BTEX 2023: Digital Transformation with Microsoft Power Platform + AI
With a low-code focus and powered by AI, Microsoft’s Power Platform is bringing new possibilities for digital transformation. Here are some of the most exciting ones.
One of the highlights of the Purple Room during CDW Canada’s 2023 Business Technology Expo was when Karin Skapski, Senior Consultant at CDW, talked about Microsoft’s Power Platform, a suite that brings the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to day-to-day collaboration tasks and reminds us that the future is nearer than we think.
Skapski described the platform using these words: “Power Platform is a Microsoft suite of low-code/no-code tools that empower you to create business solutions without necessarily needing to be a developer. Power Apps help you build apps and websites, Power Automate helps you build workflows, Power BI helps you visualize data and Power Virtual Agents help you create chatbots.”
Why leverage AI and Power Platform?
“Power Platform lets you connect your systems and processes inside and outside of the Microsoft Cloud with hundreds of connectors and the ability to create custom connectors with any application programming interface (API). AI helps you make intelligent business decisions, reduce human error and automate repetitive tasks,” said Skapski.
AI Builder
The Power Platform suite comes with AI Builder, a feature that includes AI models that help improve business processes with the power of automation. Skapski demonstrated the Power Platform model’s potential by quoting one of its more popular uses. “You can choose from pre-built or custom models to do different things, like extract information from invoices or extract information from business cards.”
Skapski also highlighted the potential of AI Builder’s templates. “Another place you can look is in templates. If you search Outlook AI (while in AI Builder), you get a bunch of options of flows using AI Builder with your email.”
GPT is coming soon
AI Builder will soon be able to leverage generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) technology. In Skapski’s words: “There’s an AI Builder capability, currently in preview, called ‘Create Text with GPT.’ It will give us the option to try a template like ‘Summarize Text,’ ‘Create Blog Post’ or ‘Write Instructions.’ Using the ‘Summarize Text’ template, I took a wall of text about CDW from Wikipedia, condensed it into two paragraphs, and it did a pretty good job.”
Copilot: an AI-powered assistant
Another great feature of Power Automate is Copilot, said Skapski. “Copilot is essentially an AI assistant that helps you build solutions. Copilot for Power Apps is still in gated preview and it's a way out from a production release, but the idea that you can create an app starting with a text prompt is quite exciting.”
However, Skapski had some good news: “What we can look at today and try out for ourselves is Copilot for Power Automate. When you create a workflow, you can look for ‘Describe It to Design It,’ and you can start building a cloud flow using your own words or an example.”
Power Virtual Agents innovations
Skapski also talked about three upcoming innovations for Power Virtual Agents, the low-code tool that helps create chatbots:
“Topic Overlap Detection is going to find overlap between topics. You can review the overlaps and consolidate them if you wish, which reduces the need for your bot to ask clarifying questions.
“Topic Suggestions is going to take phrases from conversations where your bot wasn't able to find a topic based on the messages you used or sent. It's going to put together a topic suggestion for you with phrases based on that conversation, so you can make sure that info is there the next time somebody asks about it.
“Lastly, with Auto-Triggering Improvement, the bot is going to learn based on past conversations. If there's a typo and it totally freezes the bot off, the user has to clarify what they are trying to do. With this feature enabled, any future conversations with that same typo won't require clarifying questions. It's going to learn based on that previous interaction with just that one user.”