00:00:01 Mark Smith
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now, let's get on with the show. Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Today's guest is joining me from, I thought London, but actually he's from All links for the show that we discuss will be in the show notes. It's great to have you here. Let's get started. Balesh, welcome to the show.

00:00:40 Balazs Horvath
Thanks, Mark. Thanks so much for having me. Welcome, everyone.

00:00:44 Mark Smith
Looking forward to having a discussion with you. Before we do, I always like to start with food, family, and fun. What do they mean to you?

00:00:51 Balazs Horvath
Family, two little kids, a five-year-old daughter who's actually turning 5 tomorrow morning. So I'm heading home after this and prepping for the birthday morning. And A two-and-a-half-year-old little boy. And they are now just old enough to be properly fighting with each other, but also enjoying their time together.And that pretty much adds up for the fun part as well. I'm an avid runner as well. That keeps me sane. And foods, I'm A foodie. I'll eat anything that comes across all sorts of cuisines. Yeah, I think that checks it.

00:01:27 Mark Smith
Yeah, very nice. My kids are about the same age as well, and they definitely keep you on your feet. But I love that the older they grow, the more their intelligence increases and you can have these conversations with them.And then they'll have a conversation with you about some words you've said and what they want to know the meaning of it. And why did you say that word that way? And yeah, it's very interesting.

00:01:49 Balazs Horvath
Yeah, it's a great time.

00:01:50 Mark Smith
Tell me about what do you do and what have you been doing up to this point in your career? What's your focus been in the Power Platform space? And then I see you doing a lot more work in the AI space these days.

00:02:03 Balazs Horvath
Yeah, so I'm coming at the Power Platform from the ERP angle. I've been I've been working with Dynamics ERP for all my career, and then as I was in London working for KPMG at the time when Power Platform came out and we won this innovation contest. and we were able to build a Power Platform integrated with AX7 at the time. So that was quite a big deal then to build our own expense app. We got developer resources and time off for our buildable project. And pretty much since then, that was 2017, 2018, I've always had Power Platform and Dynamics C around our projects. And then in 2020, when we started building Visual Labs Dynamics Practice, We pivoted to Business Central from F&O because the Hungarian market was a lot smaller and BC was a better natural fit. Rather than building and customizing the Business Central, we went with model-driven apps and used the Power Platform as an augmentation of the ERP. And instead of using... the CRM functionality of BC. We implemented D365 sales professional and field service and customer service. So we became this ERP slash CRM shop in Hungary. And that's been really our edge since. And for the best part of past four years, we've also been doing the data part. So we've become this one-stop shop of all things biz apps.

00:03:40 Mark Smith
Tell me, what's your observation in the recent three years, Microsoft as an organization jumped on AI. At the time, saw that they had this massive lead advantage.

00:03:55 Balazs Horvath
Yes.

00:03:56 Mark Smith
And we saw, particularly in BizApps, a lot of perhaps pivot and investment from continuing the direction of the various platforms, et cetera, in BizApps to Everything became AI and it became a joke at any event. It was like, how many times was the word AI said? And all the roadmap that had been burning along at that point seemed to pivot massively. What's been your observation the last three years?

00:04:25 Balazs Horvath
Yeah, so it's been very much that. And I've been to various conferences and the partner ecosystem seems to be echoing the same thing.It's been more hype than actual value. And I'm not sure whether it was, part the model wasn't there quite yet, or whether the integration wasn't done well enough, or whether it's just the companies, the partners need to find those value levers that if you pull, then you'll actually move things forward, rather than just have those flashy copilot icons everywhere and have a little clever little chatbot. But I'm always an optimistic, so I tend to feel like we are now turning the corner on that with the arrival of the While we did advance of Anthropic and the cloud models coming into the Power Platform and into the copilot ecosystem, it feels like we are getting a genuine colleague rather than just a cute little chatbot. And I think now with MCP and just being able to chat properly, just chat with your platform. It's now becoming, I hate to use the word game changer, but it seems to have that potential of how, they've been saying that the way we interact with apps is changing, all that stuff. So I've actually not been logging into my CRM. to log my activities and opportunities for the past two weeks or so. I've been just using actually Claude's code to interact with Dynamics, and that's a proper proof. And instead of using Power BI to get a pipeline report, I just ask Claude to generate me an HTML report that I can just, you know, show off and compare week on week. So that's some of the stuff that they've been saying for the past couple of years is actually coming around. It's a bit of a shame that you needed to, you know, you need a party supplier to give it to you, but Microsoft is catching up. So they are, as you say, they had this massive leave, but now they're sort of on the back foot and gathering themselves.

00:06:24 Mark Smith
You mentioned that you've got into data in recent times. Tell me a bit about that part of your business.

00:06:31 Balazs Horvath
Yeah, so it was sort of like a natural growth for us. So we're still internationally a small team, but for the size of Hungary, having 25, 30 consultants is quite a large team. And I mean, and we realize that we implement one system and then the other, and then we tend to have a good relationship with our clients. And what use do you make of those systems?You've got all that good data accumulating.So it's only natural that you start benefiting from the data. And for that, you need Power BI resources, you need to build a data warehouse, you need a data factory to pull in data from the Dataverse, and then VC, and then your various other systems. So it was just a natural evolution. And now it's...I'm curious to hear your authors, but it feels like everything is all converging, like Fabric, very much acting sometimes like a local platform. The new way of creating apps is almost like you can create visuals that are akin to Power BI dashboards. So it's all becoming a bit of a mix. So it feels like data needs to be very much part of everybody's stack. You can't just say, oh, we're only doing Dynamics, we're doing Fabric.

00:07:45 Mark Smith
Yeah. Where do you see this in three to five years' time?As in products like F&O, products like BC, CRM, sales, marketing. Do you think that people will be using the interfaces that we have now? You just talked about two weeks, you haven't logged into your CRM. You're doing it all through AI. Where do you see it going?

00:08:13 Balazs Horvath
So, and I think this is our challenge of the day as a partner, as a client as well, is the way we interact with apps is changing. And if you're not careful, or if you cannot provide a moat in CRM, as I think CRM will just become a database. And I actually already have clients, smaller clients, that are using Lovable generated apps as their CRM, and they're perfectly happy with it. You know, they trust it, works, and it's just like, be careful. It's like, we've been using it for... I think it's gonna be like six months for them now, so that's good enough. So, I think I'm currently betting on ERP and the data side of things. Not so much on sales and customer service with all the voice integration and all that stuff, that still seems to have the moat. And also with marketing journeys and customer insights data, that's still some unique stuff that's not easy, not as easy to replicate as just having lead and opportunities and just generate quotes. Because finance, it's audited, it's legislated, you need to do back returns and do a proper P&L. And you just can't replicate all that via vibe coding, even though AI could potentially do it for you. But the fact that that's a robust out-of-the-box app with thousands of lines of codes and thousands of tables to pre-built for you, I think that's going to be the last sort of SaaS app going away.

00:09:47 Mark Smith
Interesting, interesting. So I've spent 23 years specifically with What was MSCRM was my first product.So that was in 2003. So I've been in CRM land for a long time. Last week, I built a brand new CRM from scratch, using all my experience. It doesn't have an interface.So it's only available to my agents, of which I'm now running 23 agents. And I don't need to track an e-mail anymore. So what I've got it doing is that it looks at e-mail,And what it does is rather than like the old model was you'd track a meeting, you'd track an e-mail, you'd track, all it's doing is tracking signal. Like is there a signal in that e-mail that needs something to be done about it? Is there a signal in that meeting, but it's automatically Rather than the bulk in the past, it would take then a whole e-mail or e-mail signature, that kind of.

00:10:48 Balazs Horvath
Yeah, and then yeah, with the logo and everything and just go through your database. Yeah, absolutely.

00:10:53 Mark Smith
Everything, right? You don't need all that. And so what I'm finding incredible is, and so I used all my skills in CRM around architecture, but one of the things that I wrote a blog post when I was living in London was why are we still working on 20-year-old thinking in the CRM that we have, because at that point, I was going through the 20-year mark of my career in Dynamics CRM at that point, before it became sales. And I was laying, it's fundamentally not really changed. Yes, it went from on-prem to the cloud, but actually the concept of CRM had not evolved.

00:11:29 Balazs Horvath
Yeah, absolutely.

00:11:31 Mark Smith
But business had evolved massively. And so back in... I've got long latitude on fields. I've got yomni fields.I've got all these type of things that were really 25-year-old thinking. And so I started with a thought experiment with AI around it and said, Hey, this is all old technology. How would we do it again? Well, I said, Well, first of all, let's get rid of the construct of company, lead, and contact, and let's just call it a person. And I was like, wow, how refreshing, right? A person will have different states at different times with your organization. Yes, I'll be related to a company, but it's really the CRM is about the people, not the company is secondary. And I'm just like, wow, that's exactly right. And so I've been able to, as I said, I've been running it a week now, and it's already fully integrated to my website. I've made sure prompt injection can't be happening there. I've got it reading the, one of the M365 product team brought out a CLI integration to the Microsoft Graph. And so I can point it to whatever I want in the Microsoft Sphere and ingest data. And it's just like, wow, it's just blowing my mind about now what's possible and how integrated you can make the data sets to be without, though, the baggage of a user interface.

00:13:00 Balazs Horvath
This is really it, right? It's like we are arriving at this. is already happening. And I think it's such a big challenge for, like up and coming generations of, who still need to learn, leads, opportunities, concept, whatever. So they understand the whole philosophy of CRM actually has a demo today to an old legacy company who have never been using a proper CRM. So, for them, it was all fresh and new, but they felt like, Yeah, this is convoluted. This is complicated. But yeah, but you need to get on the data platform. You need to free your customer data so that you can really start harnessing the benefit. And I think this is where our expertise will really shine of understanding of what customers or clients actually need so that they can make the best of their solution. So yeah, and the data is still there. That's not going away. It's just being reshaped how we use it.

00:13:59 Mark Smith
I watched a video of you talking about Copilot and that companies, one of the reasons for adoption issues is that companies have allowed every AI to come into their landscape and now there's no common language being spoken.

00:14:14 Balazs Horvath
Yeah, they're literally just across the road. They spend the morning there. And they're still using Slack and Viber, and they are now jumping on the Gemini bandwagon as well. So it's really interesting. It's exactly the other way around how you would imagine like a proper AI center, excellence, excellence being governed.But on the, I'm actually quite surprised that they are actually reaping the benefits. It's almost like they're coming together in small teams. And because they're working quite disjointedly or in a distributed manner, they're all becoming their own little islands. And that's what I was talking to them about contacts. For me, in 2026, the models are good enough. It's about the context that you can give them, right? Like you mentioned signal. So how do you define a signal? In order for an AI agent to pick up the signal, they need to know what it is that you are offering to them, what it is that you are... If they send you an e-mail, Hey, I'm interested in this and this. You want to identify what is your ICP, so on and so forth. So that sort of... of context, no third party will come up with that. That's something you need to be working on so that AI and the best of breed models can make any use of it. And that was a bit of a reckoning. For them, it's like, all right, we need to actually do create that markdown file of vision, mission, principles, customers, differentiators, the language we speak, the tone of voice. Yes, I think, yeah, Berkaki will have a long way to go.

00:15:57 Mark Smith
Yeah, you mentioned ICP, which tells me, are you guys doing... A lot of work in that marketing space as well, as in with the Microsoft tooling, like it seems you're much broader than just ERP nowadays.

00:16:12 Balazs Horvath
Yes, yeah, so we are actually just started a customer insights journey project with one of the largest Hungarian universities to attract. applicants and we are using journeys for that. So, that's always an interesting use of, as you said, there's account, contact, lead, whatever. And then what if your lead is a 16 year old? girl or guy somewhere in the Middle East, you want to get them to a rural Hungarian university, and how do you track the signals? How do you market to them? How do you capture TikTok data and all that, all that good stuff? So yeah, it's always, always interesting. And again, it's because the market is so small, quite often it's, you know, we aren't specialized in one niche. We are, you know, we are doing project operations, we are doing field service, we are doing customer service, all that, all that good stuff. And We pick our talent based on that as well. It's like we want you to learn and pick up new products.

00:17:11 Mark Smith
And is it because companies are coming to you? You've established your presence in the market. For years, Microsoft have said we need to take a verticalized approach. And when you're in smaller, like in New Zealand, right, the population 5,000, 5 million people, which means there's only 3 million that are maybe of working age or less. You don't have the luxury of going, I'm only going to do oil and gas, as an example, because you're dealing with one company. That's it. That's the whole market. And so you have to take a much more broader, you take what comes. And is this the case that your branding and market has grown to the extent that now companies are coming to you and saying, hey, we see you do stuff in this space. Can you help us?

00:17:58 Balazs Horvath
Yes, also, and we work very closely with the hungrier Microsoft guys, like, they know that they can come to us, and we are not like one of one of those companies that cover, anything as long as it's a CRM, like, there are companies that do Salesforce. Microsoft and HubSpot and whatever, and then and then we'll do whoever, whoever gets the best whatever program and return on the licenses. So we are committed to working with Microsoft and our essentially our breath is, hey, do you need ERP? Is it large scale ERP? Is it small scale? If it's small scale, then BC. If it's large scale, then we, you know, we're actually doing ethanol projects as well as, you know, that's our bread and butter, but we wouldn't take on a, you know, a large scale couple thousand person day project on F&O, but we are doing rollouts, localizations for the Hungarian market, doing the vet return, all this stuff. So yeah, and that's what we're saying, like we want to be the best Power Platform and Dynamics partner in the country.

00:18:59 Mark Smith
And so are you mainly serving the Hungarian market or do you do any kind of European wider work?

00:19:06 Balazs Horvath
So we are, yeah, we are doing wider, especially with the Microsoft enterprise companies. They've got footprint in, let's say, in Poland. We're starting a project in Poland as well. They've got a leg in Athens, so we're in contact with the Greek guys. And based on my previous, you know, UK life, I do still have my network there. So actually in the past two years, half of our revenue actually came from the UK, from a project operations project and an ethanol rollout. And there we were happening on the client side. do migration data and reporting. So it's like we carved out that small place. We were cheaper than the local SI, but we still burned the systems integrator. So we found our good niche there. So yeah, what I'm seeing now is it's a lot easier to get that personal relationship built out locally. And with the little ones and the grandparents here, I don't want to relocate the whole family to the UK. So we are focusing on the Hungarian market and sort of central Eastern Europe.

00:20:15 Mark Smith
What do you feel then as your business evolves? What will the impact of AI be in your business, particularly for your consultants that are working on building solutions? What are you seeing is already changing and what do you think is going to change more?

00:20:33 Balazs Horvath
So we just hired four fresh out of uni guys and girl. Because when we started in 2020, there was only three of us who had Microsoft experience and we didn't want to, poach senior talent from competitors. We said we'd grown our own talent and then sort of accept if we move slower. Because we always wanted to focus on, you know, client-first mentality. And one of the main drivers for me to establish my own company is to sort of bring back home that client centricity that I saw in the US and the UK. And what I'm seeing now is that's going to be of paramount importance, that we keep that human touch, because my hypothesis is the human touch is what will be taken away by AI at the last. So we are 25 consultants, about 5 contractors, and we no longer have in-house developers. So all our guys are practically functionals or so technical functionals, but everybody's client-facing. We haven't got a dev shop because we're so focused on the Power Platform side of things now and we're doing... sort of out of box BC implementations. And if we have development work, we'll just outsource it to our self-contract network. That way we can keep that client focus, client centricity. And one of the things that we are teaching, I sort of flipped that our academic program upside down. Previously, I would have started with, here's Power Platform, this is what you need to do to pass PL200, learn the Canvas app, model-driven app, yada, yada, right? Whereas now, I'm flipping around, here's how you run a workshop, here's how you ask questions. Here's how you understand requirements. What's the pain point? What's the problem we're solving? Because I just went into vibe.powerapps.com last night, and I was working for Caterpillar dealerships when I started as a junior. And I just put in, Hey, give me a rental front end for a heavy machinery. And it just started going away, did its vibing, give me the checkboxes, and 10 minutes later, it was there, it worked. The question was, do I understand the business's problem well enough that I can tweak that design? Because the system will do it, right? That would have taken us four or five weeks with a bunch of Hungarian developers while me being on site in the US.

00:23:06 Mark Smith
And that's that context that you're talking about. It's really important that you have the context. They understand what is happening. And I think there's a big difference in vibe coding. to those that don't know what they're creating. They don't know what damage they're potentially producing. They don't have any kind of rigor around ALM or DevOps or anything around the rigor. But then I think it's quite different when you have somebody that has all that context. They know what good looks like. And then you give them a set of AI tools and they can create, what would be, what people would see as miracles. But of course, it's built on a lot of context that they've had or they have.

00:23:53 Balazs Horvath
Yeah, like a lot of my colleagues ask me, like, how can you prompt so well? I know what the problem is, and I can just articulate the problem very clearly of what we're solving, because that's what AI understands, right? It understands intent. So if you can give them, look, this is the problem that we are looking to solve. This is how we can solve it so that we achieve a means that will give us this benefit, then it will give you those results. But that's the thing, I think that's where there's an increasing gap between our clients and what AI can do. For instance, I was presenting at a Claude meetup last week. Okay. And just at the very end of my presentation, and by the way, guys, I haven't touched any of this slides. It was all made by Claude. And just like jaws were dropping. Because It was all branded, it was all there. It's because I gave it the right context. Well, practically, I gave it my presentation speech in a text file as part of my prep runs, and I just created the presentation from it. And it also has like a 20-page base prompt about how I speak, what I do, how we present, what we stand for. That way, it's just a single shot prompt will give you the results that you would expect.

00:25:12 Mark Smith
Yeah, a single shot prompt that took a long time to get to a single shot prompt. I like that. Now we'll close out with this because presentations, you know, you're constantly being asked to present and do something. And I don't like mine ever to be a bit stale and I want them to be visually attractive, but not, you know, walls of text, not me having, they're designed to back me up like in a presentation. And a single shot, like I've got a 12 shot prompt for presentations, which goes everything from understanding my audience to what is the story arc that I'm going to take to what is the key points I'm going to land for these different types of personas that are going to be on my audience, to ultimately, what am I going to present, you know, as an on a particular topic that I've been asked to present on. And then you have PowerPoint and Copilot PowerPoint, you're just like, okay, welcome back to the 1980s. And when it looks at adding visual elements to it.And then Anthropic comes along with a plugin to PowerPoint. And it's just like it mounts your face about how awesome it is. How do you think, how are you using those to go? What are the practical things? You talked about it was on brand and everything. What are you making sure it visually lights up what you're after?

00:26:39 Balazs Horvath
So I think the reason why this is important for this audience is because skills are coming to Microsoft, to the Microsoft ecosystem, right? And they will be very similar to how Claude handles skills. So what I did is, essentially, we have a Visual Labs VL Core. MD file, which is always used every single time that we speak with Claude. And then we have a skill, which is Visual Labs brand guidelines. So it's got our fonts, it's got our color codes, it's got how to create a professional, friendly, to the point, pretty much as you said, right? It's that consultant like, but no ******** no big words, no fanfare. And it just, I just saw it like, you see Claude's thinking and they just evoked that Visual Labs brand guidelines scale and it was just using that and it stuck to it. So that's really about it. And it's just, don't get me wrong, it wasn't AI that generated my presentation. It's like, I've been practicing, creating the story arc and I actually have a prompt of this is what a good presentation, this is what a good conference session looks like. This is the structure, start with start with the stakeholders, understanding what they're in for, and then Andre challenges me. So I turned AI around to prompt me to do better work rather than I'm asking AI to do my work. And I think that's a different way of using AI as we were trying two years ago.

00:28:16 Mark Smith
Yeah, reverse prompting is incredibly powerful. I always start with a problem that I'm dealing with. And I'll say, ask me 20 questions, one at a time, and we'll go back. And then the killer that I did the other day was, now are there any additional questions that, because we'd gone through 20, we'd burned through the 20, do you know that it asked me another 30 questions?

00:28:43 Balazs Horvath
Oh, wow. It must have been a proper deep dive.

00:28:46 Mark Smith
And so, but what came out of it was just amazing. What was, it was so, I thought 20 we'd cover it, right? And I just decided, I'll throw in just say, is there any other questions you have? And it goes, well, actually, you said this, now I want to drill into that more. And you said that, now I want to drill into that more. And I was just like, 50 questions later, but the output was just phenomenal.

00:29:09 Balazs Horvath
Yeah, it sounds like you're no longer having like, you're having a proper digital, you know, calling that works for you. And sometimes like you, Back in the day with ChatGPT, we sort of wanted where we want to get to, right? But with Claude, it's like, well, let's think it through and let's see where we land. And then you come up with novel ideas that you wouldn't really have thought that you'd end up with.

00:29:33 Mark Smith
Yeah, so good. Balesh, it's been great talking to you.

00:29:36 Balazs Horvath
And I'm really excited of having this in our ecosystem.it's coming, it's going to be part of it. So I think this is the time that we need to be as ready for it as we can. It's like, start creating that contact. So same way as you are onboarding a new colleague, you want to make sure that you can give it as much of the learning and the knowledge you can so that they can start performing. So I think that is what our clients and us as partners need to be doing now is prepare. for this new generation of models.

00:30:09 Mark Smith
I like it. If people want to reach out and get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

00:30:14 Balazs Horvath
Yeah, just ping me on LinkedIn. Bolashwar about D365. My name is surprisingly coming in Hungary. But yeah, you'll probably find me Bolashwar about Visual Labs.

00:30:27 Mark Smith
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host, Business Application MVP, Mark Smith, otherwise known as the nz365guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffee.com forward slash nz365guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the starts.