 Hey, everybody. This is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat. I'm talking to Dave Cameron. Hello Hi I'm Cameron Vitter. I'm an MVP for artificial intelligence and I've gotten it for three years now Excellent. And and where are you and what do you do? Who do you work for? What do you do? Yes, so I'm out of the Milwaukee area in Wisconsin and I work for the Octavian Technology Group. I'm the principal architect there and my focus areas are Machine learning and artificial intelligence really focused on applied AI versus the theoretical stuff So how do we actually use AI within your business and apply that to your products? It's kind of the big focus there and then I do a lot of work also with Azure and cloud architecture and helping people either Figure out how to move their footprint into the cloud or help them figure out how to Maybe make better use of the cloud or design applications targeting the cloud But those are the big focuses of our consulting company Well, you know, so I mean a great point is because AI is a category is pretty broad covers a number of different areas I'm always interested like How it's actually being used because even like Microsoft they made some announcements of about a bunch of AI around IOT for example the Internet of Things for those that don't know but where they they actually showed like a manufacturing scenario of you know Field personnel being able to utilize the technology to you know automate a lot of their work and identify Problem areas around equipment. I mean those were seeing those real-world examples of it always makes it so much more Well real around it. So what is so when you talk about AI and talk about you'll apply to AI? What does that actually mean? Well, it really depends on the the customer and the vertical that they're in but The places that we do a lot of work Are a little bit on the line of business side So taking a look at some of the internal workflows at companies and even some of the workflows that are behind the scenes and products And we'll take a look at those workflows and kind of look for easy areas where a machine could do as well or better with With machine learning and help apply that to the business You know a big focus of what we do is taking a look at you know If you've got these 10 different opportunities where we could apply machine learning into your business Let's figure out which ones are going to bring the most value or be the easiest ones to implement or a little bit of both and Figure out how to bring those to your business So so that's kind of one of the big areas is looking on kind of the back end the workflows and some of that stuff So an example I have one customer where we we take a look at they get a particular type of email and they get thousands of them a week and We do some analysis on those emails and use various natural language processing to to figure out some key information and we were able to Auto filter out about 60% of that email and even the ones that we don't filter out We are able to figure out key information about it So that there's kind of a scorecard that comes along with the email when a human gets it So that even for those the the person's able to actually work much more quickly So that that's kind of some of the less exciting Machine learning that we do but the stuff that really adds a ton of value for companies And I feel like that's a big area that a lot of people don't talk that much about but really is where Some of the big value is the other thing that we do is a little bit more on the fun side which is doing stuff That's product-facing So something that the customer will actually interact with and will directly impact a good example of that As we did some stuff with pose recognition using the Azure connect cameras and What we were doing is helping You know imagine that you have a gym class and you have some students doing say a standing long jump That's a that's a classic example that the Azure connect team was using for a while. Well being able to Do some evaluation and what happened during that jump or that jump and You know, how were the leg movements? How was the explosiveness on the jump? What was the actual distance and you know applying that to various other events? That that was an example of something we did and it was kind of fun and exciting and then we we threw some 3d Renders on top of that to show what was happening with the skill build structure as they were doing Doing these things, but you know, that's more of the fun Customer-facing really exciting. I can think of a practical application of that having been injured and gone through a couple years Two different injuries of physical therapy and where they're doing the you know They're watching my run my walk my gate and they look at the movement and and the other injury was to my shoulder So it's great to have leg injuries followed almost immediately upon healing by the by the the shoulder injury, but So much of it was You know that that expert that physical therapist watching those movements and testing those things to be able to capture that and then with office visits capturing that and doing a Comparison of data over time that's something that is difficult to do manually It is and I actually have a friend who's also an MVP that is doing something very much in that space and yeah that They're kind of taking advantage of it to bring most of the expertise of that physician or their trained person Bring that to you via AI and maybe do again. It's it's never about totally replacing people at least that's our experience It's more about augmenting their abilities or maybe kind of getting a big chunk of the work done Automatically and then sending the hard cases to the human expert. Yeah And that's kind of the approach that they're taking but the the product that he's working on and yeah It's it's it's pretty neat stuff and there's a lot of very practical and useful information. I know we We've taught there another company that runs soccer leagues And they were looking at various products in that space using kind of mixed reality to understand mixed reality and machine learning to understand You know how the kids were doing when they were doing various soccer drills so that they could advise and you know It's not just about advising to it's being able to compare progress and see you how did things change in six months? Are we seeing the progress we should and that kind of gives some metrics for the coaches as well Are we are we leading to a place where we have all that kind of tracking so you can actually For athletes is a great example, but to see if they're even their patterns are it's on decline or post injury How they're improving I mean that kind of stuff I'd imagine they'll be coming soon I'm not familiar with a product that does exactly that but there is a lot of products in the athletic space especially at the Professional level, so I'm sure if that's not it doesn't exist It will soon and then we're just one step was one step more where we have the microchip embedded and then we Just apt and neutralized if we've become you know less efficient to society I've heard the conspiracy theory I tell you I I'm actually doing a series of talks right now that are talking about doing evil with AI and Kind of kind of dive in into all of that and put ideas in people's heads. That's great. That's great Yeah, yeah guy have instructions somewhere, right? Yeah, that's right I know taking a look at because there's there's a lot of opportunities and ethics is really important in my space right now And figuring out what ethics should look like and you know, we're struggling with Going too far and being gatekeepers and kind of holding back technology Versus just leaving it wide open and letting people just go go nuts and like the criminals do what they want and Figuring out where that where the happy medium is somewhere in between there. Well We've got the ones to go there. Yeah, no, I agree I was gonna make the joke that's like, you know, I don't think there was yet an AI chapter the anarchist cookbook But yeah, I mean look there's bad people are gonna do bad things if you don't have an understanding of what's possible Then you can't protect against those things. That's why security companies will often hire hackers So that you can go and build build a better better protection around what you know what you do So you have to exploit things to find the weaknesses to you know So and that that is the real point of the talks that I've been giving lately Is just to kind of make people aware of the stuff that's out there and what's going on and you know in certain spaces There's there's so much publicity right now Like what's going on with stable diffusion and the ability to to generate images based off text Like everybody's heard about that and everybody's playing with that But I don't think people fully understand the criminal implications and the fraud implications And so helping helping people kind of see what the steps are and how easy it is Helps people understand, you know, maybe not to fall for that stuff. Yeah, we've got some as a society I feel like we have some really tough times ahead in the next five years Because what's really expensive to do right now to to make that video that just nails it and fakes a person Is probably something that anybody's going to be able to do With no skill at all within a year or so quick. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, yeah, that's why I've talked to a couple of people that's I've been getting the like the Facebook ads and Twitter ads I've been seeing in my profile for like the AI generated content Like don't worry about blogging and let the AI go and do that And I've talked to some people who are in that space and who have actually played with it Like, you know with your obviously you can write something that's technical that is to a guy in the your collaboration stack So SharePoint and teams and that kind of stuff to go and write a to have AI generate something Like it's more difficult to do where it's technicals were specific, but to do just broader marketing related Things it's easier to go and build around that, but it's going to become increasingly Easy think of like feeding in and automating anything it AI only needs like, you know Five to ten samples of of like an article of that writing style to be able to start to mimic your writing style Even less at this point actually If you give me one, I can give you a pretty good emulation of your style At this point and you know, how much money do you pay for that service to do that writing for me? It's virtually free. I actually use I do it all the time personally so You know one of one of my least favorite consulting activities is writing SOWs yeah Lately every SOW I've written has been co-written by an ml model So I let it do the initial writing Yeah, kind of tell it what points I want to be in there And then I just do a little bit of editing and I'm good to go and it's it's caught my time down significantly Well, you know, I was just thinking of uh, uh, you know one microsoft syntax So I don't know if you're playing with that and you know, but that kind of Specifically just jumps right into that that area. I just think of my mother-in-law who is retired now But was a paralegal for years and then did nothing but Put together and write grants for a company that should work for years and was doing that while living abroad And so much of that it's like you don't need to write the majority of it now It's just templated and scripted and and the you know, the ai does the lion's share of the work Yep, and I don't think a lot of people are making full use of that yet. I'm starting to see services pop up And frankly, I feel like a lot of the services that are popping up are kind of gouging people on costs And they're super expensive, but that'll probably normalize Speaking of microsoft syntax But I mean, that's that's a big part of what that is if you're in a I mean, you think of it if you're in an industry where you have kind of structured collaboration a lot of contracts You know scope of work, you're like documentation things standardized Reporting around that you can automate so much of that For the creation of of new documents new deliverables So You can really train those things to to go and build that and get really smart around You know of how those are created. Anyway, it's it's an interesting space that there's a lot going on It is and we're talking to numerous clients about starting to as tapping part of the stuff now that you can automate in your workflow Is a lot of that cookie cutter text that you write for various reasons in your line of business Right, just tell it the style you want tell it the little details that you want to be in there and let Let the ml write it and I mean we're to a point where If it's specific enough, you probably can just about trust it to be right and not even check it What it's writing in certain areas, which is fantastic I'm really eager to see Yeah, I was gonna say and and with the language with the transcription or the translation services too That's improving greatly. So it's not just write it, but then write it. Here's the languages. I need that Yes, no, and that's fantastic and I love that that that's kind of opening up a whole lot of Communication collaboration that wasn't there kind of getting into that star trek communicator level of capabilities I think we're going to see a lot of that stuff in the next year A lot of people walking around with little apps that are doing that sort of thing But what's really compelling to me is seeing what Seeing what some of these large language models can do Is it used to be that you could sort of get a decent translation? And now it's like no, you can get a translation that's better than what somebody that has Years of a foreign language experience would be able to do and you can get that out of today's models Yeah I'm really eager to see what comes out there There's a couple really big language models expected to come out in 2023 And I think they're going to be as earth shattering as what we saw in the last year or two So I think we're gonna have a big leap forward next year Well, I I'm excited to see that because I actually had Had an experience so right before the pandemic was on a flight was sitting in Seattle and had two women who were tourists Over from china and now I had to have the wi-fi working to be able to use it But using the translator was sitting there with the two of them and had a conversation I would just speak into it. It would then output of the speaker And I think that was like the I don't think it was the microsoft to think it was the google translator But anyway to be able to do that right on my phone And then they would recite it and I hit record and do and choppy english But we were able to go back and have conversation was just incredible So that's where I do want it in a little star trick button. I just want to go to yes, you know and And honestly, I think we're we're only a couple years from being able to make really good models that are small enough to actually have At least in your phone Because think of how much better that would have been without having to have the internet connection and have the time delay that you probably were watching Right as it was taking a couple seconds imagine if that was instantaneous like, you know That would be right and then if it could be compact enough that I could you know Download something have it embedded within my phone. Maybe by language or something, you know versus have it to have to Get out to the internet have that you know connectivity to be able to do it Hey camera, and I know that I usually start out at the towards the beginning of that We jumped right in the conversation which is was fine, but I always like to ask like what was your path to becoming an mvp So what were you doing? Oh sure and kind of how did you get into the program? so, um Well, I've been in the microsoft stack for about almost 25 years at this point starting back in Think it was visual studio five I think was about where I got started in the microsoft stack and I was doing software before them But not in the microsoft stack and but anyway, so I've been in there for years and years and years and always going to conferences and always enjoying What the mvps were bringing to the table at conferences and what they were participating in But I was really more in industry in various roles. I wasn't doing a lot of consulting So I I never really pushed that hard on it But once I I got focused on consulting maybe seven or eight years ago. I realized that well now's my chance I could actually become an mvp So anyway, how I got nominated is I got nominated actually in mixed reality I was in the early hollow lens one So I was one of the early people to get that device and I wrote this massive series of blog posts That were kind of digging into some of the real deep technical kind of spatial Processing stuff that was going on with the hollow lens and it was basically covering the love undocumented stuff And how to do it and so that got a lot of attention from various folks, but Based on that somebody nominated me and he's actually now the PM of that team the person that nominated me And but yeah, I wasn't getting anywhere in that space So I I ended up taking the advice of one of my friends That's an mvp and switching kind of directions to where I was actually working Which was in the machine learning space. I transitioned over to there already And as it happened there were hardly any it was a new mvp So I was the sixth person in the united states to get an ai mvp So one of the very early ones So, but yeah, I'm most of my my efforts were around speaking And doing workshops and teaching and contributing at user groups both as hosting and Running them, but I was doing various things here and there Also was contributing to open source projects as well But kind of all of those things and to be honest, I didn't really change a lot of what I was doing I just started maybe tracking it and aiming it more But I was still doing very much the same stuff. So I mean If anyone's listening to this and want some advice about being an mvp If you're looking at what you have to do and saying, oh now I have to do all this extra stuff You probably don't want to be an mvp You you only want to be an mvp. Well in my opinion It's really only worth pursuing if you already have a passion for being involved in the community If that's something you're already doing It's a pretty short putt to get to be an mvp. But if you force it, it's actually a lot of work If you're I've talked to numerous people that have pursued it that way And it becomes a lot of work. But anyway, so that's that's how I became an mvp and You know, I'm still That on occasion I've been referred to as an honorary Member of the mixed reality space. I still pay a lot of attention to that and and go to most of most of the mixed reality stuff as well and but By and large, I'm I'm very I'm doing a lot of stuff in the ai space just because that's where my consultant is as well Well, you know, it used to be that like I started as a share point mvp And it was one of the first that moved over to the office 365 And so now it's all in the same bucket. They kind of you know, they changed the buckets around a occasion but one of the benefits of You know, like we were talking before we started recording about that one of the greatest One of the best benefits of being an mvp is actually the annual mvp summit where we used to pretty pandemic get together and You know in network and and so but it used to be very closed off Like all the share point mvps were all together for that entire week out of that event In the years a couple years before uh pandemic They made it so that you're an mvp. You're a microsoft mvp So even though you're an ai mvp If if you want to go spend that entire week and your focus you want to participate in all of the You know, uh, the azure events or you know, specifically over in you know, microsoft teams or iot or whatever that area is you can go and and do that It's it's like uh being in college and taking elective courses and you know, right? So it they've really opened that up The downside to all of that going back to your point of uh of you know, the additional work Like i'm passionate about it learning about all the tech different technologies and different areas It can be overwhelming that there is a lot that's out there and you you don't have to try and do it all but uh, you know Like the there's a certain volume of activities of things that I do in the community You have to find that right rhythm that pattern for those things And uh still investigate new things and Yeah, find find what works for you and like you said What what aligns with what you do in your day job as well as what your passions are For the after hours Yeah, and I think that's a key element and you know finding the rhythm I found it to be really tricky actually to figure out the pandemic rhythm Yeah, um because what I was doing just naturally before no longer works because almost all of it was in person Yeah, and as we were talking about beforehand, I've been super excited to get back in person Um just being out there talking to people meeting new people and that's that's the fun stuff at least for me it is Yeah, no completely agree Looking forward to get back out there glad to see things starting to open up again and and at the same time just Trying to make sure that I uh, you know as an empty naster I don't have kids to worry about and you know my wife is is uh, You know works full and and is also finishing her degree And so it's kind of me and the dog and it's easy to uh get carried away and do too much You got to pace yourself as well. Yeah, so yeah, I know that's great advice That is I I've caught myself going too fast at times and had to had to pull back quite a bit as I realized that I was You know speaking 50 or 60 times a year and that was like way way too much Yeah, but it's it's easy because it like I said, it's fun Yeah, the fun to me every speaking engagement. It's the people I meet. That's the fun part And I've had people looking me weird to say well, what it's what's your hobby? I said I blog They're like what it's like. Yeah, I really enjoy doing that. So yeah, you know We're crazy right exactly Well, you know what I enjoy about it is you know every new person I meet They end up teaching me something right everybody's got their different expertise. Everybody's got their different interests So I I You know, it's kind of a two-way street. At least I hope so They they get to know me and learn something from me and I get to learn something from them Yeah, maybe make a new friend along the way. One of my favorite things. That's why I love AMAs I love panels the discussions that yes, you know, I like to uh, uh, you know crowd source My my questions my issues Yep, for sure Okay, I'm a really appreciate your time today for folks that want to connect with you reach out. What are the best ways to reach you through social? I'm linked in is by far the best place to find me. Um, I'm Cameron Vetter on there All one word is my linked in. Um, and then I'm posh porcupine on twitter And I only use twitter for business purposes, but I'm I'm definitely out there on twitter Sure, and those are primarily the two social places that I'm at. Um, I also have a blog Which I just figured out was down right before this, but it's www.camronbetter.com And my company's address is octavian tg.com Excellent I'll have all the links of course out on the black the planet dot com blog and out on youtube as well So that everybody can find Cameron's info. So camera really appreciate your time And hopefully we'll see you this next spring fingers crossed at the next mvp summit I sure hope so. I look forward to meeting you there