Revolutionising the landscape of software development, Microsoft Power Platform is now seamlessly integrating AI-powered development with Microsoft Copilot. This integration empowers users to unleash their creativity through natural language, enabling them to describe their vision and watch Copilot bring it to life with an intuitive and intelligent low/no-code experience. Whether you're a seasoned developer or a citizen developer, Copilot aims to accelerate your development journey.
What is Microsoft Copilot?
Within the Power Platform, Microsoft Copilot harnesses the capabilities of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 and the Azure OpenAI Service, redefining the approach to problem-solving and innovation.
But what exactly is Copilot? It functions as your intelligent conversational aide, whether you're seeking information, drafting content, or coding. Powered by Microsoft's cutting-edge generative AI technology, Copilot effortlessly generates content based on your natural language cues. What sets Copilot apart is its role as not just a tool, but a catalyst for productivity and creativity. Need a document summarised? An email composed? A graphic designed? Copilot provides personalised and contextually relevant suggestions tailored precisely to your requirements.
Copilot integration across Power Platform tools
With Copilot seamlessly integrated into Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, and Power Automate, users now have a virtual assistant guiding them through the development process. Copilot not only aids in building solutions but also provides valuable suggestions for enhancement along the way. Simply describe your desired app, flow, or bot using natural language, and watch as Copilot swiftly translates your vision into reality.
Power Apps
With Copilot in Power Apps, both application makers and end users can harness the power of large language models to revolutionise the way applications are built and interacted with. Simply describe the app you want to create through a series of natural language conversations and watch as Power Apps instantly generates your application.
For example, you can simply say:
- "Create a time and expense application to enable my employees to submit their time and expense reports."
- "Build an application to automate the manual process of creating and approving customer invoices."
- "Generate an employee onboarding application to capture new hire information and share training content and learning modules."
From there, a quick conversation with Copilot will make any adjustments your app needs. Need to add columns to your data tables? No problem, Copilot in Power Apps will suggest options and even help you populate them with sample data! Stuck and don’t know where to go next? Copilot will provide proactive recommendations for how you can improve your application.
Copilot in Power Apps also empowers users to obtain intelligent insights about the data in their apps through a conversational chat experience. Users can use natural language to create queries and refine their analysis, all with the help of an AI assistant embedded directly in the running app.
For example:
- "What are the most common reasons an inspection fails?"
- "Who are the most active inspectors for that type of issue?"
- "Which equipment is most often inspected?"
(Cunningham & Microsoft, 2023)
Power Automate
The evolution of automation is reaching new heights with Copilot in Power Automate. This next-generation AI sits right within the flow studio, assisting in building and enhancing flows through open-ended and conversational experiences. No special knowledge of Power Automate is required; simply use natural language to create, improve, and iterate on everything from simple flows to complex enterprise-wide processes.
Now, beyond just makers, anyone utilising automation can harness the capabilities of next-gen AI. Azure OpenAI Service has been seamlessly integrated into AI Builder's user-friendly interface, facilitating easy access to low-code generative AI models and templates within Power Automate cloud flows.
The AI Builder action, "Create text with GPT," has been introduced for desktop flows, mirroring its cloud counterpart. This feature enables:
- Content creation for daily communications or social media.
- Enhanced customer service through feedback analysis and responses.
- Streamlined back-office tasks like information extraction from large texts, saving time and effort.
(Siciliano & Microsoft, 2023)
Power Virtual Agents
Imagine simply describing what you would like your bot to do in natural language and having a complete conversational dialogue appear—ready to use in seconds—without painstakingly having to build and curate dialogues step by step.
Copilot in Power Virtual Agents uses the latest generative AI capabilities to make this possible. Creating bots in the industry has traditionally been a time-consuming process that could take months—or even years. The Power Virtual Agents end-to-end software as a service (SaaS) experience and intuitive user interface already transformed this by making building dialogue incredibly easy—even for non-technical bot builders, shortening the development cycle to weeks. Now with Copilot in Power Virtual Agents, bot building is simpler. Using natural language, anyone can create and iterate over topics in minutes.
Copilot in Power Virtual Agents can help:
- Create entire topics from a simple description
- Add or update content in an existing topic
- Summarise information collected from a user
Here are just a few examples of natural language prompts you can use:
- “Let a user check the status of a flight, accepting the flight number and date. For each question, add two message variations.”
- “Accept a user’s name, age, and date of birth, and then repeat their responses back to them.”
(Microsoft Copilot Studio, 2023)
Interested in harnessing the Power of Microsoft 365 solutions?
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We have had the privilege of collaborating with many organisations, helping them make the move to Microsoft Dynamics 365 and harness the power of Microsoft Power Platform.
Explore Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics here
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