AI builder and Copilot: Adding intelligence to your Power Platform

The Microsoft Power Platform has revolutionized how businesses build applications, automate workflows, analyse data, and create agents, all with minimal to no code. Power platform offers connecting to various data sources seamlessly. Now, with the powerful infusion of Artificial Intelligence through AI Builder and Copilot, the platform is soaring to new heights, empowering organizations to embed intelligence directly into their operations.

The platform offers the capabilities of AI without much coding knowledge. This isn’t just about making things faster; it’s about making them smarter. Let’s dive into how AI Builder and Copilot are transforming the Power Platform landscape.

AI Builder: Bringing AI Models to Everyone

Imagine extracting data from invoices, classifying customer feedback, predicting sales trends, or detecting objects in images – all without writing a single line of complex AI code. That’s the magic of AI Builder. It democratizes AI, making sophisticated machine learning models accessible to business users and citizen developers within the Power Platform.

Key capabilities of AI Builder:

• Pre-built AI Models: AI Builder offers a range of ready-to-use models for common business scenarios. These models are trained with data and if your requirements are matching with the training data, these models could be used. This includes:
  • Form Processing: Automatically extracts information from structured and unstructured documents like invoices, receipts, and contracts.
  • Object Detection: Identifies and counts objects within images, useful for inventory management or quality control.
  • Sentiment Analysis: Analyzes text to determine the emotional tone (positive, negative, neutral), perfect for understanding customer reviews or social media mentions.
  • Text Recognition (OCR): Extracts text from images and PDFs into a machine-readable format.
  • Prediction: Forecasts future outcomes based on historical data, aiding in sales forecasting, churn prediction, and more.
  • Category Classification: Organizes text into custom categories, streamlining tasks like routing customer inquiries.
• Custom AI Models: For unique business needs, AI Builder allows you to train your own custom models using your specific data, ensuring precision and relevance to your operations.
• Seamless Integration: AI Builder is deeply embedded across the Power Platform:
  • Power Apps: Easily add AI components to your apps, allowing users to interact with AI models directly, for instance, scanning a business card to auto-populate a form.
  • Power Automate: Incorporate AI models into your automated workflows, enabling intelligent decision-making and data processing. Imagine a flow that automatically processes incoming invoices, extracts key data, and routes them for approval.
  • Dataverse: AI models can leverage data stored in Dataverse, providing a unified and intelligent data layer for your applications.

The Impact: AI Builder frees up employees from tedious, manual tasks, allowing them to focus on higher-value, strategic work. It streamlines processes, reduces errors, and provides actionable insights that drive better business decisions.

Copilot: Your AI-Powered Co-Pilot for the Power Platform

While AI Builder empowers you to build intelligence into your solutions, Copilot acts as your intelligent assistant, accelerating the creation and interaction with Power Platform components using natural language. Think of it as having an expert by your side, guiding you and even generating elements for you.

How Copilot enhances the Power Platform experience:

• Natural Language Interaction: Simply describe what you want in plain English, and Copilot will help you build it.
  • Power Apps: Describe the app you envision (“I need an app to track office attendance”), and Copilot can generate the basic app structure and data model. You can then refine it through conversation.
  • Power Automate: Tell Copilot the workflow you want to automate (“When an email with an attachment arrives, save the attachment to SharePoint and send a notification”), and it can generate the flow for you. It can also help you understand and optimize existing flows.
  • Power BI: Ask natural language questions about your data, and Copilot can generate reports, visuals, and even DAX queries, making data analysis accessible to everyone.
  • Power Pages: Generate website content, forms, and intelligent bots for your web portals using natural language prompts.
  • Copilot Studio: Quickly create conversational agents by describing their purpose, and Copilot will generate topics, trigger phrases, and logic.
• Accelerated Development: By translating natural language into actionable components, Copilot significantly reduces development time and complexity, making it easier for both citizen and professional developers to bring ideas to life.
• Enhanced Insights and Efficiency: Copilot can summarize reports, suggest content, provide contextual help, and even identify potential errors, boosting overall productivity and understanding.

The true power emerges when AI Builder and Copilot work in tandem. Imagine using Copilot to describe a Power App that needs to process customer feedback. Copilot helps you build the app structure, and then you integrate an AI Builder sentiment analysis model within that app to automatically categorize the feedback. This not only speeds up development but also injects sophisticated intelligence directly into the business process, requiring minimal technical expertise.

In essence, AI Builder provides the ready-to-use or custom-trained AI “brains,” while Copilot provides the intuitive, natural language “voice” that helps you leverage those brains across the Power Platform.

The Future of Business Automation is Intelligent

With AI Builder and Copilot, Microsoft is democratizing AI, making it a tangible and transformative force for every organization. Whether you’re a business user looking to streamline a daily task or a professional developer building enterprise-grade solutions, the Power Platform with its AI capabilities offers unparalleled opportunities to:

• Automate more intelligently: Move beyond simple rule-based automation to processes that can understand, adapt, and predict.
• Gain deeper insights: Unlock hidden value from your data through powerful AI analysis.
• Innovate faster: Rapidly develop and deploy AI-powered solutions, accelerating your digital transformation journey.
• Empower everyone: Put the power of AI into the hands of those closest to the business problems.

The era of intelligent automation is here, and with AI Builder and Copilot, your Power Platform is ready to lead the charge. Start exploring these capabilities today and bring a new dimension of efficiency and innovation for your business!

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