Global AI Bootcamp is a series of events organised by the Global AI Community around the world in March, including today’s event in Christchurch, New Zealand. We had a fantastic day filled with learning, sharing and opportunities to connecting as a community.

It was great to see many new faces that hadn’t attended local community events before. Everyone from students to seasoned developers and IT professionals. You know you’ve created a good event when the interactions between presenters and audience members are authentic and both directions.

I made a decision early on to have two streams, one for developers and the other more business focused. This helped attract a more diverse audience, you don’t need to know Python to use AI and we all need to understand the ethics, challenges and responsibilities of using AI in our solutions and workplaces. I would strongly encourage other event organisers to do the same, the feedback was great and the two audiences mixed.

The Keynote was a whose who of AI experts from Microsoft which you can watch for yourself here. There are many parts of this that resonate with me including some very good points about responsible AI and the importance of testing.

Our agenda included the following talks:

• An Ensemble of AI Use Cases – Amit Sarkar
• The Hidden Foundation of AI Success: Beyond the Hype – Sarah Heal
• Automate vs AI for Employee onboarding – Ashley
• Building Cloud AI for IoT with Copilot – Bryn Lewis
• The journey to building faster with a personal RAG-powered AI agent – Blake Burgess
• Copilot Agents – intergration with actions – Sudeep Ghatak
• How to scale AI through mitigating compliance risks & bad data – Nick Draper
• A New Paradigm for Cloud Engineering: Empowering DevOps processes with AI – Hamish Watson
• Power Automate – what are your AI Options for Automation – Rich Burdes
• Prompt-a-thon for productivity – Steve Knutson
• Panel discussion

A huge thank you to our presenters who donated part of their weekend to share their knowledge. A special thank you to our friends at Ara Institute of Canterbury, who allowed us to use their facilities at no cost. Amazing and much appreciated! Lastly and definitely not least, thank you to all our attendees, I hope you all took away from learning and inspiration.

Here are some resources to get your started on your AI journey:

• Microsoft Learn Azure AI Fundamentals courses
• GitHub AI for Beginners
• W3 School Python Machine Learning
• Microsoft 365 Copilot Adoption resources
• Microsoft Responsible AI resources
• McKinsey report on the economic potential of AI
• Workplace Trends Index
• The Global AI Community

Here are some photos from the day! Let’s do this again next year!

Kicking off the Keynote

Ashley presenting on when AI will add value to your solution

Nick talking on the importance of data governance for AI solutions

Sarah talk about the information management challenges and benefits in an AI driven world

Amit showcasing Ara Student AI Projects (these students are smart!)

Rich running us through the AI options in Power Platform

Blake showing us how he uses Python, Azure Voice and Azure AI to create user stories in Azure DevOps without typing.

Sudeep demoing how to use AI to create custom API connectors. Very cool!

Bryn talking on AI drive image processing with Github Copilot & IoT Devices in environments that require hard hats and hi-viz!

That’s me, trying to say something inspirational and witty as we kick off the event!