Russ Williams

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT RUSS WILLIAMS

I am a cloud solution architect with a passion for reimagining solutions by combining new technologies in creative ways to deliver effective customer solutions. I\'ve worked with literally hundreds of Microsoft customers to envision, design, build, deploy, and operationalize Azure cloud solutions, especially conversational AI solutions. Since the earliest days of Azure, more than 10 years ago, I’ve architected and built solutions with Azure services and developed a broad set of cloud skills. Over the last 5 years, I’ve specialized in conversational AI with experience that stretches all the way back to the very beginning of the Azure Bot Service in 2018 with the Microsoft Bot Framework, Virtual Assistant Template, and later with the Microsoft Bot Framework Composer, and now of course, Power Virtual Agent (PVA) and fusion-enabled Power Automate extensions.I believe that every customer touchpoint is an opportunity for a conversational AI experience - be it a line-of-business web app, social media channels, telephony, or a mobile app. Many of my projects involved working directly with Microsoft product and engineering teams on new product features, unblocking high-profile customers who ran into issues, and developing solutions that were eventually committed directly into the product\'s codebase (Microsoft Bot Framework, Azure Communication Services, Industry Services Data & AI Toolkit). Through this work, I\'ve developed expert-level conversational AI skills and used them to capture best practices and build solution accelerators, many of which I\'ve published as open source in GitHub with the latest being a Contact Center Accelerator which you can see along with other examples of my work here: https://bit.ly/ruwill-workMy cloud solution work involved delivering strategy briefings, architectural design sessions, and hands-on development of proof of concepts for Microsoft customer who were trying to maximize their Azure investment. My Azure experience includes App Service, Storage, API Management, Azure Functions, Logic Apps, Web APIs, SQL DB, Cosmos DB, Cognitive Services (language: LUIS, QnA Maker, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, translation, vision: computer, custom, face, decision: content moderator), Cognitive Search, Azure Communication Services, Event Grid, Notification Hubs, Web PubSub, Service Bus, Video Indexer, Media Service, Mobile Services, Azure Virtual Networks, Load Balancer.My journey has also included experience developing low-code Power Apps, Xamarin cross-platform mobile apps, and.NET MAUI cross-platform mobile apps.