Morana and welcome to everyone to this pa'as in Aotearoa, New Zealand, early morning impact spring board session. Angamana, Angareo, Angaro Rangitirama, te te mana whenua, te na koutou. Ko ta Edmund Hillary te tangata, ko Edmund Hillary Fellowship e whare, ko Rosalie Nelson, toku ingawa. This is a really important keynote discussion. The global lessons are transforming New Zealand into a low carbon economy by 2050. My name is Rosalie Nelson. For those of you that don't know me, I have the privilege of leading the Hillary Institute and the Edmund Hillary Fellowship. For those of you that may not be familiar with us, the Edmund Hillary Fellowship is a community of over 500 change makers, innovators, entrepreneurs and investors, with over 400 of those being international. But they all have a shared commitment to Aotearoa, New Zealand as a base camp for global impact.  And you're going to be hearing from one of those very special laureates, Amy Christensen, today. I'd like to just open with the karakia just to really centre us and ready us for this important conversation. Hau i Herek, Hau Rarama, Hau o te Fikaru, Hau o te Taota, Hau o te Araha, te po ehere me iatato, Mauri Ora iatato, Humi e, Hui e, Aikie. With today's session, our goal is really to encourage fresh thinking and to frame discussions about how Aotearoa New Zealand can responsibly manage this critical transition to meeting its 2050 net zero commitments and how we can do so in ways that affirm economic and social as well as environmental benefits. The format today is that we will be introducing Anna Commonet, who will be hosting the session. Amy will get to present her initial thinking and then we will open up the floor for questions. So there are a few notes through this. Please do keep your audio off or unmuted unless you are speaking. However, we do want to see your faces so please do keep your video on if this is possible because this is really about community and it helps us to be able to see each other. The Zoom name, please have the Zoom name as your own personal name that's not work or another person. And just to be clear that we are recording the session to make it available afterwards. So if you have thoughts or questions, please use the chat box and we will pick up on these either during or at the end of Amy's portion of presentation. Now, what we have found is that quite often people want to make comments or they want to respond to each other and we do encourage that. However, if you do have a question, please just mark that very clearly with questioning capitals at the beginning of it. That just helps us to be able to sit through the chat that comes through. The host for our session is Anna Commonet. Now, Anna is the chair of the Hillary Institute and the Edmund Hillary Fellowship and was appointed as the chair of the Electricity Authority, Te Mana Hiko, in July last year. Now, prior to that role, she was the independent chair of the Electricity Retailers Association of New Zealand. Anna has worked for a wide variety of private and public sector organisations during the course of her career and this includes as a former Asia Pacific director of WISC, a Boeing-backed company, which is both developing a world-first all-enactrix self-flying air taxi. She is currently a director of Dawn Aerospace and she advises in the New Zealand Aviation and Aerospace sector and look, I just feel hugely privileged on the personal level to get to work with Anna as the board chair. So, Anna, thank you so much for moderating the session. I'll hand over to you. Kia ora Rosalie and Tana Koutou-Katoa. I have enormous pleasure in introducing Amy Christiansen, international climate leader, strategist, innovator, Hillary Morriott and a woman who I have had the pleasure to get to know in my role and who has enormous grace and courage. She's been a leader in developing and implementing solutions for decarbonisation and electrification with governments, business and community around the globe. She has three decades of experience in environmental law, policy and investment. Her achievements include brokering the first ever bilateral agreement on climate change between the US and another nation, Costa Rica in 1994. She helped build the sustainability platforms for, among others, the United Nations, Microsoft, Google and Virgin, where she helped Sir Richard Branson develop the carbon war room. Amy thinks big. She backs that up with action and both globally and locally. And this, in my view, sets her apart from many. She is the founder of the Sun Valley Institute for Resilience and served as its executive director for five years and is now an emerita board member and proud founder. At the Institute, Amy took the big ideas that she is renowned for around climate solutions and implemented the systems thinking it requires on a local scale to improve the regional agricultural sector as well as provide a huge boost to local clean energy ecosystems. She was also at COP28 and I know has many insights from the negotiations and her work there on catalytic climate to finance and place-based resilience strategies. Amy, thank you for being here. I know you have a cold. I know it is a different time zone and I'm just so grateful for your time. You are a very, very generous human and we love you very dearly. Looking forward to hearing what you have to say. Thank you so much, Anna. It's such an honour to be here and I apologise in advance. I am quite under the weather with a bit of a fever and a cold, but this is so important and really such a passion for me to collaborate with the Hillary Institute and the Hillary Fellows. It's been such a since 2010 when I was awarded the Hillary Glory such a wonderful journey to collaborate with this community and also a place New Zealand and so I'm really looking forward to this conversation and approach it from sharing of what's happening elsewhere for a bit of food for thought in New Zealand. I'm really looking forward to the conversation that we'll have and I have a few, I think, questions and answers and then opening up to everyone in the room. Thank you so much and thanks for the note in the chat as well. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and share a few slides' background, which I hope, as I said, will be a bit of inspiration as we think about a net zero New Zealand. So starting, I always like to start with where are we and the Global Climate Action Tracker is a fantastic resource that looks at where we are vis-a-vis country action on climate and as we can see, we have far too many countries whose commitments and policy making to date are critically insufficient, highly insufficient, insufficient and almost sufficient. No one yet is Paris Agreement compatible with their policy, although Costa Rica and a couple of other countries are almost sufficient with their policy making to date and New Zealand is highly insufficient as with many industrialized countries at this point and if you look at on the right side of the screen as we think about our fair share. So again insufficient given the historical contributions that New Zealand has made. So those of us in the United States and New Zealand who are in the state of not yet being quite on track to where we need to be, whether it's to meet the Paris goals or to meet really based on that fair share contribution over the years, it's urgent for all of us to get our policies aligned and to shift the close to $7 trillion in subsidies each year that go to fossil fuels away from that to the transition across energy and across agriculture and food systems to get us all on track. All right, so oops, let's see, there we go. So what does this mean for us? I do like to turn each year to the Global Risks Report for the World Economic Forum. Most recently came out in January's or our insurance and others are involved in producing this report each year. And as you can see in this 19th edition in 2024 the biggest short-term risk they're saying is misinformation and disinformation but in the longer term climate-related threats dominate the top 10 risks that global populations will face. And I would add that misinformation and disinformation are also exacerbating our inability to act on climate change and so I see these two coming together very strongly. And here this really demonstrates the risks and how they shift. So the near-term top 10 risks, extreme weather events in the green and pollution and then in 10 years five of the top 10 risks are environment-related due to biodiversity, extreme weather events, climate change and change to our systems. Then I think this quote is applicable. This was from the WEF report several years ago that just understanding that our economies, our fated species are deeply connected with our natural environment as many of us all know well. And that protecting and restoring natural systems is also crucial to combating climate change. So thinking about net zero goals in the context of restoring our natural systems both for the benefits they bring to our economies but also nature is often the best investment when it comes to resilience and climate adaptation. When we're thinking about risk I just wanted to point out a resource. RiskThinking.ai is a company I've been working with for a couple of years now as an advisor and Bloomberg has invested in the company and they're working to bring climate risk onto the Bloomberg terminals for public companies. So as we think about this they have three billion hexagons across the world down to a very small geographic space and looks at both our transition risk and our physical risk. So physical risk, sea level rise, storm impacts, water availability, transition risk is really about climate policy and carbon pricing.  Are you going to have a carbon price on the coal that you're relying on or the other high emitting activities in producing steel? So governments are starting to act. The World Bank has a good tracker of carbon pricing across different initiatives including cap and trade to taxes and this is at the national as well as subnational jurisdictions. So a good reference for folks. So what are we doing about it here in the United States where I am? When President Biden came in he put climate front and center on day one within the first week was rejoining the Paris Agreement and making a commitment that spread across climate goals. As you can see here his commitments that were made include reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least half below 2005 levels by 2030 reaching 100% carbon pollution free electricity by 2035 achieving a net zero emissions economy by 2050 in alignment with Paris and then delivering 40% of the benefits from federal investments in climate and clean energy to disadvantaged communities and that's going to come up later when I talk about California and their approach as well. Here's an assessment that the World Resources Institute did tracking the Biden administration's progress on climate action. So really recommend this won't spend time reading through all of this but from what has been achieved in the first three years the administration and where there's been significant progress some progress and off track. Clearly the United States has yet to tax pollution has yet to put a price on carbon so that's where we're off track has been some key progress in everything from clean electricity standards to appliance standards to tackling hard to abate sectors but perhaps the biggest emphasis for the Biden administration has been through spending with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act and that tool of federal allocation of dollars incentivising action has delivered some significant results. Beyond the United States federal level I wanted to mention California because California similar climate to New Zealand and is one that has a unique story and ever since the Bush administration pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol has really been leading in the deployment of climate policies. I'm starting with energy efficiency this is a graph that is showing us what some have historically called the Rosenfeld effect Art Rosenfeld was a member of the California Energy Commission and this is an example of how a policy maker can make incredible impact. He advocated for investing in energy efficiency in California and 1970 to past energy efficiency standards for appliances in California and so as you can see California's energy use leveled off on a per capita basis while other US states continued to rise and then that shows the difference and the implication of this can be seen when it comes to the benefits potentially to greenhouse gas emission reductions but it was a nice start to California's leadership 30 years before taking action directly on climate. This is a study of the levelized cost of energy globally and it's by Lazard an investment banking research firm and shows how energy efficiency can be the smartest first investment. I had a client I worked with I loved working with the CEO of Duke Energy one of the biggest polluters in the United States and he called energy efficiency the fifth fuel but actually it should be the first fuel so just I think it's often forgotten as a fuel and especially in the built environment depending country by country but definitely an opportunity in the built environment and in appliances to make dramatic improvements just by setting better standards so as new appliances are constructed and new buildings are constructed that can be tackled. This is a calendar of California's action on climate change starting in 2002 with the first renewable portfolio standard 20% by 2010 and the Pavley Act which was really the first climate bill required CARB the California Resources Board to set standards for greenhouse gas emissions for new vehicles that were flattened and built upon over the last 22 years and importantly this is a helpful I think a reorganization not just by year but by tactic so putting a price on carbon through cap and trade funding transportation infrastructure for electric vehicles so a tool to make more expensive fossil fuels emissions standards tools cheaper to adopt clean energy net metering which of course charges if you have a home and you're putting solar on your home net metering allows you to buy and sell from the grid hopefully on a parity basis so same costs so if you're generating solar you're buying electricity at the same price providing that incentive banning fossil fuels and increases in efficiency have continued especially with a focus on low income communities because California's regulatory approaches have been incredibly effective in decarbonization and increased energy efficiency but the prices have not followed suit as they should have given the investment energy efficiency and a lot of that is about inefficiency of policy deployment so as New Zealand is working on developing its global warming policies learning from mistakes and strategies that optimize efficiency by thinking holistically about global warming policies and understanding how to put those in place in a way that doesn't lead to price increases and investing especially in low income communities this is the result from California's investments as I mentioned as far as it's been an impact from an impact on greenhouse gas reductions per capita and per unit of GDP California's economies continue to grow but decoupled from emissions so I mentioned equity there are a handful of efforts that have been taken subsequent to the early climate legislation in California to ensure that extra attention was taken to bringing these clean energy benefits to low income communities so I wanted to mention those the low income weatherization program that California focuses provides no cost rooftop solar and energy efficiency to low income households and then a focus on ensuring that the proceeds from the California cap and trade bill go to those low income communities disadvantaged communities and those most vulnerable and then the federal government as I mentioned before has the requirement of 40% of the overall benefits of the federal investments across the board benefit marginalized underserved overburden by pollution communities disadvantaged communities I mentioned the planetary boundaries as a resource because as we look at action across key sectors to address the state of the planet I find the planetary boundaries a really important reference point to understand that we're not just tackling climate change we're tackling biosphere integrity we're talking novel entities which is plastic pollution geochemical flows related to food and agriculture and of course land system transition and one of the Hillary laureates John Rockstrom is one of the key authors of the planetary boundaries and such a resource on these issues and what it told us is in addition to transforming energy in our electricity system we have to transform our food system and of course for New Zealand the food system is at least 40% of greenhouse gas emissions and so it's a critical focus and our global system has to change as well and food and agriculture is the source globally of a majority of methane emissions and somewhere around a third of global greenhouse gas emissions and so that EAT Lancet commission on food systems and food systems in the planet it called for five different actions around transforming food and agriculture agriculture for nature and humans to thrive from diets to agricultural priorities of funding from high quantities of food to healthy quality food intensifying food production for high quality output coordinated governance of land and oceans and having food losses and waste as food waste a massive source of greenhouse gas emissions and farms have huge potential to be solutions for biodiversity and for greenhouse gas emissions as we know from soil health and agroforestry agroecology practices so I talk about transforming a food system to be decentralized decarbonized and regenerative and also I would add diversified decentralized can imply diversification but I should really call that out so decentralized growing for place localizing processing localizing energy use for food systems regenerative people always ask what is that there's a lot of banding about the term regenerative and there are three different standards under development in use now generally a definition I've turned to is that farming and grazing practices that reverse climate change by rebuilding soil organic matter and restoring to graded soil biodiversity of carbon draw down and improving the water cycle and these are some of the specific activities and practices that farmers are integrating in shifting to regenerative agriculture principles things like cover crops and no till farming to leave the soil intact and integrating animals into farm practices as well into the soil so decarbonized localizing our food system obviously reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from transportation renewable electricity on site solar thermal and geothermal for high heat use needs for pasteurization of dairy for instance or for drying in the case of New Zealand doing milk powder and then electrified transportation and of course addressing methane and so on methane there is methane capture and of reducing animal based consumption and rethinking proteins and I would also add that some in the agriculture sector in New Zealand have been talking about replanting of pine forests monoculture pine forests and just wanted to note there's been some good analysis about pine forests are not a replacement for reducing green house methane emissions so a methane emission is not the same as a sequestration of carbon so just thinking about how we're addressing these and an apple to apple strategy given the protein so critical working to make it regenerative thinking about what we're sourcing from the ocean turning to cultivated meats precision fermentation and more plant based proteins in transforming ocean foods huge opportunity for providing food we're seeing in coastal communities that the big ocean trawlers largely from China are extracting massive amounts of fish and other sea life so that coastal communities no longer have access to their food source that they've had and more than 3 billion people rely on sea based ocean foods also we can create jobs by transforming ocean foods to be more responsible such as farming seaweed farming by valves other smarter solutions rather than the wild extraction that is so harmful today and it can really provide abundance so when you're growing seaweed you're also helping to de-acidify the ocean and providing ecosystems and so there are so many co-benefits that come from transforming ocean foods I'm an advisor at Alapharm which is a cultivated state company out of Israel and they are making steak at the local lab and it's the things about the cultivated meats is that they are slaughter free in the case of Alapharm they're non-GMO they use plant based inputs they can be grown anywhere even in space they've been doing with the Israel Space Agency and NASA and they have a commitment to being net zero for scopes 1 and 2 by 2025 and scope 3 by 2030 what does that look like what's that mix regenerative protein and fermented as well as cultivated so the U.S. just tap back to what's happening there with government resources and government allocation of funds to drive that building of a resilient food future in the United States the Inflation Reduction Act had $40 billion for food and agriculture and as you can see the focus is on how do we transform the primary production distribution and processing retail and consumption but clearly primary production has been the vast majority of the greenhouse gas emissions and that's where a lot of the focused resources are provided just to be more specific about that farmer focused funding there was $6 billion allocated for underserved farmers the United States African American farmers were historically dispossessed of their land and not provided access to the same capital as white farmers that was $6 billion really a reparation of sorts although some people cringe at that term but I think we need to talk about inequity and historical inequity and then conservation stewardship program funding to support and incentivize farmers to do those regenerative and conservation based practices and a whole climate smart commodities program grants going to groups of farmers and companies who are working to do regenerative potatoes to regenerative oats across the commodities in the US and then I just want to mention at a local basis the Rockefeller foundation has a fantastic resources of their food system vision prize there were communities all around the world 1300 around the world submitted their visions for their food system in their community and it was up to a space of 100 square miles and those are fantastic visions and versions of the future food we did one here in Idaho where I am I'm in central Idaho with the third largest dairy state in the country number one for potatoes and peas and sugar beets and a few others but in our community we were doing cattle off alpha and barley and it was taking all of our water sending it out of our area and our food exporting our water including a lot of our hay and alfalfa set to feed Chinese dairy cows not good for our community so we founded an institute to focus on resilience and launch a revolving loan fund to fund our local farmers to change their farm practices at the local level so this is something that communities can consider doing accessing resources and so these are a few of our portfolio companies from a micro dairy to a corn meal milling operation to farmer that want to switch from alfalfa to local market veggies to meat processing facility and mushrooms and the institute's work is around building more resilient system which meant localizing our energy system localizing our food system and that's their primary tool we've taken to localize our food system and we've worked collaboratively with our county government officials on the energy strategy for its decarbonization and just to give you a sense of what some local communities are doing this is what our local community has done setting the goals putting in a requirement of 75% clean electricity by 2025 for the cities operations counties operations and then moving beyond that to residents and businesses and it just tracks what each policy will drive as far as greenhouse gas reductions and so thinking about New Zealand's just digging in the food because food is such a significant source of emissions there and a priority there assessing what are the risks to the food system and I want to note that the milk protein that's sorry the milk powder that's exported largely to China it's a relatively unprocessed low value product commodity that's sold out of New Zealand from the dairy industry and a lot of the companies who are buying milk powder have made greenhouse gas emission reduction targets and so when they're thinking about where are they getting their milk from and is it regenerative low carbon etc a lot of that decision making by the biggest food companies will trickle down to the source of the milk so thinking about those risks also weather related risks floods others and then that New Zealand has for its food future and investing in innovation and definitely government leadership to shift money from the activities that don't serve climate action and resilience to activities that do and I really do believe New Zealand could be this incredible global test bed for global food and farm solutions really exciting potential there but needs a collaboration among all the parties alright I will I'm a little over so I will just um I want to just mention that um you know I a little so thinking about government action aligning with private sector action I wanted to just share um note that I was in government so working on these policies for four years to get them aligned to to um I was working in Latin America to work with them to get the right policies in frame in place as they open up their energy sector to private investment and then I went to the private sector and was at Google and it was really how can business solve how can Google solve climate change so we vote so we lobbied for that California global warming bill in 2006 we um in our operations we made a commitment to carbon neutrality in 2007 we sourced renewables for our data centers which were being built all over the world fast with no consideration to the greenhouse gas emissions of those until we made the commitment to carbon neutrality and made a priority to source renewables for those data centers and then prioritize green buildings for efficiency and health of employees and we also did this really cool project because we were Google.org the philanthropic arm of the company wanted to show the world the future of the electrification of transportation and I know New Zealand has a real opportunity to electrify everything which is kind of the mantra of many of us these days get off of natural gas get off of transportation liquid fossil fuels to electrify our systems and we did a project showing the world the future of the electrification of transportation made plug in hybrid showed them plugged into the solar panels and the future of that vehicle to grid more efficient interface of our energy system which I'm excited to see real progress on that since and finally I'll just wrap up that my um sometimes having worked on climate for 30 years I get pretty sad about the state of the planet and then I get really excited by my clients and so I had them on the page so the people I work with who are innovating give me that hope but often I just go to nature and spend a lot of time in nature and so um as we think about the steps that each of us are taking um I think it's recognized that we're operating in a capitalist structure that incentivizes short term financial returns and sometimes it's hard it's hard to be fighting and working for the planet that's about short term financial returns so um I turn to um nature for healing and inspiration and the community of people I get to work with every day including this one to provide that and just to remember that um it can be hard especially for younger um people I work with who are seeing their future and to be there as a resource and an ally and a colleague to help support um in this work because and that's I think the role of what the Hillary Fellowship can provide as well. Alright, I'll end there. Thank you. Thank you so much Amy that um it's huge uh just some wonderful content here to work through and we do have some questions I am really interested in you have taken these big ideas and applied them at a local level how do you manage the the stakeholders in particular and this is picking up a little bit on questions from one of our fellows David Bent you know how do you manage for example the incumbent our food producers um who tend to have a what can tend to have a perspective on how that future should play out how have you managed that and what are your observations um it's not smooth uh first of all so I won't say I've found a silver bullet um but with the work that um so a couple things here in Idaho I've talked directly to some of those incumbents who are the beef dairy producers about the future of agriculture and the key is from is two fold one excitement around being part of the innovation of the future they know the system is evolving and they want to have a piece of that and so we've seen companies like Cargill invest in a la farms for instance in both the series A and series B and Cargill's the biggest meat processor in the world and so they're investing in a piece of the future of protein um I'm not going to overstate it certainly their broad majority of their operations are um still um in the incumbent activities but getting a piece of the upside and working with them and their venture arms to get them invested in and seeing the opportunities from beginning a piece of the upside reduces that threat and I talk about some of these incumbents going through a transition from their old economy the new one and just increasing that over time and having the government incentives to accelerate that has to show that it's in the pursuit of their bottom line and some of that will come from their sales to whoever they're selling to saying I want a better product that reduces great that's reduced greenhouse gas emissions and if not I will go into someone else um some of that comes from activists shareholders some of their asset owners I'm seeing Lee family offices foundations and institutional investors calling on those and voting for their shareholder resolutions and using that lever say so it is silver buckshot is sort of a term that's used from a hunting right out of silver bullet but multiple tools that being said Florida State Legislature just passed I'm sorry it's not so long answer Florida State Legislature just passed was I'm sorry proposing a new law banning cultivated meet Florida because some of the ranchers there didn't want that threat to the cattle there so we have to show them how they're part of it how it's in their interest so it's as I said it's not smooth at all um but we have to pressure across multiple multiple places and create the new economic opportunity as fast as possible and in your experience that does start to build that momentum even small actions those small actions start to to build momentum is that right yes and I would see the also larger action by say a general mill is a denone others who are working with their suppliers and actually helping to fund them to make that regenerative transition and there's a couple of different investment funds sustainable land management replant others who have been putting together the capital to fund the transition for those farmers but we need the off takes from a big ag to say I will do sign a longer term off take for your regeneratively grown oats than I would for the non regenerative or maybe a slight price point increase but a long term off take can often be enough even without a price increase just to give them to know that it's worth investing in that transition to regenerative so there are a lot of different tools that have to be used yeah it's interesting because you have worked across the number of different sectors and those we keep coming back to transitions in the discussions that we have you know we are in transition in a number of different areas at the moment there's a lot of disruption coming and happening both from a climate change perspective but also technology and our ability to find alternative ways to feed ourselves so in managing that transition have you I mean I know that you and the laureates have discussions about you know together as well do you talk about kind of that transition how do we manage it how do we get people to move through the change effectively without feeling that I mean you've talked about the buckshot but how do we get people through a transition effectively so that they're actually on board rather than just being dragged along or doing the rollercoaster which is what I think a lot of people feel like they're on at the moment so place directly feeling it in place and so I think the work on a local and regional level is so important not just the talking and the money spending at the national how does that transfer down and what's interesting is to look at I should try to find the slide but to look at I have another slide about Georgia the state of Georgia you know red to purple state as we say in the US politically and they have received billions of dollars of money from the inflation reduction act for solar manufacturing and solar project installations next door Alabama I happen to be starting project with coastal Alabama right now they have yet to tap into those resources so showing the benefit of this clean energy economy not just because there's a lot of federal resources there but also seeing the result of the private investment coming in alongside and the job creation and the price reductions the more choice that they're having in Georgia is aligned with their values of a more independent independent and individual choice and so I think showing that these shifts deliver whatever is important locally regionally to culture like in Idaho independence freedom and in other places it may be other values and other needs but that's where these smaller investments were making with the local farmers of showing a 12 acre alfalfa farm switch to local market veggies and make more money with fewer inputs higher quality just showing more money more predictable marketplace because you're not a commodity seller there's just that direct farmer to farmer that direct conversation on a local level that local bespoke design and implementation of these things unless you see it for yourself especially with misinformation it's hard to build the bridge between the policy and the implementation so taking this from a regulator perspective how do you create that ability to have a local level when you're a policy maker or a policy decision maker yeah well you can do two things you can regulate and you can spend and so so in our community there's a land and water fund that has put money into the impact Idaho fund because it sees the benefits of changing agricultural practices and what's being grown to the land and water quality that the fund is focused on supporting and then they're changing regulations which used to not allow things like a flour mill which was helping to localize there's a barley grower who's growing organic barley and they were just selling to Anheiser, Bush and Bev and now they can they're actually making this really high value high quality, relatively high price flower, you know higher price power that's really prized in locally, regionally now all over California and so before you couldn't have a mill on your land because it was farmland so providing those changes to permits and the regulations yeah and you've talked a little bit and written about benefits of developing sector based benchmarks you know can you tell us a little bit more about that that work and how that's what have the results been say that again? I'll just introduce the benefits of developing sector based benchmarks against which all operators in a given industry can participate and just you know how that can open up the carbon markets to emerging companies what have you seen in that area well I think always science based targets of course and I think holding firmly to that and then it allows it for an Apple to Apple comparison whether it's for the buyers themselves or for the companies to understand what they're producing and what the impacts are so I think just having quality right that trusted information and a time of misinformation it's been a struggle and a battle but the science based targets initiative and as a as kind of a global go to I think has played an important role hasn't been perfect by any means but has played a really important role and then otherwise I'm seeing sector players come together and hire scientists to go in and create their own methodologies and benchmarks and going through the third process of getting them approved and authorized so that they can lead for instance low carbon beef standard is something being considered now So just a question Amy from a New Zealand perspective I mean we are pretty focused and the government has signed up to the 2015 net zero targets and we are dependent on the emissions trading scheme and carbon credits to really you know get us there so what are some of the risks and opportunities we should be taking in the next decade or so Well the emissions trading scheme ideally would generate the capital to then put a thumb on the scale for the priorities areas of investments and to benefit local or sorry equity to address equity so any inequitable impacts from a result of putting that price on carbon outside of the cap and trade framework emissions trading framework recognizing what we're subsidizing as far as existing legacy activities across fossil fuels and agriculture and shifting the capital so it's not more it's shifting where it's going I know that's hard because you legacy interests but again pulling the legacy interests into the future of food pulling them into renewables and opportunities to develop renewables projects here in Idaho just as an example we have very recalcitrant utility who did not want to be hold what to do and was having competition from private developers for Wynn and Solar and changed the rules so that they only have to sign it to your agreement which allows no one to develop any projects in Idaho and so but then a private developer came to the 101 and had a conversation and they made a deal where the utility could also get a piece of the upside and so finding ways the regulatory solutions New York State California others have worked hard to prioritize to incentivize energy efficiency regulatorally so that utilities were truly insented so having energy efficiency be the first fuel for if you're selling if you're operating in California if you're selling to California energy efficiency gets on the grid first and then they've ordered beyond that so as far as access to the energy markets structuring it in a way where you're prioritizing what's going to deliver the right benefits and arguably if you do energy efficiency first it should deliver the lower costs even if you might have a higher cost following that like a win in solar I want to Matthew Jackson I don't know if you're online but you've got a really good question there about blended finance model do you want to ask that directly or would you like me to do it don't know if Michael's there it's just there we go sorry you're probably in the middle of breakfast a lot of that first of all thank you very much for being a part of the fellowship and the laureates so my question is I went to market with Hamann another fellow for climate tech found that New Zealand venture money just wasn't interested so we went down the route of applying for a waste minimization grant where we were in the last final stages for it I'm really interested in what you can talk to us about in relation to where you've seen blended finance models work overseas to then use and see technology implemented that then helps create the policy it's a great question I just came back from which is why I'm sick I was travelling too much work and too much travel but I was at the natural capital summit I was with a number of both venture investors and actual entrepreneurs and fund developers so the reality I find is when you're coming out with a first of its kind project we have to de-risk it and so in order to de-risk it we need access to some kind of de-risking tool whether it is something like a government provided loan guarantee or having the philanthropic family offices foundations come together and provide a de-risking tool like a first loss fund to de-risk that to bring in the larger amounts of capital behind it we there's a number of members of a global network called the Confluence Philanthropy and has a meeting next week in Denver and a lot of these family offices and foundations are working for instance with the apparel sector to how do we get rid of the coal boilers which are the high heat hot water for the dying process in the key countries India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Indonesia etc and shift to electric boilers and renewably generated electricity so they're building a first loss fund basically to de-risk the financing of those projects which would finance an electric boiler and finance renewable energy either onsite or on the grid and so they're actually building a new tool to do that the third thing that's needed in that besides a willing supplier and the de-risking and the institutional capital finance it the other pieces we need fashion companies to be willing to sign a longer term purchase agreement for clothing that is done decarbonized so being able to step up with more of a commitment so it's really, I'm not going to say it's easy because it feels like so many pieces need to come together but blended finance has been used over the years successfully through carbon markets I was a carbon lawyer at the World Bank in 2005 and that emissions trading so we would sign a long term agreement to pay for the annual emission reductions from those projects that was contractual and a mezzanine lender would come in and provide upfront money against our contract to pay for those emission reductions and that was a successful blended finance approach in order to fund the putting in place of the new technology with that money that was lent against our contract to offtake the carbon so that's a concrete example in place the other one is one that's in development and just to note that in talking to some of these funds working in emerging markets especially having access to grants from philanthropies has been critical to help them do the work to get projects ready for investment to de-risk them up to the next stage so even just straight philanthropic resources to de-risk to just get them to a further level to be more investment ready but you still have things like political risk and currency risk and so sometimes having that additional de-risking like a first loss or a loan guarantee is still really vital and we need much more money from corporate finance from philanthropy, from family offices to do that kind of de-risking because it leverages all this institutional money behind it to de-risk those projects there's too little money even if you have a big endowment 10% go into de-risking and they're rarely, rarely, rarely turned to if ever they're just there, it's more of a perception of risk I've seen mostly than actual concern about either technology or political currency risk Thanks Amy Thank you Do you have any further comments on that Michael? Matthew We're on track I guess my reflection is if I'd asked that question a year ago I want to save some time we are looking at the family offices and that's kind of where we've got to we've started that process now so thanks very much for that insight and the examples we're talking about I'll look into them a bit further because I'm just about to start proposing them to Fonterra and Biscope Steel Yeah, absolutely Where is that corporate I don't know if you saw the study by I'm going to forget the name of it I'll try to find it, put it in the chat or send it afterwards but there was a study about corporate dollars and where it's sleeping and it's banks and the fact that the corporate dollars that are sitting in banks are far greater emissions that they're funding through their investments by those banks than their corporate operations Fonterra going to others and saying where is your money sleeping A, B, how about dropping 10% into here or whatever the number is to do de-risking to deliver clear environmental benefits from your projects Thanks so much Thank you Matthew Thank you so much Amy Just one very quick last question because I am mindful of time and people will be moving on at 9 o'clock at our time What are your trends that you're seeing in US based philanthropy support and how that could translate to Aotearoa New Zealand's transition to a low carbon economy Thanks Brad for that question A couple of things I just wanted to endorse David's mention of the Volts podcast and I absolutely agree that inflation action act far more attractive than cap and trade and so when you're spending money I think I can get a little piece of it so a strategy for action you know as I said ship the money from the bad to the good and not I mean yes this was additional funds but it doesn't necessarily have to be depending upon where governments are spending money so trends in philanthropy corporate philanthropy are doing more in this space than historically and corporate capital as well are doing more in driving impact with their philanthropic dollars it used to be more like I don't know it felt a little bit sort of I don't know how to say it but light and a little bit the work by corporate philanthropy wasn't particularly strategic about doing systems change work and I'm seeing that more family offices, foundations and corporate philanthropy are really looking at how to be strategic I'm currently working with the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth and they have historically done a lot of work around development and small business and now they're bringing a climate lens to that and what are the risks and opportunities for small business and these be climate change and so bringing climate into existing priorities by a company and understanding what its implications are and what that had to blend those two also equity justice justice first investing investing in and uplifting and centering indigenous knowledge if we're working on nature based solutions which of course New Zealand already does that so yeah sorry we're getting time but no thank you thank you for your generosity and your time I know that you're incredibly busy and it's just from our perspective fantastic to have an international connection to be able to actually understand what's happening overseas what some of those learnings are we do have an extraordinary community with our laureates and our fellowship to draw on and encourage participants to reach out to EHF and Rosalie and the team to really access this community who do have such a rich resource of knowledge and skill Amy thank you I hope you'll be better soon I'm going to pass over to Rosalie and thank you all of the participants in today's session Thank you Anna for moderating that session and Amy so much insight and very practical guidance and recommendations that we can take on board I think there's a lot to assimilate so thank you look just before we go we realise that we're just coming up to the R questions just one very quick question and we would love you to enter this into chat what's the one key takeaway or insight that you are taking from this session just a reminder for you all we're having one of our last of the public sessions that we're holding that's going to be at midday today catalyzing communitarian responses to combat world crises so we'll be providing the link to the fellow only sessions and also to the public sessions in chat and just a reminder that this session will be recorded so we will encourage you to go back look at it and also to share it with anyone else that you think may be interested and it would also be good to go back and look at some of the other sessions we've held about helping New Zealand innovators to go global and transformative ventures so there's been a lot of rich content this week just before we go I will do just a closing card here just to close off the space kia ora temorino kia whakapapa whanamo te moana hei huahi nga tato e te rangi nei aroha atu aroha mai tato e tato katoa thank you all so much and thank you for sharing your thoughts in chat just as you come up


It's a bot time we did a Toolbox episode on bots. Hi, welcome to Visual Studio Toolbox. I'm your host, Robert Green, and joining me today is Sam Bazoo of Progress. Hey, Sam. Hello. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the cozy confines of Studio B. Isn't this nice? It's changed, but it's nice. Yeah. We're just going to sit back and chat about bots. It's about time. Now, bots is one of these new things that there's a lot of buzz about, a lot of cool demos of bots running in Skype, or bots calling and making appointments for you, and there's this amazing amount of stuff that's going on. That's all cool, of course. But what I want to focus on is us as traditional enterprise line of business developers, whether we're doing desktop or web or mobile or whatever. What does it take to build one of these things? Because it turns out it's not that hard to get started. Then what are some of the uses that we might think about, where we would actually take advantage of these in the types of businesses we're currently in? So we're going to do that. This is a two-parter, so obviously this is part one of two. So tell us about bots. Let's jump in. Yeah. Let's switch to slides so we can talk through. So what you see, I think, over the last couple of years is human-computer interaction is evolving. Be it through AR, VR, be it through any other ways, and you see the impact of AI. So we are not only interacting differently with computers, we're also expecting different things out of our computers. This is where bots come in, and bots aren't new. They're about maybe two, three years old now, but they're evolving fast. So I think that's the next frontier of apps. So let's dive in. So is Cortana, Alexa, Siri, are those bots? Sort of. They're agents. Let's dive in. So Robert already introduced me. I'm Sam Basu. I'm a Tolerate Developer Advocate at Progress. I focus on the .NET side of things across web, desktop, and mobile. And bots is something that actually does excite me nowadays. So I think one of the fundamental questions we need to ask is, what exactly are we talking about? Because bots is a very generic term. We're not talking about robots. We're not talking about the spider bots that Bing or Google used to crawl the web. There are different types of bots. What we are focusing on for enterprise applications in particular are chat bots or conversational bots. Bots that we can actually have a conversation with, be it over voice or be it over text. And what can they do for us? How smart can they get? So they actually automate things for us and can actually help us. Okay. One of the fun things that I've actually seen many people do, whenever we talk about conversational bots, back in 2013, I think, there was a movie that came out. It was called Her. It had Hokey and Phoenix in it. And it got a little weird quickly. It was about conversational bots, but this lonely writer, he started having a relationship with his conversational bot because it was so smart and it kind of got him very quickly. So that's kind of the AI aspects of being a bot and how smart it can get. So let's kind of break down what exactly is a bot and how we can build them. Okay. I think one of the reasons why building conversational bots is interesting and challenging and fun in a way is because we're all trying to make a cake. We have a lot of ingredients. There is no fixed recipe because it really depends on what exactly you want your bot to be. Okay. So you have to kind of break down what are my ingredients and how am I exactly gonna build it so it suits my needs. So let's kind of break down where conversational bots stand today. And we are possibly looking at a slice of it, but bots are apps. Okay. That's fundamentally it. I mean, these are web-based apps that we can communicate over HTTP and they can be housed in different things but they're fundamentally apps. But they are complex apps because they have lots and lots of integrations. That's what makes them smart. So a bot by itself, if it was just talking to you and had no brain, it'll be pretty dumb.  So the real benefit of having a bot is all of those integrations that make it smarter. Okay. So that's what we're talking about. So there's a lot of plumbing. There's a lot of different things that make up a bot. So to your point are the voice assistant spots in a way they are, but they are the front end to the intelligence that's behind. So when you talk to Alexa, when you talk to Cortana or Google Assistant, you are firing things off over voice. But the things that you're firing off be it an Azure function, be it an Amazon Lambda, that's where the intelligence lies. So those are bots. Okay. You're just using an agent to get to the bots. Yeah. And I mean, with Cortana, you can type it in. So I mean, it essentially is a conversational bot over text. Right. So these are agents. And then we talk about platforms because this is where bots can reside and this is kind of a big benefit of having a bot. It really is platform agnostic. What you're building is very fundamental and there are multiple platforms who can all talk HTTP. So you can have your bot housed inside of Facebook Messenger or Twilio or Slack or Team, wherever your users are, you can have a bot kind of integrated in there. So it's easy for them to find it and talk to it. Okay. So these are the platforms and then we have agents. So like we said, bots by themselves don't do much. It's what we do behind the scenes with bots that makes it interesting. So first up is there's got to be some sort of rules engine that tells you about what to do, what questions to ask, what paths to kind of guide you down as you're having conversation with your bot. Next thing is natural language processing. If your bot is literally going off a bunch of strings to say, find me a flight out of Seattle, then that's the only thing it'll understand. If you say, get me out of Seattle, it's gonna get confused. But that's kind of how we naturally speak to each other. So this is where natural language processing comes into play and all of the voice agents do it as well. So when you say, get me out of Seattle, they find, so it's an utterance. They find the intent, what exactly are you trying to do? Like get a flight out of Seattle and then they'll find the parameters. Like what airport are you flying out of? And then it's gonna trigger the corresponding contextual thing that's gonna help you find the flight. So in that way, it's a step or several steps beyond just voice enabling an app, right? Like you could voice enable an app so that instead of having to pick from a menu choice or click a button, you could say, open the report. Open the monthly report, right? So at that point, there's one thing that the app does, it opens the monthly report. There is a command and you say, open the monthly report. But if you went in and said, what happened last month, then obviously the app has no idea what you mean because you didn't hardwire in a bunch of commands. So the beauty of the bot is that it can be trained to be more cognizant of what you're saying instead of just expecting, if you say these five things, I will do these five things. If you say anything else, I have no idea what you're talking about, okay? So there is a command, there's a thing that the bot knows how to do, it's how you get to it. Because I think that's an important distinction because I think the very first time I saw a bot, I was thinking, oh, well I can voice enable apps and I've been able to do that for a long time. How is this better? So it's a bunch of things that your bot knows how to do and a bunch of different ways that the user can come to it. So that's natural language processing. Then there is some state management, there's some logic that you will have obviously behind it. What if you told your bot, order me the pizza that I had last week. Now by nature, bots are supposed to be stateless. Like it's one turn of you saying something and the bot getting back to you. But how is it gonna remember what pizza you ordered last week? So you can actually persist some state in your bots and that goes back to wherever you wanna store your data and how you wanna authenticate and authorize the user. But it's possible to maintain some state. So the bot is more of a conversational and how two humans will interact. Sure, yeah. So these are the things that make up the bot's intelligence and then there are bot frameworks because we don't wanna do everything from scratch, it's difficult. So there's Microsoft Bot Framework which we'll talk about exclusively today. I actually have not played a lot with the others but there is a lot of other ones. There is Facebook, WattAI, Amazon makes Lex, IBM makes Watson and Dialogflow from Google. So there are lots of these frameworks, they all are about the same and they have their SDKs, they have their ways to kind of bring you on. So all of this is kind of geared towards helping developers build bots. Okay, that's it. So let's kind of dive into Microsoft Bot Framework and then see what it can do for you. Before we do that, to answer your initial question of what can this do for enterprise apps? So yeah, all of the Skype bots are fun but when it comes down to what line of business apps can fit as bots, it's a lot of little things that can be automated, workflows. And I'll give you two classic examples where we actually have customers doing this. We have a hospital where people call in and they want to schedule an appointment. It's a very basic task. And yes, somebody has a calendar open and every doctor's calendar is in sync.  That's something that can be automated.  But over like six months, they were able to train their bot enough that it's good enough to schedule simple appointments. It's all about like, what can we automate before you have to talk to a human being? Right. Yeah, another example is support systems. If you have like an IT help desk that's trying to help you kind of go through problems and roadblocks, maybe the initial things, maybe your basic problems can be dealt with with the bot. It just knows the basic things that can go wrong. And then if you're having more problems then transfer to a human being. Okay. Some common examples. So let's kind of talk about the Microsoft side of the world because this is where we live and breathe. So this is what Satya kind of opened up a couple of years back conversation as a platform. This is the next interface. This kind of helps app developers have ways, new ways to interact with their system as an end user. So it's a new frontier for us. The benefits are obvious. We get to have increased productivity. We get to, we are able to reduce the time that a human has to spend over just trivial things, things that can be automated. And the big benefit is being able to reach customers where they're at. So if you are already plugged into Messenger or Twilio or Slack, then we'll meet you there. You don't have to install a new app. We just kind of have a bot that's embedded into what you are. So that's where we stand. That's the benefit of bots, okay? So now let's dive into what we can do with it, what benefits we can get and how we can start building it. So based on who you ask, Microsoft Bot Framework is a big thing. I think it's comprising of two fundamental things. One is Bot Builder. This is the SDK. This is how you actually build your apps, your bots. You don't want to do it entirely online unless it's something super simple. You want to have it locally. And that's how you'll have it in your IDE and you'll code it up and you'll make it work and you'll test and then you'll push it out to wherever you want to have it hosted. And there is a developer portal which kind of helps you get started. It gets you the SDKs.  And then it has all of these little connections which help you get your app into Slack, into Skype, into Facebook. Those things are really nice. And then this is just the bot part of it. And then we get into what's called Cognitive Services which I don't think it's really a part of the bot framework at all. It's AI sweet. But this is what really gives your bot intelligence. These integrations, I think we are about maybe 30 or so restful APIs right now. You don't have to be a data scientist. You don't have to know AI. You're literally making restful endpoint calls to use Cognitive Services. But these things can be trained if you're into machine learning a little bit. And then your bot starts getting smarter and smarter. So that's where we are. Cognitive Services, these are Microsoft's slides, but we know what they do. It's a lot of things. It's vision, it's speech. It's a big part of it is natural language, LUIS, which is learning natural human interactions language. And Azure is very, very good at this. So all of these APIs are part of Cognitive Services. And this is what helps us make our bots smarter. So that's what we're going to integrate with. I won't go too much into details, but just to kind of give you a hint of where things are at. And then there is Azure Bot Service. So you don't have to use this. Essentially, a bot is a restful endpoint. You can have it hosted anywhere you want. But this comes bundled with a whole bunch of goodness that kind of helps you get started quickly, helps you have your bot nice and hosted easily, and then have all of these connections so you can push your bot anywhere you want. Yeah, so that's the Azure Bot Service. It has those SDKs that we talked about. And it has templates. It has integrated ways in which you can test your bot. And then you can deploy your bot through the channels. And then once you are successful building your bot and having it deployed, then you kind of take it to the next level. Let's do CI CD pipelines. Let's do Azure functions that trigger other things based on what your bot is doing. So all of those extra things can be built in and how you scale your bot based on demand and so on. So Azure Bot Service is a very compelling offering when you have to get started with bots. So that's enough slides. I'm getting bored of slides altogether. So let's look at some stuff. Let's look at some demos. All right. So the first place I will point anyone to go to is do a search on Bot Framework. And you will land on dev.botframework.com. This is the landing page for Microsoft Bot Framework. And it has a lot of goodness to it. So take a look at what it can offer. And it talks about all of your audiences, all of your channels, and how you kind of get started with. Documentation, this is actually really, really well done. This is Azure Bot Service that you're looking at. But some of it can be local. So we're going to walk you through some of these things that you can do to get started. So notice how right out of the gate, you have different ways of getting started. You can do Bot Service, which is directly in Azure, or you can do local in C-Sharp and Node.js. So before we go in, right now, the Microsoft Bot Framework is at V3. We started about 2016, so we are at V3 right now. V4 is what's coming next. And we have a preview bit of it. And V4 is substantially different, actually, in some ways. But we'll talk about V3, because that's the present stable production release. But V4 is coming sometime this year or early next. So in terms of languages and programming IDs and tools that you can use to build your bot, you are looking at C-Sharp and Node.js right now. So pick your Poison C-Sharp or JavaScript and then go at it. In V4, you will be able to do Python and Java. But we are not there yet. So this is the best place to start and this kind of guide you through. Let's look at the Azure side of the story. So I'm going to go to portal.azure.com. So this is Azure. And if I make it a little bigger, so we can see, if you go in here and say, create a resource, what you want to pick is AI and machine learning. And then in there is a whole bunch of things, but you want to pick web app bots. Once you select this, it's going to ask for a bunch of things. What's your bot name? What subscription resource group? You can create a new one. If you have a whole bunch of bots, maybe you kind of group them into one resource. Where do you want to have this hosted pricing and so on? Templates, we'll talk about that in a second. It does use some Azure storage. Maybe the state management in particular does use Azure storage, App Insights and so on. So you kind of set this up and then you hit create and it'll go ahead and create a bot for you. So instead of having Azure, kind of waiting on Azure to spin this up, let's kind of look at what we have. So here's a simple bot that I have and I have not changed a word of this.  But this thing is spun up. It's called the SAM Echo Bot. So it's just a simple Echo Engine. But this thing is spun up and it's hosted in Azure right now. So this is what you'll get when you hit the create button. So before we even look at anything else, if you go do this, test in a web chat. So this is a bot that's ready and it's deployed.  It looks like a little web chat engine and this is where you can test. So I can write things here like hello and it's gonna come back and say you said hello. So we can say more things hi from Redmond. It's gonna come back and say you said hi from Redmond. So this is literally a Echo Bot that kind of repeats what you said. But it's a quick and easy way of you being able to deploy this and be able to test this right away. So you know exactly how your app is working. So this is what's called the web chat. And if you are using this from a web application, you can just kind of plan this and embed this as is. So this web chat can be taken and embedded in your web application. So all of this chat's functionality is available from your web app. It's just hosted in Azure. You don't need to know about it. It's just a web chat, okay? So when I go into this thing called channels, this is what makes apps interesting. This is where you get a whole bunch of things that are easy to configure. Web chat is already running, which is what we saw. And then Skype, this is another channel. Some of these channels are kind of featured and already configured for you. Like Cortana, Skype, they're very easy to get started, same with Teams. If you're going to Facebook Messenger or Slack or Twilio, there are some extra authorization and things that you have to do to make sure your app is registered with Facebook. You are carrying authentication tokens back and forth. But it's not that difficult.  But essentially this is a restful endpoint that knows how to get an HTTP message from you and then echo back what it just said, okay? So you notice the Skype thing here, which is also the same bot running in Skype. Because I already went through this, but what it does is, let me pull up Skype here. Essentially that echo bot now becomes a contact in your Skype list. So this guy here, once you configure it and open up Skype, it's going to say, hey, you have a new contact. So your bot now becomes a contact. So you can talk to your bot just like you talk to your human being. So in here we can say, Ola, it's going to come back and say, hopefully, you said Ola. So same exact bot that we saw on Azure through a web chat. Now it's not a web chat, it's part of Skype now.  Okay? So that's just a Skype app, Skype channel. There are other things you can do like obviously Skype for business and Slack and Facebook Messenger. So this is an app that's running. Let's take a look at Build and that'll show you what it's doing behind the scenes. So it's saying, hey, we have an app, a bot that's running in Azure, but you have not made any code changes yet. You literally haven't even seen your code. You went from a template and you said, give me a basic bot and this is what we spun up for you. There is some code behind it, how do you want to work with it?  That's one way. Or you can say, I actually do want to do continuous deployment, continuous builds and deployments. So this is where you say, no, I want to push my code to GitHub or VSTS team services. And then when every time I do a push and I commit, you do a build and you push it to Azure. So you can do CI CD. But if you are working with something super simple like this one, you can do the online code editor. And what that does, it just opens up your solution inside of a browser. And if you kind of recognize the look and feel of this Visual Studio code, this is actually a web app. It's an electronic app. So you kind of see that shell. You see the same code intelligence and some of the benefits that you get. So this is what Azure created for you when we said file new project and then create new bot. This is what it did. And it's gonna say, hey, you can change things here when you're done, just hit build.cmd. We can build it and deploy it back for you. So there's a whole bunch of things in here that are not important. The only thing that's important here is this echo dialog.cs. This is literally the one file that's controlling what your bot does. So this is kind of standard for any Microsoft Bot framework bot. So there is a message received. This is fired when your bot receives a message from the user. So the user says something, it comes to us. And you can actually reset it. So you'll notice that we actually have a counter that counts how many times you say it. And then if you say it reset, it's just gonna reset the counter. So there's a prompt to make sure you're confirming it. But otherwise, it's just gonna say context.postasync. You said that. So this is literally the one line of code that's echoing back what you're saying. That's it. That's the bot, essentially. So just one line that kinda echoes back what you're saying. So this is a bot that's deployed when you go to Azure and just do file new project, give me a bot service. Okay, so this is a bot because it's built on the bot framework, but it's not a bot because it only does one thing. Okay, so if this is all you wanted, then wrapping it around a bot, maybe a little bit of overkill. But this is a nice template to give you some basic plumbing and then you can build on top of that. But I mean, this is a good starting point because not only are you creating a bot, you're also hosting it in Azure and you already have those channels that are configured. So you can put that bot in Skype and Slack and other places. So again, I would point people to the documentation, which is really good. If you go through the quick start here, this is what we did creating a bot but if you want to get the bot builder SDK, then right now you have .NET and Node.js. So if you look at what the .NET side of the story is, you need VS 2017 and then you need the bot template C-Sharp. I mean, it's a template extension that gives you this template, simple echo bot. So you will get the bot framework and then you start with that and then it spits out the same code that you just saw on Azure, but just in C-Sharp and it's local to you and then you can test your bot. Right now, this simple bot is just a web app. So you can kind of fire this up in IIS Express and run it locally. And then we'll talk about a different type of way in which you can test your bot, that's the emulator. So same exact idea, you can do it with .NET and C-Sharp. What I like being on a Mac today is the Node.js side of things because if you're in JavaScript, you can do the exact same things. The bot framework is platform agnostic that way. So what this expects you to do is have NPM installed and then you get this bot builder package essentially. So it has all of the bits that bot builder can do for you. So let me show you what that looks like.  All right, hopefully this is big enough. So I'm going to go into my folder here. This thing is called the node echo bot. And if I kind of fire this up, if I say node app.js, I'm firing up the app. You don't see anything because it's just a console app, but I can say the same exact things. So it's just echoing back what I say. So same exact idea, it's just running locally in a console app. So if you look at what this is essentially, so I'm gonna fire up VS Code and look at the same folder. Essentially this being a node app, we did a NPM in it. So we have some package.json, we have the node modules in here, but this is that one file that's making the bot work. So essentially with Node.js you have dependencies. So we're depending on the bot builder and we're saying we are building a console connector and whenever you kind of fire up the message received thing, we're gonna take your text and kind of said you said that in one line. So this is Node.js, this is pure JavaScript running on the server side or wherever you have it hosted, but it's your bot written in Node.js. Now this is just local, this is a console app. They kind of step you through. There are some extra packages called Restify which kind of help translate this console app into a RESTful endpoint. Because the bot has to be a RESTful endpoint. So if I do an NPM install of Restify which is what the docs will actually walk you through. So this is RESTify is what we're using. It's a very simple package that kind of helps you make RESTful endpoints out of your Node.js code, whatever your app is doing. So we're using this and then once we have it we can change a little bit of code here. This one is requiring RESTify and same bot builder but we are creating a little server here so we can host it as a RESTful endpoint and then we can take it to the cloud or whatever web endpoint it is. That's our port number and then we are creating a chat bot. The app ID and password we will talk about this. So every bot that's deployed to the Azure bot service has to have a unique identifier and Azure creates that for you. But otherwise it's just gonna say you said that. So if we actually go back and run this now instead of app.js, let's run Node.restfulapp.js. This one said, hey, I'm not a console app. I'm running at this port because you use RESTify. So I'm running it as a RESTful service on port 3978. So how do you test this? You can go to your browser or you can use this little thing which also comes with the bot framework. This is called the bot framework emulator. It looks kind of a little bland without having any inputs here but this is a local emulator that will help you test your bots locally before you're ready to deploy it to whatever service. So in here I can actually go to that same port that we are on. And it's gonna ask for app ID password. You can skip it for now. You can test this locally but once you have to go to Azure you do need the app ID. So this is the exact same app. And now you see that working here inside the emulator. So this is the RESTful endpoint. I don't have it hosted anywhere but I'm able to invoke it. And the nice thing is this one kind of shows you all of the JSON that's coming back and forth between the bot service and you. So this is a super simple emulator but it does a lot of things. And actually the emulator on Windows is a little more sophisticated than the emulator on Mac because one of the things that you get into with bot development is kind of conversations and you have to test your conversations and sometimes you have to kind of start midway the conversation to start. So it's like a little bit of a template where you can pick up a conversation as just simple JSON and kind of start midway and start testing. So it'll let you do all of those things. So that's the emulator. That's one way of running it. So let's close this. That's just a quick example of doing it locally in Node.js. Let's kind of go back to Azure and I'll show you the other side of the story here. So this was our Echo Bot. So let's go home. If I did a new resource again, if I did a web app and then look at these templates. So it's not just the basic template you can do. It comes with five or so templates which can help you down the right path of building a bot. First thing is form. This is one of the most commonly used templates. This is where you have to order a pizza or you have to book a flight out of Seattle. Those repetitive things, because essentially when you do this on your web applications today, you are going through a wizard. None of this is new. It's how you want to interact with your computer. Are you more comfortable doing a more natural conversation rather than just clicking around on your website? So we can kind of walk you through that wizard in a bot. So these are like a series of steps. Then language understanding, this is where we are actually going to call into Lewis in Cognitive Services because this is what actually understands what you mean when you say natural things. So behind it, it's going to be an Azure Cognitive Services app which has to have its own app ID and it needs to be registered. And then that's when you're going to have to train your model. So when you say book a flight out of Seattle, what are the 20 different ways in which you can say it so that your bot understands and then passes it back to the bot? So essentially what we are getting is from the bot framework you are pre-configured to call into Azure Cognitive Services and then Azure Cognitive Services makes sense of what you are saying and brings it back to the bot. And you can do this from C sharp or Node.js. So just a quick example of the form thing which is very easy to look at. I do have a form bot here which is called the sandwich bot because that's just a normal example. So let's go ahead and look at this thing here. We're going to test this in a web bot or web chat window. So here, if you noticed a little messaging here, I can say, hi, I'm up here. And the bot knows that it's a specialized bot and says, hey, it looks like you're trying to order a sandwich because that's what I know. What type of sandwich do you want? So these are now pickers. So you get to pick what you want. I would like a steak and cheese. Now it's going to go through a list of things. Now you're getting to rules, right? So you said this, then that, then this, then that. So, and you can kind of back trace sometimes if your user does not give you the right response. You can say, oh, I didn't understand that. I wanted this from you. So you can kind of go back and forth a little bit. So six inch sub, what bread you want, that, and then within breads, within Italian breads, you have two types. What do you want? What type of cheese? So these are all pickers. Then you get to pick a whole bunch of things. So these are like just numbers that you can pick. Cucumbers, what type of sauce do you want? Let's do honey mustard, and that's it. So it's essentially said I went through these six steps with you, and I made you choose things every step, and you gave me this sandwich. And once you're ready, is this your selection? You said yes, and then said, OK, that's your sandwich. I'm going to send it off to the shop, and they're going to deliver it, whatnot. So just a super simple way of using the form template, which actually kind of gets you quite a bit into these dialogue flows of how to ask the user. And if you look at what this does for you, we'll give it a second. All right, so now this one has a little more stuff to it. So there is a model, which is our sandwich. This has all of your options, like what type of sandwich was it, what type of bread, what type of cheese. It's all in here. And then you have your dialogues as to how you actually control what you ask the user. That's message controller. So this is where your task and your post you're awaiting the message from the user. All of that is kind of coded up here. And then you kind of let the bot kind of drive the conversation as to what exactly it needs to get all the information from the user so we can go about it. So all of this is kind of bundled in, and it's part of the template that you get. It's really easy to call into most cognitive services. And good examples of this are like vision APIs. If you have to have a bot that knows how to understand or make sense of images from the user, you take the image and you hand it off to the Azure Cognitive Services Vision API. We have another customer of ours who uses the Vision API to do quality control on shipping. So they have a little camera that's mounted on top of shipping containers. And they do quality control as things are going out of their warehouses. You can also do sentiment analysis with cognitive services. So as you are talking to your bot, you can kind of sense that the user is getting angry. And you can sense his sentiment and say, oh, maybe we can do other things to make you happy and so on. So all of these things are intelligence that you're adding to your bot. And this is what makes bots smarter and they kind of let you automate workflows. So this is where we are, this is where we start. Some things that I really like pointing out is the thorough documentation that the bot framework has. There are tutorials on how to do just about everything. Let me show you some things that are really interesting. The concepts here, let's do cognitive services, language understanding. Let me do a how to, I thought it was really nicely done. They talk about channels and the thing that I was trying to get to is how you can hook this up to language services. So that's something we'll do in part two. Yeah, we could. So essentially, I mean, just start here, essentially is what I'm saying. And they have documentation on how to use vision API and language services. All of these things that help you go from your bot to other places that give you your bot intelligence. That's it. So bots are nothing more than apps. It's a restful endpoint, but it's platform agnostic so you can put it in whichever channel that your user is using and start automating little things in your workflows that don't need human interaction. Very cool. Yeah, I mean, if you look at some of the most common things that we do on most websites, it's a bunch of steps that we follow, wizards. And this is where bots can come in and make it more conversational and more natural. Right? Yeah. Good introduction. We'll end it for here in this part and we'll come back in part two and see more about how to build them. Absolutely. So again, this was all about bots. You can find me at SMIDIP. That's my social handle on Twitter and GitHub and everywhere. But thanks for watching. All right, and we will see you next time on Visual Studio Toolbox.