Copilot has landed in the Power Platform

If you’re a Power Platform user, you’ve likely noticed that Microsoft has been seamlessly integrating Copilot across the Power Platform with AI-driven capabilities designed to accelerate and enhance both the developer and user experience.

Copilot’s arrival in the Power Platform signals a new era of productivity and innovation through the world of low-code and AI-driven solutions. One of the most exciting features is the ability to create web pages, custom applications, and automated workflows simply by having a conversation with the Copilot chat box. This conversational style allows you to describe your requirements for Copilot to translate into functional solutions and bring them to life.

In this blog post, we explore the key features that Copilot brings to the Power Platform.

Power Apps

Power Apps empowers users to create custom applications without extensive coding knowledge. Copilot enhances this experience by suggesting code snippets, automating repetitive tasks, and providing intelligent guidance.

• Start with Copilot: With Copilot, you can create an app — complete with its underlying data — simply by describing your requirements through a series of conversational steps.
• Smart data detection: Copilot automatically detects the data in your app and suggests relevant ideas and recommendations based on your specific context.
• Ask Copilot: Copilot also enhances the user experience of apps, available in the Copilot pane users can answer questions about the app using natural language queries.

To start using Copilot in Power Apps, AI Builder must be enabled for your environment. It’s also worth noting that these are preview features and aren’t currently recommended for production use.

Power BI

Power BI’s Copilot features collectively enhance efficiency in report writing. From report creation to narrating your data, Copilot helps you transform raw data into compelling visualisations and actionable insights.

• Report generation: Copilot streamlines report creation through automated processes. It generates reports based on selected topics or specific user prompts and provides suggested report content, including outlined report pages and descriptions based on the underlying data model.
• Narratives: Through the narrative visual, Copilot can generate text summaries of the data in your report, providing an easy-to-read guide for users. This visual also offers prompts so that you can further tailor the summary to your reporting requirements.
• AI-powered synonyms: Copilot can generate Q&A synonyms, helping report readers find relevant information within your reports and improving useability.

To access the Copilot Power BI features your tenant admin must have enabled Copilot at the tenant level, and your workspace must be running on F64 or Premium capacity.

Power Automate

In Power Automate, Copilot streamlines repetitive tasks by generating and enhancing workflows based on natural language descriptions.

• Workflow automation: Describe it to design it is a preview Copilot feature enabling you to create a new workflow just by describing what the flow should do. Copilot translates the text input and creates a flow matching the description which can be further refined to meet requirements.
• Seamless integration: Copilot is available from the Power Automate homepage and within the makers portal via the Copilot pane. The Copilot pane provides a conversational interface, acting as your AI companion throughout development.
• Increased productivity: Copilot can be used for editing and improving a workflow, debugging, and even learning about how a flow works by providing a text description of what a flow does.

It’s important to note that whilst these features are available for you to try, Copilot for Power Automate is still in development and primarily optimised for English language use.

Power Pages

Power Pages leverages Copilot’s capabilities to simplify and streamline web development. You can effortlessly build web pages, integrate forms, and embed chatbots without requiring extensive coding experience.

• Revolutionised website creation: Copilot transforms how websites are built through its conversational style interface that allows you to create a new site from scratch within minutes just by describing the website you envision.
• Site Structure and Content Generation: Generate text content for your site, define site structure, layout, and create new pages and sections and construct data forms using Copilot’s capabilities.
• Colour theme creation: Use Copilot to establish a cohesive colour theme for your website and effortlessly generate the necessary CSS and HTML code for your web pages using Copilot’s natural query language prompts.

To access these preview features, your environment must be located in the United States or Europe regions, and your browser language should be set to US-English. Keep in mind that since this is a preview feature, it is not recommended for use in a production environment.

Copilot Studio

What was formerly Power Virtual Agents capabilities and features are now part of Microsoft Copilot Studio. Copilot Studio enables you to build intelligent virtual agents (copilots) that engage with users seamlessly for a range of requests from simple Q&A to resolving issues requiring complex conversations.

• No-code graphical interface: Copilot Studio allows you to easily create copilots through AI builder — a guided, no-code graphical interface.
• AI-Powered chatbots: Copilot enhances the conversational capability of chatbots by generating topics, trigger phrases and responses for your bots.
• Task automation: Bots can perform follow-up functions and actions using Microsoft Power Automate to automate the resolution of user queries.
• Built-in analytics: Copilot Studio offers built-in insights into copilot performance and usage to help optimise and manage your copilots.

To use Copilot Studio, a Microsoft Copilot Studio subscription is required. Once you publish your copilot, anyone with access to the published copilot can interact with it without needing a special license.

The integration of Copilot features in the Power Platform marks an exciting new chapter for developers and business users alike. These AI-driven capabilities have the potential to significantly accelerate development times and make the creation of Power Platform solutions more accessible, even for users without extensive coding expertise. While many of these features are currently in preview mode, they hold the potential to revolutionise the Power Platform ecosystem.

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Learn more about Version 1’s partnership with Microsoft here.

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About the author

Sarah King is a Senior Data Visualisation Consultant here at Version 1.