A year of Microsoft Copilot: Accelerating innovation with AI-powered low-code

The past 12 months marked the beginning of the era of AI. In March 2023, Microsoft took the lead in AI transformation with the introduction of Microsoft Copilot, which has since been deeply integrated in the company’s portfolio—including Microsoft Power Platform—with generative AI transforming how organizations work, collaborate, and create.

Before generative AI, Microsoft Power Platform already enabled tech-savvy business users to participate in the creation of digital business solutions. Copilot further democratizes this creation by accelerating development and assisting end users in getting the best out of their data in the applications they use most.

With Copilot in Microsoft Power Platform, organizations have the power to revolutionize the creation of apps, webpages, workflows, and custom copilots for development teams—while also greatly enhancing the experience and value for users for which these solutions were built. Let’s take a closer look into why more than 230,000 organizations have already used AI capabilities in Microsoft Power Platform.¹

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Build and customize copilot experiences with Microsoft Copilot Studio

Microsoft has been helping customers build intelligent conversational experiences since introducing Microsoft Power Virtual Agents in 2019. With the recent announcement at Microsoft Ignite 2023, Microsoft Copilot Studio ushered in the next generation of virtual agents, incorporating GPT technology into them to become AI-powered copilots.

Copilot Studio users can customize Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 using their own enterprise scenarios and business data for more control over critical topics and processes. They can also build, test, and publish their own standalone copilots and custom GPTs and manage their access, data, and analytics securely. Customers like PayPal, National Bank of Canada, An Post, and HP utilize Copilot Studio to bring about new value for customers, employees, and their businesses.

“Copilot Studio enables us to build and make quick updates to an employee-facing copilot that can reason over multiple knowledge sources and provide consistent and relevant answers. Copilot Studio has helped us reduce the workload and costs of our support team, while increasing the engagement and loyalty of our employees.”

Ramesh Murugan, Director, Employee Technology & Experiences, PayPal

Past announcements for Microsoft Copilot Studio:

• Copilot in Power Virtual Agents: Next-generation AI assists bot building with natural language
• Generative actions (public preview)
• Generative answers
• Build using natural language
• Add multiple languages to your copilot (public preview)
• Create your own plugins (public preview)
• Expanded regional availability for generative AI capabilities
• New licensing model

Learn how Copilot Studio can help customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 or build your own copilot experiences. We also invite you to check out the on-demand content from Microsoft Ignite and the implementation guide to learn more about practical deployment of Copilot Studio.

Build better, AI-embedded apps, faster with Copilot in Power Apps

Microsoft Power Apps lets you create custom apps for your business needs for makers—from low-code to professional developers—or business users with technical capabilities.

Copilot in Power Apps further accelerates the impact for makers, allowing them to work faster and be more productive. In fact, makers using Copilot in Power Apps build apps from Excel 80% faster and with a 60% higher success rate than those who don’t use Copilot. With the ability to quickly deploy Copilot in Power Apps, makers are just a few clicks away from bringing generative AI to their users.²

For users, Copilot in Power Apps provides an in-app Copilot experience that will allow them to gain insights from the data using natural language queries, making applications more flexible to meet their evolving needs.

“Building the app from scratch would have taken six to eight hours. We were able to just describe in natural language and build in a few minutes.”

Ron Colvin, Director of Innovation, CONA Services

Past announcements for Copilot in Power Apps:

• Announcing a next-generation AI Copilot in Microsoft Power Apps that will transform low-code development
• Build apps through conversation
• Create multi-screen applications with Copilot in Power Apps
• Continue editing your app with Copilot
• Ingest data and create robust structured tables with Copilot in Power Apps
• Customize copilot deployed in the apps with Microsoft Copilot Studio
• Add a predefined prompt for users to run on a click of a button
• Draft text input in canvas apps with Copilot
• Use Copilot to assist you with filling forms in model-driven apps

Learn more about building with Copilot in Power Apps and using end user copilot experiences in low-code apps.

Accelerate Hyperautomation with Copilot in Power Automate

Microsoft Power Automate provides a range of tools to automate, analyze, and optimize processes within your organization to drive digital transformation. With Copilot in Power Automate, automation has become even faster for professional developers and has empowered even more non-developers to build solutions that save time and reduce costs.

With generative AI, users can work faster and automate more, whether they’re building workflows, generating custom code, seeking guidance, or analyzing performance data with the assistance of AI.

“Copilot in Power Automate takes seconds to create flows that commonly take me 10 to15 minutes to create manually. This lets me skip the busywork of creating basic flow structures and I can get right to the advanced customization that I need to focus on. This time delta is even larger for novice builders still learning the tools.”

Brian Hodel, Principal Developer for T-Mobile

Past announcements for Copilot in Power Automate:

• Automate smarter than ever before with AI Builder and Copilot in Power Automate
• Create and refine workflows
• Write script
• Get step-by-step guidance and information
• Assist in data ingestion for process mining
• Analyze desktop flow (robotic process automation) activity
• Surface insights from process mining and get recommendations for optimization

Explore Power Automate and learn more about streamlining processes across your organization to save time and focus on what’s important.

Quickly create secure, low-code business websites with Copilot in Power Pages

With all the exciting new generative AI features announced since March 2023, building with Microsoft Power Pages has never been easier. Makers can use Copilot in Power Pages to assist with creating a site or webpage, generating a form, or changing content tone. Professional developers can use Copilot in Visual Studio Code for the Web to quickly write and edit code, accelerating customization of their website. Furthermore, with the integration of Microsoft Copilot Studio, makers can build and embed their own generative AI-powered copilots on their websites with minimal configuration.

“We believe that AI-infused automation with [Microsoft] Power Platform will be critical for us to meet our goals to grow our internship program three times in two years with the same size team.”

Tim Herron, Chief Innovation Officer, Degrees of Change

Past announcements for Copilot in Power Pages:

• Revolutionize business websites with Copilot in Power Pages
• Create an AI-generated site using Copilot
• Create an AI-generated webpage using Copilot
• Add an AI-generated form using Copilot
• Add an AI-generated multistep form using Copilot
• Add AI-generated text using Copilot
• Add an AI-powered chatbot
• Add AI-generated code using Copilot

Learn about Power Pages and how you can enable all your teams to create professional websites faster and at a lower cost.

Manage and govern low-code solutions at scale in the era of AI

Over the past year, Copilot has enabled organizations to create new and innovative applications for their employees and customers, and it’s essential to have a governance strategy in place and that can be enforced. Microsoft provides new governance features for organizations to manage their Microsoft Power Platform suite and transition between personal productivity and enterprise mode to further ensure that you are in control of your data.

“[Microsoft] Power Platform enables us to carefully control the data that feeds our AI models and, through active directory and dataverse, also control who can access which data through those models.”

Thomas Bilbo, Principal Product Owner for Microsoft Power Platform, PG&E

Past announcements for Microsoft Power Platform governance and AI:

• Let AI generate app descriptions for faster and easier administration
• Tenant isolation
• Automated application lifecycle management integrated in Microsoft Power Platform
• Use environment routing to direct new makers into dedicated dev environments
• Advisor in Managed Environments uses AI to help you optimize Microsoft Power Platform tenant

Watch the Microsoft Ignite 2023 session on operating Microsoft Power Platform at enterprise scale, and if you’re interested in diving deeper into Copilot and governance, we invite you to tune into the Low Code Approach Podcast episode with Sid Gundavarapu.

Bringing Copilot to Microsoft Power Platform can transform your business

Generative AI is transforming the way we all work, and the speed of these transformations is increasing with each improvement. Microsoft sets the standard by creating a strong framework for how organizations can use AI, including a comprehensive approach to integrating AI responsibly. By integrating Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Power Platform, organizations can decrease time to market by allowing Copilot to handle certain tasks for them.  

We’re proud of what Copilot has already helped Microsoft Power Platform users accomplish in the past year, and we’re excited to assist further in accelerating innovation with these AI-powered, low-code tools.

Explore further Copilot can help your organization deploy impactful solutions with Microsoft Power Platform. If you’re curious to dive deeper into how Copilot works across Microsoft Power Platform products, tune into Episode 27 of the Low-code Approach Podcast.

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Sources:

1 Microsoft Fiscal Year 2024 Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call

2 Build better apps, faster: Copilot in Power Apps is now generally available | Microsoft Power Apps

Richard Riley

General Manager, Power Platform

With more than 20 years of experience in product management, product marketing, and all aspects of go-to-market strategy and execution, Richard is a thought leader in low-code technology and has been instrumental in bringing generative AI to Microsoft’s low-code platform. As the leader of the product marketing team for Microsoft Power Platform, Rich’s product portfolio includes Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages, Copilot Studio, Dataverse, Power Fx, and more.

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