At its virtual “Future of Work” event, Microsoft revealed the introduction of an AI copilot, which they plan to apply to Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, and Power Automate. This AI copilot is intended to facilitate the process of creating line-of-business applications, flows, and bots by giving users the ability to utilize natural language to explain what they want to construct.
Microsoft’s corporate VP for the low code application platform, Charles Lamanna, has stated that the Power Platform is now incorporating AI-enabled support into Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, and Power Automate with the help of Copilot. This new live in-studio assistant helps developers create solutions and provides advice on how to make them better. Building an app, flow, or bot is simple; all you have to do is explain what you want using everyday language and Copilot will create it in a matter of seconds. It is really simple.
Essentially, the Power Platform Copilot functions like Bing or ChatGPT – you offer your request and then collaborate with the bot in the chat window to improve.
In Power Apps, the primary low-code tool of the Power Platform, users can now type phrases like “Create a time and expense application to let my staff submit their time and expense reports” and the system will generate the app for them. Besides constructing these user interfaces and connections to an organization’s data sources, the Copilot can also help users investigate their data and display it graphically (Microsoft’s example being “What are the main reasons an inspection fails?”).
Considering Power Virtual Agents is on the same platform and getting similar updates, it makes sense that it has been more closely connected to Power Apps, which allows developers to quickly incorporate a chat bot into their apps.
Power Automate from Microsoft is a tool to simplify the workflow process, and during its testing period, customers reported a 50% decrease in the amount of time needed to create a Power Automate workflow.
A useful capability to highlight here is that with the combination of the service and GPT model, Power Automate can be used to generate text or summarize current documents automatically.
Microsoft has stated that the features they are currently offering are experimental previews enabled by the Azure OpenAI Service with GPT. They have also advised that these are not intended for production use. Despite this, many people may choose to use them for production purposes. Microsoft has made it clear that they will not be responsible for any issues that may arise from using the features in production.
