Every year at Microsoft Build, Microsoft returns to its roots and puts developers at center stage. This year, Microsoft Power Apps is announcing a powerful set of next-generation AI capabilities and developer-focused features that improve productivity for all developers—including those who code.
In March, we announced a next-generation AI Copilot in Power Apps that will transform low-code development, building on the ability to generate Microsoft Power Fx from natural language and create apps from uploaded images. For the first time, Copilot in Power Apps gave developers the ability to create complex data tables and single-screen applications all from natural language.
Today, we take the next step in the journey of AI-assisted development:
- Copilot can create multi-screen applications and make real-time adjustments with the power of natural language.
- Copilot is adding data processing capabilities by helping you clean and prepare your data before you even start building the app. Copilot can now ingest any Excel file, no matter how loosely structured, and create robust structured tables with a variety of data types.
- Copilot control now brings the power of intelligence to your favorite model apps with its intuitive data understanding and convenient navigation. Copilot control in canvas apps also gets a major boost in understanding your Dataverse data.
- Copilot is making life easier for developers and admins alike with the ability to generate descriptions for complex applications and multi-component solutions with apps, data tables, and automations.
While Copilot is changing everything about the way we work, it’s not the only update we’re announcing to improve the lives of developers everywhere. One of the most important tools for any developer is the ability to reuse the components they create. Experienced developers accelerate their productivity by creating robust libraries of modules they can quickly deploy in new applications. Now, Microsoft Power Platform is enabling organizations to tap into those robust libraries with organization-wide component catalogs. These catalogs allow anyone to submit and install approved components that other developers at their company have created. This catalog is key to enabling any organization to scale its low-code practice company-wide.
Copilot can now create complex multi-screen applications
While the initial iteration of Copilot in Power Apps helped you get started with an app over Microsoft Dataverse, now you can go much further working side-by-side with AI. Makers have already seen the power of Copilot in creating and editing the data tables that underpin their applications. Now, Copilot will be able to create complex multi-screen applications through natural language conversation and design and update beautiful user interfaces. All of this means less time spent on mundane tasks like aligning buttons and more time spent on solving complex coding challenges.
Here are just a few examples of natural language prompts you can use:
- “Add a screen where users can submit and rank their favorite ideas from my existing screen templates.”
- “Add a button to my page that allows them to sort their data.”
- “Change the color of all my app’s buttons to blue.”
- “Center all buttons in their containers and turn them orange.”
Anyone with a Dataverse environment in the United States can get started using Copilot in Power Apps today.
Copilot control now enables developers to add the power of Copilot to their own applications
Copilot isn’t just for makers. With copilot control, we gave developers the ability to add the power of Copilot into their custom apps. Now, copilot control will be available to all Power Apps makers, whether they are building model-driven applications or custom apps. Copilot in model-driven applications understands and can reason over the Dataverse tables in your app—large or small and can even navigate through the data in your app. All of this is wrapped up in a new copilot control user experience with a brand-new look that follows you where you need it most. This copilot can maintain multi-turn conversations to navigate and derive insights about your application’s data.
Here are just a few examples of natural language prompts you can use:
- “How many high-priority tickets were created last month?”
- “What is the breakdown of the current status for the tickets that were created last month?”
- “Which types of tickets are most overdue?”
- “What are the most common budget items where actual spend exceeds estimated spend?”
- “During which months do our sales geographies generate the highest revenue?”
- “How does that change for just our West Coast geographies?”
- “Take me to my support agents page.”
Learn more about how copilot control is putting the power of generative AI in every application to drive insights for users.
Copilot can now understand unstructured file inputs and turn them into structured data tables
To help speed up and simplify the creation of tables and apps from Excel, makers can now drop their Excel files into Power Apps, see a quick preview of the table that will be created and a preview of the data that will be imported. Makers can tweak the names, descriptions, data types, and other table properties before creating a brand-new app that is automatically connected to the new table and data.
Makers with Copilot enabled will get a helping hand in the creation of a great table for their data. Copilot will review the incoming data to come up with appropriate column names, ensure the right data types are selected, and even convert simple columns into choices if it sees a collection of repeating values. Copilot will also provide names and a description for the table based on the data. This can all still be achieved with Excel files that don’t group cells into a table and can even deal with tables that have no column headers present.
Learn more about how Copilot in Power Apps is automating the process of data preparation and ingestion.
Copilot can generate descriptions of your applications and solutions in seconds
Admins today rely on app descriptions to manage the hundreds of apps within their organization. Without descriptions, they have no way to know what the apps do without opening each one individually. This makes it hard to scale. Coming soon, Copilot will be able to help you generate a description of an app by ingesting the app’s metadata and returning an overview of what the app does in natural language. This alleviates the need for developers to manually write summaries and for admins to open individual apps every time they need to understand what each app does.
Solutions are complex, often containing dozens of components that are difficult to partition and summarize. In the case of pipeline deployments, admins and approvers currently must open every component in every solution to gain an understanding of what they do. By using AI to help generate useful solution descriptions, developers save valuable time and get high-quality descriptions of all their apps and solutions.
More information about Copilot’s ability to generate descriptions of applications and solutions coming soon!
Sharing reusable development components to achieve organizational level-impact
Modern software development works by building on components, packages, and libraries that other developers created as foundational blocks. A developer’s productivity is a function of how robust and efficient their tools are. With better tools comes faster iteration. With reusable tools comes scalability. As developers and administrators look to expand the reach and impact of their low-code applications, the need for a central repository of low-code components that anyone in an organization can leverage is clear. That’s why we’re announcing a brand-new catalog in Microsoft Power Platform that gives makers a place to publish, share, and reuse the best low-code components within their organization. We are also empowering administrators to ensure only components that meet the highest standards of quality and security are published through the catalog manager.
Submitting a component to the library is simple and requires just a few lines of code in the command line interface:
Once the component is submitted, the environment administrator is prompted to review and either approve or reject the component.
Installation of components from the catalog is easy in just a few lines using the command line interface.
Once you install the component, it will appear as a control in the maker studio. You can easily drag and drop it into your application to start building on the work of your organization’s best code-first developers.
Learn more about the new catalog in Microsoft Power Platform.
These advancements—significant improvements to Copilot and the release of the catalog—will accelerate the productivity of every professional developer who is building on Power Apps. Join the era of AI-assisted development and see how generative AI can amplify your impact.
Get started with next-generation AI capabilities
- Learn more about the latest next-generation AI updates to Copilot.
- Submit your first components to the catalog in Microsoft Power Platform.
- Need a free developer plan? Get started at Power Apps Developer Plan.
Learn about other announcements across Microsoft:
- The future of app development with Microsoft Power Platform.
- New ways to develop and orchestrate automation with Microsoft Power Automate.
- Revolutionize business websites with next-gen AI in Microsoft Power Pages.
- Reinvent your AI assistants with generative answers, actions, and more in Microsoft Power Virtual Agents.
Availability
These features are currently available in the United States and English language by signing up. Note that these preview features are experimental, and accuracy and relevance cannot be guaranteed.
Responsible AI
Microsoft is committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are helping our customers use our AI products responsibly, sharing our learnings, and building trust-based partnerships. For these new services, we provide our customers with information about the intended uses, capabilities, and limitations of our AI platform service, so they have the knowledge necessary to make responsible deployment choices.
FAQs
Power Apps is empowering coders with next-generation AI capabilities? ›
One of the main advantages of the Power App Platform is that being a Microsoft solution, it is full capability to integrate with other Microsoft tools. This means that developers can leverage data from Microsoft applications (e.g. Dynamics 365, SharePoint, Excel etc) and other third-party services.
What is an advantage of using Power Apps to create apps? ›One of the main advantages of the Power App Platform is that being a Microsoft solution, it is full capability to integrate with other Microsoft tools. This means that developers can leverage data from Microsoft applications (e.g. Dynamics 365, SharePoint, Excel etc) and other third-party services.
What are the capabilities of Power Apps? ›Apps built using Power Apps provide rich business logic and workflow capabilities to transform your manual business operations into digital, automated processes. What's more, apps built using Power Apps have a responsive design and can run seamlessly in browser and on mobile devices (phone or tablet).
Is AI builder part of Power Apps? ›AI Builder enables teams with the business expertise to easily automate processes and predict outcomes to improve business performance. AI Builder is a turnkey solution that brings the power of Microsoft AI through a point-and-click experience and is directly integrated into Power Apps and Power Automate.
What are the limitations of Power Apps? ›- Poor reusability. One of the most important concepts taught to beginner programmers is modular coding. ...
- Multiple users can not use the app at the same time. ...
- Difficult debugging.
- Simplified User Experience. Microsoft's Power Platform makes the life of the average user much easier. ...
- Improve Customer Service. ...
- One Source of Truth. ...
- Goal Insights and Projections. ...
- Process Automation.
The advantages of mobile apps include convenience, easy communication with customers, and online usage. The disadvantages of mobile apps include difficulty to create, the cost to create them, the cost to make them available to people, and the need for updates and support.
What are the 6 major components of PowerApps? ›The six major components of PowerApps are a gallery, screen, card, control, property, and function.
What is the purpose of Microsoft Power Apps? ›Why use Power Apps as part of Microsoft Power Platform. Quickly build professional-grade apps, create automated workflows, connect to diverse data sources, and embed dashboards into your apps when you use Power Apps with other Microsoft Power Platform solutions.
What are the features of PowerApps AI? ›PowerApps AI includes a range of pre-built AI models that can be easily integrated into apps, such as object detection, sentiment analysis, and language understanding. These models allow users to perform tasks such as image recognition, language translation, and text analysis without building the AI models themselves.
What is AI in power apps? ›
AI Builder is the platform for providing a low-code user experience for every developer to create and customize their PowerApps and Flows.
Is PowerApps better than Power automate? ›PowerApps apps are more versatile than Power Automate workflows. This is because PowerApps apps can be used on mobile devices, desktop computers, and web browsers. Power Automate workflows, on the other hand, can only be used on desktop computers.
Are PowerApps really useful? ›It is one of the best low-code application builders in its niche. All developers can use PowerApps to build professional-grade apps that solve complex problems quickly. It is one of the best low-code application builders in its niche.
What are the two types of PowerApps? ›There are two main types of Power Apps: Canvas apps and Model-driven apps. Previously, Power Apps Portals would have fallen under this category. Microsoft have since released Power Pages, a standalone product that has evolved from the functionality of Power Apps Portals.
What is the value proposition of Power Apps? ›Power Apps value proposition is simple. Software developers are scarce and expensive. CRUD applications are not terribly complex. Power App's drag and drop interface allows your users to quickly build applications themselves.
What is the salary of Power Platform developer? ›As of May 17, 2023, the average annual pay for the Microsoft Power Platform Developer jobs category in Brooklyn is $106,989 a year. Just in case you need a simple salary calculator, that works out to be approximately $51.44 an hour. This is the equivalent of $2,057/week or $8,915/month.
How many companies use Microsoft Power Platform? ›We have data on 2,150 companies that use Microsoft Power Apps. The companies using Microsoft Power Apps are most often found in United States and in the Information Technology and Services industry.
What are the benefits of apps? ›Mobile apps provide customer-appropriate content and personalized experience. Analyzing user behaviors, geography, language, and interest apps can tailor a delightful experience for the customers. Further, the mobile app offers customization provisions for the users to set their preferences.
Why are apps effective? ›A well-designed mobile app can perform actions much quicker than a mobile website. Apps usually store their data locally on mobile devices, unlike websites that generally use web servers. For this reason, data retrieval happens swiftly in mobile apps.
What are the advantages disadvantages of artificial intelligence applications? ›The advantages range from streamlining, saving time, eliminating biases, and automating repetitive tasks, just to name a few. The disadvantages are things like costly implementation, potential human job loss, and lack of emotion and creativity.
What are the 4 components of Power Platform? ›
Power platform has 4 primary components - Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents. The other components that are often used with Power Platform are - Dataflex Pro (Common Data Services), AI Builder, and UI Flow (part of Automate).
How many types of solutions are there in Power Apps? ›Two types of solutions (managed and unmanaged) Solution components.
What is the difference between Azure and Power Apps? ›Azure Logic Apps is a service used for application integration, building workflows etc. PowerApps are for building GUI applications. Almost everything can be called an application, or an app, therefore it's not reasonable to assume that all things called apps are similar in some way.
What are the 4 AI capabilities? ›- Reactive machines. Reactive machines are AI systems that have no memory and are task specific, meaning that an input always delivers the same output. ...
- Limited memory. The next type of AI in its evolution is limited memory. ...
- Theory of mind. ...
- Self-awareness.
Artificial intelligence, or AI, has the potential to cut energy waste, lower energy costs, and facilitate and accelerate the use of clean renewable energy sources in power grids worldwide. AI can also improve the planning, operation, and control of power systems.
What is the most advanced AI capabilities? ›GPT-3 was released in 2020 and is the largest and most powerful AI model to date. It has 175 billion parameters, which is more than ten times larger than its predecessor, GPT-2.
How do you use AI in Power Apps? ›- Create an app. ...
- Select Data > Add data > AI models.
- Search for, and select Language detection AI model. ...
- Select + from the left-pane, and then select Text input control.
- Repeat the previous step to add a Text label control.
- Rename the text label to Language.
AI Builder is a new Microsoft Power Platform capability that enables you to add intelligence to your automated processes, predict outcomes, and help improve business performance.
What is the role of AI in power sector? ›AI in energy contributes to the real-time monitoring of power grids, more accurate predictions of power fluctuations, and the development of new strategies to work with geothermal energy sources.
How much is Power Apps AI? ›| Subscription plans | Pay-as-you-go plan | |
|---|---|---|
| Per app plan $5 user/app/month | Per user plan $20 user/month | Per app plan $10 per active user/app/month |
| Build and run custom apps4 | ||
| 1 app or 1 portal | Unlimited | 1 app5 |
| What's included | ||
What is the role of AI in power electronics? ›
The application of AI/ML in power electronics is different from its use in more established areas such as image classification, speech recognition, etc. Power converter design, optimization of control loops, and preventative maintenance are three key areas where AI/ML are being used.
What exactly is the difference between PowerApps and Power Automate? ›What Are MS Power Apps & MS Power Automate? Microsoft Power Apps is primarily a design tool for forms, while Microsoft Power Automate is an automation and integration tool. They're individual products but can be combined.
What are the pros and cons of Power Automate? ›Power Automate is not suitable for long-lasting workflows because they can run without warning. A workflow cannot be changed, one you run it. Forms Customizations are not available. For this reason, Power Automate is typically combined with Microsoft PowerApps, but this also increases the costs.
Can you automate in PowerApps? ›Create the Power Automate Flow
On the Create your flow screen, from the list of instant templates, select Click a button in Power Apps to send an email. Enter a name for the flow as "Flow triggered by Power Apps", and select Power Apps as the trigger. Select Edit in advanced mode and then select, Continue.
Power Apps is Microsoft's low-code development platform that empowers developers, business users, and CRM Administrators to create custom native mobile and web applications by connecting to the cloud or on-premise data source. Power Apps leverage the Common Data Service (CDS).
Can we use Python in Powerapps? ›Once your model has been trained, it can be published to be run in the cloud, using one of the Custom Vision SDKs for programming languages such as Python, Java or C#, via a REST API, or access from Power Automate using a Custom Vision connection.
How long will it take to learn Powerapps? ›Mindmajix's Power Apps training program offers 18 hours of practical either Live online training or Self-paced Video learning in building and managing cross-platform applications for B2B businesses.
What are 3 types of Power Apps? ›Types of Power App. Using Power Apps, you can create Three types of apps: Canvas apps, Model-driven apps, and Portal Apps.
Which company uses Power Apps? ›| Customer | Industry | Vendor |
|---|---|---|
| Aeon Nexus Corporation | Professional Services | Microsoft |
| Airworthy Aerospace | Aerospace and Defense | Microsoft |
| Subscribe | Professional Services | Microsoft |
| Subscribe | Communications | Microsoft |
make.powerapps.com is the Maker Portal. From here you manage environments and solutions and build out the common data service or AI builder components. create.powerapps.com is your canvas app studio where you edit and build specific apps. Create Portal > Studio for Building and Editing specific apps.
What are three 3 advantages of automation? ›
Advantages commonly attributed to automation include higher production rates and increased productivity, more efficient use of materials, better product quality, improved safety, shorter workweeks for labour, and reduced factory lead times.
What are the 3 benefits of automation? ›The benefits of automation include improved accuracy, reliability, and productivity, as well as improved employee morale.
What are five advantages of automation? ›- Lower operating costs. ...
- Improved worker safety. ...
- Reduced factory lead times. ...
- Faster ROI. ...
- Ability to be more competitive. ...
- Increased production output. ...
- Consistent and improved part production and quality. ...
- Smaller environmental footprint.
AI Builder is a Microsoft Power Platform capability that provides AI models that are designed to optimize your business processes. AI Builder enables your business to use intelligence to automate processes and glean insights from your data in Power Apps and Power Automate.
Is Power Apps being used to modernize app development? ›NET apps can be modernized with PowerApps. No matter when you have created, purchased, or last updated your legacy apps, Microsoft Power Apps development can modernize legacy applications seamlessly and effectively.