Fidesic AP’s Post

Transcript

Alright, I'm going to let it rip if you're good. Sounds good. Let's do it. What's been going on? Hey there, Ben. How you doing? Very good. Thanks for having me, Kevin. Yeah, no problem. How was your directions this year? Generally, you get everything you wanted, you meet everybody on your list. I thought it was great. I mean, the first thing they shared, one of the general sessions is just how many people they had there and how it was the biggest ever in terms of attendance, right. And I think based on when it was booked versus how many people showed up, it was a little tight, right, because there were so many people there. So excited to see that it's. Continuously growing, that's what I get most out of it. I would say is just you know seeing people because we only get a couple times a year to all get together and do that kind of stuff. So always love to do that. And then of course all the new things that they roll out and show you from a Microsoft standpoint since they're I think almost half are just shy of half something like that. I can't remember what the stat was of the speakers were from. Uh, Microsoft like it's yeah, it does feel like the one time of the year where you get direct interaction with Microsoft. Obviously the theme for, oh, I don't know, the past 12 months has been AI in pretty much every conversation that you have. Every keynote I've attended in the past year has leaned in a pretty heavily into a I don't know if you have any notes on the specific things they talked about in regards to Copilot. I think I've got the next slide about Copilot specifically, but. Yeah. Uh, what were your top news on Copilot and general integration of AI through the stack or the things that stood out to you? Yeah, I mean it's, it's all they've been talking about for the last, you know, six months for sure, definitely probably even last 12 months like you mentioned, but that was the hot topic. In my opinion, from everything we saw between that and what Business Central has, I think there's still a lot more to come. I I personally think it's still kind of primitive right now. I think if you know how to use it right now, it's awesome and it can help save save you time, right? Like even with the analyzed view that came out in V23I believe and in my opinion, it was kind of hard to use for for end users, right? Like it was kind of like a pivot table in Excel, but it's kind of tedious and you had to know where to go. With Copilot, now I can in natural language type in. You know I'm on my customer Ledger entries and I can say create me a view of all my customer invoices and include you know these three dimensions and total it and give me a column for the dates when I drill down, right? And again it works, but even with that I found if you don't use the right words or tell it exactly what to do yet it's still, it's still might not return exactly what you're looking for and that's just kind of like bringing clients back down to earth and on some things. Right. Because I see the marketing buzz, which again, I love it. It's where everything's headed. But I just, I'm a realist. So I like to be real. And I do get why Microsoft is so all in on all our presentations on this stuff. It's not just a like capitalized on the buzz. It does really feel like to me that this like space, like the dynamics generally or F&O&BC like you know, the whole Microsoft ERP stack, it's in a position to capitalize on this stuff like no other platform. And I don't know, it's one of the reasons I'm excited to be in this particular space is it feels like the connectivity of everything really is the standout feature and like the ability to connect AI tools into this is going to become more and more important as time goes on. Microsoft kind of has a secret sauce here that is going to be extremely hard for other people to replicate. Wrapping up just sort of general news and things. The environment transfer is something else that I don't did, they just announced that. They announced it for the first time at directions and I actually about a week before directions. The client came to me with this exact use case and I had read an article probably a month ago, so I'm guessing it came out like 3 to 4 weeks ago or like maybe three to four weeks before direction, something like that. I like this because for for clients they never want to, they don't ever want to pay like a ton of hours to do something that's just like following instructions, right? They want it to be easy and I think a lot of things like this are making it. Easier so that we don't need to spend an unnecessary, you know, 20-30 hours to do something like this. We can just take a few buttons and it works for the more common things. And I always like to tell people too, if they're like, I'm excited about the future for all the AI stuff and everything that Business Central is doing. But it's like, this is the worst that it's ever going to be, right? Tomorrow is going to be better next month, it's going to be better. Six months from now it's gonna be better, like, and a year ago it was worse than it is today. That was another thing that we mentioned. I think it was probably the youngest any Microsoft conference I've been to has been as well, which also, you know, youth isn't everything, but it certainly adds to the buzz when the mean age and the channel goes down a little bit. It's good to see the, you know, the younger generations excited too, which leads in pretty nicely to one of the sessions I went to. I guess this is a consolidation of several marketing sessions I went to, all under the vague umbrella of a theme of millennials or way more important. In the buying process than people assume at this point which kind of charts with everything that I've encountered. But the one data point on it is at this point in like you know SMB space that 40% of the decision makers that are actually making buying decisions are all ready Millennials. It is the single largest purchaser decision demographic that exists in this channel currently. And that's another reason why I think Microsoft is doing all of the things that they do around BC to make everything as self-service is. Click to set U as do you know follow this guide and you can just do everything yourself to some degree and that's why they're pushing all the ISV's to go that direction too is that's what millennials want. You know I almost prefer the, you know, having to actually go go through and learn about it sometimes because I think sometimes when it is just you know clicking go whereas if you go through and we, you know, we sell apps as well and like I said with a financial dashboard or something, 80% of it already. OK. Well, if somebody goes in and plugs it in and they never read the manual or they never call us, they're only going to get that 80% right, because they never went went further. But the 80% worked is that that extra 20% can really add a lot of value because their configuration elements to the app that really give it some more horsepower. That's kind of on us at a certain point, right. As app developers, it's like how do we make that last 20% as frictionless as possible? And that was one of the huge discussion points on all of this is like. If it doesn't feel self-service, you can go set it up and try it out. You're going to lose a huge majority of your like younger AKA millennial buyers right out of the gate. And it's like, OK, there's ten solutions to this one problem. One of them I can just set up and see it work like it's pretty obvious the one that you're going to pick and that self-service is like. Going to become more and more important to this as time goes on I think and I mean too with that buying decision piece, right. I think it's not only that they're making the decisions that it has to be easy, but the acceleration at which decisions are made, right. There's not these, I mean there probably still are a lot of like the longer term assessments and like system selections and things like that. But you know if if this is the way that it's going, those decisions will also be able to be made much quicker. And I know Microsoft's doing a lot with kind of, you know, more rapid deployments. Of Business Central, so that you can get a trial of Business Central and you can kind of self implement like I always think you know if you're going to self implement still have an advisor and I think there is a difference between like full self-service and like I just want to see it work before I talk to somebody and get guidance. If I had to bet on what one of the keynotes is next directions, I would probably say these rapidly deployed business central implementations is going to be one of them. So if you want to place a side bet on it Kevin, we can do it offline. OK, yeah, I'll send you a LinkedIn for the inside dirt before I place that bet. So I was looking through my notes on this. I don't think this is necessarily in order of importance. These are just the seven key things that matter in terms of getting your app source listing optimized. That's what I want to talk to you about. We've got this list of things. What's your opinion on what actually matter the most to get you up that page ring when I look at the apps that we sell on App Source. Again, we're still trying to get on page one. I I don't know what the secret formula is to get there. We've got we got a few apps on page 2, which again you'd think in order, you know you're most popular app would be the first one listed, even if it's only on page two, right? But if you're scrolling through, the first app that you see of ours is with 28 apps on App Store. So that one is probably #5. In terms of clicks, it's five. In terms of downloads, it only has like two or three reviews. But it's the first one they see, so maybe the titles good, the publisher names the same on all of them, so that doesn't matter for me. So on that one, maybe my title is good or my headlines good or my categories are good. But it seems that those things which maybe this list is in order because though that would outweigh popularity and solution rating, right, Which in my opinion four and six there. To me as a buyer, those are the most important. I don't care about the title. So yeah, that's all I would be. Looking at but maybe we're but again we're millennial brain right Amazon like I don't buy anything that's less than 4.7. Again every name on that first page you're probably going to recognize. In my experience, I've been around a long time. Yeah, in my experience I do. It does chart. The title is the most important thing. We've been playing around with it, tweaking that and just seeing how things go, and it's a matter of aligning your title to make it what people are searching for. It's been more important than pretty much everything else, which I think is interesting that you just got to. You know, sort of wordsmith, the name that finds the right people. Easy way to boost your views on these things is to just make sure that you're linking to it from your own personal marketing site. And you're linking to it from your like, content that you're posting on other marketing platforms or LinkedIn or whatever. But actually link to the app source listings themselves. Because that will drive traffic and traffic drives popularity, which can then obviously contribute to bumping you up those ready rankings. So the other session I went to that I thought was interesting and has huge potential for people like us. Specifically is the page scripting for UAT in BC. Umm, it's it's in beta technically, but it really felt like it could totally test our app and to end like as it exists in its current state, which is pretty amazing. I'm excited to see where this goes. It's got conditional steps where it'll like check the value of something in BC if it's not 500 and it's supposed to be, it'll like pause the script and let you know that it errored out just in the demo I saw. I think it's fully. Cable for pretty much anything I would want it for. Anytime you can save UAT steps and save testing to get quicker rollouts of things. This is always a good thing. I don't know if you went to that session, I don't think I saw you there. No, I didn't. But I've seen some stuff about this online as well. I've seen some examples. Again, I haven't played with it too much, but it looks it looks promising, sounds good. So it's pretty quick. Basically there's some things that some murmurs I heard around and some vague references during the keynotes that relate to ISV's and how that relates to Copilot specifically. One is like you can add Copilot directly to your ISV offering. Still no details on that, but it's a pretty cool thing. Get in that Copilot space directly. And then the other thing that I've heard through talking to people and I think was also vaguely referenced in one of the keynotes is the ability to talk to Copilot and ask for actual apps on app source or ISP recommendations. We are approaching a world where the first thing you do when you want a new piece of software is you go talk to Insert Chat Bot here and ask what you should do. And all of them are claiming that there's no like pay to win model that exists like Google has, right? Like ohh, we gotta get our Google ads in order or whatever the case may be used to be how it used to work. And I don't know how this paradigm is going to shake out. I'm not sure anybody does. But I don't think we're very far away from that being the first step for your average person of oh, I need a report, I need a report dashboard for BC. I'm just going to ask Copilot what I should do. Like it doesn't feel very far fetched that's going to be. The norm very, very soon and I'm not sure anybody knows what that means yet. So that's going to be extremely interesting to see how all this shakes out. We'll see how we'll see how it goes. Ben, thanks a million for hopping on this. It's always interesting talking to your perspective, always good to hear your insights and I look forward to seeing you at the next one whenever it is. Good. Thanks for having me.