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Microsoft’s Americas AI Leader Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering®
Arguably the most significant news story over the last few months has been about OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, and the broader topic of artificial intelligence. Microsoft’s investments in OpenAI, first $1 billion and then $10 billion, have put Microsoft back in the spotlight and increased its valuations. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, has made subsequent announcements regarding BING integration and first-party applications. One Microsoft Sales Director leading the future of AI with ChatGPT tells us what this means to customers, partners, and the broader markets.
Deb Harding Oberly, Microsoft’s America’s Sales Director for Artificial Intelligence, leads a team of highly trained “black belts” specialists who work with customers and partners to integrate emerging technologies like ChatGPT. For this special 175th episode of Ultimate Guide to Partnering, Deb joins us to help demystify Microsoft’s plans. Agility is often cited as a key principle to successful partnering. Discussions like this can help us stay informed and make the right choices for successful business outcomes. I am thrilled to welcome Deb and hope you enjoy and learn from this discussion.*
- ChatGPT was used for this introduction.
In Deb’s Words
Deb Harding Oberly has over 20 years of experience in the technology industry, serving in both the software and services space. She is the Americas Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Sales Director of a specialized technical sales team at Microsoft. As a 13-year veteran at Microsoft, Deb brings a unique blend of experience in the partner space and direct customer sales. She has a track record of driving digital transformation and unlocking key insights and business value for Fortune 500 customers across the globe. She has a passion for the power of data and cutting-edge technology and has helped craft and execute go-to-market strategies in the IoT and AI/ML spaces. Her current team is at the forefront of the OpenAI and ChatGPT phenomenon, helping customers and partners tap into the power of generative AI.
What You’ll Learn
- Why Microsoft Partnered with OpenAI? (6:22)
- What Microsoft is doing with BING and 1st Party Apps (13:17)
- Recommendations for Partners (20:44)
- What makes a great partner? (23:57)
Microsoft Trainings on AI and ChatGPT
Tech Talk: Azure OpenAI Technical Deep Dive Registration Page (eventbuilder.com)
MS Learn https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/explore-azure-openai/?source=learn
For OpenAI learning, we have this self-guided workshop here : https://github.com/Azure/azure-openai-workshop
Creating Ultimate Partnerships
Let’s face it, we all have seen partnerships that look good on paper but never live up to their expected results. There are many reasons why partnerships fail, and at Ultimate Partnerships, we help you get it right by applying a proven set of best practices and frameworks. If you want to learn more, follow the link in the show notes, or visit our website.
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Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Typos
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
microsoft, ai, partners, gpt, customers, technology, partnering, deb, chat, satya, models, team, tech, generative, partnership, excited, learn, bing, open, conversation
SPEAKERS
Announcer
00:00
arguably the single biggest news story. These last several months is chat GBT open AI and the broader topic of artificial intelligence. Once it was announced that Microsoft first made a $1 billion investment in SAM Altman’s open AI startup, followed by a $10 billion investment, Microsoft entered the spotlight and saw its valuations rise. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO has made subsequent announcements both regarding the integration to Bing and first party applications. And what each of us want to know is what does that mean to our market and to us as partners? My next guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering is here to help answer these questions.
Announcer 00:46
This is the ultimate guide to partnering the top partnership podcast. In this podcast Vince Menzione, a proven partner sales executive shares his mission to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host Vince Menzione.
01:05
Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host and today I will death overly is Microsoft’s America’s Sales Director for artificial intelligence and leads a team of black belts. These are highly trained specialists that focus on working with customers and partners to integrate emerging technologies like chat GPT for this special 170/5 episode of ultimate guide to partnering. I’m excited to launch this discussion. To help us demystify Microsoft’s plans. We often talk about agility as being a key principle to successful partnering. And at this time, conversations like this one can help each of us stay better informed and help us make the right choices for successful business outcomes for successful business outcomes. I hope you enjoy and learn from this discussion as much as I enjoyed welcoming Deb overly. I’m so excited to welcome athletic greens as the latest sponsor to ultimate guide to partnering friends who know me well know I’ve made taking a green drink supplement, part of my health ritual for over 20 years now. And it has made all the difference to my health and well being about five years ago I added athletic greens and now their product ag one has become my go to green drink supplement. I take this literally every single day. Ag one is packed with 75 high quality vitamins, minerals, Whole Foods source superfoods, probiotics and antigens. It literally is replaced every vitamin in my cabinet. I take it at the start of the day, and often have a second serving on days when I really need it. If you’d like to give ag one a try. Athletic Greens is giving away a free one year supply of vitamin D and five travel packs with every new purchase. Check them out at athletic greens.com forward slash Vince M.
Announcer 03:24
Deb
03:25
welcome to the podcast.
03:26
Thank you, Vince. I’m excited to be here.
03:29
I am so excited to welcome you as a guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering. You are Microsoft’s America’s Sales Director for artificial intelligence AI and lead a team of black belts responsible for Microsoft’s exciting new set of capabilities with Chet GPT. Probably the most discussed topic in tech these last several months, maybe even in the business world. So I’m super excited to have you here today.
03:52
Thank you. I’m excited to be here.
03:54
So we’ve known each other since my days at Microsoft right the Malvern office and bumped into each other many times over the years. But for our listeners that don’t know, Deb overly, can you tell us a little bit more about you your role? What is a blackbelt team? And your mission at Microsoft?
04:12
Yes, sure. So I have been at Microsoft almost 13 years, 13 years in April. And I know it’s crazy and worked with partners actually. I started out my career here and worked with partners for four or five years and went into IoT. And then now I’m in AI, IoT and the AI side I been in the blackbelt team. So the global blackbelt team, it’s called is a team of subject matter experts deep technical subject matter experts that really help solution and bring business value to the customer using our technology. So I run the Americas team for artificial intelligence and machine learning in the global Black Belt team. And like you said something new is coming into the market. As everybody knows Did everybody like give it in the supermarket’s? It’s just crazy. I’m excited to talk to you and the audience about it, and just really dive in on how we can help each other. So
05:11
yeah, it is an amazing day, right? Everywhere you go. Everyone is talking about chat. GPT. Right. Even people that are not technology people, not business people, it has gotten such mainstream adoption right now. Right? I feel like Microsoft has displaced all the oxygen in the room. And there was a lot of noise going on about other things, right, like Elon Musk, and Twitter, and metta and all these other subjects. But this has become front page. And from the time it was revealed, especially when it was revealed that Microsoft made significant investments in open AI and Sam Altman’s company. Can you tell us when you and the team were first made aware and introduced to this technology?
05:51
Sure. Yeah. I want to back up a little bit, though to before I get to that part. So because you’re talking about Microsoft and displacing the competition and partnership. And so first of all, to start the whole discussion, I’ve never seen excitement like this. And I’ve been here 13 years, I’ve been in technology before as well. I’ve never seen excitement like this, like people are buzzing about it. C level executives all of a sudden want to talk to us when they maybe didn’t want to talk to us before they were with a competitor. So the excitement is there. Right. And it’s all about the generative AI piece of it, chat. GPT is what everybody’s hearing. And I think that even my aunt wants to have a debrief on chat GPT with that could do that with everybody in my life. But what’s really the buzz and like you and I were talking earlier about how you played with chat GPT it’s mind blowing, right? The generative AI piece of it to generate content to generate code to generate images is mind blowing. The partnership that we created with open AI is was brilliant, is brilliant. Okay, Satya Nadella, our president or CEO. He saw potential here in this technology earlier than most companies. And because Microsoft partnered with one of the leading research companies in this space, that’s a good marriage. It’s like a mutually beneficial partnership. So why did open AI want to work with us, we had the we were providing the supercomputer to be able to handle these large transform, transformational AI models, right. And at scale, it’s not easy to do, we actually have to build something bigger and better for them. And they use that technology to continue to develop and train the models. We provide the supercomputer, and then we host and monetize their tech. So we together are obviously mutually beneficial, like I said, where our partnership really makes a bigger bang than our competitors is not only are we taking their tech and hosting it, but then we’re doing this end to end solutioning to benefit and benefit customers and, and bring this enterprise grade flavor of open AI into our customers hands, right? Because you have to think about responsible AI security, compliance, governance, all that kind of stuff, the public chat GPT that you play with, you can’t just necessarily bring that in without those kind of guardrails, right, and in the enterprise. So that’s the why. But the when was we our first investment started in 2019. And so yeah, and so that’s a longer term journey that we’ve had with open AI. And so it makes sense that we’re leading over our competition. So that’s, like some background I wanted to make sure I want. I wanted to level set that because it really is about a partnership. And we’re working really well and continue to work well together. You asked me about my team’s awareness of the tech. We’ve been aware of this type of technology for years, right? Several years. So transformer models, which are the core technologies, these have been around since 2017. Microsoft had Azure open AI services available in Preview private preview for more than a year now. So these transformer models are not new chat. GPT is an evolution of these models. That’s been fine tuned for question answering. So the natural language processing field that’s evolved enormously over the last couple of years and my team has been along for that ride and journey from the beginning so
09:31
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10:52
so transformer models are based from an encoder and decoder type of architecture. And it uses self attention. It’s called self attention to contextualize the meaning of words, right. And so like I said, some part of this, like natural language processing, and these models are getting bigger and more advanced. And that’s the power, the evolution is occurring in this space.
11:16
So when I asked Chet GPT, the other day, write me a headline for this podcast, it was in self attention mode. Is that what I hear? And so we had this conversation a little bit earlier before we started, but I rattled for a couple of rabbit holes for a couple hours there, we were having this whole conversation,
11:33
never heard that happening, never heard that happening.
11:37
It was fascinating to me. And we were having like a little bit of a debate, like a spirited debate about how I should write this. And I used an AI model that like analyzes my headlines, and it’s saying, No, you shouldn’t just rely on that you really should make it more readable to the listener. Okay, I guess I’m gonna take your advice this time,
11:56
right? And you’re talking to a computer. Unbelievable. I know. And that now you know why it’s the buzz, right? What’s really cool is, it’s tangible, right? So you use it, you go and use it, and you go, wow, I can see so many applications of this technology, and how it can help.
12:14
So amazing. I’m curious on how Sam and Satya met, maybe I don’t know if you know anything about those details. But that’s an interesting conversation probably of its own.
12:25
Yeah, I think that’s above my paygrade. I don’t think I was in the hallway when they met. Fine, gentlemen.
12:35
Yeah, I’m still trying to get those two gentlemen on the podcast. We’ll work on that. So it was very interesting, because the chat GPT conversations started first, and there was a lot of buzz. And then all of a sudden, people became aware, I’m not sure what happened if Microsoft made an announcement, or people became aware of the fact that Microsoft was hosting this and had made a billion dollar investment. But then Satya made the other announcements, the additional investment of $10 billion, the discussion of integration to Bing, and the implication of other first party applications. So what do you expect to see next, like, how do you see chat GPT and open AI playing a bigger role in Microsoft’s future?
13:15
That’s a great question. I’ll talk about what we’re doing now. So Bing is obviously our search engine, right. And we announced that the integration of this technology and Bing, and actually today, as we’re recording, we announced the secret sauce there. There’s something called Prometheus model, which is a proprietary, I can’t talk proprietary technology that Microsoft uses Bing plus GPT to generate responses in real time data on real time data. So like right now, what you’re seeing in chat GPT is, there’s a certain point in 2021 ish that we’re ended, what it can work with, as far as data, real time is the key to this real time data. And that’s why I don’t know if you’ve tried being I’m already using it. The new bang is so
14:05
much better. I am on the waitlist. So I’m excited.
14:08
One day, it’s just gonna magically come up and you’ll be like, Oh, hey, yeah, I’d like to chat with you. Bang. Just makes your life so much easier. So now we’re innovating and trailblazing on search GitHub. We own we, they’re part of our company, right? We’ve got copilot, and that’s like, you have this AI pair programmer that works with next beside you hence the name copilot right? And it works with all the popular programming languages. And so when we did a study on this, it’s 55%. productivity boost.
14:42
So it’s really helping you write code. Uh huh.
14:45
Yep. And if you think about what you’re doing it like when you just go to type of text, and that starts to tell you, Oh, I think this is maybe the next word that you might want to type. Same thing in code with codecs. It’s amazing. It’s really cool. Yeah. And then the other two that We have now integrated Viva sales, that we’re combining data from office and CRM, and layering on GPT three technology and helping sellers with intelligent contextual responses generating content for them. Marrying the three of those right teams was my favorite. I don’t know, it’s maybe a tie with big teams, we’re providing intelligent recap, live translation. And that really helps. You could get recaps of the meeting. And then you can actually cut content against that. And it really helps with follow up summarization, that kind of stuff. It’s really powerful. We will see more integration. I can’t really talk about what we’re going to do next from a first party perspective. But as you think about it, there’s a lot of different ways in which we can integrate generative
15:51
AI. You know, it seems prescient now, we just had Monique a word on the podcast just a few weeks ago. And she’s in the business applications marketing organization. And they moved her business underneath Jared Spataro, who leads modern work within Microsoft. And it says what you’re seeing right here, but business applications, modern work coming together, right layering in chat GPT or open AI across all those things. I want to summarize that you talked about the Prometheus is that new pronounce it Prometheus model. And that means because chat, GBT was schooled up until some point in time and 2021 Correct. Yes. Now it’s getting new information, right? Real time on every. So Bing is feeding it is that the way I hear it being is feeding it. So if I type in Deb overly, it’s going to tell me the most recent thing about Deb Moberly, and it’s going to layer that into the conversation. Right? Yep.
16:44
And again, that was just announced today. So we’ll get more depth of that depth details. But yeah, it’s pretty incredible.
16:51
So your team is responsible for customers. And some of those customers are also partners that embed Microsoft technologies into their offerings. I think independent software vendors, what areas are you starting to see the most demand, you mentioned, the CEOs all wanting to have a conversation today.
17:08
Oh, my gosh, there’s so many, which is incredibly fun. It’s incredibly fun to ideate with customers about what they want to do, I was in a session with a customer across, we got the highest folks and across all these business units and to see them virtually whiteboard, use some of those tools with the posts and stuff was like off of the off of my screen, the number of ways in which they were thinking, not necessarily always prescriptive to their industry, but like writing job descriptions for HR writing, new hire announcements, follow ups after interviews, that’s this kind of things or proposal writing or when this one customer is like 80% of our time is writing puzzles that we don’t even think our customers read. This could really help us find and be a little bit more efficient, and then use that time savings in another way. But what the use cases are vast. Like I said, the areas of demand that we’re seeing, primarily is this knowledge Chatbot. This more complex, the conversational AI has been around but this generative AI is really taking it up a notch like you saw when you worked with chat GPT semantic search, intelligent document processing, abstractive summarization. These are general areas that we’re seeing, but I’ll tell you, the majority of the customers that we talk to, they really want to have a chat GPT type of experience with their own data, right. So a lot of internal, of course, external as well. When you have that conversational chatbot, or a conversational AI solution externally, they want to the customers want to make it more human that your experience with GPT and others, right, you start having a conversation rather than how do I do X from an FAQ that they uploaded? And you’re just doing a question and answer this, it really helps you conversationally, take it up a notch and make it more human.
19:05
And when you talk about their own data, publicly facing data behind the firewall, what are they thinking there?
19:11
It can be both a lot of times what sometimes customers want to use internal data, sometimes they want to add external data. Sometimes they want to do internal data and add like manuals or compliance type of documents to marry the two. It really depends on the use case. It’s really an it’s a knowledge worker enhancement, right to get them more productive and efficient and help them find what they need faster, and then also generate content faster. The other thing I’m seeing with customers is and this is more like partners that embed Microsoft Tech Tech Tech in their offerings is really taking existing apps and innovating and modernizing injecting this generative AI capability into them. But the other part of your question that I’m I want to not necessarily tangent but add in is if you’re a partner, and your traditional more like systems, integrator etc, that I’ve worked with before an existing practice and adding to your existing practice this kind of capability and skill set, we’ve seen partners that have created centers of excellence within their organization that are specifically for Azure open AI. And also we’ve seen partners create certain assets, solution accelerators, etc, and demos to really provide a solution quickly to customers, those are two things that you can do right away that customers really need to see the art of the possible. So hopefully, that’s helpful to the partners as well.
20:46
I’m glad you brought that up. So What recommendations would you have for our partners listening today on what they should do next?
20:53
Yeah, that’s a great question. So I talked earlier about how excited everybody is about this. And I’m gonna reiterate that sea level, like we have engagements with customers, where the CEO is he or she is saying, I want to know where you are with this. How quickly can we get this done? How quickly can we modernize this? How quickly can we do that? This beautiful, so we have a great opportunity. So as a partner, there’s a couple of things that we need, from a Microsoft perspective, we always need our partner community to scale. We can’t scale with just us. So we need resources, we need subject matter experts. So the sooner you scale up your folks, and let us know that you’ve done that we can’t wait to turn to you because my team is a team of 12 experts, right? Yeah. And that’s for the Americas doesn’t mean that we’re not scaling up internal folks. But we need to scale through partner. And then once you’re there, and even before that, okay, so I’m going to backup a there’s learning the technology, but B, a lot of this is a business conversation, right? We did qualification, because a lot of customers are really interested in this. And then we realized that they’re just tire kicking. So the standard like sales one on one, you have to make sure there’s sponsorship, budget, timeline, business value statement, all that kind of stuff, you can educate, and then qualify and make sure it’s actually a fit for open AI. Right. It could be other cogs services. And honestly, it’s never standalone, it’s all kind of creating this architecture solution, that it’s not just Chet GPT it’s not just dolly is not just codecs. There’s a whole architecture around this. And that’s where we need your expertise as partners. Customer offers is what we need. We need use case ideation workshops, you can use PI funding, you can, you know, as a service for an hour for for free for your customers, we need repeatable package solutions using the tech stack. Those are the kinds of things that we need right now to tap into the momentum. And I would say, a call to action by you net it up or net it out is learn it, everybody right now, except for my team and other global blackmail teams that have been exposed to this for a couple years. Everybody is a student of learning open AI, everybody is so we shouldn’t have impostor syndrome. We’re all learning it right? Now you can use it, start working with it, get your hands on it, experiment with it, try out use different use cases. Third thing, skill your staff and build your practice, inject it in an existing practice, talk to your customers, talk to all of them, they want to talk to you about it, and attend the training. We have training coming up and I’ll give you the links. There’s an MS learn module, there’ll be more hands on workshops, and hackathons, etc, we will be providing a lot more training for partners and technical professionals to upskill on the technology.
23:42
I want to repeat what you said here, learn it, we’re all doing that right now. Right? Use it first example, skill your staff, inject or build a practice, talk to your customers, and then attend the training. And you’re going to provide some links with the training for us. Fabulous advice. So this is the ultimate guide to partner with about 13 years now at Microsoft, can you believe it’s 13 years?
24:05
No, don’t make me do the math.
24:07
What do you believe, makes a great partner.
24:09
So I told you in the beginning that I started my career at Microsoft, working with partners, and I actually worked for two boutique firms here in the Philadelphia area in the beginning of my career. And so I get both sides, right, I sat in the chair, as a partner, I sit in the chair at Microsoft, what I think makes a great partner is a partner that approaches the Microsoft relationship as mutually beneficial, and a give and take right? We need partners to be proactive and an extension of our sales team. And the best partners are the ones that are like one step ahead of us in our field and bringing customer insights and marrying those with service offerings. You know, an example this whole chat GPT comes out open AI comes out. It’s crazy. I meet with one partner and they say oh yeah, we’re already doing we already have four Engaging with open AI. And here’s what we’re seeing. And this is what we’re thinking. And this is the offering. Yeah. And I was like, This is gold. This is actually what we need. And there’s so much demand here events. I’m not kidding. There’s so much demand that we need to turn to partners much earlier and say, Hey, guys, we gotta live one. Here you go. Because we can’t handle the influx. So yeah, it’s a great opportunity. And I think this mutual benefit is key. A lot of times partners are like, Oh, Microsoft, opening eyes is great. Can you give me leads, it’s a two way street, I used to always say that to partners, I’m like, listen to the way you win the hearts and minds of the Microsoft field sellers is you bring them a lead they didn’t have from that point on, you’re going to be happily ever after. You have to think that way, too. It’s hard, because you think, Oh, you got all these leads. And I’m sitting here on your progress. And we’ve got so many customers. Now I’m asking you to skill up. And then and we can go happily ever after.
25:57
Well multiply and go after the market together, right. And I find this all the time with partners, they expect Microsoft to become their sales team, they expect Microsoft is going to buy their company, I can’t tell you how many of these conversations I have, rather than pivoted the other way, learn the technology, enabled the technology and take it to market and become a leader in the technology as a partner.
26:18
That’s when we notice because there’s a there’s a huge ecosystem, we love our partner ecosystem, it’s how do you differentiate?
26:25
I love what you have to say. And I know you manage like when we first met, you were on the national si team, leading a group of partners. And so I know you know that market and that type of partner intimately. But I’d love to pivot here, Deb, as you might know, I’m interested in the career journey. And we have a lot of listeners that are earlier and career professionals. And they want to learn like how did you get to this spot in your career? Was there a pivot? Was there a spark that set you off on this path? And I know that you didn’t in fact, spend all of your career in tech. So maybe there’s an interesting point there.
26:58
My story if I would net out my story. It’s all who you know. So I was a liberal arts major and poli sci French double major, no computer science background.
27:10
Liberal Arts. Interesting. Yeah. What did you want to do when you got out,
27:14
move to France and be an ambassador at age 24? So didn’t really work out
27:19
and sip for French wine and eat amazing baguettes? And yeah,
27:24
exactly, exactly. So I kind of fell into tech, right? I fell into tech, a year after college and work for a small boutique firm. And that was a Microsoft partner. And the rest is kind of history. I worked for a number of years. And in a couple of companies. There was an elearning took seven years off to do residential real estate of all things when I had my second child and met someone that was relocating to be a GM here in Melbourne, and Microsoft. And he recruited me for a job and I got the job. That’s fascinating. Yeah. So it’s all the, you know, events. And one of the things that I wanted to say, which goes circles back to something I said earlier, imposter syndrome is real, right. But I just recently learned about myself that we should all just give it up. I was on a panel for AI for Temple University here in Philly.
28:17
My daughter’s alma mater. Yeah. And so there were a bunch of folks
28:21
that AI engineers and much more technical than me, and one guy got on, spoke up and said, I have impostor syndrome. And the reason I do is because these technologies are so fast, etc. And he said, and then I realized that I couldn’t have studied these technologies when I was in college, because these technologies didn’t exist. And so the spark, and pivot is I got lucky about who I met. I’ve always loved Microsoft, I have such respect for the company. So as soon as I met this guy, we hit it off. And then the next thing I know I’ve got an opportunity when I would not have to interview and a one my way end through the interview. And from that point on, it was up to me. So being a constant learner and shaking off impostor syndrome, has helped me navigate 13 years here and navigate towards some pretty trailblazing technologies like IoT, Internet of Things, and AI and ML, and I continue to be excited and challenged every day.
29:23
So is there something you do to shake off the impostor syndrome? Is there any ritual or practice or learnings there?
29:32
It’s such a great question. Rituals is our pay you reach out to the smarter people around you. My team is so darn smart and talented. I call them the AI Globetrotters because they each have a different skill. And trick is probably not the right word. But if you remember the Globetrotters, one spirit one spinning the ball on the finger, the other ones doing this dunk that you didn’t think was physically possible and you’re delighting the audience. My team delights the customers with their depth of knowledge. And so surround yourself with really smart people and learn from them. And they will take the time to net it out for you. And I try to be a learner every day. And then I also say to myself, you probably know more than most in the room, as long as you’ve done some homework. And if you don’t know the answer, then go find it. So that’s how I get over it. But it’s exciting to be challenged every day. So it’s not necessarily a negative thing.
30:25
I love what you have to say here. So this is a fun question for me. And I’d love to ask this one of you. So you’re hosting a dinner party, and you can invite any three guests from the present, or the past to this amazing dinner party. And we can talk about where you’re hosting this later. But who would you invite? And why?
30:44
Okay, this is such a good question. And I probably would have a different answer each day because there are so many people. So my initial reaction to you are these two people. Oprah Winfrey, okay, I’m a huge fan. I think she’s one of the most inspirational women of my time on this earth. And what she’s gone through, when she was younger, to what she’s built, and how she gives back to individuals, and particularly young women is just mind blowing. So huge fan. Second person would be Satya Nadella. Because I am a fan girl of his I just can’t. He’s just so inspiring. I love I’ve been here 13 years and he was the CEO the whole time. But I remember sitting at one of our internal big events, MDX or something, and I was front row, and he was talking and I felt like in church, it was so good about his son, and the accessibility passion he has and I was almost in tears. I think I did cry. So I just I’m such a fan of his. I love his him, instilling in us the growth mindset and love his focus on diversity, inclusion and treating everybody with equal rights. He’s just so inspiring. And seems like an amazing man. I’ve never met him, but hope to someday at this great dinner party. The third one would be Martin Luther King, Jr. Yeah, same vein of that same vein. So his unwavering dedication to the value of a human being and equality. It sacrificed himself for it. I think I’d have to have like, maybe not speed dating, but like, I might have to have each one on one time and then a dinner party because this is so exciting. But I think I would have it in Napa Valley.
32:26
Napa Valley. Yeah. I thought maybe you were gonna say France, not France,
32:31
outside with the wine and the vineyards in the background. You know, I’m saying
32:34
sounds fabulous. First of all, I have to come by and spend some time because these are three people that are on my list. Like you said it could be any three any one day but Satya and Martin Luther King, absolutely. The I Have a Dream speech is just still brings every time I listen or watch it brings tears to my eyes, Satya for all the work he’s done had refreshes on my bookshelf right behind me here. And Oprah just what an amazing story.
33:00
You can come on, but you
33:01
too. Okay, I’ll bring some wine as. So, Deb, we have had some headwinds. These last several months in the tech sector, in particular in the economy. Also, what would you say to our listeners now to help them optimize for success? As we continue through 2023,
33:22
I would say, continue to have a growth mindset around this, know that generative AI is the future and we are just getting started. Remember that everyone is a constant learner in tech, learn about it, read about it, be a student of tech and stay curious and creative. That last word is really important, creative. I’m seeing it with my customers, with my team, with everybody that I interact with around this technology. If you think about how I can help you one of those things where you could write whiteboard and be like, Okay, I just wrote like 15 different things. And I gotta figure out where I’m going to start first. So creativity, curiosity and learning, I would say just optimize that will optimize your success for 2023 and beyond.
34:10
Yeah, I just love this right around mindset learning staying curious. And creative is an interesting one, right? Because there’s what do you okay, I’m going to put you on the spot here. What do you do to be creative? I might not add this in I just was curious. I figured I had to like do things like throw out? Oil Painting shell? No, I hit this. No, no, that’s all right. We don’t have to go down this rabbit hole right now. So I’ll do this. So Deb, I want to thank you. You first are an amazing human being we got to work together at Microsoft. You are always just such an I would say a kind, smart and collaborative individual From my observations, and I wanted to thank you for making your time available to our guests. Ready to our listeners today?
35:02
I want to thank you for asking, because I think this is a great platform to reach so many wonderful partners and folks in your community. And it’s such an exciting time, like I said, we are ready, willing and able to partner with you and our customers to bring this technology to life in valuable ways. For everybody, such an exciting, yeah, thank you for having me. I’m really glad to be here. And let’s all sell some open AI together.
35:31
Sounds good to me. Such an exciting time. Thank you, Deb. Thank you. So there you have it. Another amazing guest joins Ultimate Guide to partnering. And I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did. Odds are if you’re a technology partner, executive, and hearing my voice, chances are you too, are looking to accelerate your success through partnerships. I mean, let’s face it. We all have seen partnerships that look good on paper, but never live up to their expected results. There are a lot of reasons why partnerships fail, and at ultimate partnerships, we help you get it right by applying a proven set of best practices and framework that’s used by leading partners working with Microsoft, and other technology giants. If you want to learn more, follow the link in the show notes, or visit our website at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com.
Announcer 36:29
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Ultimate Guide to partnering with your host Vince Menzione online at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com and facebook.com/ultimate Guide to partner. We’ll catch you next time on The ultimate guide to partnering