Scott Nichols is a Principal Cloud Solutions Architect at Microsoft. He works for the commercial enterprise division serving the high-tech division out of Silicon Valley. He is also the leader of the .NET and the Azure user groups in Boise, Idaho. He started his career in the IT profession in 1993 as a mainframe and web developer. Since then, he has served as a Lead Software Engineer/Solution Architect, a Software Development Engineering Manager, a Sr. Cloud Software Solution Architect, and a Sr. Enterprise Solution Architect. When not at the keyboard, he loves the outdoors hunting, camping, fishing, archery, and working in the yard.

Topics of Discussion:

[4:03] Generative AI’s turning point.

[5:52] Bridging the AI coding gap.

[6:39] Scott explains the shift in project workloads to generative AI-based projects, both customer-facing and internal.

[7:25] Networking companies using AI to analyze telemetry data and create new products.

[8:49] Azure AI Foundry is a web portal that allows developers to spin up Azure Compute and access over 1800 models.

[13:00] Although a “Cloud Guy,” Scott values his on-prem hardware as a playground for learning and experimenting with AI tools.

[15:04] The benefits of using open source or on-prem tools to start working with AI without incurring cloud costs right away.

[15:40] The rapid pace of innovation.

[20:41] An example of Khan Academy using AI to create an online tutor, requiring significant prompt engineering to ensure accurate responses.

[27:12] AI agents monitoring AI agents.

[27:59] AI’s limitations and opportunities.

[31:56] Testing strategies for AI-Integrated systems.

[35:37] The future of AI and how it’s a great time to be in AI.

[39:35] Great advice for the next generation of developers and software engineers.

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