Feature
For a while, it seemed like Microsoft was a few minutes behind the curve when it came to AI and low code. But, in the blink-and-you-missed-it world of IT evolution, the business giant came roaring back to the forefront at last month’s Build conference, expanding corporate capabilities when it comes to the three tenets of its Power Platform: Automate, Orchestrate, Innovate.
Yes, Microsoft has always had plenty of low-code chops inside Power Platform, enabling non-designers and developers to create apps and websites. But the new Copilot AI feature took a little time to evolve its way into the company’s all-encompassing digital business ecosystem.
Now, from SharePoint to Bing, Copilot is fast becoming a tour de force for business and knowledge workers uncovering the power of AI.
New Features
Getting the impressive stuff out of the way first, here’s what’s big across the main elements of Microsoft’s Power Platform:
- With Power Apps and Copilot, users can now create complex multi-screen applications with minimal effort.
- For those who need a website, Copilot in Power Pages boosts the speed and reduces the effort needed to create the style and content.
- And Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents with Copilot make those processes even easier, helping any type of business scale up or re-org more efficiently.
Also, remember the until-recent need to train your chatbots on stacks of data? No longer. With Power Virtual Agents and Copilot, the Conversation Booster feature lets you highlight your company knowledge base, FAQs or other resources, and your bot will learn to answer customer questions in just a few minutes, no creation required.
The AI Power Within Power Apps
For businesses playing catch up, Microsoft’s Power Apps plays in the same market as Mendix, Appian, Zoho Creator and a host of other low/no-code tools to help businesses get productive through new products.
Also available are many open-source tools that reduce the operational cost and increase flexibility, though they come with their own challenges.
Power Apps helps developers and non-developers speed up their app ideation and creation through low-code tools, linking to the wider Microsoft ecosystem, including Office 365, Dynamics and Azure.
By creating new apps, upgrading legacy code, linking data sources together and automating manual or intensive tasks, Power Apps helps businesses run more efficiently and broadens the creative sources beyond traditional leadership and coders.
The arrival of artificial intelligence through Copilot improves automation to help build prototype or functional apps in short order, with process automation all handled through a smart drag-and-drop UI. All of the back-end integration is handled almost invisibly for users, and pricing runs, for example in Power Pages, from $200 for 100 authenticated users per site per month.
Jon Manderville, Chief Product Officer of Collab365, highlighted that “Microsoft’s mission of increasing business app development velocity for the masses is going to benefit from having Copilot across the M365 estate — and they have hit a sweet spot, I believe.”
However, he said, makers, citizen developers and pro-code developers are still well-served to take note of the name. He recognizes that Copilot is just that, not a fully fledged pilot of your digital domain (yet!). Leaders and users are still in charge, and with the right skills they can then engage Copilot to supercharge their experiments and efforts.
For those in the Microsoft ecosystem, this is an easy upgrade to help businesses rationalize data, develop digital products that meet customer needs and prepare them for the AI-powered future.
And each element works smoothly with the others, so a Power Virtual Agent can easily be dropped into a Power Pages website, and so on.
Once data is in Dataverse, it’s available for Power Virtual Agents chatbots to use, including the Teams bots users can now make. If a user keeps a list of company hardware assets like projectors in Excel and brings that into Dataverse instead, it could become part of an onboarding chatbot that helps new employees find out how to do things, alongside the official company HR tools.”
Related Article: Microsoft Copilot Is Coming. You Need to Be Ready
Business Power Apps … With Benefits
There are several implications for a Microsoft-equipped business.
Licensing will be the first question in terms of “how much Copilot” does the business need? Who gets access, and is a phased rollout needed?
Then, as deployment kicks in, there’s the question of controlling users who see an exciting new raft of features that roll out to them across the various component services of Power Platform.
So, there are two sides here:
First, the business opportunity comes in providing the power for users and designers to create, or improve on existing, solutions that accelerate business efficiency, productivity and growth.
The risk, however, comes from unauthorized or over-ambitious use of resources — or worse, live business data.
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Alongside traditional business risks including compliance, security and privacy, IT leaders and security operators will also need to monitor usage and adoption across the business, ensuring that app or site creators:
- Do not create excessive costs in the research phase of their work.
- Do not contaminate live data or production services.
- Provide clarity on new data store creation, ensuring privacy and compliance rules are followed.
- Create AI-generated content that is legal for the business to use.
- Ensure that any ethical issues are cleared with legal and compliance teams when creating or deploying apps.
And no doubt that Power Platform will become more powerful as new AI features are built into Copilot and more users across the business get access to them.
