To help your team take on these complex challenges and drive your business toward future success, it’s essential to invest in the right technology.

Discover the next generation of intelligent business applications

The future of business starts today—and we’re excited to invite you to get a first look at what you need to get ahead at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event. Watch product leaders guide you through the new capabilities. See hundreds of new product features, advancements, and innovations to help you drive revenue, delight customers, increase visibility, and strengthen collaboration across your organization.

Learn about the new features and capabilities being released across Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, including:

Conversation boosters in Power Virtual Agents empower everyone in your organization to build useful bots in minutes. Conversation boosters enable you to tailor the conversations your bots have with context based on your data by simply pointing your bot to a URL when there’s no topic already available. After searching your organization’s information, results are filtered and summarized in Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. Your bots will be able to adapt and answer users’ questions for these new topics in minutes.

Here’s a preview of bots guided by conversation boosters—all done without the need for manual work:

See conversation boosters in action for both customer-facing bots and employee-facing scenarios, and for Copilot features—also available to try now.

With Copilot in Power Virtual Agents, AI capabilities simplify and speed up bot building—saving makers hours previously spent making and maintaining bots and topics. Tell Copilot what data to collect and a dialog will be created with trigger phrases, entities, variables, and branching. You can also use natural language prompts to refine your bots and update them manually with an intuitive graphical user interface.

More enhancements in advanced bot building include an intuitive conversation authoring studio, end-to-end software as a service (SaaS), and thousands of prebuilt connectors that make it easier for professional and citizen developers to create, collaborate, deploy, and manage intelligent bots.

PowerFX also supports bot building with features to access and use data, eventing logic, and code—and create interactive visual cards for conversations.

And there’s much more in store. You’ll also see how these solutions work for businesses like yours with demos hosted by Microsoft product experts. You’ll hear from Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Business Applications and Platforms, about how to innovate with business applications to grow your business faster than ever. The team behind the Microsoft Power Platform 2023 release wave 1 will also share insights and guide you through how all these updates, advancements, and new tech will help you:

• Expand visibility, reduce time, and enhance creativity in your departments and teams with unified, AI-powered capabilities.
• Empower your employees to focus on revenue-generating tasks while automating repetitive tasks.
• Connect people, data, and processes across your organization with modern collaboration tools.
• Innovate without limits using the latest in low-code development, including new next-generation AI capabilities.

AI innovations

A major theme of this digital event is the evolution of AI. Leaders in the field will show you some of the latest developments in AI that are leading the next generation of business applications. You’ll also join us for a special session that includes a deep dive into the tech behind language models hosted by Dr. Walter Sun, Microsoft Vice President, AI in Business Applications. Throughout the event, you’ll receive expert guidance on how to build more agile, customer-focused teams by empowering your solutions with AI and see firsthand how to get more value out of your data, collaboration, and tools.

Brand-new insights from the experts

Find out how to enhance your customer experiences across your business with a look at real-life scenarios in expert-led demos of new capabilities and features. Gain valuable insights for overcoming your current challenges from other Microsoft customers who will share their journeys. And get answers to questions from the experts during a Q&A chat.

For a range of key best practices, strategies, and insights applicable to organizations across many industries, you don’t want to miss this digital launch event.

Watch product leaders guide you through the new capabilities. We hope you’ll join us.

Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event

Tuesday, April 4, 2023

9:00 AM–10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC–7)

The post Explore new capabilities in Microsoft Power Virtual Agents at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

The first annual Power Platform Conference sponsored by Microsoft is coming to Orlando for an amazing in-person event this September, with keynotes, sessions, breakouts, and more—all dedicated to Microsoft Power Platform products: Power Automate, Power Apps, Power BI, Power Pages, and Power Virtual Agents.

Gain insights and understanding on the latest features and benefits of Power Platform from Microsoft’s senior thought leaders, software engineers, and community experts, all focused on uniting humanity and technology. Learn and connect with key innovators as they incorporate human-centered design and use discovery-based solutions to solve ever-changing business challenges.

This year features over 100 speakers and more than 150 sessions. Conference-goers will have the opportunity to connect—and reconnect—with users from around the world, building their personal and professional relationships, while gaining valuable insight into what’s new and next for Microsoft’s business applications.

Capping off the week is a conference-exclusive night at Universal Orlando, home to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter® and Islands of Adventure™!

Don’t delay—sign up for the Microsoft Power Platform Conference today! We can’t wait to see you in Orlando!

Unmissable Power Virtual Agents sessions

Power Virtual Agents will have its own track at the conference providing many opportunities for you to begin your Conversational AI journey. There will be a variety of topics including 101s, product deep dives, and hands-on workshops to suit your learning needs.

Check out this one-pager and all the links below to learn more about Power Virtual Agents.

Power Virtual Agents Sessions:

• Power Virtual Agents 101
• The Power Virtual Agents Cookbook!
• Best Practices for Envisioning and Designing Power Virtual Agents
• Building Bots Using the New Power Virtual Agents Unified Authoring Canvas
• Building IVRs and Telephony Experiences with Power Virtual Agents
• Tuning your NLU Within Power Virtual Agents
• Inclusive and Accessible Design in the Power Platform – Starter Pack!
• Successfully Roll Out Virtual Agents in the Enterprise Space : Notes From the Field Conference
• Using Custom Connectors with Power Virtual Agents and Share Your Connector with the Community
• How Conversational AI is Helping the Helpdesks in the Post-Covid-19 Pandemic World?

Hands-on Workshop: Build Your Own Intelligent Bot Using Power Virtual Agents!
Power Platform sessions including Power Virtual Agents

• Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Bi, Power Virtual Agents…What Should I Use, and When?
• Empowering Business Enablers with the Power Platform
• Governance Is Not a Dirty Word
• Governance Vision Roadmap
• Governance at Scale
• Managing the Power Platform at Scale
• Power Platform for Code First Developers & ISVs

Featured Microsoft Power Virtual Agents speakers include

• Dewain Robinson (Principal Product Manager in PVA Engineering)
• Gary Robinson (Principal Product Manager in PVA Engineering)
• Michael Vakoc (Senior Product Manager, PVA Engineering)
• Kendra Springer (Principal Design Manager, Power Virtual Agents)
• Henry Jammes (Principal Program Manager | Power CAT | PVA)
• Jack Rowbotham (Product Marketing Manager, PVA)

Featured Power Virtual Agents Community speakers include

• Dian Taylor (Business Applications MVP, Dynamics 365 | RSM)
• Gokan Ozcifi (Business Applications MVP, Microsoft Regional Director)
• Lisa Crosbie (Business Applications MVP)
• Prashant G Bhoyar (Business Applications MVP, Microsoft AI MVP, MCT, Cloud Solution Architect)
• Troy Taylor (Business Applications MVP, Senior Power Platform Consultant, Hitachi Solutions)

We are looking forward to seeing you at the first in-person annual conference for the Microsoft Power Platform!

The post Don’t miss Power Virtual Agents at the first Microsoft Power Platform Conference! appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Make sure you sign up to hear the latest and greatest for Power Virtual Agents and how we are enabling fusion bot building teams to achieve more.

Main sessions: 

Breakout: How to accelerate cloud automation and conversational bot development for developers (Wednesday, May 25th, 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM PDT))

Ask the Experts: Accelerate cloud automation and conversational bot development
On-demand: What’s new for Microsoft’s Conversational AI and Power Virtual Agents

Get involved! 

Customer Roundtable: Managing Conversational Bots in an Enterprise (Tuesday, May 24th, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM PDT)
Join the customer roundtable and share your thoughts to help shape Power Virtual Agents roadmap.

One-to-One Consultations on Power Virtual Agents
Sign up to speak with some of our product managers in engineering about your conversational bot projects.

Other Power Platform sessions: 

Keynote: Innovate with collaborative apps and low code (Tuesday, May 24th,  10:50 AM – 11:10 AM PDT)

Into Focus: Low Code solutions using Microsoft Power Platform  (Wednesday, May 25th, 11:15 AM – 12:00 PM PDT)

Breakout: Power up your development efforts with the latest low code innovations (Tuesday, May 24th, 12:30 PM – 1:15 PM PDT)

On demand: Implement Power Platform with Architecture Best Practices and Fusion Development
On demand: Exciting innovations in Power Automate

Learn. Connect. Discover. Let’s innovate without compromise, develop creatively, and find out what more you can do with Power Virtual Agents.

Get started

If you want to learn more about Power Virtual Agents prior to Microsoft Build, be sure to visit aka.ms/LearnPVA.

Don’t forget to use #PowerVirtualAgents to share what excites you about the announcements.

The post Sign up now – Power Virtual Agents at Microsoft Build (May 24-26) appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Building a more agile future

That’s why we’re excited to invite you to the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event on April 6. Register now for your first look at hundreds of new features, enhancements, and innovations to transform your business into a more agile, customer-centric organization.

Catch all the latest advancements across Power Virtual Agents being unveiled, including:

• Enhanced authoring experience with Microsoft Office-like commenting.
• Integration with Power Apps portals without using any code.
• Improved data loss prevention options.
• Proactive bot update messaging in Microsoft Teams.

And that’s just the start. You’ll also learn how new features across Microsoft business applications are already helping our customers navigate change and seize opportunities. You’ll hear from Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Business Applications & Platform, about how your business can innovate by modernizing processes and uncovering game-changing insights. Then listen in as senior Microsoft engineers and experts behind the technology guide you through the latest advancements in Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform 2022 release wave 1 and how they’ll help you:

• Adapt quickly to change as new business priorities, market conditions, and customer opportunities emerge.
• Innovate everywhere by solving problems with solutions that ease collaboration and work seamlessly together.
• Deliver more value to your customers in less time by quickly adopting or enhancing solutions that accelerate results.
• Create more memorable customer experiences by modernizing your processes and uncovering insights into your supply chain.

Join us to find out more about the ongoing investments for Power Virtual Agents in these areas:

• Seamless integrations across Power Platform, Microsoft Teams, Dynamics 365, Azure Bot Framework and Cognitive Services
• Enabling teams of pro-code and citizen users to develop solutions together, on a single platform, with the tools of their choice.
• Benefits from the broader Power Platform capabilities such as connectors, governance, security, certifications, and reporting.
• Advanced conversational capabilities in a simple & intuitive way with Adaptive Cards, Integration with Azure Bot Composer and Cognitive Services
• Pricing models that allow organizations to grow their Conversational AI solutions

Fresh insights

Innovation in AI, mixed reality, and industry solutions is enabling a new generation of agile organizations. Understand the why and how behind the trends with insights and best practices from industry leaders on how to accelerate results. Have questions for the experts? You’ll have a chance to ask them during the live Q&A chat. You don’t want to miss this digital launch event packed full of ways to help you adapt fast, collaborate with ease, innovate together, and make a positive impact.

Register now. We hope to see you there.

Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event
Wednesday, April 6, 2022
9:00 AM–10:30 AM PT (UTC-7)

The post See what’s new for Power Virtual Agents at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

The Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event is almost here. Join us on April 6, 2021, from 9–10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC -7) to discover how new innovations coming to the 2021 wave 1 release will give you the tools you need to transform your business by:

• Bringing a new level of innovation and agility to your organization with modular applications that all work together.
• Unifying relationships, processes, and data with connected, comprehensive, cloud business applications across your organization.
• Gaining end-to-end visibility while enabling your teams to achieve greater outcomes faster.
• Thriving as your business changes by extending existing applications and building new solutions.
• Giving your organization the tools it needs to provide a safer workplace while maintaining productivity as teams work remotely.

You’ll be able to participate in a live Q&A chat and hear from James Phillips, President, Microsoft Digital Transformation Platform, as he shares stories from customers about how they use Microsoft business applications to drive success.

You’ll also hear from the executives and engineers behind the technology as they discuss the new features and capabilities of Power Virtual Agents. Here’s a high-level overview:

• Authoring experience improvements with topic suggestions from bot sessions, image and video support, and new topic trigger management.
• Custom bot content created in Bot Framework Composer is now directly embeddable and executable from within Power Virtual Agents, so collaboration between bot makers and pro developers is easier than ever.
• New @mention capability for bots created in Microsoft Teams provides the ability to share that bot with a security group.
• Better error handling improves integration with Power Automate.
• New PCI and HITRUST certifications and support for the government cloud.

And that’s just the start. Register today to ensure you don’t miss a single update, insight, or in-depth product demonstration from the experts behind them.

Come join us. And experience tomorrow’s innovations for your business—today.

Register now >

The post Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event | April 6, 2021 appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Due to the unprecedented times we’ll be delivering Microsoft Ignite virtually this year, from Sept 22-24.  If you haven’t had a chance to register yet, there is still time so we hope you will take a few minutes and register.

This Ignite we’re going to focus on how Power Virtual Agents empowers all your developers to help create powerful chatbots with conversational AI.  Both the Power Virtual Agents sessions will be available on-demand with links directly to the sessions below.  For pro developers, check out the session on how Power Virtual Agents will soon include the Bot Framework Composer, enabling pro developers to create sophisticated bot topics which support adaptive dialogs.  These topics are designed by pro developers to respond to dynamic queries and enable the chatbot to intelligently adapt to a conversation.

We’re also very excited to enhance the experience for citizen developers by adding the Power Virtual Agents authoring canvas in Teams as part of our new Power Platform and Teams integration.  Now Teams users can easily create fully functional bots inside the Teams UI.  As Teams is rapidly becoming the productivity tool for organizations, we’re excited to add Power Virtual Agents into Teams so that users can quickly and efficiently create chatbots right from Teams, and also easily publish/distribute their bot in Teams for employees and teammates to use. PVA is now included in the Teams license so all Teams users can build PVA bots in Teams. Both these sessions will showcase the expansive capabilities offered with Power Virtual Agents, fully empowering both citizen and pro developers to create enterprise ready chatbots which are both easy to use, but can handle sophisticated use cases.

Below is a list of the sessions focusing on Power Virtual Agents and the Power Platform at this year’s Ignite.  We hope you have a chance to join us for some of these great topics so you can learn more about the Power Platform and how it can enhance the efficiency of your organization.

Power Virtual Agents Sessions

• Building Bots with Power Virtual Agents and extending them with Microsoft Bot Framework
• Build intelligent bots for your employees using Power Virtual Agents and Microsoft Teams

Other Power Platform Live Sessions

1. Microsoft Power Platform: Fill the app gap and supercharge organizational agility
   • Live Tuesday Sept 22: 9:30 – 9:50 AM PDT
   • Replay Sept 22: 5:30 – 5:50 PM PDT
   • Replay Sept 23: 1:30 – 1:50 AM PDT

2. Build Agile Business Processes with Power Apps
   • Live Tuesday Sept 22: 11:30 – 12:00 PM PDT
   • Replay Sept 22: 7:30 – 8:00 PM PDT
   • Replay Sept 23: 3:30 – 4:00 AM PDT

3. Automate your desktop with Power Automate
   • Live Tuesday Sept 22: 1:45 – 2:15 PM PDT
   • Replay Sept 22: 9:45 – 10:25 PM PDT
   • Replay Sept 23: 5:45 – 6:15 AM PDT

4. Amplify your pro developer skills with Power Platform
   • Live Wednesday Sept 23: 12:15 – 12:45 PM PDT
   • Replay Sept 23: 8:15 – 8:45 PM PDT
   • Replay Sept 24: 4:15 – 4:45 AM PDT

5. How to responsibly scale Power Apps in your organization with a Low Code Center of Excellence
   • Live Tuesday Sept 22: 1:45 – 12:15 PM PDT
   • Replay Sept 22: 9:45 – 10:15 PM PDT
   • Replay Sept 24: 5:45 – 6:15 AM PDT

Begin Your Journey with Power Virtual Agents

We hope you explore the possibilities with Power Virtual Agents by getting started here. You can build your first chatbot in a matter of minutes and get started on delivering an engaging experience for your customers and employees.  Also, make sure to follow our blog for the latest feature updates and use cases for chatbots.  Please join our community to share your ideas, provide your comments, and even help drive the future direction of our product development.  Below are some quick links to get started on your journey!

• Power Virtual Agents Webpage
• Power Virtual Agent Technical Docs
• Power Virtual Agents Video Gallery
• Power Virtual Agents Blog

The post Power Virtual Agents at Microsoft Ignite Virtual Conference appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Join this webinar to learn about these new features from the product team. In this session, we will review what’s been released lately, including the new collaboration features like exporting and importing a bot, and the ability for multiple authors to collaborate on a bot.  We’ll look at new authoring features that enable passing in context to the bot from an external website, new Power Automate integration features, and finally, enabling your bot in multiple languages to expand your customer reach.

Start leveraging the latest that Power Virtual Agents has to offer you!

When:  July 29, 10 AM PST

Register at https://learning.eventbuilder.com/FY21WhatsNewWebinarSeries (leave the Partner ID field blank if you don’t have one) to get a link to the Live Event.

Don’t miss the opportunity to attend the What’s New Release Webinar Series, focused on What’s new in Power Virtual Agents.

The post Webinar: Power Virtual Agents – What’s new appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

The post Webinar: Use Bot Framework Skills to extend the abilities of your Power Virtual Agents bot with Azure Bot Framework appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

1. Empower subject matter experts to drive engagement in your business using Power Virtual Agents
2. Build a bot that integrates with your backend systems with Power Virtual Agent
3. Best practices for building an intelligent bot with Power Virtual Agents

	Empower subject matter experts to drive engagement in your business using Power Virtual Agents Cleber Mori; Emma Archer; Omar Aftab; Pawan Taparia Learn more about how customers are improving engagement and productivity and reducing costs through personalized conversational intelligent virtual agents. In this session, get an overview of all new…
	Build a bot that integrates with your backend systems with Power Virtual Agent Marina Kolomiets; Pawan Taparia; Salem Bacha Learn how to integrate Microsoft Power Virtual Agents with your backend systems to enable bots to act on behalf of your users. As part of this session, we cover invoking Power Automate flows and call…
	Best practices for building an intelligent bot with Power Virtual Agents Murali Kumanduri Learn more about best practices that our customers follow to build successful virtual agents. This session covers what it takes to build a virtual agent that provides the best business outcomes, and how to improve your virtual agent and drive engagement…

Visit us at our Community Forum to post questions and discuss Power Virtual Agents.

The post Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2020 – Power Virtual Agents sessions quick reference appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Since the release of Power Virtual Agents December of 2019, the development team has added a myriad of new features! In this webinar your hosts Reza Dorrani, Tomasz Poszytek, and Charles Sterling will take you on a tour of these new features, show you how to use them, walk through hard earned best practices and make themselves available to answer your questions. Session highlights include how to call Q&A Maker from Power Virtual Agents, setting up AAD authentication, a tour of the new Power Virtual Agents Community and how to use Office Graph API to access the user’s identity.

When: May 15^th 9 a.m. PST

Where: https://aka.ms/PVACommunityCall

Agenda:

• NEW Power Virtual Agents Community by Reza Dorrani
• Using suggested Topics and calling Q&A maker by Tomasz Poszytek
• Topic Redirection/Go to Another Topic by Charles Sterling
• No intent/Fall back by Tomasz Poszytek
• Custom Canvas by Charles Sterling
• Setting up and using integrated AAD Authentication by Reza Dorrani
• Enhanced flows integration and calling graph API by Tomasz Poszytek
• Enhanced Analytics by Charles Sterling
• Power Virtual Agents in a Day by Reza Dorrani
• Q&A

Presentation: Power Virtual Agents What is New and Exciting.pptx

Our presenters

Reza Dorrani



Reza is a Microsoft Business Applications MVP & Principal consultant at Catapult Systems. He is a Microsoft Power Apps & Microsoft Power Automate community dual super user. He was awarded the Microsoft Flow All Star award by the community. He is also the founder and leader of the Houston Power Apps and Power Automate User Group

Tomasz Poszytek

I do believe in enabling organizations to work more effectively and I’m helping them to achieve it by leveraging their effectiveness through their business processes digitalization and optimization. I do have a strong analytical background being a Business Analyst for years. I have lots of experience in Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and Power Virtual Agents), but also in other workflow platforms. I very much enjoy to continuously learn to stay up to date and to share my knowledge not only with my customers, but with technical communities as well. I’m building business processes and applications that are easy for users’ to stick to, so they can follow and understand them. In overall I transform processes to be more reliable and effortless. I am also a co-organizer of SharePoint Saturday Warsaw and active community member, blogger and international speaker.

Charles Sterling



https://aka.ms/chucksbio

 

The post What is new and exciting for Power Virtual Agents Webinar May 15th appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.