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- Can AI help build your automation workflows,
your apps, webpages and bots
without you knowing how to write a line of code?
Well, let's find out.
Today, we're looking at how the fusion
of AI large language models
with Microsoft's Power Platform
make things easier than ever,
from AI-assisted workflow generation in Power Automate,
how you can use Copilot with Power Apps
to build apps from data in seconds,
where this also applies to generate your websites
with Power Pages, and of course,
how it translates to chat experiences
with Power Virtual Agents, and joining us again
to tour the latest Power Platform updates
is Stephen Siciliano, welcome back.
Yeah, thanks for having me here again.
- Thank you, so every time we have you and Charles Lamanna
on the show, just when we think we've reached the pinnacle
of low code app and logic development,
things get even better.
So this time last year, we were generating an app
from a sketch on a piece of paper
and now we've shown recently,
we're able to go from just an idea to a finished app
complete with backend logic in the time
it takes us to describe what we want using Copilot,
which is leveraging large language models like GPT.
In fact, most of the Power Platform components
have their own Copilot experiences now, or coming soon,
so how does this change things?
- In many ways, it's a great way to explore
all the capabilities the Power Platform has to offer,
while saving you a lot of time and effort.
The AI and Copilot experiences across the Power Platform
can increasingly assist you with whatever
you may be trying to do without you needing to be a code
or process expert.
Now if you have an idea, it can come to life
in the best way possible.
Not only will the AI build out an experience
based on its knowledge and/or any data you present it with,
you can take advantage of suggestions to customize your app,
or you can ask for what you need in terms of logic
and workflow and have it generated for you.
This can work whether you want to automate
a repetitive process or build an app or website experience.
- And something to point out here
is what you can end up with using Copilot and AI
isn't just a basic experience,
these are fully-functional experiences.
- Yeah, we're giving you the power of AI
to reach the experiences and outcomes faster
and this can help enrich what you're trying to do.
In fact, let me give you a taste of how you can transform
a common scenario like invoice processing
and go from process automation to integrated
and interactive internal and external experiences.
Most of us can relate to data entry and approval workflows.
Here, you're looking at an Excel spreadsheet
that a finance team might use to process invoices,
you know, the ones that arrive as an email attachment
or even in snail mail.
Somebody manually parses this information,
sends it to someone else for approval,
enters the information into an Excel spreadsheet,
then the payment process can finally happen.
Of course, this is something that Power Automate
has been able to do for awhile now,
but you needed a fair amount of knowledge to make it work.
Now I can use Copilot to build out my basic workflow
using a simple natural language prompt.
I'll type, "When an email with an invoice file arrives,
start and wait for an approval."
And it generates this nice preview flow
in just a few seconds to manage intake and approval.
The nice thing about this is that if I want to iterate
on the flow a bit more, I can ask Copilot to generate
another variant if I want it to.
For example, I'm going to add more details
after when an email arrives.
I'll add "then for each file" to my prompt,
and you'll see it adds the "for each step."
Once I feel good about the flow,
I can click next and that will ask me to sign in to connect
the required services to run my flow.
And what you're seeing here is the new, modern canvas
with zooming controls so I can easily navigate everything
on the screen and focus in on what I want.
In fact, I'll dig into this trigger card
to see what's happening and you'll see that as an email
with an attachment arrives, it will trigger the flow,
but from the red message,
it looks like it might be missing from the parameters.
We'll get to that in a second.
But first, I want to make sure my flow
is only scoped to invoice attachments.
Right now it'll try to process everything
so I can ask Copilot to only trigger
on invoice-related emails.
I'll paste in, "trigger the flow
only if the incoming email title contains invoice"
as a new prompt.
Keep your eye on the email parameters on the left.
Copilot automatically added that parameter filter
to the trigger and now the flow is more accurate.
I didn't need to know how to add that filter.
I'll give Copilot a like for that.
But let's keep going and fix up
that approval step we saw before.
I'll get that step back into view.
There it is.
I'll specify approve/reject, first to respond
and the red text is gone,
but I need to add a few more parameters.
I can do that with Copilot and use variables too
so I'll paste in another prompt.
Update the title of approval to be
"New invoice needs approval,
assign the approval to my manager."
Now, let's check how it did.
Title looks good.
Now let's check if it got the assigned to parameter right.
When I hover over mail,
you'll see it's pulling my manager info automatically.
Remember in our manual process,
after the invoice was approved, we updated our Excel file?
Let's automate that step too.
I'll paste in another prompt.
If approved, write the invoice data to Excel Online.
Now let's see what it did.
It added that as an action,
but I want to specify it's only for approved invoices
so I just need ask Copilot to move it
into the right condition for true.
Now let's take a look and you'll see it's there.
I just need to tell it which Excel file I want,
so to save a little time,
I've already defined the file attributes we need.
Now I can select a few more parameters
for our column and it's done.
From here, I just need to save my flow.
And one more thing Copilot is really good at is describing
what a flow does.
All you need to do ask.
So, I'll ask it, "What does this flow do?"
And Copilot gives me a nice summary
that anyone can understand.
- This is going to save a lot people a lot of time
in terms of building the automation and the workflows,
but what about the invoice content itself?
Can we extract the data from that?
- Yeah, so we'll be able to use AI Builder
with its forms processing to get all of that information
right into our workflow.
This is something that we've had for a few years now,
so I won't walk through the entire process.
By the way, everything I've shown now
is something you can do today.
Now, I want to give you a first look
at what's coming with Copilot and AI Builder.
First, you'll see this step to extract the data
from incoming invoices.
And this is the cool part.
Here's where we're using the large language model
to extract approval justification
and automatically generate it for you in an email.
In fact, let's run this so that you can see what it does.
This is the approver's inbox.
An approval request just arrived and when I open it,
you'll see that the LLM in this case
authored a comprehensive email with justification context,
and of course, the AI Builder extracted
all those invoice details
and I can approve it right here from inside Outlook.
I'm going to switch desktops quickly
because this all happens pretty fast.
You'll recall that if approved,
our flow needs enter the new row into Excel.
There it is just in time.
- This is pretty impressive stuff.
I know the team has also been working on using GPT
to make the app-building experience a lot faster.
In fact, we just published a three-part series
with Emma Cooper on this topic specifically
that you can check out at aka.ms/PowerAppsAuthoring.
- Yeah, there's a lot of exciting new stuff
on the app side too so we can use that same Excel workbook
and walk through that scenario.
Let's say our finance team wants to build an app
to help manage and track the invoicing process
instead of just using an Excel spreadsheet.
Now it's super easy and this is something you can do today.
I'm going to import this Excel file,
the same one we saw before, directly into a Power App.
Notice this spreadsheet doesn't have a header row
and that's okay, the AI will take care of that.
To build an app using our workbook,
I just need to start in the Power Apps Studio
at make.powerapps.com.
Now, I'll click start with data and upload our Excel file
by dragging and dropping it onto the canvas.
Copilot processes that data for a moment
and moves the data from an individual Excel spreadsheet
into a Dataverse environment.
This way it's also a more scalable central place
to manage invoice data where everyone can work
simultaneously on the same underlying shared dataset.
And here's why I mentioned there was no header row.
The AI is able to process all of the data
in the spreadsheet and determine the column headings
and data types automatically.
You can open these up and edit them
if it doesn't get everything right.
I'll open the status to check this one,
but these look perfect to me.
I can also check the table properties
and these also look good, it even added a description.
From there, I can create the app.
That brings me to the Power Apps Studio authoring canvas
and the app looks pretty good already.
You'll also see that our Dataverse table
is already linked in the tree view.
This is a working app.
I can hit play and browse though the app in full screen,
selecting any of these line items on the left
and seeing their corresponding invoice data on the right.
- I really like that it also added the ability
to search and create a new record,
so where else can Copilot help as we build out our app?
- Yeah, let me show you how Copilot can help
beyond these initial creation steps.
So we're going to customize this existing app.
From the edit view, I'll choose the Copilot option
from the top bar, and from there,
I can make changes to my app using prompts.
I'll paste in add a submit invoice button
to the selected container and Copilot places the button
on the app canvas.
It even moved my edit and delete icons
automatically to make space for the button.
From here, I could edit this control
to upload an invoice document
and run a flow similar to what we just built.
- All right, so in just a couple of minutes,
you've also managed to automated a manual workflow,
you created a new app experience
with a more robust Dataverse backend,
and combined your app with a robotic process automation
using generative AI and Copilot in a bunch of places
that's going to save a lot of time.
- Yeah, and these were just a couple of ways
that Copilot will be able to help out
all of your existing processes.
And we can use Copilot and AI with your public-facing sites
and experiences too.
Using Copilot with Power Pages,
you can get started building professional websites
even faster than before.
Let me show you how.
I'm in the Power Pages design studio
and I'm editing an existing site.
You can see I already have a few pages built out.
Just like we saw with Power Apps, you can open up Copilot
with this control on the top right,
which opens up the right pane where I can add prompts.
In my case, I want to add a page and I'll type
"Create a page to allow our partners and suppliers
to get in touch with us."
And with that simple prompt, Copilot generates HTML
and CSS for each section of the page,
as well as contextually relevant images.
And this is looking pretty good,
but I want to expand the subtext and describe
how we work with our partners and suppliers.
So I'll select it
and bring up the component-level Copilot experience.
Now I'll paste in my prompt and you'll see it generates
a nice paragraph to start with.
Of course, I can edit this further if I want to.
I'm going to stop there, but you can even use Copilot
to generate forms too like a contact us form,
but we'll save that for a different show.
- I really like here how this uses the large language model
is actually able to both write the code
as well as text-based content for the page.
Switching gears though, one thing has been apparent
the last couple of months with tools like ChatGPT,
it's that the chat and conversation experience
can be more intelligent than ever,
so how would you add something like that
to your website or Power Page?
- Yeah, that's very easy to do with Power Virtual Agents.
Anyone who visits your website
could have additional questions where they might not be able
to find the right information
if it's buried deep in your website.
Let me show you how we solve for that.
I can use the new integration between Power Pages
and Power Virtual Agents to add a bot to my site instantly.
With one click here in set up,
a bot is created for me and added to my site.
Now I can open Power Virtual Agents,
make a few changes and test it out before publishing.
The bot is already configured to provide generative answers
to user questions powered by OpenAI and GPT,
just by pointing to our website.
You have the option to add more sites here,
including internal sites, such as SharePoint,
and everything respects the site and content permissions
you have in place.
Coming soon you'll be able to upload documents
and choose the tone for dynamically generated responses
and there are additional controls for content moderation.
As soon as this bot is created, it's instantly useful
and is able to have rich, multi-turn conversations.
Let's open the test canvas and give it a try.
If I ask, "How can I book travel?", you can see the bot
has searched across our website and then summarized
a response for me from a knowledge-based article.
Each answer also includes one or more attribution links,
ensuring site visitors can always find more information
and easily review the source of the answer.
Then, if I ask a follow up question,
the context of the previous conversation
is taken into account to make sure I get the answer I need.
I could now use Copilot in Power Virtual Agents
to create topics to handle key use cases for my bot
just by describing the topic I want to build,
using natural language,
the entire topic is instantly generated for me.
I can then use Copilot
alongside the powerful authoring canvas
to iterate further on my topic.
Copilot in Power Virtual Agents and the new authoring canvas
are both out of preview now too,
so let's add this to our website.
Back in Power Pages, I can publish the bot
and make it available to our customers in one click.
Now if I open our website as a user,
I can open the bot and test to ensure everything is working.
This is another example of how we're leveraging AI
to reduce what might have been a multi-month effort
to develop a bot, down to just a few minutes.
And to be clear, I'm really just scratching the surface
with what AI can do for you using the Power Platform.
- There's really so much to try out
and I just can't wait to get started.
- Yeah, there's a lot there today and a lot more on the way.
It'll save you a ton of time.
And please, give us your feedback.
Just let us know what you'd like to see.
Go to powerplatform.microsoft.com to get started.
- Thanks so much for joining us today, Stephen.
All of the end-to-end updates on AI in the Power Platform.
Of course, keep checking back to Microsoft Mechanics
for all the latest updates.
Subscribe to our channel if you haven't already,
and as always, thank you for watching.
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