004 - Stranger in a Strange Land

How did a CPA end up at a Microsoft developer conference?

Hey Friends!  This last week I was at the Microsoft Build conference – a big conference for developers that work with Microsoft products. 

Why?

I’ll be honest, there were times that I asked myself that same question.  I also asked myself “What were the words those people just said?  Were they real?  Are they just trolling me?”

But, the reason I went was because there were going to be some pretty significant announcements around AI and Microsoft products.   Since a lot of us use Microsoft products and definitely could use an AI hand with all of our tasks and projects, I wanted to check it out and bring you back the news. 

Plus, it was down the street from my house.

First, I have to say, there are some incredible people working either at Microsoft or in that space.  I met a lot of lovely folks.  And, yes, I’ll probably go again next year, but first I’ll make myself a “Tech Language Guide”.

And now on to the Top 3 Things That I Think are Exciting for Us

CoPilot in Windows

What’s “CoPilot”?  It’s just another way of saying “ChatGPT/BingAI now lives in our system/software and does stuff for us”. 

If you remember Clippy, the animated paper clip from forever ago, its like a more helpful, AI-powered version of that.

Here’s a video of the CoPilot announcement for Windows. The thing I’m most excited about isn’t having a Spotify playlist or changing to dark mode, it’s sending CoPilot to fix my printer settings.

And here’s a presentation where my whole worldview was changed in the first 10 minutes. You can watch the whole thing if you want to, but it’s kind of long. I just know that watching someone pull information from all over their system and crafting an email in Teams Chat pretty much ruined current technology for me.

And there are lots of versions of CoPilot. When someone asks me “When is CoPilot coming out?” I say, “Which one?” Here’s a picture of all of the Power Platform applications getting the ol’ “CoPilot Treatment”.

Right now CoPilot for Microsoft365 applications (you know - Excel and all of the other less important applications) is in paid preview with 600 companies. If you want to read about all the cool things that the folks on that list get, here is an announcement article (I’d suggest watching the ‘Symantic Index’ video too - I still can’t tell you what it is, but eventually it’ll all sink in).

Why is this exciting? Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of faffing around in the system, trying to find documents and wasting time. I am more than happy to offload that on to the robot.

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ChatGPT/BingAI/CoPilot Plugins

What’s a plugin? So, you know how ChatGPT will just make stuff up if it doesn’t know?

I hope you know that - here’s a recent article about a court filing where ChatGPT merrily made up a handful of an attorney’s citations. It’s not a research bot.

But, it *could* go research things for you, if it only had access to the right tools…

One of the plugin examples was a person drafting a legal contract and then calling in Thompson Reuters’ tools to update the contract for California law and check the provisions. 🤯

Here is a *very* short video from Microsoft with *a lot* of big words about plugins. But, it’s basically like equipping your CoPilot robot with tools. And maybe those tools are work related, like Thomson Reuters. And maybe those tools are fun, like Kayak or Instacart.

Here’s a big ol’ list of plugins that will be available in ChatGPT and BingAI (and presumably Microsoft 365?) with more coming. Plugins will soon be as numerous as the apps you have on your phone. Which is good?

Why is this exciting for us?

Well, right now ChatGPT and BingAI are nice-to-haves but until it can actually do things other than write haikus (j/k - it can do a lot of amazing things, but its still limited) then we won’t be able to full embrace the technology in our practices.

There are two things here - plugins that live outside of our data and plugins that live *inside* of our data. If we can have CoPilot PLUS our data PLUS plugins, will we ever need to go outside of our working space again?

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CoPilot in the Power Platform

Now there were a TON of exciting things in the Power Platform session. If you want to watch the whole session with breathless giddiness like I did, you can see it here.

If I was going to call out three things that were swoon-worthy from this session, it would be:

• Converting Excel files to Power Apps in 30 seconds - how many Excel files do we use to just *track* things? That’s not what they’re for!

  If you can look around and think of an Excel file that you’re using as a database, you will be very interested in this functionality.

• Using CoPilot in Power Automate - how many tasks do we do that are the same thing every single time? Isn’t that actually the goal, have a standardized process that is the same Every. Single. Time? Wouldn’t it be nice to just automate it instead of trying to get excited about setting up 1,000 file folder structures?

  Power Automate already had a ‘Describe to Design’ feature (which we’ll discuss in a future newsletter at some point), but CoPilot in Power Automate will take that one step further and help you build out flows.

• Power Virtual Agents - holy bananas. I can’t even with this part of the presentation. Just. Can’t. Even.

  How many of our clients have a “quick question” that takes us out of our flow to check the answer? Even if it’s “Hey, what time of year do we file tax returns again” or “I can’t remember how to log in to the portal”. What if we had a friendly, fully capable virtual agent working on our behalf that can then hand off the conversation when it starts getting too deep? How much time would that save us?

There was so many more exciting things going on at Microsoft Build and if you’re interested, I can share more. But I think those are the biggest things that tax, accounting and personal finance professionals would be interested in.

What are you most excited about?

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Footnote - my June ‘30 Days of AI - Tiny Lessons for Busy Professionals’ filled up, but if you’re still interested in taking it, the July class is still open! You can find it here.