Welcome
Check in, settle in and meet the Midlands Microsoft community.
Photo by Lulu Black on Unsplash
Photo by Lulu Black on Unsplash
02
EY
9th floor, seminar roomOne Colmore SquareBirmingham B4 6HQ Microsoft products and technology
All experience levels
New speakers welcome
About the event
We use a single-room format, with sessions covering a range of Microsoft products and technology.
We are open to people who work with, are learning about or are interested in Power Platform, Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics, AI, Copilot, data, security and related topics.
Agenda
Times are approximate and may shift slightly on the day.
What does an agent actually cost? Designing for token economics before you ship
Dieter Gobeyn
Most agent demos skip the question: what does an agent actually cost to run? A REST call costs the same every time. An agent doesn't, since the same prompt varies with reasoning depth, tool calls, retries and context growth. We'll map what you really pay for in Microsoft Foundry beyond model tokens and then look at several architectural options for controlling spend.. plus when NOT to build an agent at all. Expect some live demos in AI Foundry portal, and you'll leave with a FinOps checklist.
Break
Ten minutes.
Knowledge, Tools, MCP, and Multi‑Agents: Choosing the Right Approach in Copilot Studio
Lee Ford
Copilot Studio has seen amazing change from its humble beginnings as Power Virtual Agents to what it is now. The sheer number of similar options now available to build your agents is quite daunting - leaving you with the same feeling of what to watch on Netflix - where do I start? We’re here to help! The key message of this session is - you don’t need everything, just the right thing. Join us as we take you through a deep dive of all the available options, including: - Knowledge sources (RAG) - Tools (Connectors, Prompts, REST APIs, MCP servers) - Triggers - Agents (Child and connected) We will cover each subject in detail, with real-world examples and live demos. By the end of this session you should hopefully have left choice paralysis with an idea of what each option is designed for and - most importantly - when to choose one over the other.
Break
Fifteen minutes to pick up a sandwich from nearby shops. We do not have sponsors, so food will not be provided onsite.
Github for Vibe Coders: Building with AI Without Losing Control
Kayode Ajayi
Annabel Okuomose
AI has made it possible for almost anyone to build software. You can describe what you want, ask an AI coding agent to build it, make changes through prompts, and have a working application surprisingly quickly. You no longer need to understand every line of code before you can start creating. But as the application grows, a different set of problems starts to appear. What changed? What did the AI modify? How do you undo something that broke? How do you experiment without affecting the working version? What happens when two people or agents change the same application? And how do you know which version is actually the right one? This is where GitHub becomes useful. This session is a practical introduction to GitHub for vibe coders, AI-assisted developers, low-code developers, and anyone using AI tools to build applications without a traditional software development background. Using a simple application built with AI, we will explore the GitHub concepts that every vibe coder should understand, including repositories, commits, branches and pull requests. Rather than teaching GitHub as a collection of developer commands, the session focuses on the problems these concepts solve. You will see how branches can provide a safe place for you or an AI agent to experiment, how commits create checkpoints you can return to, how pull requests help you review AI-generated changes before accepting them, and how GitHub gives you a history of how your application has evolved. We will also look at how these practices apply across different ways of building software, from AI coding tools and coding agents to low-code platforms such as Microsoft Power Platform. Attendees will see a practical workflow where an application is changed using AI, managed through GitHub, reviewed and safely brought back into the main version of the application. By the end of the session, attendees will understand the GitHub concepts that matter most when building with AI and have a simple workflow they can start using immediately to experiment, manage changes and build with AI more confidently.
Break
Ten minutes.
IaC for AI - Secured, Version-Controlled Agent Infrastructure
Elliott Leighton-Woodruff
Deploying AI agents into production shouldn't be a dark art. Learn how to treat your agent infrastructure with the same care as your application code using Infrastructure as Code to build secure, auditable and version-controlled AI services. In this session, we'll explore the journey from AI Foundry models through API Management to production-deployed agents. You'll discover how adopting IaC practices eliminates ad-hoc deployments and enables seamless environment parity across dev/staging/production, giving your team confidence that every agent deployment is repeatable and reversible. Level: Intermediate to Advanced
Wrap up
Closing notes and a chance to continue the conversation.