This week, Microsoft have introduced Copilot – next generation AI that will enhance all areas of the Power Platform and Microsoft 365.
Currently in a limited Preview in the US, Microsoft Copilot promises to bring the power of AI to App building, Flow generation and more.
Microsoft Copilot in Power Apps
By simply describing the app you want to build, Copilot can take that request and build your initial app. It can then help to populate it with sample data and make suggestions for improvements.
Also, by embedding a Copilot control into your app, you can allow users to ask questions about their data using natural language, such as “What is the most common type of support case?” and receive instant responses, without having to manually query data.
Microsoft Copilot in Power Automate
Although Power Automate already has a feature to use natural language to create a Flow (introduced last October), Copilot sits right inside the Flow editor and allows the user to to have open-ended and conversational experiences while building a Flow. During the build process, they will be able to ask questions and get assistance making improvements and changes, just by using natural language and not requiring specialist knowledge on how Power Automate works.
Copilot will also be coming to Power Automate Desktop Flows too, which will allow for the use of AI for tasks such as:
- Content creation: creating daily communications to teams or on social media
- Customer service: gathering feedback and responding accordingly
- Back office: the fast extraction of data, such as phone numbers, addresses and amounts, from documents
Microsoft Copilot in Power Virtual Agents
When creating new Topics for your chatbot you will be able to use natural language to describe the information you want to capture, such as “add a question to ask the user for their date of birth” or “add two message variations to all questions in the topic” and Copilot will automatically carry out the changes for you.
What about the rest of the Power Platform?
Although AI enhancements have been announced for other products such as Power BI and Power Pages, there have been no details published yet. However, more AI-related announcements are expected at Microsoft’s Business Applications Launch Event on April 4th.
Will Copilot be coming to Microsoft 365 too?
Yes. Microsoft’s long-standing office productivity tools such as Word and Excel will also see the huge benefits that AI can bring. This includes:
- summarising your Outlook Inbox to highlight the most important emails
- asking Excel to analyse data and automatically producing trend information
- generating a PowerPoint presentation based on the content of a Word document
- producing an automatic summary of a Teams meeting
For a summary of these upcoming features and more, please refer to Microsoft’s own Copilot introduction for Microsoft 365:
Summary
As AI continues to rapidly evolve, it is becoming increasingly evident that it will have a significant impact on various aspects of our daily lives. It comes as no surprise that the technology we rely on for our work will also be subject to these changes. With the introduction and expansion of Copilot, we can expect to see great boosts to our productivity and the quality of service that businesses can provide. We look forward to further Copilot announcements in due course and will report on them as they happen.
