Microsoft Community Insights Podcast
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Microsoft Community Insights Podcast
Episode 38 - Insight to Impact: The Power of Azure OpenAI with Amit Mukherjee and Bhuvi Vatsey
The rapidly evolving field of generative AI can be intimidating, especially for those looking to implement enterprise-ready solutions. That's precisely the gap Amit sought to fill with his book "Azure OpenAI Essentials," co-authored with technical reviewers who ensured quality and accuracy throughout.
Amit, who has spent years helping healthcare organizations build scalable generative AI applications, explains that his motivation came from witnessing firsthand the understanding gaps among both customers and Microsoft's own technical field community. Rather than continuing with ad-hoc office hours and one-off explanations, he decided to create a comprehensive, structured resource that would guide readers from absolute basics to enterprise implementation.
Hello and welcome to Microsoft Community Insights Podcast, where we share insights from community expertise to stay up to date with Microsoft. I am Nicholas. I'll be your host today. In this episode, we'll dive into Insight to Impact the power of Azure OpenAI Essentials. Before we get started, we'll remind you to follow us on social media so you never miss an episode and help us reach more amazing people like yourself. Today we have two special guests the return of Bruvi and the first of Amit. Would you like to introduce yourself, please?
Speaker 2:Sure, Bruvi, you want to go yourself please? Sure, we're going to go first.
Speaker 3:Sure, thank you. Thanks, nick for having us and thanks Amit for being the perfect partner on this. I'm Bhuvi Watsay. I am part of Security Growth PM team working on growing our security products.
Speaker 2:Awesome.
Speaker 3:And yourself.
Speaker 2:Yes, so I've been with Microsoft for the last three years and before that I was in AWS and my main role is more on helping customers for building their generative AI applications. So I've been part of healthcare industry, so helping all of my healthcare. We are provided from a customer for building a genetic AI, a JTBI at scale, including securities, making that highly scalable in JTBI applications, different models, whatever you name it. So that's pretty much all I'm playing in Microsoft.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I remember we met each other for the first time at Build and you showed me your book that you've written about how to open and hide essentials, so we just want to dive into it. So what inspired you to create that book?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think this question is in fact, I also thought, when I start thinking of writing a book, what exactly motivates me to do that one and you know it's not something. This idea to write the book overnight came on me. As we serve the customer, we see that a lot of understanding gaps because this technology is new and when we have a Microsoft partnership with OpenAI, there are a lot of things to uncover and also the discovery. Then we found that not only our customer but also within our technical field community in Microsoft there are a lot of things. They have some understanding gaps.
Speaker 2:We thought, because I'm serving in this role, so I thought why not? I can having in this role, so I thought why not? I can, you know, having ad hoc calls with customer, ad hoc office hours sitting internally to give and reskills our people and our customer, why not? I can combine all these things in a very systematic manner in some sort of books approach and that might be helpful for our customer to digest. Now the question is why not blog? Why book? Right, it couldn't have done the blog too? Um, what? I think that blog is definitely a great you know medium to you know risk, kind of an evangelize your skills or knowledge to the world. But the reason I go to the book because I really want a very structured effort, because I'm not a kind of a disciplined person where you can put every day every certain amount of time when you go to the book.
Speaker 2:It's in your own ways. You can put your time and maybe one weekend you sleep and don't write anything. Nobody cares. But when you sign up for a book with a publisher, they have a very tight agenda. They have a very strict timeline. I need to follow that one very tight agenda. They have a very strict timeline. I need to follow that one. I thought it made me discipline if I go on that route. Rather than upload, both is absolutely either way you can take. I mean, anybody can take it to evangelize their skills. But I thought book would be more systematic and it made me systematic rather to write something and put it in a very concise way so that I can give it to the world, as well as my customers and my technical sales communities, and that's all motivates me to write the book.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so Pruve has almost the first person who wrote the book. No, read the book. What's the experience of the book so far?
Speaker 3:Yeah, the experience has been phenomenal and I will take this opportunity to elaborate on some of the aspects of the book. But if you look at the contents of the book, as Amit mentioned, it is very systematic, which is very hard to find in a general format like a blog. But in this book especially, it is highly valuable because it is very comprehensive. It starts with the basic but it caters to a persona of many demands from different areas. For example, it could attend to people who are, let's say, just newcomers into the field of AI and explain the basics, what LLMs are for, what does prompt engineering mean and all of those basic stuff. And once that basic ground setting is done, then it delves into practical applications, how the users would enable themselves to harness the AI capabilities and solve real-world problems. And the problems that are picked in the book are very agnostic to maybe just tech. Maybe you want to just create a movie recommendation chatbot, or you want to just create a movie recommendation chatbot, or you want to create some multi-agent scenario which is just refining some visual images from dali. So those kind of real world scenarios got me really hooked into the book and always wanted me to learn from words. Then it's a lot of hand holding as well as well. I felt that if there is somebody who is nervous oh I don't know how am I going to proceed with that Then the book goes step-by-step in explaining you those details.
Speaker 3:For example, if you have not done much of Python coding and you are not sure how would this particular use case be done, the GitHub repository takes you to step-by-step navigation. That, hey, install this. This is your prerequisites. It kind of covers all corners for you. And then in terms of scaling it, so in later chapters it scales it to very much in terms of enterprise-ready solutions. So it talks about the security aspects of it. How do you make sure that your content is moderated, there's no abuse? How would you make sure that, if there is any open AI scaling that you're looking for, and if your capacity limits are reached, how would you implement kind of load balancing strategy with APIM? So all these are really essential techniques that should be discussed, along with the best practices that the book covers. So I'm really thankful to Amit for putting all this together and giving our communities such a well-approached and strategic way of learning AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it looks like an amazing book because it starts from someone that's beginning to enjoy to like intermediate know what they're talking about. So I mean it's going back on the book. When you wrote the book, is there any challenges that you came across that you had to face when writing the book? As often, yes.
Speaker 2:So I would say there are two things. First of all, I'm a family man two kids, my wife so that challenge is always there. You have to spend, curve out some time out of your normal regular kind of an hour. So that's a big commitment, that time right. And second thing, I would say it's not a challenge.
Speaker 2:I would say writing a book is a learning process for the author too. So sometimes we think that, uh, without something you write in a paper, forget about book anything. If you write in a blog or paper, you have to do your own research, right, I mean, you can talk something, but when you write something it's completely different angle. So when I write the book and some of the things, even I didn't know much details on that. So I did a research and I went as part of the research I learned a lot for those things when I, you know, putting into the book, because putting into the writing something you are technically liable to what you are writing, right. So that learning process helped me to learn many things.
Speaker 2:That's one thing Only. The challenge, as you stated, timing is a big challenge because we are all full-time employees and in Microsoft, helping our customers, and it takes long hours and long weekends and early mornings, late nights that's the only one challenge to managing the time. And last but not least, is making yourself more enthusiastic on the book. Sometimes, you know, I feel sometimes that when I'm writing the book, maybe half of the chapter is gone and I found that, oh, it's taking too much time, let's leave it. Sometime I had that kind of a syndrome created inside me and then I say, oh, no, no, no, half is done, let's remain in a few chapters, let's complete it.
Speaker 2:So that's self-motivation and nobody's going to motivate you at that time you are the only one in the battle and you have to kind of fight the battle and to get to the end, so that self-motivation is very much required, along with the time management. These are the two primary sort of challenges I had and for everything, everything, finally get through that to get you know, get to the end goal of the book.
Speaker 1:How would you know if a chapter is finished? Is that when you run out of like knowledge?
Speaker 2:So that's a very good question. So, actually, this book, actually, in fact, I have this book in my hand. So this book actually, in fact, I have this book in my hand. So this book actually, the publisher is SPAC, you can see here.
Speaker 2:So when you start reaching out, spac basically reached out to me to can you write a book on that one? I said, yeah, that's a very prominent topic and no Booklist is there in the market and as part of the process they have a requirement that how many chapters need to be there, how many total pages need to be in the book, and each chapter what would be the number of pages? Right? So around 30, 40 chapters is a very standard one and close to 250 to 300 pages overall.
Speaker 2:The book has to be so and if you go beyond that, sometimes they do review, they do a lot of corrections and they say you know it's going beyond, make it short if it is too short on this particular chapter. The number of pages, they said, okay, increase more and we expand more on that. So they have a very strict sort of layout and we try to follow that layout and that's where we want to concise the knowledge within those chapters and that much of pages okay uh bruvie, from your experience in reading the book, what's your favorite uh insight that you or take away from it?
Speaker 3:yeah, two, actually couple of insights, but I can probably touch upon on few. The first thing that I wanted to call out was amit didn't assume that the community might know something for sure. Yeah, so when you were talking about the challenge, amit, I think maybe one of the challenges you might have experienced was not to assume anything like going right from the ground. That reflects when I'm reading through the book, because every concept is explained, so that was amazing insight for me. Another insight that stuck out for me was, as I explained earlier too, that there are many hands-on exercises that you can do and you can go along and follow along. It's like you don't have to assume, like amit didn't assume, that, hey, they would have these certain things in stores. No, he is kind of showing all the steps that are included, even for the movie recommendation, if it's an external website that you need to have some kind of subscription or be a member of. Even those kind of granular details are laid out.
Speaker 3:And the best part for me was the reference architectures For any situation that Amit and the co-author has picked. They have given simplistic reference architecture that explains how the system is moving from one part to another. As a reader, that takes all the nervousness out, because you don't have to imagine anything much. You are given out the kind of scenario, the way the solution is moving, and you can visualize it right in the book itself. So you don't have to search separately, go out and say, hey, I read this term in the book. Can you explain it to me so that I go back and resume my reading? Those kind of situations are taken out yes, that's very well said, boobie.
Speaker 2:And and yeah, that's one of the challenge. When I start writing the book I said should I write this paragraph or not? I mean I know. But then then you know, somebody showed me, you know, think about, you are a reader of the book. When you write a book, always think you are a reader of the book and that's where you want to see that. That way you can overcome the challenges. Because if I think on the author angle, I might think, hey, this paragraph or maybe this chapter is doesn't require, right, but even a reader angle it might be required. And I start thinking on that way and then I finally find, okay, this maybe it is a very basic information, very simple information, but maybe the reader doesn't know that right. So I put the reader's shoes and sometimes it's very hard to be very honest what things you really want to put that into the book. Even though you are not telling for one reader, this book is going to be for many many readers.
Speaker 2:Some people are very knowledgeable, some people are in between, some people are very basic, so that balancing these things was definitely a big challenge for me Okay.
Speaker 1:So I noticed that there's some practical experience in the book as well, like demos as well. So does it include things that you can do on a portal, things that you can do on scripting, whether it's Python as well?
Speaker 2:Yes. So this book definitely covers and I think we've already gone through that. We have a total of 13 chapters and I think six or seven chapters are kind of practical and another six or seven chapters are kind of theoretical. And these practical chapters we don't want to dump in everything at the beginning of the book and also not at the end. We want to make it somewhere in between. So first three chapters you'll see the starting, the foundations of the generative AI language models, what is Azure OpenAI, to keep some details. And then we'll go some practicals and the very end, which is more for the enterprises, like prompt engineering, more on scaling, enterprise security, which may not be the people's going to be initially needed. Maybe they need it for the enterprise settings. So we put it at the very end so that it's going to be complete.
Speaker 2:And each practical chapter has, as we said, has, a reference architecture. It has step-by-step guide. If something needs to be done from the portal, it goes through that. Also, supplemental GitHub links are there. They can go and take that GitHub links and implement by themselves. And it even goes more granular, like if somebody doesn't have an Azure OpenAI account or even Azure subscription, how are you going to create a subscription for them. You're going to go all of that, so it doesn't need to be. Person has to be in Azure. They can apportion Anybody doesn't even touch any in their life. In Azure, they even can take this book and implement the solutions by themselves.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, that's brilliant because it's for extremely beginners. So if someone were to how many, so for each chapter it's got a demo practical experience. So if someone were to how many, so for each chapter it's got a demo, a practical experience. So if someone gets stuck from reading that book and trying from a demo, is there an answer sheet or something people can use.
Speaker 2:Not an answer sheet, but if somebody goes through the theoretical chapters and then goes to the demos, they will get a complete sense. If somebody doesn't know anything about Azure and they directly go to the demos, they will get a complete sense. If somebody doesn't know anything about Azure and they directly go to the practical chapters, they still can get that, but they will not understand what's going behind. So, for example, we have some services because we talked about definitely Azure, openai but we cover other peripheral services to build that demos right. So you need to have some understanding on those peripheral services, which is not covered in the book. But this book is more on the open AI service. But if you go through the basic three chapters of the open AI services what is that? And some advanced topic and then you go to the demo, you will pretty much understand how this demo works or how the practical works.
Speaker 1:Okay, great, rufi, as a community member or someone that read the book, what do you think?
Speaker 3:uh, and it could improve, like from today, if you wanted to redo the book yeah, definitely not redo, but if we, because ai is there's so much happening on a daily basis. I just want to shout out one thing that the book really covers at the enterprise scale, especially chapters like privacy and security and operationalizing Azure, openai. They cover in great detail on how AOAI does service compliance or content filtering, and also how could you provision quotas and limits. Everything is very well structured. What I would like to see more is how the multi-agent orchestration and the agentic AI frameworks, which, of course, are becoming more and more adopted now. So maybe now is a good time to add those frameworks like MCP A2A, and also advance the chapter that touched base upon this agentic, multimodal, multi-agent framework, including those frameworks and also have more practical examples of autogen and semantic kernel, because, yes, the book talks about them, but maybe with more enterprise-ready solutions coming with these frameworks, it would be a great add-on to this book, in my opinion.
Speaker 2:I 100% agree, bhuvi, on that one. In fact, pat has reached out to me hey, would you like to write a second version? And I said, yeah, not this year, I'll separate it. This book doesn't cover anything about agent, as Bhobie and Nicholas you might have seen that one Because when I read the book, agent was kind of all in talk, nothing was there much. But yes, second version, I will more cover on the agents and A2A and MCP, how to build an agentic AI, all these things we're going to cover in a more advanced and that time I'm assuming that somebody has already gone through this first version of the book and then going to the second version of the book, which is a little bit advanced and I don't have to assume much that time because I'm assuming they have gone through this. Yeah, definitely good, good showdown on that one. Definitely that's the plan to cover in the second version.
Speaker 1:Okay, Amit, you said you wanted to show us some cool demo of the book Sneak Peek.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I will let me share my quick screen, and I'm a dual monitor here, so is there any way I can share the screen?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you just present there's a problem and just share your screen or window. Okay, oh, can we? Can someone like if we were to get a book, is it only a hard copy, or someone just have a digital copy?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, good to mention that one. So this book can be, they can take. You know it's basically sold in a two-medium platform. One is the Amazon or the directly-packed website and this book. Right now I think there's a 40% discounts in the packed website, so instead of being $49.99 in Amazon, you can be around $35 or something in directing the fact website. Or you can buy through an Amazon. Amazon does provide a digital copy as well, but I believe they do provide only the hard one. So depends on the readers preference, you can buy a digital copy or a hard copy either through amazon or through pack website.
Speaker 1:For the hard copy, otherwise you could convert it to audio so people, instead of reading, they can just listen to it.
Speaker 3:Yes, like in kindle and stuff yeah, so I bought my book from pack directly and the best part about is that there is a plate function on FACT website. There's a summarize function and also there's an AI assistant, so that works wonderfully on that platform.
Speaker 1:Okay, brilliant. So to wrap up from your experience, ahmed, if you were to give someone advice, if someone else wanted to publish a book, what advice would you give them?
Speaker 2:Yes. So first thing, my learning process, as Ruby also mentioned, when you're first writing the book, make sure you have a time, commitment and self-encouragement. It's the self-motivation, the first thing you need. If you do not have much time, commitment and self-motivation, it's the first thing you need. If you do not have much time, committed and self-motivation, you can write the book, but it will be not a good quality number one. And second thing sometimes you're going to leave in between. You say, okay, it's too much effort, so that's very much important.
Speaker 2:Second thing you pick a topic which you are master of, right, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Okay, I write the book everybody's writing in jdvi. Should I go and tap on that? Not necessarily. You can write the book which you are really passionate about, right, and that's where the things gonna come out. And third thing is that, um, I would say if you are not a very systematic you know discipline, like me, I'm not a very disciplined person then find a publisher, right, who can publish this before, because when you find a publisher, they will make you systematic, they will give you timeline, they will every time they're going to knock you hey, is it done? This chapter is done and there'll be a lot of back and forth going to happen because when you write a chapter, they will review it and they will say, okay, this is not correct, re-ed, re-edit it back. So, back and forth, anything going to happen.
Speaker 2:And make sure you've got a good reviewer like Bube is a good reviewer of that book Before the publishing. You need to have a good reviewer who can really same subject matter expert like you, who can review the topics and give you a positive feedback so that you can incorporate those feedback. In fact, for me, I it took almost seven, eight months to write the book because writing chapters is is not that time consuming, but collaborating with a reviewer. You know, in a publisher giving a feedback, some images are not properly, you know, uh, resolution is not good. So all these things, some cosmetic things, you have to know both go through all of that. So those are the three things that are very important Commitment, self-motivation, subject matter expertise and discipline. If you have that, you are an author, to become an author for sure?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's true, ruvik. Did you have to review the book for any like the content of it before it's been published, whether it's like just to make sure it's the content? Everything is there is quality.
Speaker 2:You're in mute.
Speaker 1:It's me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely, I have done book reviews in past. For fact, I did a book review for modernization of workloads onto Azure, as Amit mentioned. Yes, they keep you on task. They make sure that the reviewers are also committing to certain chapters and then staying on track and also complying to the timelines, because it's all packed, they have to get things out the door by a certain timeline. So, yes, I 100% agree with Amit that your reviewers have to be also very well aligned and they have to be subject matter experts.
Speaker 3:So I remember the chapters that I reviewed. I was very close to that part of the technology. I had hands-on experience with that. And then the feedback that comes and how it inculcates, how PACT inculcates that feedback. I really love working with them on that experience.
Speaker 2:One thing I would highly say last statement is when you start writing the book, don't think about money.
Speaker 2:I haven't wrote the book for the money, to be very honest because, this technology book become obsolete in six months and the new thing is going to come up right. It's just about building the brand and reskilling yourself. So build your brand and if you test your things, go for a book. Right. If you're writing a book for the money, then don't write a book which is emerging technology. It's going to emerge a lot. To be very honest, this book will six, seven, eight months or maybe a year later. This book will say okay, you need a revision. So at that time you may not have that many copies sold to. You know, get a lot of money. So just as one tip for you, don't look for the money. Just build your brand and risk yourself on the book.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for you, don't look for the money just build your brand and risk yourself on the books. Yeah, yeah, and I noticed that the book has been reviewed by quite a few people. There's few like feedback on amazon as well, and it's been forwarded by mark russell, so you had some like comments on it yes, so he's a vp of the product and, uh, in microsoft and it's called the accuracy.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I'm very grateful to him that he reviewed that. You know, give an acknowledgement and the forward for that, and my two colleagues, especially DJ Dean, who is also a reviewer of that book, who is my colleague also. He's a fantastic guy, very knowledgeable in JDBi, so very same knowledge like me he has, so he got a chance to review my book. I'm gonna give a suit out to him as well. And definitely movie who is doing a post review of the post production review of this book?
Speaker 1:so I've got a question for myself. So how many times can the pop that can after like review the book before it's published? Is that whenever you feel field is ready?
Speaker 2:so typically as per the package publisher could have a different policies but the packs if we had minimum two reviewers to review the book, minimum. So each chapter is not like that. I have to write all the chapters and stuff everything to the reviewer. I write the first chapter or second chapter, I give it to them. They will run it. I start writing third chapter, they will say come back, these are the things you need to correct it. I go back and start writing this. You know correcting those chapters. So minimum two reviewers is must needed and the four word is not mandatory. They can be as part of the publishing the book or they can be later after publishing the book into the Amazon or in a back website. They can give us a forward. But I got fortunate to get Marco's first hand write a forward for me in the publishing process itself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the book is available now and you can get it in PACT and Amazon. Is that right?
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, that's brilliant. Is that correct, is there?
Speaker 1:anywhere else it's available. Yeah, that's brilliant. Thanks for joining us for this amazing talk on your journey on writing a book. Hopefully people have learned how to, like you can get a copy of it, start from beginner and then be more like advanced at your opening day and hopefully, if someone wants to, wants to write a book for themselves, they can learn some of the mistakes and challenges that you had to face, like time management as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you, nicholas, for inviting us. On this kind of book publishing procedures and what is covered in the book, I'll be happy to chat once we come up to the new version of the book.
Speaker 1:Thank you. So when's the new version? Is it next year? I'm planning for next year.
Speaker 2:This year is so many things I need to cover. I'm planning something next year too. I'll just write the second version of the book.
Speaker 1:Okay, no worries, thank you, thanks guys.
