publisher, so they'll put up the preview. And of course, I will come and tell you all about it. And you guys can sign up and become part of the, the people that will maybe be early readers of the book, but I'm excited about it. It's stuff I say a lot, but what better way to kind of You know, I am a huge fan, many of you know, huge fan of Hamilton and Hamilton the musical. And so I'm always like, I need to write more. I need to document more. I need to build my legacy. I need people to know the ideas in my head longer than I am here on this planet. And so this is a big move in that direction. So super excited about that as well. Yes, Vijay, exactly. It's one of my catchy little phrases. Maybe that's a book title one day. It certainly should be an article. Thank you so much. Um, ah, John, what's up? Good to see you. Uh, thankful that you are here as well. Um, you should definitely look in this list of people that are commenting, some really great people you should connect with. I often say like it's great to come in and of course listen to content, but like the group of people that we create, like this community that we create, we all think along the same lines but from def— very different perspectives and lenses. So I encourage you to connect with each other, um, throw connection requests around like confetti. That's what this, this business and honestly, this world is all about. So let's see, I'm going back to my agenda of all the things that I wanted to share with you. So I shared with you the book, the LinkedIn course. I'm going to share with you my learning path in just a moment. Oh, so I have a couple of cool things that are happening now that are kind of post-COVID. So many of us, at least I am hungry for the world of like user groups that we used to have, right, where we used to all get in a room. Bring our laptops and like actually build stuff together. I do value virtual because I have a bunch of kids, right? So I can't just easily leave my house. But I do really appreciate being able to kind of get my hands dirty with people, ask questions, teach what I know, learn from others. I just love that part. And so July 22nd here in South Florida, actually partnering with Miami Dade College, we are going to be launching an Azure AI Day. As a matter of fact, if you want to be a speaker at this event, I will invite you to reach out to me. I would love to have you speak. But if you don't want to be a speaker and just want to attend, that's another option as well. But we are going to be hosting it locally. We're also going to be hosting an AI— so I don't know if you know this, but there's an AI Skills Challenge that's launching, launching with Microsoft. It actually starts, I think, on the 17th of July. And I'm going to be going live every other day. So I'm going to try and go every day and just surprise you. But every other day is my current commitment because things always happen. But every day and go through— I don't know if you remember, I did this 2 years ago, went live every day for like 2 weeks and taught the AI fundamentals content that allowed you to prep for an AI Azure certification. If you go and sign up, and I'll do another live on this, but if you sign up for the Skills Challenge, you can get a certification voucher for free. So really cool opportunity to get that stamp of like you are, you know, doing cool things and testing out your skill set and actually getting practical and hands-on. So awesome. Great. So I see someone has already signed up with the— for the Skills Challenge around Cognitive Services. I might have overstretched. I'm the person who clicks all the buttons, right? I did. I don't think I clicked all of them, but I signed up for Cognitive Services. There's another one, like a Power Platform one, and I was like, oh my gosh, that would be cool. So it's going to be a busy time. But these are the types of things people always ask me, how do you stay so excited? How do you stay so happy and energetic? I will tell you that doing these types of projects with other people is extremely energizing. I was talking to someone just this morning about healthcare and we in 5 minutes ideated like this really interesting thing that I actually want to build from a just like build a demo of. But it was like this reimagination of patient experience, reimagination of diagnosis coding that is super complex and doesn't yield like enough value, certainly not what's, what's available and capable with the generative AI organization. So anyway, like in 5 minutes we just came up with this cool idea, but here's what, what needed to be there for that idea to come to fruition. You needed someone maybe like me, right, who is very knowledgeable about the technology, but I needed someone who is much more knowledgeable about the domain. And that's what I think is different about this technology. I mentioned it with the executive kind of drive and the business pushing, uh, the envelope of innovation in this space. But that domain expertise that you have in healthcare, in finance, in user experience and product development, that domain expertise is really what generative AI requires in order for you to get really good results.. And so I partnered with someone I just met today. It was amazing conversation. And in 5 minutes, I'm like, we should build that. That could change the world. I say that a lot, but I mean it every time. So really cool. I love in— I love doing like ideating and then building, right? So the ideating, I feel like is the, you know, when I'm going from the boardroom to the whiteboard, the whiteboard is the ideating, the technical architects. Some of you categorize yourself as this, right? How do you who thinks about and strategizes. You have to have that piece. But then there's someone who actually builds the thing and you have to really need someone in all three areas, right? Who's thinking about the business, who's thinking about the architecture and the strategy, and who's actually building the thing. And these are magic teams that we're putting together that I have the ability to put together at Accenture. It's been pretty amazing. Asif is in the house. What's up? Thank you so much for joining. So there— oh yeah, great. Thank you for posting the Miami-Dade Cloud Skills Challenge. Amazing. This is why we have people like in our community that can support. So definitely take a look at that link. Would be so excited to see some of you live. And I'll do another LinkedIn Live actually leading up to that for those who are going to be coming and seeing us live and just prepping and doing those things. Okay, I'm almost running out of time. So let me finally get I don't know if I know how to share my screen, but I do know how to do this other thing, which is put in— I created a new website and it's, as you know, I care a lot about diversifying, like diversifying our environment in the world of AI. I today, and many other women have this problem challenge. I today am often the only woman on a call. I am often sitting in an audience looking at a panel that has no diversity on the stage. These are silly things maybe, or maybe you don't think it's that big of a deal. But me as the person looking to be inspired, I want to see a little glimmer of who I am everywhere I go, right? Like I want to see the world represented in the rooms that I'm in. And I think we're a long way from that, but we can do little things to get there. So I started this community, Women in Generative AI, specifically because it's not a coding community, though we will do coding. It is a Boardroom, Whiteboard, Keyboard, and it's leave your titles at the door. You'll see members of this community are CEOs, CTOs, CDA, Chief Data Officers, but they're also product owners, user experience researchers, and they're also brand new developers coming out of college. And it's amazing the kind of things that we've been doing and talking about and thinking about. I'm a big passionate advocate for women in leadership and the value that a diverse perspective brings to leadership. And again, I always tell people, like, I'm not saying we want all women all the time. I just want a little more women in some of the time that I'm working because I don't have much now. So Women in Generative AI, if you go to that Learn site, you will see a brief, a very brief list. It's all I could do right before I got on this live to show you the, the, the LinkedIn, not LinkedIn, the Microsoft Learn classes that are currently available for Azure OpenAI service. Many people send me messages and they'll ask me, how do I get started in generative AI? How do I get going? How do I obtain the skills? How do I become— I think there was maybe 60 Minutes. Anyway, there was some big media delivery or component. I don't know what it was called, like a little segment of a session. On 60 Minutes that talked about this new role, this prompt engineering role. And I think the, the interesting part about prompt engineering is that yes, it requires a little natural language understanding. It's good to understand what you're prompting, but it's actually more critical that you understand the business problem you're trying to solve, right? That you understand the vernacular that's required as solving part of that problem. So hopefully you can access it, and I didn't accidentally misspell Bellitt. Yes, please tell every daughter and every woman, girl, that there's so much room in this space. I think one of the challenges we have right now in creating inclusive, and I mean, symphony of people, right? My team, I'm still building it, but I feel very good about it, right? Like, there are all sorts of people, right? I have, you know, people that are from a traditional background that look like everyone else. Oh boy, it's a little slow. Sorry, I'll catch up. And then I have, you know, I have people, I have women, I have people of color, right? I have people that have different accessibility concerns or challenges. I have people like me who are empathetic to a ton. Like I have, you know, I want, I want to have as many perspectives as possible so that when I'm building a solution, which I am building right now for Microsoft, when I'm thinking about Microsoft solutions, I'm not just thinking through my very specific siloed lens, right? That I'm thinking as broadly as possible. And this is something that I learned at Alexa is that I don't know if you all remember, like at the beginning of Alexa when we only thought people would buy one Alexa device, like there was a time where we only ever even considered you'd have one device in your house. I know now I have lots of them. I'm watching my— hopefully my connection is not as terrible as it seems. But yes, I think it would be really interesting for us to think about, you know, like, how does this technology really change things? I am now inviting people in the ideation sessions that I do I'm inviting them to not think about how do I solve this specific problem, but to actually think about what could I do to avoid the problem even starting? And that is where generative AI— it's a little mind-blowing activity, but this is the number one thing we're doing with clients today is sitting down and ideating on what— OK, what problems are you solving for? What Band-Aids are you trying to put into existing systems or solutions. But then take a step back and think, how could I avoid that problem altogether? Like, what's causing that problem, right? RCA, root cause analysis. And now how might I use a generative AI solution to actually avoid ever seeing that problem exist? I know there's one of our clients is working on, you know, mitigating a lot of legal concerns, right? So they've got a bunch of legal traffic that they currently have humans processing. What if I could just avoid it ever getting to a legal, you know, debate or litigation? What if I could actually serve that customer or client earlier in the process so it never ends up in litigation? Again, like it's a very disruptive way of thinking about things, but I think it's a really cool thing to consider. So thank you all for joining me. You now see Women in Generative AI. Sign up for the list. You'll get notified every single time I publish anything. I want to give you a couple of fun things. I'm going to give you a bonus. Let me see if— I think I can type a message in here. I don't know, it won't let me. Never mind. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go back into this chat when this is over and I'm going to populate 3 of my favorite GitHub repos. These are baseline repos you can use, and if you have an Azure subscription, you will be able to leverage that Azure subscription to build these out. There are some magic buttons today where you can just click a button and it automatically will build the entire infrastructure as code into either Codespaces or better yet, right inside your Azure subscription. It's like very cool. I'm very, very happy with it. But the last thing I'll leave you with is my best news of the day. And many of you probably have guessed, but you've probably seen the MVP buzz that is happening, which is all of these amazing, incredible AI experts experts, data experts, Microsoft experts are getting notified by Microsoft that they've gotten their next year of certification as a Microsoft MVP. I will tell you, every year I get nervous and, and this is my third year. And I will tell you, when I got the letter that said that I am an MVP, I cried like I was so— it's amazing what a little recognition will do for you. I could cry right now where you're like, I'm recognized and people understand how much I'm working and how much I'm trying to help the world use this technology. It was an extremely gratifying moment. And so I just wanted— it's one of the reasons I wanted to get on live and just say thank you for watching all the crazy things I do. Thank you for joining my lives. Thanks for listening and reading my content, because this is the exact community that I do this for, right? Like, how do I give you what I learn every day? Um, and I— and there's more, there's so many more people that we could extend this to. I encourage you, feel free to take that list, recreate that list, share. I am— I do not own anything. I always tell people, I, uh, I nourish the world and the world nourishes me, but it's not a linear relationship, right? So I am giving, giving, giving, use whatever I have given to help perpetuate the information that we have to everyone. Like, the more people know what this technology can do and how it can do it, the bigger amount of change we can have in this world. And I do think that we can make big, big, big changes. So congratulations to me, MVP, hat trick, third time. There's so many more people that have done this like 8, 16 years in a row. But I'm on my third and extremely grateful to have the opportunity to serve in this capacity for another year. Woo-hoo! But I will start kicking that off by doing the July in-person session with Miami Dade College. And then we're going to be meeting monthly in South Florida. We're going to meet with Accenture people, plus anyone from the outside who wants to join us. So it's a really great chance to see what real clients are like, big clients are doing. But at the same time, if you're a startup founder or you want to start your own company, you might be able to get some really cool ideas of where the world needs your help right now. So amazing. Thanks for joining me. I am right at time, so I'm going to let you go. It's 2:30. I will join you again, all being willing, next week for a fun rendition. Don't forget to check out this site. I will be updating it today with the Google and AWS learning, but I will tell you, Azure OpenAI Service, I have done some really incredible work. And so I'm going to be sharing all as much of that as I can over the next few weeks with you. Thanks for being my friend. Thanks for hanging out. And most importantly, Be the most positive person in the room. It's super fun and it's contagious. So talk to you later. Thanks for everything. Have a great weekend. Bye.