As a continuation to our series of blogs on Microsoft Copilot, we now bring enriching insights on how Copilot integrates with Microsoft Power Platform, which has a vast user base of 33 Million users, as announced in the Build 2023 event. Copilot in Power Platform now simplifies the design of Apps, BI Dashboards, Bots, Web pages, and Process Automation. Users now need to provide instructions in the natural language, and Copilot immediately generates the required solution across the five constituent applications in Power Platform– PowerApps, Power Automate, Power BI, Power Pages, and Power Virtual Agents.
The optimal utility of a technology platform lies in its accessibility and usability to all end-users. The shift from solution development with extensive coding, training end users, and deployment has seen radical changes in recent years. The future lies in a "No-Code and Self-Service model," empowering businesses to leverage the complete benefits of the application. What changes now are the time, skill, resource, and budgetary constraints, which get significantly decreased by using Copilot in the PowerPlatform suite.
Microsoft's vision of enriching the usability and features of the Power Platform started in 2019 with the introduction of the AI-Builder. The subsequent years saw the launch of AI Capabilities in other applications, with the ultimate Copilot integration launched in March 2023 in a preview mode, with a production release eagerly awaited. Though highly complex solutions require some technical intervention, Copilot ensures that business users get the right solution for their requirements in a faster timeline, with easy feature additions and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities, all poised for a faster time-to-market.
Read ahead on how this game-changer in Power Platform will accentuate your usability of the suite and put the power in the hands of users even without coding skills.
Copilot with Power Automate
Power Automate, the widely preferred choice for automating processes, now gets a huge boost with the integrated Copilot. Users need to type the requirements for the flow in their natural language, and it gets automatically created and allows further feature addition and refinement. AI-driven user conversations translate into a design process catering to simple and complex flows.
The automated sequence begins with understanding the intent, setting the necessary connections, applying flow parameters, updating and enhancing the flow, and generating responses to user queries.
The AI Builder in Power Automate now includes Azure OpenAI services within the interface, enabling easy cloud flow creation in a low code generative AI model using built-in templates. In addition, the enriched AI Builder allows you to use the "Create Text with GPT" feature in your desktop flows. This feature enables content creation for communication with Microsoft Teams and social media.
You can now create flows that collate, analyze, and automatically respond to customer feedback. Users can now also automate back office tasks, such as data extraction across large amounts of text. In addition, flows automatically execute pre-defined actions and generate associated communication.
Copilot with PowerApps
Low code capabilities and NLP in PowerApps were introduced in 2021 with the introduction of Power Fx. The recent addition of Copilot in PowerApps brings in an automated user-defined sequence that instantly builds an App that has been ideated and described in a natural language and generates back-end logic and associated tables. Users can query the App functionality, populate sample data, and visualize the functionality and the output. Copilot also generates recommendations for enhancing the App functionality.
With the new integration, users can directly import Excel files in the App Studio and have Copilot process and store them in Dataverse, with automated detection of column headings and data types. It facilitates faster App building, working with table records, and easy customization.
Apart from automating App building, PowerApps now also has the feature of embedding AI-powered Power Virtual Agent Bots in its Apps. This functionality comes with the inherent functionalities of Power Virtual Agents, such as conversation boosters and simplified Bot building by ideating in a natural language.
Copilot with Power BI
Copilot in Power BI brings the capabilities of using Large Language Models (LLM) to make data insights more enriched and insightful. Users need to describe the required visuals and insights, and Copilot automatically generates the output. In addition, users can generate Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) calculations, create data narrations, query the output, and get responses in their natural language. Copilot's feature enhancement allows even novice users to get the much-needed data analytics, making it simpler to make efficient data-driven decisions across every stage.
Copilot in Power Pages
Copilot in Power Pages lets users rapidly give the necessary natural language prompts to generate relevant content, code, CSS, and images into a webpage and embed Chatbots. Copilot also can generate web forms and a Dataverse table based on the user requirements and provides a simplified and seamless way to create web pages. It removes the complex process of HTML-based coding, page structure, and alignments, along with generating other page elements, making it easy for every user to create a web page.
Copilot in Power Virtual Agents
The use of Power Virtual Agents is to create conversational Chatbots that interpret data, add conversation elements, and sift through vast amounts of data to give the output. With Copilot in Power Virtual Agents, users need to express their requirements in a natural language, and the Bot gets generated to use the functionality of OpenAI's GPT, with access to the required data needed for responses. There is also a planned enhancement to include document uploading, selecting the appropriate tone of the automated response, and moderating the content in the conversation.
The above features of Copilot’s integration with Power Platform enable users to “Get More for Less.” Usability is no longer limited to experienced technical developers but now lies in the hands of every user. Such democratization of using Power Platform simplifies business operations at every stage and pivots the way for an accelerated Digital Transformation. For more details on how this upcoming feature can work for you, contact us, and our Power Platform experts will be glad to help.
