(upbeat music)
- Hi everyone.
I'm Julie Strauss, the general manager of Power Platform,
developer and admin experiences.
Having a low-code strategy is critical
for every organization
as it empowers business agility for years to come.
In fact, in the next five years,
500 million more apps will be created.
That's more than all apps built in the last 40 years,
according to IDC.
There simply aren't enough professional
code-first developers to go around
for the volume of work ahead of to modernize businesses.
However, the good news is
that low-code technology is here to empower
more people to create apps regardless of coding ability.
Microsoft looks at low-code,
not as a collection of discreet applications
but as a platform with an end-to-end portfolio of tools
that are powerful alone and even better together.
A platform that brings together all you need to innovate
and automate your business securely, seamlessly and quickly.
Enabling everyone from citizen to pro developers.
This release wave builds on our commitment
to create applications and experiences
that add value to every role.
This, by breaking down silos
between data and insight and people.
Let's take a look at some of the new capabilities.
Power Apps is focusing on reducing risk for organizations
with advanced governance capabilities,
ensuring every easy onboarding
and use of low-code capabilities in a manageable way
for the organization at scale.
With this release, developers will be able to build
and reimagine and deploy their business applications
through an intuitive natural language conversation.
Makers will get intelligent insights
and analytics through a conversational chat experience.
They can use natural language to create queries
that will help them create the app,
all with the help of an AI assistant.
Power Pages continue to invest
in bringing more out-of-the-box capabilities
to support the low-code and no-code development,
as well as professional developers.
With the launch of new solution-based
application lifecycle management capabilities,
both professional developers and low-code makers
now can utilize solutions
to migrate their website configurations
from one environment to another.
With virtual tables and cloud flow integration,
Power Pages can now connect
to your external data sources and services seamlessly,
enabling both low-code makers and pro developers
to build amazing user experiences.
Power Automate is releasing new capabilities
to simplify creating new flows
and describing them in natural language.
This with other experience improvements for creating
and authoring flows means it'll be easier
for everyone and every new user to get started.
Power Platform is taking no-code AI to the next level
with new GPT enhanced capabilities for AI Builder.
You can now harness the power of cutting edge technology
and embed intelligent AI into Power Automate.
Amazing improvements include introducing work queues
where automatable tasks can be viewed and managed together,
as well as providing simpler connectivity
to a machine for desktop flows.
Eliminating the need for additional installs
and password management.
Power Virtual Agents offer a new unified authoring canvas
that is Microsoft's single conversational AI studio
for all bot building needs.
Now enhanced with GPT,
Power Virtual Agents bots immediately useful
and are the fastest way for organizations to reduce costs.
With the continuing integration
with Microsoft bot framework capabilities
and Azure Cognitive Services,
bot creators from subject matter experts to developers
are empowered to begin building today
with the public preview.
The unified authoring cameras will be generally available
in this wave.
Now, let's take a look at a real customer scenario.
Pacific Gas and Electric, PG&E,
is a San Francisco based utility company
that provides natural gas and electricity
to more than 5.2 million households in Northern California.
In 2001, the company embarked on an ambitious program
to leverage automation and citizen development
to alleviate cost pressures
and eliminate redundant and manual processes
from the daily work of its 32,000 team members.
The answer was Microsoft Power Platform
which deployed to help PG&E rationalize
its automation tool footprint,
consolidate on a single platform,
and replace legacy applications and solutions.
In a moment, Miti will show us some of the new features
in the 2023 release wave for Power Platform
which allows companies like PG&E
to provide a much broader set of capabilities
to drive digital transformation
across the entire organization.
Miti, The floor is yours.
- Thank you, Julie.
PG&E has a responsibility to assist local areas
in rebuilds and continued operations
during catastrophes like wildfires and earthquakes.
In complex scenarios like these,
providing a quick experience for end users
so that they can easily search for outages
using their home address is critical.
This is when Power Pages comes into play.
With this new release,
makers can securely call any power automate cloud flow
from Power Pages UI, thus providing the ability
to connect to any data source.
With the updated VS code for web experience,
when makers open VS code for web
to call cloud flows from Power Pages UI,
they can now edit all the components
of their Power Pages website in one go,
rather than going page by page.
The necessary JavaScript can be easily added in the UI
to call these cloud flows.
The next step is to provide an experience for users
to report an outage using this website.
This data is stored in a SQL Server hosted by PG&E.
Whenever a customer reports an issue,
we want to make sure that it'll directly be created
in this SQL Server.
To make this integration
with external data sources even simpler,
we are adding first class support for virtual tables.
With this capability, we will enable the integration
of external enterprise data with Microsoft Dataverse
without the need for data duplication.
First, we create a virtual table in Dataverse
which connects to the reporting SQL Server.
Then from the data workspace,
we can see that the virtual table connected to SQL Server
appears just like any Dataverse table.
We can now quickly create a form for this table
and embed it in the Power Pages webpage
using the out-of-box form functionality.
It is amazing how easy it is
to connect to a SQL Server table
and reuse all of the out-of-box functionality
of Power Pages.
This website content is now ready to be promoted
from developer environment to production.
To do this, makers can now utilize
the new Power Pages solution aware ALM capabilities.
They can export all the changes in the solution
and then import the solution
to their production environment.
Site config has now become portable.
Let's now take a look at how PG&E customers
can self-serve information and report outages
with Power Virtual Agents.
With this new release,
Power Virtual Agents allow organizations such as PG&E
to build bots with GPT using company related resources.
Organizations can now easily connect their bots
to their websites with just a link.
All they need to do to create a bot
is to specify a single web address,
Power Virtual Agents will search this web portal using Bing
and summarize relevant results using GPT.
How amazing is that?
Now that this bot is created, we can go into settings,
check the topics that have been created,
and simply turn off those that we don't want to use
and we're now ready to test.
We can ask questions like,
where can we find out about scheduled power reports?
This generates responses automatically
based on the information found on our website.
We can also check to see
if there are any electrical outages in our area
and we can be very specific here.
See how the bot understands
that we are asking about a particular area
having an electrical outage.
This is the power of bots
with GPT being able to generate back the response
without us having to author a topic here.
And once this bot is ready,
modifying dialogues has never been easier.
Customers can now use natural language to build topics.
With this release, we will enable makers to design
and modify bot dialogue with natural language.
Bot builders can effortlessly describe
the desired bot design
and GPT will automatically transform it into a topic
that can continuously be refined and optimized
through the use of natural language processing.
In this case, what we're going to do is create a topic
that allows a user to report a power outage
and collect the user's name, phone number, street address,
and a description of the urgency of the problem.
Whether it is critical, high, medium or low.
We'll give this a name and there we go.
The topic is created and is already prepopulated
with the trigger phrases and conversation path.
All the different selections that the user can have are here
as well as the summary of the information that's collected.
We can also select just a specific note
that we want to target and change it using natural language.
This allows us to be specific
about where we want the change to be applied.
Let's see how Power Automate
can help the quality department of PG&E
stay on top of customer feedback.
The objective is to have a daily recap of customer feedback,
generate an email report,
and push this data to an internal site
without API connectivity.
Let's see how Power Automate can achieve all of this
with the new release.
We are going to create a flow based on the description.
Once a week, get all the feedback from a table in Dataverse
and send them by email.
With Power Automate, organizations can easily
get started building new automations.
All that is needed is a simple description
of the cloud flow and everyday natural language.
Thanks to OpenAI,
we can easily add an action to generate a summary
of all the feedback received from customers.
Using the provided template of instructions,
we can prompt the model to work the way we choose.
Whether it is summarizing text, analyzing sentiment,
or extracting key information from customer feedback,
getting started is simple and easy.
And we can even craft our own set of specific instructions
for greater customizability.
In order to make sure that the generated summary
is good enough,
it is crucial to incorporate human in the loop validation.
This ensures that GPT acts responsibly
with the desired intent.
To do this, we can now send GPT generated output
to an approval flow before it is automatically processed.
Some automations require an RPA bot
to automate manual tasks.
Here, we want to store the customer feedback in a web form
that stores it into an internal data store.
RPA automation requires a bot machine to run
and with the latest hosted RPA solution,
we provide hosted machine to build, test,
and run automations from within Power Automate portal.
Thus, eliminating the need for customer managed machines.
Users can select a default VM image, a custom VM image,
or connect to a customer VNet
for access to on-prem resources.
Once the hosted machine is provisioned,
the user can directly launch into the Windows machine
from Power Automate portal.
The hosted machine has been preconfigured
to connect to the environment and is ready to go.
It's time to create a new desktop flow.
We configure an action to launch an instance
of Microsoft Edge with the web form
and automatically complete this form.
We can now go back to the cloud flow
and add an additional step.
If the approval is received,
a desktop flow action will run on the same hosted machine
to add the feedback into a web form.
And now, we are all set.
Finally, let's take a look
at how Power Apps enables PG&E's teams
to inspect facilities to quickly detect and resolve outages.
During power outages, PG&E's electric overhead facilities
undergo specific inspections.
The team's primary task is to check into the site
and inspect the various parts.
Let's see how organizations like PG&E can build new apps
simply by describing what they need in natural language.
With this release, the Power Apps maker portal
now has this big text box saying we can use everyday words
to describe the app we want to build.
How exciting.
We type in site inspection details
and a table is immediately generated.
We review the columns and see that the table
even has sampled data that matches our scenario.
We have all heard the phrase, "There's an app for that."
To build the right app though,
one of the most crucial steps is to design
and build the right table.
Now with co-pilot for Power Apps.
everyone can create those tables using natural language.
Just describe what you want
and Power Apps will create it for you in seconds.
Hmm, this table looks good
but it seems to be missing something.
Since we're not quite sure what it is,
let's ask our co-pilot to give some suggested columns
for this table.
The columns that we get in response look good,
so we go ahead and add them.
Looking at the table, we see that a location column,
which is very important to define a site being inspected,
is missing.
Let's go ahead and ask our co-pilot to add a location column
and populate it with data.
At this point, what we have looks great.
So let's go ahead and click Create App,
which in a few seconds will create
a fully functional modern application
using the data that we just defined.
Looking at homepage,
it seems that it allows our application users
to interact with this data using natural language.
This is awesome because not only do we as makers
have an intelligent co-pilot help us build the app
but we can also give the same GPT enabled experience
to our users.
Let's see another amazing addition to this release.
Here we are looking at an app for scheduling service visits.
Looking at the app and the design tool,
on desktop it looks good
but our frontline workers are going to be using this app
on a few different devices.
How will it look for them?
We could publish this app
and then run it on a different device, but that takes time.
And what if we don't have the right device handy?
Enter the device preview feature.
This is a brand new way to make sure
that an app looks good on mobile
without ever having to leave the Power App's design studio.
We have just seen some of the new features
in the 2023 release wave for Power Platform
which allows companies like PG&E
to provide a much broader set of capabilities
to drive digital transformation across the organization.
Back to you Julie.
- Thank you, Miti.
You've just seen only a few
of our fantastic new capabilities including,
building new apps just by describing in natural language
what you need with Power Apps,
describing a flow and build it in seconds
with an AI-based co-pilot with Power Automate,
improved code editing reliability
and enhanced page preview experience
with VS Code for web with Power Pages,
as well as support to allow customers to create bot
and specify a single web address with Power Virtual Agents.
But that is not all, we have over hundred features coming
with this release between April and September.
Thank you for your interest
and I hope you enjoyed the summary of what is coming next
with our October wave for Power Platform.
To learn more, head to our release notes
and release web videos.