Unboxing!!! I think it's Microsoft MVP stuff!

I know it's kind of a surprise. I didn't expect to go live today, but I wanted to go live. Uh, it's almost the end of the day. I have— oh, I think I have a meeting starting in like a couple of minutes, so this won't take long. If I'm in that meeting with you, I'll be right there. Um, I didn't realize how close it was to the bottom of the hour. Anyway, that's okay. We're gonna do this unboxing. Um, if you are here live, let me know you're here. I'm on a bunch of platforms right now, so I won't know you're here unless you say hi and then I could see your comments. They all get aggregated on Restream, which is pretty cool. I am so excited because I just a couple of days ago found out that I got that email that apparently this is my only my second year as a Microsoft MVP, but apparently every time this time of year, you know, we kind of sit biting our nails hoping we get this email that says, you know, that we get to do it another year. So I'm really excited about it. I spent the whole day kind of going through and re-upping all of my subscription stuff and getting access to new tools. And it's so exciting. So I wanted to share with you a couple of things. One, oh yeah. So if you're here, of course, live, hashtag live. So I could be like, oh my gosh, you're awesome. Thanks for being here live. But if you're catching this on the replay, just let me know, hashtag replay. Otherwise, I don't know if you've noticed, but the way, especially on LinkedIn, it's not easy to tell when people come in and when they comment. So it just helps me kind of figure out who's who. So I'm going to do a bit of unboxing for you. I got a box today. It's from Seattle, so I'm like, it's got to be an MVP thing. Anyway, so I cracked the seal, but I have not opened it. So I'm going to open it in front of you. But I wanted to share a couple of things that I'm going to be doing as part of the MVP. Program this year. I think I always kind of set some goals for myself. I'm a big goal-setter, target, sub-targets kind of person. I like to create metrics and measure myself against those metrics. And so one of the things that I really am passionate about is demonstrating the value of artificial intelligence, right? There's a lot of kind of hype these days. Gartner, for example, one of these organizations that does a lot of analysis on industry trends, right, Gartner ended up releasing a study that, or at least an examination of executives that have evaluated all of these AI projects over the last 5 years. And, and they're starting to recognize a bit of a trend in that these projects aren't returning actual business value. And I think, I think there's a couple reasons for that. But one of the things I want to do, and I'm not going to go into you know, why we think AI projects are failing and why they're actually not, though I'd love to. But that's not what I'm gonna do today. I am, though, gonna spend just a couple minutes talking about the different places that AI is doing very well. That is, you know, has tangible outcomes for businesses. And I'm gonna spend, you know, a couple of lives, probably one live a week, going through these different use cases and sharing them with you. I have access to a nice hosted environment where I have lots of credits to use up. So I'm going to start building out some pretty elaborate demos. They're actually called Dream Demos at Microsoft. They're awesome. They have AR, VR combined with AI combined with Azure Machine Learning, Cognitive Services, data, sometimes a lot of the kind of old school stuff from like containers to applications written in Java, Node.js, maybe even Python. So lots of cool stuff. Everything I do though will be available on GitHub. So you'll get to kind of play around with it with me if you decide to. But they're really fun applications. So I wanted to walk through a couple of those scenarios. The first one, I'm gonna talk a little bit about Intelligent Retail. It's a bit of a special, you know, place in my heart. I love Intelligent Retail. I got a chance to demo it on stage. In front of, you know, a few thousand people, I think 4,000 people a few years ago. I just, I love the concept of being able to reduce friction for customers who want to buy stuff. I, as someone who doesn't— don't hate me and don't me, but I don't actually like shopping that much. So when I do shop, I want it to be quick and painless. And so reducing friction is a big goal of mine in these interactions and AI specifically cognitive and applied AI, there's so many cool things that we can do to reduce friction for our customers. Another thing, which is really interesting, I'm already speaking on 3 separate stages in the fall around how the metaverse and Web3 and blockchain are impacting the manufacturing industry, right? Like how, what is, you know, the metaverse for manufacturing? What does the factory of the future look like? So I'm gonna spend some time talking about that. I'm also really passionate about customer care in general, right? Like, how do we— we have tools now to do customer service really, really well. Part of it is having good humans doing that work, but part of it is augmenting those humans with good tech. And so I'm going to do a couple of demos around that technology stack. It'll be so fun. What's up? Thank you. Good to see you. Awesome. So, It is, yeah, I'm so excited about these, right? These are like real tangible use cases that generate business value. I mean, I'll tell you, I was at a customer and we went from like 37% intake to like 87%, which meant that the productivity of the team went up, but our customers also got served faster. And I was like, why isn't everyone doing this? So anyway, I feel like part of it's sometimes these technologies can become our best kept secret. So, So as my mission, you know, I'm newly minted 2023, you know, MVP in AI for Microsoft. I'm going to share with you all the stuff that I know that I've learned at Alexa, at Microsoft over the years around building responsible AI, but also how do we solve some pretty real problems inside of our businesses, whether it's— so the first one I talked about, retail, whether it's factory of the future, manufacturing, another place I really think there's such cool stuff we can do there. But also, you know, what about automotive even? Or what about healthcare? So much we could do in healthcare. Oh my goodness, even just on patient care alone, not even talking about the hard HIPAA stuff, just how do we make our patients a little bit happier, um, get a little bit better service? Like, I know as someone with 4 kids and a dad who has his own health problems, like, goodness, I could use a little reduction in friction in those spaces. So I'm going to share with you what I know. I hope you'll find it enjoyable. Okay, let's go ahead and open this box. Are you ready? I'm ready! I can't wait! I love Shrek. Okay, I love Shrek. So this is it. It came from Seattle. Um, I cracked the thing, but good tip to those who do, you know, you send boxes to people, it's really cool when you don't let them see what's in it right away, right? So they wrapped it up. There's a nice little card in here and it says, thank you for everything you do to support the technical communities around the world. Here's a token of our appreciation. Oh, it's so cute! It is an MVP award! Um, so I think this is just like swag, I guess. Fancy. All right, so the first thing, and I'm, I'm just, I'm gonna say it's for my horchata. I don't know if any of you know that drink. Oh my gosh, it's delicious. But the first thing is a cute little cup, so I'm gonna sport— oh, there, there we go. I'm gonna sport my cute little cup from now on. I'll put it on my desk. I think I can do hot and cold in it. Um, but I also have my horchata in it. Oh my gosh. And for those of you who don't know, obviously, like, I'm a hoodie, like, lover. Thank you, Warren, for my hoodie. It says Uniquely Noelle. Isn't that so cute? Okay, I love it. Um, but I have a new hoodie, so that's cool. Um, so I want, you know, I get a chance to go around and sport my very new— and it's mirrored, so I don't know which side to show it to you on. How cool is that? So thanks for joining me on my little unboxing. I got cool swag from the MVP program. What— it was very well timed. I think I submitted my address for like this mystery gift months ago, I feel like, or maybe it was weeks. It was at least a couple months ago. And it just happened to come on the same week that I got my award. Yay! Well, it would have been kind of sad if I didn't get the you. But, uh, really awesome. So, so excited. Um, have a great, great rest of the week. We have one day left to knock it out of the park, hit our targets and sub-targets. It's never too late to set one. Um, I, like I said, I'm really big about it. So I just told you I'm gonna go after 4 industries over the next— I'll call it through the end of the year. I'm gonna go live once a week and just share with you the use cases that I'm working on every day. I hope you'll find it exciting and fun. So really thanks Microsoft for all my cool stuff and for the award. And yeah, I'm really excited to be here. So, okay, talk to you later. Thanks for joining me. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.