 Hey everyone, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP Buzz Chat and I'm talking to you with Liji. Hello. Hi, Christian. It's great to have you. So people don't know who you are, where you are, what you do. Why don't you give us a lowdown? Sure, sure. First of all, thank you for having me on the show. It's a pleasure to meet you coming back after a long holiday after the 4th of July. So my name is Liji Thomas. I'm a manager with Bellorum Reply. Bellorum Reply is a digital transformation firm based out of Kansas City in the US. I recently relocated to the US last year and I'm an MVP in the AI space at Microsoft. Very cool. And so what's your role? What do you do at your company? So I started off like 15 years back as a software engineer and I moved up the career ladder and today I manage a brilliant branch of software engineers. So on the technical side, I work mostly on the on the Microsoft stack on the AI projects and other web projects as well. So on the AI stack, again, mostly focused on the Azure cognitive services, pod services, etc. Well, it's an interesting space and one that's expanding pretty rapidly. In fact, one thing that we see for those that aren't familiar in the MVP program, and every few years, they'll kind of rejigger the naming conventions and the kind of the buckets, the categories that each of us are in. AI is one of those areas where it's kind of spread across different areas. So it's newer to have an AI standalone category, but there's still some data platform people, developers, other engineering roles. There are people that are in cloud and data center management that do a lot of AI and are leading more heavily that direction. People that are over in the Azure category. So what was kind of your focus? What kind of brought you into the MVP world? Right. So you're right. In the AI space itself, it's a it's a huge space. It's all encompassing up a lot of technologies in there right now, particularly from the Microsoft stack. For this area, you have Azure cognitive services, cognitive search, bot service, and of course, Azure machine learning. My focus has been on the first three, which is cognitive services, bot service, and cognitive search. So even beyond that, now that you see the proliferation of low code and no code tools, you see that AI is being more democratized and is available to citizen developers or everyday developers, as they call it. So I don't know when or how that will come into the picture, but then you see the AI is being used across the breadth of the spectrum right from low code, no code to custom AI, which is using Azure machine learning. So my focus is again, more on the AI as it pertains to the development stack, which is by using simple API calls like cognitive services, bot service, the development of virtual assistance and conversational agents, cognitive search capabilities and that area. My journey as an MVP is going to be a little longer answer than that probably. So as I said, I've been in this space for more than a decade right now, and a majority of that has been fortunately on the Microsoft side. So I'm a little biased on the Microsoft stack, I would say. So being heavily involved in working with this stack and AI used to be, went from a hype to a reality just in a couple of years by now, but even before that was something that I fell in love with way back in school and college. So fortunately, I've had the opportunity to work in this space and to actually build apps in this space and this is beyond POCs and prototypes. So I think clubbed with that my passion for sharing of knowledge in the community. I introduced me to a lot of other opportunities, getting to meet people in the community, sharing that knowledge and be doing that for a lot of while when a couple of MVPs who are out there kind of noticed and they reached out and they supported me in terms of building additional opportunities for me, sort of mentoring me in terms of, hey, you know what, this is something additional you could do to add value to that and sort of like that. So that's when, again, that relationship flourished and they nominated me as an MVP and then I come into the club. But before that, for years, a lot of this groundwork that we do with or without the MVP badge is just learning and sharing that knowledge that you approve with the community. Yeah, it's, well, that's consistent. We were just joking beforehand that with the renewal process that of course you're brand new, you're not going through the renewal cycle here, but on an annual basis, as MVPs get renewed or not renewed on July 1st, typically around the beginning of July, we're still waiting here, we're on the 5th and waiting for those emails. But that, it's a great way to kind of reflect on things that just the process of the course of the year. But it's also, I think those that recognize, hey, they may not be doing the same volume of writing and speaking and mentoring, like things with work pick up, and so there are people that lose their MVP, but for the vast majority of us that don't like throw ourselves into a pit of despair at losing our MVP. It's, I always tell people, it's like, look, regardless of the plaque on the wall, this is the way that I operate. This is the way I automatically, I share, I collaborate with the community. I'll be doing this after I'm an MVP, you know, regardless until I retire. After I retire, I don't know, I think my time will be spent collaborating on projects with grandchildren, but that's it. Until then, you know, we're just going to keep on doing this. So usually, so people ask, I'm sure people once you earned your MVP came up and said, well, what's the secret? What's the, what are the three things that I should go and do? What's, how do you respond to those questions? Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I will tell you. And I, to be honest, after the longest time wondered, though I've not probably asked someone, I've wondered like, what does it take to be in the light club of like MVP? It's a black box. I would just tell you completely. That's why I like, I like getting different perspectives. Like, what do you think it is? What was it from your perspective? I will, I, so when I got the MVP, I tell you that the way I came to know of it, and probably many others as well, is from a tweet that, hey, you know what? Congratulations, your MVP. I knew for the longest time that I've been, the whole nomination process itself takes a couple of months and they go through the audit interview. It's, it's, it's not a simple process at all. So I come to know from a tweet that I am an MVP. And then I'm like, I spent about a good 10 minutes on that email. And I'm like, I hope they didn't get the name wrong. I hope they didn't get the email wrong. I wonder if that's ever happened. Like, oh, sorry, we sent you that email. I reach out to my CPM and I reached out to my other MVPs. I'm like, okay, so this is not a hoax. So, but jokes apart, yes, there were a lot of people after that reached out like, what certification do I need to take an MVP? What program do I need to do? Like, the three or four things that you need to do an MVP? I think the best answer that I've got is the one that I've asked my CPM in terms of, you know, without me just even asking, I think probably she just figured it out from my face. It's like, you know what, you probably want to know what you did to become an MVP. And then she gives me that list of just the line activities that I had submitted as part of my nomination process. And the one thing that I still remember her told me, to be renewed as an MVP, what you need to do is just continue doing the great stuff that you've done. You don't have to do any superhuman thing here. It's as simple as that. You don't have to do anything beyond that. What got you here is being a community leader. And you keep up that passion and that perseverance in giving back to that community, marrying technology and people wherever you go in the best possible fashion is what you got, is what got you here, is what's going to keep you renewed every other time. But of course, in interactions with the community and product groups is a different thing. But all up, that's the simple thing that I tell people as well. Like you said, the plaque on the wall is on one side with or without a badge, would you do it? If you would do it today, if you would do it tomorrow with or without that badge, that's probably fine yourself as an MVP. The MVP will come eventually someday, but then focus on giving back to the community. I love what you said about marrying the technology with the people, because that's it. It's everything that you're doing for the community. It's a, I think another mistake that MVPs make as far as the renewal process is that all of the, as you're starting to learn, all of the NDA calls that are happening every week, there's so much that's going on, the volume of those. And sometimes I feel so guilty, like I'm not able to participate in just in my field, in my area, for me, SharePoint and Teams related, yammer when they have them, but really Teams and SharePoint. And I'm not able to join every one of those calls or watch all the recordings. And I feel the guilt around that. But that is just the benefit of the program. You can't lose sight of what really matters is the core of what you're doing, as you say, as what got you into the program in the first place. It's the blog posts, it's the videos, it's the community events, the user group participation, the leadership that you're showing, all of those things, that's what gets you in and sustains you. Now again, it is a black box. So there's other factors which you and I have no idea that Microsoft has. I think it's generally known that there are some areas where there's a lot of MVPs and Microsoft is not as keen on adding a lot of new ones. And there's other new burgeoning areas where they're like AI, I think it's a great opportunity. Azure, there's still tons of opportunity. Things around the power platform, there's tons of opportunity for people to step up, show that leadership, get involved in the community, and produce, and then be recognized for that, where it's tougher to become like a PowerPoint MVP or even some areas of Office Apps and Services where it's pretty crowded right now. But there's also a lot going on. So I like anything. I don't pick what I am interested in or write about or speak about or talk to people about, help people about, based on what I think is going to best position me for next year's MVP. I'm working on the stuff that I am passionate about. And I think that's my word of advice for people. Yeah. And that's probably the sad news as well, right? I mean beyond the point, you really cannot build an MVP up from scratch, 80 to 90 percentage. You need to have had that passion for lack of a better word, again, marrying people and technology. And then the MVP or the specific route to that would just show you that navigation path from there, but then some things that are just so difficult to build right up. So I like that 90% passion, 10% strategy. I love the strategy, yes, I would think, and then not with zero strategy, but yeah. It's good to have a, well, like I said, so there's something that I do, like I don't know what you do. And maybe this is as you continue moving forward, but something that I've done throughout my 10 years as an MVP, and I did a couple of years prior to that, is I started on a monthly basis cataloging all of my activities. And I'm not doing it to like, hey, world, look at what I did. It was purely for my own brain to keep organized all of my activities. And about, I don't know, six, seven years ago, I started posting it as a monthly blog post at the beginning of each month with all of my articles and all of my slide decks and presentations and webinars, just collecting all those things. So I can one, as part of the renewal process, I can go and plug those more easily into the tool and keep track of those contributions. It's also a great tool just for me to go in and kind of remind myself where I've been. And so I don't know if you do any tricks like that to keep. You know what, I was just thinking about it as we talked about the renewal process today morning, I'm like, I need to take a stock of what's, you just cannot improve what you cannot measure, right? So you need to be able to, at least for your own self documentation, keep a list of all those activities and stuff, and it's gonna just help your renewal process at the end of the year as well. So keep a stock, but I think that's a great idea. I would definitely follow suit stuff. Yeah, you need to take a look. If anybody that's watching, you go to BuckleyPlanet.com. And if you go over to the keywords on the right side and find like the, like, what do I call it? I don't have it up in front of me, but like the monthly thing, whatever monthly it's up there. And you'll see the queue of all those. But it's great to be able to go back and say, what was I working on in December? And, you know, what was around that event? What did I go and create? And so I'll often go and be able to pull things for, for like social posts and like, I want to, you know, evergreen content, I want to share it out again. It's been, you know, several months from that, or it's just a reminder of what was I working on? And can I leverage old writings old, you know, six months ago, so old, not fresh, but to, to leverage that content for new, for new articles as well. And put, has my thinking changed on any of those things? Absolutely. Yeah. How often do you even look around for your own car keys, right? You just forget when you've done or how you actually solved that problem last time around. So you write for yourself first, then for others. That's why I'm also a one note user for that exact reason. I like, well, often if I'm searching for research, because I use it. So I use it in all walks of my job and I use it in personal life as well, is that I'll go search there first, and I will often have notes on a topic or several articles that I have, I've written in one note first, and then published on the blog or some other site for my company. And then I'll archive it, I create a folder where I save all of those published works, usually with a link to it. But I'll go search there. It's been just a fantastic research tool as well. I am so glad you say that, Christian, because I'm glad to meet another person who takes one note as a productive application. People tease me like, what other app out there do you use? I'm like, I use one note. Does that even count? But I think I found that to be super useful. I like having tabs and it's like, I literally live in one note. So yeah, it's open all day, every day. In fact, I've got right open right now and I have my blog calendar up and I'm looking at what's coming up, what my plans are for the upcoming week. So yeah, it's a great tool. Well, Leeji, really appreciate your time and getting to know you and hopefully we'll see you next year at the MVP summit. Oh, yes. I can't wait to see all the MVPs. It's been remote for the longest time I will think about time we got together. Well, definitely. And for folks that want to find out more about you, maybe connect with you, what are the best ways to reach you? So I'm out there in LinkedIn, pretty lazy on Twitter, but then LinkedIn, I would say. And my official blog post is LeejiThomas.com. Excellent. And we'll of course have links to all those up in YouTube and on the blog. Leeji, really appreciate your time today and let's connect soon. Thank you, Christian.