Gary Pretty
Principal Product Manager, Power Virtual Agents And Conversational AI At Microsoft
Southport, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
RockstarGary Pretty is a Principal Product Manager at Microsoft specializing in Power Virtual Agents and Conversational AI, with a two-decade background blending hands-on engineering and product leadership. He has led development of unified authoring and GPT/OpenAI-powered Copilot features while driving developer tooling strategy for Bot Framework Composer and telemetry-driven product decisions. A former senior engineer on the Bot Framework SDK, Gary continues to contribute to prominent open-source projects like microsoft/botbuilder-js and botbuilder-dotnet, improving middleware, telemetry, and QnA integrations. He combines product strategy, developer experience, and deep integration expertise across channels such as Alexa and Google Assistant, and has a track record enabling enterprise conversational solutions. Based in Southport, he balances enterprise program delivery with community-building—founding the Bot Builder Community and regional developer groups—and is a self-professed Disney World fanatic.
9 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
171reputation
3kreached
10answers
4questions
Github Skills (37)
nuget10
bot-platform10
javascript10
middleware10
azure-application-insights10
package-management10
net10
dotnet-new10
dotnet10
netframework10
asp-net10
sdk10
package10
dotnet-core10
bot-framework10
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
BotBuilderCommunity/botbuilder-community-dotnet
Aug 2018 - Oct 2022
Part of the Bot Builder Community Project. Repository for extensions for the Bot Builder .NET SDK, including middleware, dialogs, recognizers and more.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:16 releases, 26 reviews, 494 commits in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Gary appears to be primarily involved in updating project files and working with the .csproj files to address NuGet packaging issues and dependency updates. They made changes to several .csproj files across multiple libraries within the project to resolve packaging issues related to the framework, middleware, and dialogs. The contributions mainly revolve around build configuration and dependency management, ensuring the project's libraries function and package correctly. The updates demonstrate a focus on maintaining the build process and ensuring the project is using up-to-date libraries.
dotnetrecognizersbotdialogsadapters
microsoft/botbuilder-dotnet
Feb 2018 - Apr 2021
Welcome to the Bot Framework SDK for .NET repository, which is the home for the libraries and packages that enable developers to build sophisticated bot applications using .NET.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 reviews, 206 commits, 133 PRs in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Gary focused on updating the QnAMaker integration within the .NET Bot Framework SDK. They modified the QnAMaker code to utilize the v3 API, including adding support for new features like strict filters and metadata boosts. The user's contributions focused on enhancing and improving the capabilities of the QnA Maker within the Bot Builder framework to support a wider set of features. Furthermore, they added optional inputHint to methods within the MessageFactory.
dotnetsdk-frameworkdotnet-core2botsdk
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