Articles about Microsoft

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.

The quest for Digital Transformation has led to businesses adopting new and futuristic technology platforms to accentuate their operations, enhance customer experiences, and stay ahead in the competitive race. However, there is an overarching need to ensure easy accessibility, even for novice users, to achieve complete adaptability. Modern technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have made accessibility simpler, with advanced capabilities such as Natural Language Processing (NLP). Users can define a task in their natural language, and the application interprets the requirement and gives the desired output-without any need for coding. NLP and LLM (Large Language Models) form the basis for Copilot, Microsoft’s latest technology offering in partnership with OpenAI, which leverages the capabilities of the world’s most advanced supercomputers, hosted on open-source foundation models, and the best of AI development infrastructure. Copilot is a game changer across prominent platforms, including Azure, Teams, Power Platform, and Microsoft 365. Most importantly, Copilot also provides a significant boot for security monitoring and threat analysis. Github Copilot was released back in October 2021 and has been generally available. However, most of the modern Copilot offerings are available as previews or are in testing phases, with the full capability to be available very shortly. Let’s have a look at how Copilot can bring in a radical transformation in business operations. Microsoft 365 Copilot The Microsoft 365 Copilot integrates with all constituent applications such as Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams, amongst others, by using GPT-4 and Microsoft Graph. Users need to type in a task description, which automatically gets executed. For example, type in a query for generating analytic reports from raw Excel data, and you get the result instantly with real-time visualizations and reports. Microsoft recently launched an application called Business Chat, which has access to your emails, calendar, chats, documents, and many more. You need to type in a query that requires access to multiple applications in M365, such as the status update of the project, and you instantaneously get a report derived from related emails, documents, meetings, and chats. With the Microsoft 365 Copilot, you can: Create documents from various sources, have real-time edits, change the tone, and rewrite your copy. Get instantaneous presentations by aggregating data from various sources. Create insightful visualizations and reports from raw Excel data. Optimize the time you spend in Outlook, and make communication faster. Get real-time summaries and actionable items right within a Teams meeting. Leverage the new feature integrations in Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents to quickly work on a low code model and build custom Apps and Automated Chatbots. The Benefits of Copilot for Microsoft 365: Save Time and Resources: You just specify a task and let Copilot handle the execution without having multiple resources dealing with humongous and disparate data. Increased Productivity: Rapid execution and accurate output drives faster operations. Better Resource Allocation: Get the advantage of moving your team to more strategic operations, rather than working manually on routine office tasks. With the above features, the Copilot for Microsoft 365 enhances your business operations and makes way for a digitally mature modern workplace. Microsoft Security Copilot The Microsoft Security Copilot uses AI capabilities for early threat detection, analyzing the best-suited remediation, and enhancing the native capabilities of the application. It helps businesses improve their security posture based on analytical insights and quickly processed signals that discover hitherto unknown vulnerabilities and suggest the best incident response patterns. Security analysts can query it in their natural language and get the desired response without coding or manual analysis. Benefits of Microsoft Security Copilot: Faster Response Time: Get insights from multiple sources within minutes with the proper incident management response, which takes multiple hours or days with conventional analysis. Proactive Mitigation: The Microsoft Security Copilot helps in early threat detection and risk exposure and gives predictive measures to mitigate the progress of the incident with appropriate countermeasures. Integration Capabilities: The tool integrates with Microsoft’s security applications, such as Sentinel and Defender, and Intune, with insights that match your current security posture. Skill Enhancement: Help your security analysts stay updated with the latest in cybercrime and incident management, threat detection, and prevention. Azure OpenAI Copilot The Azure OpenAI Copilot leverages the GPT-4 Large Language Model (LLM) and enables users to train the application on a vast vocabulary and code and automatically detect patterns in usage to enhance its language processing capabilities. It generates text and code as seamlessly as a manual user would do, for a wide range of requirements such as creating content and code, language translation, custom marketing text, and summarization, amongst other text requirements. Azure OpenAI Copilot also has image generation capabilities that include the creation of marketing assets, visuals, and process roadmaps in an engaging way. Users need to type a query in, and the application automatically generates the required content- best suited for startups that operate on a lean staffing model. With Azure OpenAI Copilot, users can: Create own AI models customized for specific requirements. Benefit from the comprehensive enterprise-grade security that Azure offers. Choose the most appropriate data model to upload from Azure Cognitive Search, Azure Blob Storage, or Upload Files manually to let the application index the inputs. Applying filters to moderate the content that is being requested and generated. Save time and resources by automatically generating text or code with enhanced accuracy. Build your Own Copilot In addition to the vast AI models that Azure AI has, the Azure AI Studio offers a cloud-based platform that facilitates easy building, deploying, and managing your AI solutions with its constituent tools and services. Users can choose from using the Founders Hub or Azure OpenAI Playground to create custom Copilot stacks built on a model, such as ChatGPT or GPT-4, with their content and images. Azure AI Studio facilitates the creation of custom Apps and Chatbots based on your business data. Benefits of using Azure AI Studio: Built-in Plugins that integrate with third-party data sources. Support for structured and unstructured data. Flexible subscriptions on a monthly or yearly basis based on “Provisioned Throughput Units,” enabling users to reserve and deploy a defined model processing capacity. Compliance with your business regulations for access privileges, security, data sharing and retention, and document tagging. Pre-defined throughput for workloads, with consistent prompt and completion sizes and API requests from the reserved processing capacity. GitHub Copilot The GitHub Copilot is an independent tool for DevOps offered in the Azure Data Studio. The GitHub Copilot Chat integrates with the GitHub Copilot and helps users with predicative autocomplete suggestions for writing code. Users can leverage it for code snippets or query the tool in their natural language and get the required code as an output. The tool has the OpenAI Codex as a base, a system recently introduced by OpenAI. It supports coding requirements for C, C++, Python, JavaScript, Ruby, and Go, apart from SQL query generation for databases. Users can enable and configure GitHub Copilot Chat in a supported IDE and turn it off when required. Features and Benefits: Pre-processed input, which can either be a code snippet or a query in natural language, is sent to an LLM which interprets and generates the required code. The feature best works for rapid coding requirements, saving you the time spent by manual coders. The response is either a custom code snippet or an interpretation of the code input. It includes the appropriate code highlighting and formatting to deliver accurate output. Users can benefit from automated suggestions and outputs for syntax, test cases, code concepts, debugging, and related requirements. The above models of Microsoft Copilot save development and operational costs and help novice and skilled coders query in their natural language and get the desired output. Copilot’s vast set of capabilities will redefine core and critical operational requirements and give the right solution for many use cases. For more information on how this can work for you, contact us, and our experts will be glad to help.