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Blog

Notes on strategy, systems and thought leadership.

Building modern chat experiences with Microsoft Agent Framework and OpenAI ChatKit

14 Dec 2025

Learn how to combine Microsoft Agent Framework's structured agent orchestration with OpenAI ChatKit's polished chat UI for production-quality AI experiences featuring streaming, widgets and file uploads.

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Decoding Australia’s National AI Plan for Builders

03 Dec 2025

Guardrails are the roadmap. If 2023 was the year of "Magic" and 2024 was the year of "Pilots," then 2025 has officially become the year of Standardisation . The release of Australia’s National AI Plan today marks a defin

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The Pragmatic Guide to Human in the Loop AI

16 Oct 2025

AI shines on the happy path and trust is earned on the edge cases. Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) is how you keep AI honest. Humans arbitrate ambiguity, absorb asymmetric risk and turn every override into learning. This partic

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A developer's guide to the Microsoft Agent Framework

02 Oct 2025

If you’ve been building with LLMs for more than a few weeks, you've probably discovered there's a big gap between a demo that impresses in a meeting and a system that quietly runs every day in production. The difference

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Validate Fast or Stagnate with AI Consulting

09 Sept 2025

Across dozens of client conversations this year, I’ve noticed a pattern: everyone has internalised the fail‑fast strategy yet only a handful of organisations actually practice it. Most enterprises and even many mid‑marke

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Building Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Communication for Smarter AI Systems

14 Aug 2025

When you start building AI agents , it doesn’t take long before you hit a wall and ask yourself, “ How do I get my agents to talk to each other without reinventing the wheel every time? ” Sure, you can handcraft APIs, de

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How I solved the HEIC extension saga with a simple MCP server

16 July 2025

Last month, after giving a talk at UTS Sydney, Dr. Nabin Sharma kindly forwarded a batch of session photos with every single one in .HEIC format. I wasn’t impressed when I was asked to pay for an extension just to view a

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Hack Yourself with AI Red Teaming

14 July 2025

The first instalment in this series celebrated the promise of the open agentic web, an internet where autonomous software workers cooperate across organisational and technical borders. That vision remains compelling and

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Leading in the Age of the Open Agentic Web

26 May 2025

This weekend, C-suite executives and innovation leaders are digesting the twin signals sent from Microsoft Build in Seattle and Google I/O in Mountain View, where both stages unveiled the same bold future: the Open Agent

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Create Personalised Experiences with Azure AI Foundry Agent Service

07 Apr 2025

Throughout the history, human progress has been marked by our ability to delegate. From the first domesticated animals pulling carts to the industrial revolution automating manual labor, we have consistently sought ways

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Leap Forward with Modern AI using Microsoft 365 Agents SDK and Semantic Kernel

08 Jan 2025

Happy new year. I know you're excited to see this. It is real, it is happening, but you know what? It is still in preview and things will break. So, get ready for it. If you're wondering what this SDK is all about then d

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Building Multi-Agent Systems with Multi-Models in Semantic Kernel

15 Dec 2024

Imagine running a restaurant. Each of your team member, from the chef to server to the cashier has got specialised skills. While the chef prepares delicious meals, the server ensures that the food is delivered promptly a

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Give local memories to your local AI Agents

09 Sept 2024

In our previous post , we delved into the fascinating world of local Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) using Microsoft’s Phi-3 and the Semantic Kernel framework. I demonstrated how to build a basic Console App that sh

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Bring your AI Copilots to the edge with Phi-3 and Semantic Kernel

05 Aug 2024

It's true that not every challenge can be distilled into a straightforward solution. However, as someone who has always believed in the power of simplicity, I think a deeper understanding of the problem often paves the w

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Building Your Custom Retail Copilot: A Step-by-Step Guide with Semantic Kernel and Azure OpenAI

12 Mar 2024

Hello 👋. May I request you to write this prompt into your ChatGPT console and see what do you get? My friend is coming from Thailand. Can you please track the flight from Bangkok to Sydney? Also, considering the weather

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ParkingGPT - Your AI Parking Copilot

08 Jan 2024

About 10 months (March, 2023) ago, I got a mention in a tweet from one of my good friends and our local community leader, Simon Waight . It was about solving a complex parking problem with Computer Vision. I bookmarked t

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Build your AI First Apps with Semantic Kernel

31 Oct 2023

The world is changing rapidly and so are the applications that we use every day at our workplace, home, gym, playground and the likes. Gone are the days when applications were just software that ran on your workstations

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Best practices for building collaborative UX with Human-AI partnership

16 Oct 2023

In today’s digital age, it is not easy for any business to work without the application of artificial intelligence (AI). Especially for those in retail or consumer market, AI has now become the integral aspect of their g

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Build Sentiment Classifier, Translator and a Flight Tracker with the Generative AI

10 July 2023

Last week I received an email from the Microsoft Reactor team informing me that I had 360 RSVPs on the day of my talk . While I was super excited, I was a bit nervous because I wanted to ensure that I deliver the content

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Break out of your comfort zone, and start learning new skills

05 July 2023

When we’re kids, we explore our interests and abilities, adopting what we like and leaving what we don’t. In this way, we create our comfort zone, where we find less stress, increased efficiency, and improved confidence.

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Unlock the power of OpenAI's GPT with No-code AI Builder

28 Mar 2023

As you know, Microsoft's AI Builder now supports prebuilt Azure OpenAI models, allowing users to easily integrate powerful AI capabilities into their applications and processes without the need for any coding or data sci

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Create personalized experiences for your apps, bots and websites with Azure Personalizer - Part 3

04 Jan 2023

Personalization in customer service is the practice of tailoring interactions with customers to their individual needs and preferences. This can be achieved through the use of customer data and technology such as machine

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Create personalized experiences for your apps, bots and websites with Azure Personalizer - Part 2

05 Dec 2022

In today's digital age, it is not easy for any business to work without personalization. Especially for those in the retail or consumer market, personalization has now become the fundamental aspect of their branding. It

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Create personalized experiences for your apps, bots and websites with Azure Personalizer - Part 1

31 Oct 2022

In the last couple of years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has shown tremendous growth opportunities. It is rapidly improving and changing the way we interact, shop and work. AI has become so ubiquitous in our daily lives

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Give your Power Virtual Agents a voice with Speech and Telephony

25 May 2022

When Power Virtual Agents were released, it was ensured that people who are closer to their customers can create bots for them. The team at Microsoft worked hard on tooling so that users could not just feel the ease of c

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Power Virtual Agents get the biggest update ever!

24 May 2022

I love the idea of Power Virtual Agents and it's enabling nature of creating the bots. But, because of my in-depth experience (or exposure) with Microsoft Bot Framework and Composer, PVA features never got me excited. Un

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Computer Vision Simplified with AI Builder

23 Jan 2022

Few months back, I posted a small video clip on my LinkedIn to show how I used ML.NET (w/ Azure), WinML & UWP to build a custom real-time object detection application. I received a few messages of folks on how I actu

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Hacktoberfest for .NET Developers (C# Edition)

02 Oct 2021

Hacktoberfest is celebrated during the month of October when open-source software enthusiasts, beginners, and the developer community participate by contributing to open-source projects. This is its 8th year and since th

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Chatterbox with OpenAI's GPT-3 and Bot Framework Composer

05 Aug 2021

Last week my level of excitement just went up to another level when I got an access to OpenAI's API. The API features a powerful general purpose language model, GPT-3, and has received tens of thousands of applications t

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Introducing Bot Framework Component Model for better sharing and extensibility

25 May 2021

Hey there! 👋 I am back with the bot post again. The Conversational AI has witnessed a tremendous growth just in past 2-3 years. According to latest research, Gartner predicts that by 2022, 70% of customer interactions w

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Boost your Customer Service with Opinion Mining

14 Feb 2021

If you run (or a part of) a business then you must have customers and a big number of those customers are driven by the customer service. Good customer service acts as a catalyst for your customer retention and helps you

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Generate dialogs automatically using Form Dialogs for Bot Framework Composer

26 Jan 2021

Back in 2016, Bot Framework v3 SDK used to have a famous feature called FormFlow. The beauty of FormFlow was its simplicity for basic conversational flow. You just had to define a class with some options as enum and call

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Global AI - The Podcast

03 Dec 2020

Few months ago, during a discussion with one of my colleagues, I learnt that there are a lot of people who prefer listening to podcasts while driving back home, during their morning run or if they're heading back home on

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Integrate your No-Code Power Virtual Agents with Low-Code Bot Framework Composer

17 Nov 2020

Microsoft Build 2020 has been quite interesting; not because it was virtual but because I got a chance to represent the Australian Developer Community for Azure & we witnessed a new way of integration between Bot Fra

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Beginners: Let's build COVID Safe solutions with AI & Power Platform 🚀

16 Nov 2020

2020 has been unique, unusual and a different type of year. It became a reason for many changes and one of those changes are going virtual from in-person meetups. Virtual meetups have become an essential tool for the com

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Beyond Sentiment Analysis: Object Detection with ML.NET

20 Sept 2020

Despite my diverse engagements with different Microsoft stacks ranging from Power Platform to Azure AI, I have always been a .NET (C#) guy and because of that I have a special place in my heart for all things XAML and ML

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Enable your Bot Framework Skills to support multi-tenant Power Virtual Agents

06 Aug 2020

Ever since Power Virtual Agents (PVA) have gone GA in December 2019, we've seen significant updates to this total No-Code visual authoring canvas. As an avid Conversational AI enthusiast, I have been following and implem

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Publish your Bot Framework Composer bot with already provisioned resources in Azure

14 June 2020

In Oct 2019 at Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft released Bot Framework Composer in public preview with handful of fantastic features to build some really cool bots (not for production because of a preview). From the first day

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Save lives, businesses and more with Anomaly Detector 📈

21 Apr 2020

Around 2.5 years back, one of the data centers in the Hospital of Cairns, Queensland, Australia caught up the fire because of the faulty battery. This year, UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch concluded that the fire

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Build a Flight Tracker ✈ with Bot Framework Composer 🤖 - Part 2

01 Mar 2020

In our previous post , I talked about how can we create a simple Flight Tracker bot with the fixed Adaptive Cards information. In this post, we're going to learn how can you handle interruptions during a bot's conversati

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Build a Flight Tracker ✈ using Bot Framework Composer 🤖- Part 1

09 Feb 2020

Knowledge increases when it is shared. As a strong believer of this notion, it always cheers me up when I see a new tool, technology or even a blog post which helps people solve their problems. In today's world, there ar

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Empower your existing Power Virtual Agents with Bot Framework Skills 🤖

31 Jan 2020

Are you addressing your day to day customer service operations using Power Virtual Agents? Do you have multiple bots for your organization to cater specific use-cases? Do you want to combine all of them into one experien

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AI for Every Developer: Immersive Reader for People with all abilities

16 Dec 2019

By the end of year 2019, we've seen almost a decade of disruptions in almost every sector of industry, from blockchain based agriculture to liquid biopsy in healthcare, from smart banking to personalized products; all ha

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Power Virtual Agent gets multiple channels support, authentication and entities

14 Nov 2019

On Tuesday's evening I shut down my machine after completing up all the pre-requisites (i.e. slide deck and just a couple of demos) for my upcoming talk for Power Platform World Tour in Sydney. I was a bit relaxed that o

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Extend Power Virtual Agent with Microsoft Bot Framework

31 Oct 2019

Ever since Microsoft came up with the Power Virtual Agent for Customr Service , it was well received by the organizations and community as potential tool for enhancing customer experience and resolving issues effectively

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Infuse AI into Power Virtual Agent with No-Code

12 Aug 2019

Last week I gave a talk on how you can extend Dynamics 365 using Bots (mainly Bot Framework / Azure Bot Service), I received a good amount of queries and feedback on the topic. One of them was to explore the capabilities

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Enhance Power Virtual Agent with Power Automate and No-Code

25 June 2019

During last week of May 2019, Microsoft announced the Power Virtual Agent through which you can deliver rich, personalized bot conversations to resolve customer issues quickly and effectively any time of the day, any day

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Bot Framework Skills: How can you develop and add them to your Bots

06 May 2019

As it's announced today at Build 2019 and I am happy to have contributed my bits to this specific project, Microsoft wants you to build customized digital assistants tailored to your brand, personalized to your users and

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SentimentAnalyzer - On device (offline) Sentiment Analysis for .NET Standard apps

22 Apr 2019

As a .NET (read: Microsoft Stack) guy, I have been a huge fan of applied machine learning with the actual focus on how to solve a certain business problem with efficiency and minimal cost. When Microsoft announced the Co

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Extending Dynamics 365 with Bots: "Ok Google, what's next for me"

15 Apr 2019

In our last post , we discussed the endless possibilities of Bots and Dynamics 365. We saw that how you can easily integrate the Azure Bot Service with CRM using S2S authentication and extend the features depending upon

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Extending Dynamics 365 with Bots: Lead Generation

12 Mar 2019

Ever since Microsoft came up with an idea to closely integrate Office and Dynamics CRM & ERP (of course with Azure), we all witnessed its benefits and acceleration towards the business goals. As a Software Engineer /

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Integrate LUIS, QnA Maker and Personality Chat in your Bot - Part 2

23 Dec 2018

In my last post , I briefed about how can you create FAQs, LUIS models and connect them with your Bot using CLI tools. In addition to this, I also discussed a few basic features of Dispatch tool and told you how straight

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Integrate LUIS, QnA Maker and Personality Chat in your Bot - Part 1

17 Dec 2018

After reading the comprehensive documentation of Azure Bot Service, correcting a few logical mistakes, solving syntax problems and fixing some READme docs, I'm going to tell you how easy and straight forward is to integr

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Bot Builder Community Project: An OSS Marvel

20 Aug 2018

Today, we're excited to announce a global opensource project for Bot Builder Community which is not just limited to .NET Stack but it's open for Python, Java or Node developers. History It was an ordinary evening when I

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Custom Vision (Image Recognition) with on-device processing

02 Aug 2018

Last year, I wrote about how you can enhance your business using the custom vision with Bots (read: Azure Bot Service). It was a time when Custom Vision service was in its early preview and you could only use your model

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Integrate custom machine learning models to your Bot using ML.NET

15 July 2018

Do you want to recommend your latest products or services based upon your customer's choice of shopping? Do you want to notify your customers with an estimated time of order delivery with respect to their location? Do yo

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Sentiment Analyzer - Custom Middleware for Bot Framework

22 May 2018

I have been stating these at multiple forums that Microsoft Bot Framework (MBF) is currently the richest in terms of features, supported channels and flexibility. With MBF, you can not just create one basic customer serv

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Boost up your business with Twitter by adding it to the BotFramework stack

02 May 2018

BotFramework is by far the most diversified bot development framework when it comes to the multi-channel support. The only famous conversational (sort of) channel left as of now is Twitter, which I believe will be added

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Accelerate the frequency of Border Checkpoints using Cognitive Services

25 Feb 2018

It has been just two weeks since I started going Saudi Arabia almost 3-4 times a week. The King Fahd Causeway (which is a bridge between Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Kingdom of Bahrain) was architect to bring enormous amo

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Gem Dealer - My Alexa Skill in comparison with LUIS

29 Dec 2017

Hey Alexa, ask gem dealer to update me about gold rates for today! Either you call 'necessity is the mother of invention' or 'if there's a will, there's a way' -- you need to get things done the right way. It has been al

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Globalize your Bot using multiple languages with LUIS

19 Nov 2017

According to the 2017 Ethnologue , English is no more the most spoken language and Arabic language's rank is not the same as it was before. Undoubtedly, English still has the significance but interacting with one's prima

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Easy booking bot with flexible Adaptive Cards

09 Sept 2017

Ever since the bot uprising, SMEs have started investing in innovative solutions for better productivity in an optimal cost. Customer services, on all fronts, require a human being. However, 90% of the time that human is

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Enhance your business with Custom Computer Vision in Bots

19 June 2017

Computer Vision (CV) is one of those APIs which is considered as the essence of Cognitive Services. It provides state-of-the-art image processing algorithms help you moderate content automatically and build more personal

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Multipurpose Bot using Multiple Dialogs in Bot Framework

11 June 2017

I am still in a delusion of finalizing this blog and how a reader would react towards it but anyway, there I go! First of all, you’re most welcome here. This new and improved blog is all about the business, development t

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