The AI Builder is part of the new 2019 release wave 2 set of features. It is now available on Preview on your Power Apps environments with an expect general availability of Oct’19. To enable the new AI Builder capabilities on an environment, you have to go to the Power Platform Admin Center https://admin.powerplatform.com and open your environment settings. There you select Features, and you will see a new option to enable AI Builder on your environment like in this screen shot. Full details available on the documentation.

AI Builder offers four types of AI Models to use in your Power Apps. To create a new model for your Power Apps, you just need to choose the model type and follow the steps to configure it. The process is fairly easy, following the wizard you will select the settings for your AI Model, the data to use, and train it. There different AI Model types are:

• Binary Classification: This model tries to predict a binary – e.g. yes/no – business outcome. You can choose a binary field as the target of the prediction and then use the rest of the data fields on an entity to try to predict the value. You can use it to predict customer churn, late payments, etc. Details on Binary Classification model.
• Form Processing: This model wraps a Computer Vision model that allows you to extract key-value pairs and table data from documents. After you create the model, you can use it in your Canvas Power Apps with the Form Processor control, or with Flow. Details on Form Processing model.
• Object Detection: Like the Form Processing model, this type helps you to build a model that can identify objects in images. It can be used to automatically identify products in retail scenarios, or part in field service applications. Once you train your model, you can use it in your Canvas Apps with the Object Detector component, or in Flow. Details on Object Detection Model.
• Text Classification: The Text Classification model allows the tagging of text. You provide examples of text and labels, and the model will try to predict the labels. It can be a very helpful model to classify or route significant volumes of emails, surveys, or any other text. You use an entity in your CDS with the text and sample tags as the source; the model will generate a new entity to store the precited tags. You can also use Flow to classify text using a published model. Details on Text Classification Model.

Once you choose the model type and go through the wizard to build and train it, the model will be stored in your environment under the AI Builder models section. There you can see the training report showing its performance and quality, and you have options to modify or retraing the model. You can also compare your latest trained version with the published one, and publish your model.

Obviously, to create a model you need data to train it. Classification examples, tagged text, images, etc. For example, to obtain the best results in the Binary Classification type you would need at least 1000 records. Fortunately, Microsoft is also providing some data samples so we can play with this.

AI Builder comes as a complement to other packaged AI models that we had already available like the Sentiment Analysis or Topic Extraction we have with Azure Cognitive Service, which is already available in Flow and PowerBI. It wraps some of the more sophisticated capabilities of Cognitive Services, like Computer Vision and makes it easily consumable within Power Apps.

This new AI Builder capability of the Power Platform is a fantastic example of the effort that Microsoft is doing to democratise the access to AI technologies for all the business. It allows all types of users to create AI models for their business applications without requiring complex tools or processes, and help to deliver increased value to their business.

So, What is the IKEA Effect? As Wikipedia describes it, The IKEA Effect is a cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created. In other words, we humans tend to over-value the fruit of our labour.

This effect has been know to marketers for many years, but it wasn’t formalised until 2011, when a group of researchers, including famous behavioural economist Dan Ariely, published the results of their studies focusing on how labour can induce greater liking for the fruits of our work. Participants in these studies associated a disproportional amount of value to their self-assembled flat pack furniture. When asked to bid on furniture, they were willing to pay 63% more for their self-assembled one versus pre-assembled. This effect is quite interesting as it applies not just to creative work, but also prescriptive and straightforward labour without room for customisation also presents this effect.

This effect has been put to work in many products, from easy-cooking packaged recipes to software products that help you to get started with simple tasks and sample data. However, the effect completely breaks down if there is not completion of the job. In other words, we need to feel we have accomplished something; otherwise, the IKEA effect disappears.
By now, you have probably realised that this cognitive bias can be useful in the Business Applications world. In my personal experience, there are two crucial areas where this effect can have a profound impact and help us deliver successful projects.

The first one is related to ownership and the transfer of knowledge to internal teams as we embark on new Dynamics 365 deployments. I believe that we can ensure the long-term success of new technology in an organisation by involving, from the very beginning, internal technology teams and users and giving them ownership of the solution. For example, seconding an internal team of IT and business users to work on the implementation of a business application alongside external vendors can trigger the IKEA effect, and make them value more the solution. This value, in turn, can help with the broader adoption across the organisation as now we have peers advocating for the new solution. Likewise, if the internal IT teams are involved from the start and take ownership of the platform, they are more likely to continue to find ways on how this new technology can solve additional business challenges, helping the organisation to maximise the value of the investment and avoid stagnation.

The second aspect is directly related to the Power Platform. There is much discussion – and some controversy – over the concept of the Citizen Developer. However, looking at the IKEA effect it could be easy to infer that users will place a disproportionally higher value on their self-created PowerBI Reports and Power Apps against anything that we can provide as an IT team. Thus, these ‘self-service’ tools can deliver a profound impact on the ROI of our technology investments.

In summary, I believe that looking for smart ways to include users in the building process of our Business Applications can unleash the IKEA effect and increase the perceived value and adoption of our solutions. With the Power Platform and the low-code and declarative tools we have, we should be able to figure out ways on which users can participate in the build process and increase their perceived value of the solution. However, we also need to be careful as this effect is a double-edged sword and it can contribute to the Sunk Cost effect – where we continue to waste money and resources on failing projects – and the Not Invented Here syndrome – where we disregard good ideas developed elsewhere.

I have seen the result of the IKEA Effect manifesting in some clients where internal teams have taken ownership of the platform after the initial implementation, and continue to invest on it and deploy it to solve new business challenges beyond the original scope. What is your experience? Have you seen this effect before?

As you probably now, Flow and Logic Apps have many commonalities as they use the same underlying technology for its core engine. They have the same concepts of triggers, actions, and connectors. In fact, Microsoft built Flow on top of Logic Apps. Scott Durow has recently published a great video explaining the origins of Flow and how you can trace them back to the old Microsoft Biztalk Server integration product. It is well worth watching.

Microsoft positions Logic Apps as part of its core Integration platform offerings in Azure. It is the go-to tool to build integration solutions within Azure and connect disparate SaaS and On-premise systems, and it can be used in combination with enterprise messaging capabilities in Azure. On the other hand, Flow is a process automation tool to help automate business processes within your organisation, it has support for mobile and easier human interaction.

Many people, myself included, initially look at Flow as a cute toy but not a serious tool when compared to Logic Apps. We thought that Flow was more of a personal productivity tool for users to create time-saving automation but not good-enough for enterprise processes. This image was helped by the lack of some extended capabilities to manage and monitor Flows in its first release, and some miss-conceptions on performance in the initial iterations. However, the reality is quite different now. Stephen Siciliano explains this quite well in his latest session at Microsoft Build ’19. Both tools provide enterprise-grade capabilities in performance, management, and ALM support. Flow is not aimed just to end-users but it is also a tool for organisations to automate business processes. It actually has some extra features to provide better human interaction like the Mobile App for IOs and Android, and the Approval flow capabilities.

So, if both tools are equally powerful and Flow is not just a lesser version of Logic Apps. When to use each one? Again, the key is Integration vs Automation. You should look at using Flow if you require automation within Office 365, Dynamics 365 and PowerApps or your solution connects with them also, if you need to use mobile application capabilities or model human-driven process like approvals.

In other words, Flow is the workflow engine for the Power Platform and Office 365. It has some benefits above Logic Apps for workflow automation in these scenarios, like ability to run-as a user, mobile support or human-interaction capabilities, and additional integrations with PowerApps, Dynamics 365 and Office.

On the other hand, Logic Apps is better suited for more complex and B2B integrations. It suits better if your solution already has other Azure components, and it is more oriented to developers and IT Pros. It provides support to create more complex integration scenarios above what Flow is designed for. This screen grab offers an excellent summary. You can also check Stephen Siciliano session – Intelligence Process Automation with Flow watch from minute 44:30 if you want to see just this topic.

In conclusion, I am now a convert and I can see when Flow has some serious advantages over Logic Apps and the added value of its extra capabilities. I think there is a better together story in complex solutions where Flow can work as the workflow engine for automation, while Logic Apps becomes a piece of an Integration Platform based on Azure Services. What is your view? Feel free to let me know in the comments.

In conjunction with Mauricio Molina from SmartProcess in Colombia, we delivered a session covering all the new features for Portals that come with the April’19 release:

• Improvements in Diagnostic Tools
• Site Maintenance mode
• External data visualization on Portals (more on this in a future post)
• PowerBI Embedded support
• CDS Starter Portal

You can check all the slides in SlideDeck, the recording of the Session’s will be available at the Dynamics365 UG Spanish community site. You can also check for more details on the Dynamics Portals April’19 Release Notes.

• Personal background – moving back to Galicia, Spain from London
• Changing jobs 
• The journey of being an MVP, Microsoft Employee, MVP Reconnect, and MVP again, while continuing to participate in the community.
• Roles handled when he was still working for Microsoft 
• Overview of some highlights around how the core technology has changed since he’s been involved with it 
• Changes around Dynamics 365 and Power Platform internal to Microsoft or observation about the matter being in the community 
• How Microsoft compares to competitors like Salesforce and SAP 
• Views around Microsoft leadership and how the company has transformed over the years 
• Advice to people who are new to the Dynamics platform and want to build a career in the Dynamics space 

I am sure that by now you have already read about the rather surprising collaboration announcement between two of the biggest rivals in the CRM software space. In the first instance this looks very confusing, especially for all those that work closely with Microsoft Dynamics and for whom Salesforce.com has been depicted as the evil and uttermost enemy to fight. However, after carefully reading Satya Nadella press release and Kirill Tatarinov blog post you can have start to form a second impression of what is happening, and the famous words of Michael Corleone come to my mind.

Despite its relative importance for the company, Microsoft Dynamics is still dwarfed by the revenue generated by Microsoft’s sacred cows of Office and Windows. Also, looking back you can see how Microsoft grew from being a home/desktop software company to become an enterprise software company with most of its revenue coming now from this segment. Thus, the extreme importance of protecting what Microsoft calls “the stack” (Windows, Office, SharePoint, etc.) as the de facto productivity solution in the enterprise space. Even if this means swallowing some bitter tasting deals for some members of the Microsoft family.

Microsoft’s challenge looks like drawn from the innovator’s dilemma. Years ago this company was the challenger and slowly grow up from the bottom of the market displacing the established competitors that disregarded the lower margin segments and kept focusing on more profitable areas. However, with the disruptive innovations happening on the software space, Microsoft is now facing the other side of the coin. It has to change and make its crown jewels relevant on the world of devices and cloud services, and do it quick. Otherwise it will face new competitors slowly eroding its market share and it will end up cornered like others did before (e.g. DEC, Novell, Borland).

This co-opetion deal with Saleforce.com, like the previous move to offer Office on the IPad, is just signalling that Microsoft new leadership recognises the challenge and it is reacting to ensure it stays relevant. Convincing an organisation to switch its CRM is not an easy feat, the barriers to change are big, therefore enabling all Salesforce.com customers to easily use Office365 and Windows based devices is definitely good for Microsoft. It will allow to place its new devices to this customers, and maintain the relevance of Office for the enterprise segment.

Salesforce.com is also getting a significant benefit from this deal. It is well known in the Microsoft Dynamics side that the best compete strategy with Salesforce.com is to try and pivot the pure CRM conversation to bring in the whole picture of productivity and collaboration with the integrated Microsoft ‘stack’. As much as Salesforce.com has tried to fight that by building alliances and buying other vendors, Microsoft is still stronger on that game. Oracle and SAP, the other two big players on this arena, have already made similar deals with Microsoft, thus Salesforce.com risked being the only one without a solid integration on the Microsoft ‘stack’.

Despite leaving Microsoft Dynamics CRM in a harder position to compete against Salesforce.com, we could argue that this deal is a win-win as both sides will likely benefit from it. I am convinced that in Microsoft’s leadership mind this is a necessary evil and minor collateral damage. However, I personally believe that this can be a good thing for Microsoft Dynamics. Losing that USP of integration with the Microsoft ‘stack’ will force an increased investment to continue improving the core product and find a new edge against Salesforce.com.

Additionally, and this is a wild guess, there could be even longer term strategic implications. If Salesforce.com customers get used to rely on Microsoft Cloud and Devices for all the other needs outside CRM, we could reach a situation where the migration barriers between both CRM offerings are reduced and it would be an easier move for the customers to directly use another Microsoft service for CRM instead of a separate vendor. Therefore, this could end up actually being a Trojan horse entering the Salesforce.com tower.

Either way, only time will tell. Meanwhile, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing heads will no doubt have a hard work ahead to deal with Salesforce.com after losing one of its key differentiators, and will need to provide some positive spins for its partners. Not to mention Salesforce.com chief Marc Benioff having to water down his anti-Microsoft mantra.

What do you think?

Picture: Marc Benioff Twitter

This idea has been better formalised on a very interesting study that names this phenomenon as “The Presenters Paradox” (Weaver, Garcia & Schwarz 2012). As you probably know, humans have to evaluate everything in relative terms and reduce all the information we are presented with to something we can handle. However, the process that our brains follow to do this might vary depending on the side of the information chain we are. Thus producing some seemingly contradictory results as that study demonstrates.

People in presentational roles will fail to anticipate that a moderately positive attribute will dilute the desirability of the overall package from the evaluators’ perspective

Essentially, the study comes to demonstrate that  when we are presenting an offer to a potential buyer we are tempted might include additional mildly favourable items on the hope that this add up and tilts the audience on our favour. Or at least, that is what we believe from the presenter’s perspective, at the end of the day we are showing

On the article you can find some really interesting examples. The hotel advertisement is one of my favourites. In this study presenters are given the task of choosing what features to highlight on an hotel ad: A pool rated 5 starts (highly favourable), and a restaurant rated 3 stars (mildly favourable ). The results show how while most of the presenters decide to add both features thinking that more is better, the strategy backfires as the evaluators apply a holistic view and give more favourable ratings to the listings with a smaller number of highly favourable features.

The Presenter’s Paradox on Software Sales

How this applies to the Software Demonstrations & Sales? Let’s imagine another example. You are presenting your software solution proposition to your potential customers. You know they are very much interested in features A and B as they will be the key for their business objectives. You also have other 2 features C and D that are not immediately relevant for what the customer wants to achieve. Now let’s suppose that we can put a number on the perceive value (more on this topic in a future post) of this features for the customer on a scale 1 to 10.

• Our software: A=10 | B=10 | C=7 | D= 5
• Competitor: A=9 | B=9 | C = 5 | D = 5

As the customer is interested in A & B, initially we have a really strong proposition and we are better than our competitor. The average perceived value by the customer is 10. At this point we can stop there, we are on high and the customer loves our software, or we can be tempted to mention the other features our software has in order to demonstrate our superiority. We are on a high so we decide to go ahead and show C. This now leaves us with the average perceived value of 9. As we demonstrate C we start to see some tougher questions and hints of doubts from the audience, so we decide to go ahead and introduce also D to show that we can cover other areas. We know that this is our weakest one, but we believe is ok because competition is not good either. So, at the end of the presentation we have an average perceived value of 8.

Meanwhile, our competitor decides that the best strategy is to stick to its guns and only demo the two key features for the customer business scenario. That leaves them with an average perceived value of 9. So, despite having a weaker proposition that ours the perception by the customer is know that overall (and that is the key) they provide a better value.

This whole story comes to highlight how important is to prepare any demo and have a solid strategy for complex software sales. The key here is to know what the customer is looking for and anticipate how they will evaluate our software. We need to make sure we maximise the perceived value of our proposal by the customers.

Hope you found it interesting. Thanks for reading.

Originally posted at Marco Amoedo

Featured Picture by NASA Goddard

Post Picture by Frank Hamn

The reason why I am sharing this with you is because I have decided to take back once again the challenge of regularly publishing here my toughs around Microsoft, Dynamics CRM and Business in general. Hence the title of this post “Rebooting”.

Over this year’s my favourite product, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, has come a long way and the community surrounding it has become much bigger and the level of the people involved is impressive. I can just hope to add my humble contribution to this community and that you find it worthy enough to read it and discuss it.

In line with my interests, knowledge and personal experience evolution over this years, I have decided to split the blog in two sections: One technical dedicated to Dynamics CRM and all the geeky stuff, and another one dedicated to Business, Strategy and other non-technical topics where I will share some learnings in this areas.

So, without more wait let the reboot being! I hope you like it

Thanks for reading.

//M

The Update Rollup packages are based on MSI technologies. If you type in a command prompt “msiexec” you will see a screen this one proving information about the different command prompt options to execute MSI based installers. Including the information about how to enable logging of the setup process.

Enable logging is really useful when it comes to diagnose errors. Sometime the setup fails for a unexpected reason and the information provided through the UI is not enough to diagnose the problem. In those cases you can profit from the logging capabilities to get a detailed setup trace log with which can help you to find the error.

The CRM update rollups are MSI based. Therefore if you ever find a problem installing one of them you might find helpful information about the errors using these logging techniques.

To execute a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Update Rollup using logging you nee to run the setup from the command promp adding the “/log” option and additionally indicating where you want to create the log file. For example:

CRMv4.0-KB968176-i386-Client-ENU.exe /log c:\test.log

Hope you find it useful.

Marco Amoedo