“Future of Agents & Apps” with Ryan Cunningham & Daniel Newman

Hey everyone, this is Alan Hummel, CEO of Techstrong welcome, welcome to this very special virtual event that we are producing in partnership with our friends at Microsoft. The event is titled, unlocking the Future of Agentic Experiences. And it's gonna be a series of videos in, in this virtual event that you're gonna be able to, you know, take a look at and, and interact maybe with some of the analysts and speakers here.

I really think you're gonna enjoy and get a lot out of these videos in this event, and look forward to hearing your feedback. I'd like to kick things off with our keynote, and it's our keynote 'cause I think we've got two terrific speakers in this one. And it's around the future of apps, right?

And it features Rum, CEO and principal analyst Daniel Newman. If you've ever seen Daniel on an either many TV shows or, or, uh, conferences that he keynotes, you know, he would've dynamic, dynamic thought leader he is, I think you'll enjoy it. And Daniel is gonna be speaking with none other than Ryan Cunningham.

Ryan, of course, is corporate VP for the power platform at, uh, Microsoft. And, you know, Ryan is gonna share with Daniel and with you the all up vision. The, you know, the all around vision for power platform.

We're going to connect the dots between apps, agents, and interfaces, right? Ryan, and, and you know, with Daniel are going to illustrate how Microsoft is leading automation in this AI era. He's gonna articulate how Microsoft is enabling every organization to build, govern, and scale intelligence solutions with unmatched speed and trust driving the future of a agentic apps.

It's a great discussion and I think it's a great learning experience. So here's Daniel Newman and Ryan Cunningham. Alan, thanks so much for that introduction and to introduce myself.

I'm Daniel Newman, CEO of Futurum. Very excited to be here today, today with all of you and even more excited to introduce my guest for this conversation. Ryan Cunningham from Microsoft.

Ryan, why don't you say hello to everybody and give a little bit of background on the work you do at Microsoft. Uh, Thank you Daniel. It's awesome to be here with everybody today.

So, I'm Ryan. I'm the corporate Vice President for Power Platform here at Microsoft. So, uh, look after all the teams of, uh, uh, product people and engineers and designers that are building, uh, really our low-code application platform and the future of where that is going.

Uh, you know, really excited to talk to you about that today, Ryan. I've been working, uh, with and around your team for many years as an analyst. It's been great to follow.

Of course, the change that's been going on in this market is extraordinary. And I think that everyone out there is gonna gonna leave this, uh, conversation knowing a little bit more. And hopefully maybe you'll give us a little bit of that, uh, secret sauce about all the stuff Microsoft's doing.

Nothing too secret though, you know how that goes. Oh, I know. So Let's, let's start big.

Uh, I mean, when we talk about the future of apps, connecting agents, interfaces, applications, you know, what is the kind of the North star for Microsoft? What are you, what are you guys heading towards here? Yeah, Uh, look, it's a, it's a crazy time to be alive in a business application platform, uh, environment, right?

Because, uh, this whole world is, uh, being turned upside down in actually two dimensions at the same time. Uh, one is how we build software, uh, radically changing in a world of agents and, and vibe coding and everything that is filling up our LinkedIn feeds as technology professionals. What's really interesting right now is the dramatic expansion in efficacy of what I can build and the dramatic expansion of who can participate.

At the same time, You have to be evolving the platform even more and even more quickly to, to get them what they need and what they're trying to do to accomplish the, the future that they're trying to build. Yeah, A hundred percent. And, you know, I would say to, to even build on your last comment 'cause it's relevant here.

Um, it's not just an opportunity for more people to tinker and build things. It's actually really an imperative. Like, if, if we're really gonna accept the premise that every company that wasn't born yesterday is operating inefficiently and needs to, to rapidly advance in a world of agents, then the expertise you need is not just the AI technology expertise.

You actually need to go get all of the process expertise, you know, all the humans who know what it really means to run a more efficient HR department or finance department, or, you know, whatever it is, they're sitting with a real job in that department today. You gotta go figure out how do I harness that expertise and bring those tools right to the, to the point where the process is actually happening today. And that's where you need a higher abstraction platform that has agents built into it that help do the coding, that help do the work.

Microsoft does have some really unique approaches in this space and, and particularly if you look at this broader world of how software is getting built and code generation and agent swarms and every other term we're coming up with right now, you know, where we're really focused right now, particularly in the space of business applications and productivity is really make that relevant to the way companies run and operate. You know, we're not out there to, to, uh, you know, serve any possible whim of any possible developer on the planet. There's lots of great tools for that.

Microsoft makes some of them in other places, but here we're really focused on the, the core operating system of a company. And by, by that I don't mean windows. I mean sort of all the business applications, business processes, specialist teams of people that today make a company tick.

We're seeing consolidation in this era. Customers have a ton of choice. Yep.

Everyone kind of says use our agent thing, right? Um, what we're gonna wanna see is, you know, the orchestration is gonna be super important. And then of course the, the speed, flexibility, access to all the tools, data, cloud, and of course Microsoft's in a very small group, right?

Companies that has pretty much all of those things, right? Um, not all, not the only, but one of a very small number. And I think that makes you competitive.

I wanna go to the, the pragmatic side because the, uh, viewers here are probably thinking about, you know, how do I do this? How do we do this in our firm? You know, we hear some of those stats about AI ROI and the enterprise and, and, uh, let's just say that I'm a, I'm a absolute believer, but I do think there's some hurdles, you know, what are those kind of key enablers you're seeing fundamental enablers, enterprises, you know, need to get right now, right?

To make sure that those, those POCs and those production, uh, AI projects start to work and really show value. Yeah. We're seeing customers, um, adopt exactly the mentality you're talking about.

You know, not just how do I run the current process faster, but what if I fundamentally changed the process itself, um, to really great effect. Um, you know, we've, uh, we've shared some stories of retailers, um, that are starting to use agents and apps and automation together to totally change how they do things like fraud detection and, uh, even refunds and returns management. Um, you know, if I go contact an online retailer and say, I want a refund, uh, you know, traditionally that's a human going and vetting, is that a real customer?

Did they buy something or is this fraud? Does it meet our return policy? Which is by the way, usually like a 50 page PDF that changes once a quarter.

Um, you know, and then do I want to issue the refund or can I save them as a customer? And that's super slow, it's super inefficient and it's really expensive and often it's outsourced to vendors. Um, you know, can I go implement an agent that does that instantaneously, or at least does major parts of it instantaneously, um, you know, really starts to change my operating and my risk profile and my customer relationships.

And so, you know, even in use cases like that, starting to see, you know, millions of dollars of value unlocked really quickly and just better customer satisfaction, actually the balance of value is really shifting towards that process expertise. Um, and I think part of the challenge though is just, you know, very few people with real Jobs woke up this morning and said, God, I want to build a business application, or I want to automate a process. That's just not a thing that happens to most regular people.

Um, but a whole lot of people woke up this morning and said, man, this part of my job sucks. That could be better. You know, I wish we didn't have to burn so much time doing X.

Right? And, and really harnessing that energy, that value those skills and those people, and bringing great tools to them. That's part of the whole thesis behind why a platform is, is critical right now.

You know, what does it mean to totally change that interface into a human and agent collaboration space? What does it mean to go see the activity of what agents are doing on your behalf when they need your input? Let's talk a little bit about Plan Designer.

Yeah. Uh, you know, we're seeing, we go from manual to automated to, you know, to agentic level orchestration, which is great. One of the key things too is gonna be trust.

We gotta trust our systems. We gotta be sure that, you know, the agent, uh, workflows we're building, that they're inspected, that they're constantly modified to be sure that they're right, that they're traceable. Like talk a little bit about kind of how Plan Designer can help companies.

'cause that's a lot of work, by the way. Yeah. That's a lot of work.

Yeah. You can automate or you know Yeah. Streamline some of that outta the process.

Yeah. com. You can try it today.

But, uh, what it really is, is of a different kind of AI centric development experience. Um, you know, you go type into that box a business problem. We do not assume that you just want us to spit out a thousand lines of JavaScript that you, that you need an app.

Um, like a lot of vibe coding platforms today, we actually do what a real software team would do. In fact, we've built in a digital software team, we've trained a requirements agent, a process agent, a data agent, a solution architect agent. It's a highly collaborative environment.

This is not a sort of throw a paragraph over the fence and watch magic happen. It's really sort of training and teaching people with process expertise, how to think like software architects and solution architects so that they can know up ahead of time, why do I want AI to do certain things? Where do I want it to work?

How do I want it to interface with humans? And that's really the foundation of that trust in the system. Have You seen, uh, some examples out there of Plan Designer being sort of delivering promise?

'cause it sounds super optimistic. Are people using this? Oh, a Hundred percent.

We have started to see really interesting sort of challenges thrown at it. Um, you know, we have, uh, customers in highly regulated financial services context that are taking decades of old homegrown, uh, non-compliant software that was built over, whether it's, you know, hacked in Excel or built one off and sort of saying, can I use this to rapidly modernize what I had before in a way where, you know, traditionally going and turning all that old stuff into full stack software was just incredibly costly and, and cost prohibitive. Um, you know, starting to bring those things into plans and generate a more robust plan for modern software moving much faster.

Um, we've even seen huge extremes of that. I've, I've, I've seen a customer take, you know, 50-year-old COBOL code and just paste it into plant design and say, what the heck is this program doing? And can you help me build a better version of it?

Um, and actually the results were pretty promising. So, um, you know, people are getting really creative with, you know, bring the problem, bring the challenge, bring you know, sort of the business area that you want to improve, and then start working with these agents and on this digital software team to, to design a solution. So, you know, we're doing all this work.

We are trying to train people to think differently, remove constraints, whatever's possible. But the UI is, that seems to be the next frontier. Like the old enterprise software.

It's like, these are the things you can move and these are the things you can't, and what you can customize and here's what you can't and here's your dashboard. And it's like, great. But in the future, like I might just wanna say, Hey, you know, Microsoft, whatever.

Yeah. Uh, this is what I wanna know today. Right?

And then I want to obviously learn based on my behavior over time what I wanna know. Right. And then I want it to continue.

Yeah. Like things like that, like Right. How does the, how do you see being in, in this space so much, the kind of UI evolving?

Yeah. Um, you know, I think, um, specifically chat as a UI is super compelling and natural for a lot of things. Um, I do not believe that we're gonna go regress 40 years of, of UI innovation and go all back to chat in the command line though.

Like, there's a lot of things for which text is actually a terrible modality. Um, you know, in which, uh, you know, just paragraphs are are not great. Um, and, and I think there's, there's a more underlying thing here that you're touching on, which is a lot of traditional experiences, whether it's text-based or, or visual.

Assume a human shows up knowing an intent, right? As opposed to, you know, an agent being really proactive and taking care of something for me, or pushing me an update or a notification when I need to know it. Um, and so I think those experiences start to evolve a lot.

What gets really interesting is where they meet, you know, and we really see a lot of this, uh, you know, task-based data entry, repetitive stuff, increasingly getting delegated to agents on your team. But that means you'll need to work with that team in a totally different way, right? And, and where a, you know, traditional CRM system or HR system or, uh, you know, whatever, you know, pick your business application was, you know, previously, like we talked about people typing into boxes and then other people viewing reports.

You know, what does it mean to totally change that interface into a human and agent collaboration space? What does it mean to go see the activity of what agents are doing on your behalf when they need your input? You know, when they're blocked on something or they've noticed a trend or, uh, you know, there's a form they tried to fill out but didn't complete, then that's an important meeting space to go have experiences and user experiences.

Um, and a lot of times those do need to be structured in a visual way. A lot of times they could happen, you know, ephemerally or, or with a chat message, but how do you route people to the right place at the right time? Um, you know, we're working across all of those fronts, you know, that's why we have a robust set of tools in copilot studio for, for building the agent part of, of, uh, all of those things.

It's why we have a ton of evolution in power apps, you know, sort of becoming this new agent centric experience where I can see a feed of that activity. I can have agents help me, uh, do the work in the applications. Um, and those two worlds will just continue to evolve together as we start to bring things into the future.

Yeah. So you heard me talk a little bit earlier, Ryan, about governance. Um, governance is part of the, the critical, uh, constraint.

And one of the things that differentiates software, right? The reason we can't just use open AI for everything would be because it doesn't know how to handle the data. Be like, oh, let me talk about, you know, help me do a job offer, help me do a compliant healthcare notice to somebody.

Like it doesn't how to do that, right? So building applications that do know how to do that is the key you gotta build up with. I mean, of course we wanna go fast, right?

So fast is the new, the new role, right? But the trust and scale are, or, uh, the other words, I know you often need these words, but like Yeah. You know, what do you think and where are a company sort of struggling with governance, uh, and scale here with automation and, you know, kind of how do you think what you're building an agent oversight can help them?

Yeah. So I'd say there's a couple dimensions to governance and scale. You know, there's the breadth dimension.

We have a whole lot more people who now can build a whole lot more things. How do I make sure that all that stays on the straight and narrow when I can't centrally top down code review every single thing that every single person and agent is doing. And then there's sort of depth scale.

You know, when I do wanna roll out a mission critical solution to a hundred thousand employees that has AI in it, how do I make sure that that AI is not just functioning, but actually continuing to get better every single day? Um, and, and you know, the, the good news is we're not inventing any of that from scratch. You know, breadth, scale and depth scale.

Were a challenge in the first generation of power platform. Um, and something that we've built a ton of capability into the platform over the last couple of years to really, uh, tackle at huge scale. And we call that, uh, the managed platform set of capabilities.

And within it, there is managed governance, managed security, managed operations for lifecycle a LM management, stuff like that. Um, and may managed availability even, how do I go ensure high availability run disaster recovery drills for critical workloads. All of that is built into solutions baked, uh, on the power platform.

Um, and all of that value accrues to this next generation of components being built as well. You know, an agent built in copilot studio benefits from all of those managed capabilities. Um, a new app built in power apps with intelligent capabilities in, in IT benefits from that entire stack.

Um, and so that's why, you know, you start to see even highly regulated financial services firms, government agencies, um, et cetera, really trusting Microsoft here, as opposed to a 20 person startup that was founded yesterday. Um, you know, to, to really take the bet on standardizing for this, this segment of, of software. Um, then you get into the operational oversight, okay, I have agents doing work.

How do I have humans managing the work of those agents? That's not a developer role anymore. That's really an operational role.

You know, what does it mean to be an agent manager or an agent boss in a claims department at an insurance company or in a supply chain, uh, operation? You know, that's where we need these new interfaces, and that's what power apps is building in with concepts like the agent feed. You know, how do I build a, a purpose built oversight experience for really high volume activity of, of agents?

This is one of those things that like, right, there's so much doubt across the industry about being able to do this in a sort of, when you give up the human in the loop or even just have one maybe guiding, but you're moving so fast, it's like, um, you know, are they safe? Are they auditable? Because when you're in a business, everything you just to be traceable and trackable Yep.

Uh, is predictable the outcome. Like, hey, you're gonna have an agent interfacing with your customers, or you're gonna have an agent, uh, doing a bunch of accounting work, which by the way, it's like a spiral one mistake, and it's just Sure. You know, how that goes.

Yep. Like, how are you guys overcoming that doubt, you know, through the guardrails you're putting up, through the oversight, the accountability that you kind of baking into your platform. Because I think you get over that hurdle, Ryan, we move a lot faster.

You know, I think what's interesting here is actually a lot of our customers have had to build these systems already. You know, a lot of our customers already operate critical processes across massive employee bases and even larger vendor teams that operate at arm's length already today, right? We've already had to go build in a, in a world of a whole lot of variability of, of who's doing a task.

How do you create an audit trail? How do you create rules? How do you create data policies?

How do you create oversight? A lot of those concepts exist today because there is variability in the human system, right? And so a lot of the way we, we approach this, okay, how do you adapt those existing concepts, policies, features, capabilities?

How do you adapt that to a world where it's humans and agents doing the work? And what are the sort of incremental, you know, sort of 10% shifts that you need to make in those systems to accommodate agents, um, but not completely, you know, pave them and re re rebuild them from scratch, right? Because a lot of these sort of trust concepts, uh, or zero trust concepts in a security concept are already built into to the system.

Um, and so there's a ton of work we're doing there in the managed platform in, uh, you know, a lot of the ways that, uh, you know, a lot of the Microsoft security governance and oversight concepts apply to agents. Um, and, and that's again, one of the benefits of building on a mature platform and a mature system in Microsoft is, uh, you know, we're not having to recreate all that stuff from scratch, like a, like a point solution startup would have to do. Yeah.

So the, the last thing just on specifically on security. Yeah. Um, security is a super hot topic.

Yeah. What do you, the customers, how do you want them to think about the approach? Because in the end, like you can get it all governed and right, but you have to keep your doors closed, locked.

And, you know, that's an increasingly large problem. AI is, is much, uh, enabling it, uh, as it is fixing it, right? Well, look, I mean, we could probably spend an entire hour on, uh, uh, security and threat model approaches in the, in the AI era.

It is absolutely critical. And like any security challenge, there is no silver bullet. You know, every customer needs to have a defense in depth strategy and needs to think about what am I doing from a data security perspective?

What am I doing from an exfiltration perspective? What am I doing from an access perspective? Uh, you know, the good news is we have a lot of that built into the platform today.

You know, even a customer building their first copilot studio agent and using the managed power platform to roll it out. We'll see a security score in the power platform admin center, we'll see AI driven recommendations about what to do to improve that security score. Um, you know, it has a whole bunch of capabilities in there that, that go all the way to operate this in the cloud.

But with a private vnet, with your own managed encryption keys, um, you know, again, we have a lot of highly regulated, very security conscious customers that are working with the platform today. Um, I would say though, to zoom way out and look at that, um, and maybe connect it to some of the rest of the conversation we've had, it is absolutely risky to go too fast. It is also very risky to go too slow, you know, and the rest of the world is evolving, including threat actors and competitors, right?

And so the cost of standing still is probably the most costly position to be in. So let me, let me, you know, as an analyst, uh, I have to ask you 'cause uh, I've got a few things, uh, but, uh, what kind of in this whole evolution, this, this exciting moment for the future of apps and automation, uh, and agents, like what's kind of keeping you up at night, the biggest concerns that you see out there? And then what are the kind of upsides for you?

Like, what do you most kind of think could be the biggest surprise in, into the future? Give us that big vision and moment here, Ryan, to take us home. Look, I think, um, I'll start, I'll do that in reverse order.

I think there's a ton to be excited about right now. Um, and you know, I, I think, um, there's just so much potential in creativity that we can still unlock. net code in their life.

Um, you know, what unites that community is this sense of we can make something better. We can, this can be better, let's do it better. And, you know, I feel like we're at the precipice of just blowing a huge lid off of the ceiling of what you can do there.

Um, and there's a whole lot to be excited about. Um, I mean, you joke about a night job. I stayed up last night vibing a power app that's just a Tetris game because it was awesome and fun and so much faster to create it than it would have been in the last generation of the technology.

And I think that's a tiny, tiny microcosm of, you know, go take that creative energy and apply it to everything that's inefficient about every aspect of every customer organization today. You know, we're really standing on the precipice of completely rewiring how companies work, um, and doing it with people who, who have deep expertise in that process and a deep desire to make it better. And that's just incredibly exciting to me in this, in this moment.

Um, and then to flip it around, okay, so what stands in the way of that? You know, it really is all about speed and pace of iteration. And, and really it's about time to wrong.

You know, there's, there's so much that we need to go invent and covent with customers and experiment with, um, and try, and nobody out there is perfect right now. What, you know, what will define winners and losers for technology companies, for customers, for operations is how fast can you be wrong? And then how fast can you get less wrong and more, right?

Um, so that's, that's the journey we're on. That's the hill we're climbing. Um, but it's just a super exciting time to go think about what the, the top of the mountain can be.

Brian, this was a lot of fun. It was a great conversation. Appreciate you sharing a little bit about where all of this is heading.

There's so much potential for companies to really start reimagining Yeah, realize just how big of a leap forward we, we are having right now with, with ai, with Ag agentic and the work that you're doing in power platform. So Ryan, thank you so much. A hundred percent really, really enjoyed the conversation.

Daniel, thank you for the time. Everything about the way we work is changing very quickly. Thanks to the advancements in applications and of course, agents automation and what interfaces may look like in the future are all gonna continue to change.

They're gonna enable and they're gonna power businesses to be more efficient and of course to be more productive. It was a great conversation over the last hour. We really did reflect across not just power platform and how they are thinking, how Microsoft is thinking about building its future, but really about how businesses should be thinking about developing their future, removing constraints, being able to look at problems in new ways, and then being able to apply software and then being able to utilize resources in new ways that can deliver more value to your business and of course to the customers that you serve.

And this is not gonna be easy. It's gonna take some time. There's gonna be some effort, but it is something that can be done today and companies can start to extract value right now.

And moving quickly is gonna be more and more important. That's something I'm seeing as an analyst, and that was clearly something that Ryan had seen as well. We talk a lot about that is the customers that are moving fast are gonna be the customers that get the biggest results and of course are able to benefit the most from those efforts.

And lastly, we still have to keep all of those considerations that have existed with enterprise applications, with software that runs our businesses. And that's gonna be the governance, that's gonna be the controls, that's gonna be security. And that, of course, is going to be putting people in the right roles and enabling them to do the work.

All those things remain similar, but of course, with a new bend, we're gonna upskill the talent. We're going to think about problems in new ways, we're going to move more efficiently, and together we're going to drive the future. Great conversation.

Appreciate everybody spending the hour with me. See you all soon.