Microsoft Announces More AI-Focused Development and Management Tools at 2023 Power Platform Conference

(everything possible/Shutterstock)

Artificial intelligence (AI) can transform any business. It shouldn’t be surprising that AI is playing a key role in reinventing the Low-code/No-code software development space. An increasing number of companies are looking at AI technologies to upgrade their offering. 

In the second annual Power Platform Conference, Microsoft announced several AI-focused updates across the Power Platform. A key focus of this conference was to help the Power Platform community maximize their use of artificial intelligence. 

In the last year, Microsoft Power Platform has grown rapidly with monthly active community members going past 5.2 million. To support the continuing growth of the community Microsoft announced designer updates for Power Automate, advancements in copilot, and automated environment routing for faster onboarding. 

According to Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Chares Lamanna, “This expanding community will play a pivotal role in shaping Microsoft Power Platform’s AI-driven future. To further aid the community’s growth, I’m excited to announce advancements in copilot, incredible designer updates for Power Automate, and automated environment routing to accelerate maker onboarding.”

Updates to Power Platform Copilot 

The Power Platform Copilot allows users to create automation that can streamline workflow through natural language expressions. Users can create a flow by simply describing what they need. According to Microsoft, with the advanced AI enhancing low-code development, more than 126,000 organizations have used Power Platform Copilot. 

New capabilities in the Copilot are going to make it even easier to build data driver websites. For example, developers can use natural language to tell Copilot to make a homepage and sitemap with various site themes and layouts. It allows business users of all technical levels to create applications, websites, and more. 

The new updates allow developers to easily modify and refine their applications using Copilot’s point-and-click interface. Now you can add and edit multiple Microsoft Dataverse tables using Copilot directly within the PowerApps Studio. In addition, Copilot can now answer more questions related to application building. All these advancements in Copilot are set to significantly boost productivity and simply the expense of website creation. 

Dataverse and Fabric Integration 

Microsoft also announced the integration of Dataverse and Fabric. The Microsoft Fabric is an all-in-one data and analytics solution. It is used for a variety of tasks including data engineering, data lakes, and data movement.

With the latest upgrades, users can now create a managed Lakehouse within their Fabric tenant with just a few clicks. This will allow the users to send their Dataverse data directly into Fabric as delta tables. As this is a SaaS service, it makes it easy for users to establish connections and create workspaces in Fabric. 

Introduction of Data Activator 

The Power Platform Conference also included the data preview of Data Activator which provides real-time detection, notifications, and data monitoring without the need for any code. It works on any type of data in Microsoft Fabric including real-time streaming data in Azure Event Hubs. The benefit of Data Activator is that it can reduce the time required to monitor reports, dashboards, and other data to generate insights that define tasks that need to be completed.  

With the Data Activator, users can connect to a wide range of sources including business intelligence (BI) data sets, Eventstreams, and more. Once the connection is established, it allows for continuous monitoring for actionable patterns. When the Data Activation detects an actionable pattern, it triggers the defined action. 

We can expect a lot more focus on AI from Microsoft in the coming months. The next upgrades and new capabilities to the Power Platform are expected to be announced at the Microsoft Ignite event scheduled for November 14-17, 2023. Related Items 

Microsoft Puts AI into ERP and CRM

Synthetaic Forms 5-Year Strategic Partnership with Microsoft for Next-Gen AI Data and Cloud Solutions

The Drawbacks of ChatGPT for Production Conversational AI Systems