The answer usually isn’t model quality or tooling. It’s whether organizations are establishing the right constraints, setting the right ambition, and designing for scale from day one. The counterintuitive lesson I keep seeing: the organizations moving fastest are the ones that kept their guardrails tightest.

As I shared with Keith, organizations that succeed don’t treat AI as a side project. One customer we discussed, a leading American multinational financial services company, is a good example of getting this right. Their first AI deployment wasn’t about a vague AI-adoption goal, or a generalist chatbot. It focused on a concrete, human problem: employees across branches spending time searching through hundreds of forms and procedures during customer interactions. The agent allowed branch staff—across consumer, small business, and other roles—to describe what they needed in natural language and be routed instantly to the right process.

The impact was immediate: shorter wait times, smoother interactions, and more time focused on the customer, without introducing new risk. Importantly, the agent didn’t approve transactions or make financial decisions. It helped people move faster, and the guardrails were exactly what made that possible at scale.

By setting clear ambition while focused on a high-impact, low-risk use case, they were able to build confidence in the technology. They created momentum while not forcing the organization to compromise governance.

Humans stay in control

Scaling AI successfully means keeping people in the loop. I’ve seen that the most successful implementations are explicitly human led. Transparency is key. Audit trails, activity logs, and clear explanations of agent behavior build trust and make systems easier to improve over time.

Success also requires the right kind of guardrails. In regulated industry workflows, it’s not enough for an agent to be right, it needs to be explainable. For example, in a power of attorney verification—agents can handle extraction, matching, and analysis in seconds. Ambiguous or high-risk cases are escalated to humans. With agents as colleagues, teams can spend less time on routine checks and more time applying judgments where they actually matter.

Scaling without sprawl

As adoption grows, the challenge isn’t just proliferation—it’s clarity. Successful organizations distinguish between:

• Personal productivity agents.
• Team-level agents.
• Enterprise agents.

Each category carries different expectations for governance and oversight. A personal agent helping someone summarize documents doesn’t carry the same risk as an agent touching customer data across systems. Builders can solve problems for themselves or their teams, but expanding solutions generally triggers reviews and accountability.

Governance as an enabler

The fastest-moving organizations have created clear, governed pathways for experimentation and deployment of agentic solutions. New solutions are started in constrained environments with limited data access. As they prove value and maturity, they can be promoted into environments with broader reach and tighter oversight. This approach enables innovation while maintaining visibility, accountability, and control over data access and sharing.

Here’s the reality leaders can’t ignore: people will use AI regardless. The choice is whether they do it inside your platform, with your data protected and your policies enforced, or outside of it.

The urgency has changed

Over the past year what’s changed most isn’t the technology—it’s the level of urgency. Organizations no longer ask why they need AI. They ask how to govern it so they can move now.

In the organizations I’ve worked with, the platforms and controls are often already there. The differentiator is execution: choosing the right first problems, designing with governance in mind, and scaling in a way that keeps humans firmly in control.

That’s how AI moves from a pilot to production—and stays there.

Watch my full conversation with Keith Kirkpatrick to hear more real-world examples and lessons from regulated enterprises putting AI to work today.

The post Scaling AI with purpose: How organizations are balancing ambition and control appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Jump to: Popular categories | Organizations (A-Z)

Featured stories

Accenture Power Platform for 50k newly skilled makers	Pacific Gas and Electric 300+ solutions generate ~$75M in savings annually
Ericsson Innovation through collaboration aims to save 1 million hours	Holland America Line Agent built with Copilot studio handles thousands of conversations per week

Recent stories

ABN AMRO Bank | Accelleron | Banco de Crédito del Perú (BCP) | Deutsche Bahn | Ericsson | Evergy | EY | Fortune Brands Innovations | Galeries Lafayette | Holland America Line | John Cockerill | Lotte Hotels & Resorts | ManpowerGroup | Nsure.com | NTPF | Uber Technologies | Virgin Money | ZF | Zurich Insurance

Makers in action

Jacqui Peck Audiologist builds apps for HAPEE program	Foyin Olajide-Bello IT Pro creates a community of citizen developers	Rebecca Sackett Citizen developer digitizes manufacturing processes
Lauren Taylor Principal uses Power Apps for reading fluency	Brian Hodel Code-first developer automates complex processes	Martin Lee Dispatcher builds over forty apps

See also

• 100+ customer story videos highlighting Power Platform and Copilot Studio
  Champions driving change with Power Platform
• Professional developers using Power Platform

Popular categories

• Generative AI and Copilot – Accelerating development and streamlining processes with generative AI. E.g. ABN AMRO, Holland America, Virgin Money, and more.
• Scale and governance – Organizations with a center of excellence and enterprise-wide adoption. E.g. Accenture, Deutsche Bahn, ZF Group, and more.
• SAP + Power Platform – Customers who have built Power Platform solutions integrated with SAP systems. E.g. Coca-Cola Beverages Vietnam, EY – Customer onboarding, John Cockerill, and more.
• Fusion teams – Cross-functional teams with pro-developers and business users collaborating to build impactful solutions. E.g. Nsure, Rabobank, Zurich Insurance, and more.
• By industry – Education, Financial Services, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Media & Communications, Retail, Government, Non-profit, and more.
• By company size – small, medium, and large businesses.
• By technologies used – Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages, Copilot Studio, Dataverse.
• By maker persona – Citizen development, Pro-devs, IT-Pros, Partners.
• By scenario category – Assets, Customers, Employees, Products/Services, Supply.

Stories by organization name (A-Z)

ABN AMRO Bank ABN AMRO evaluated several platforms before picking Microsoft Copilot Studio to build their customer-facing “Anna” agent and the “Abby” agent, which provide support to the bank’s employees. The new agents are consistently delivered high customer satisfaction, higher accuracy rate for intent recognition, more precise and reliable interactions, and faster time to market customer story
Accenture Accenture, a global professional services company, encourages a culture of innovation, and has enabled Microsoft Power Platform for over 700,000 employees across the globe. customer story | case study on Accenture.com | interview on Power CAT Live
ADH Clinic A small business owner went digital, staying open during COVID-19. The solution uses Microsoft Bookings, Forms, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dataverse. customer story
Ardent Mills Ardent Mills, with over 40 locations specializing in flour, quinoa, and organic & gluten-free products, uses Power Apps solutions daily. They adopted Dataverse to build a paperless, modern mill. customer story
Arm Arm, a leading semiconductor and software design company in Cambridge, England, used the CoE Starter Kit to manage the platform and build a thriving maker community. customer story
Armanino Armanino used Power Apps connected to Azure SQL to build a workspace scheduling solution that helps manage office space for its agile workforce. customer story
Balfour Beatty Balfour Beatty, a leading UK construction contractor, used Power Platform, Dataverse, and Azure services to streamline over 70 legacy documents in their processes for new businesses, bid management, and project delivery. customer story
Blackmores A team of full stack developers used Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, along with Microsoft Dataverse, to consolidate and unify several systems. Includes apps for coaching sales staff, managing vendors, and more. customer presentation
Brown-Forman Brown-Forman, with over 150 years of history and brands like Jack Daniel’s, Herradura, and Korbel, used Power Automate for desktop RPA capabilities and connectors to integrate systems like Salesforce, Workday, and Google Workspace, saving thousands of hours over a short period of seven months. customer story
Call2Recycle Call2Recycle, a non-profit, partnered with EFOQUS to digitize sales, finance, and operations using Dynamics 365. They used Power Pages, Power Automate, and Power BI to extend their Dynamics 365 implementation and create an external portal for e-bike retailer enrollment and training. customer story | video
Centrica Centrica, an international energy services company serving millions in the UK, expanded their Power Platform success by investing in Microsoft Dataverse and establishing a Center of Excellence for scalable adoption. customer story
Chevron Chevron has built a scaled up Center of Excellence with robust governance processes enabling hundreds of makers to build thousands of apps. blog | customer presentation | Center of Excellence deep dive
Choice Aviation Choice Aviation Services, a US-based international airline cargo company, used Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI to create a unique logistics system, setting new efficiency standards for the industry. customer story
Cineplex Cineplex, one of Canada’s leading media and entertainment companies, developed innovative solutions for finance, guest services, and other departments. This includes scalable RPA desktop flows with deep integration to backend systems as well as AI-driven copilots. Together, these solutions save the company over 30,000 hours a year in manual processing time. customer story
City of Kobe Built multiple solutions using the entire Power Platform to respond to COVID, providing status on special cash payments and information via chatbots and dashboards. customer story
City of Ottawa City of Ottawa IT used a fusion development approach to deploy chatbots for citizens and employees. Built with Microsoft Copilot Studio (formerly Power Virtual Agents), these chatbots integrate with various systems using Power Automate and custom code. customer story | MBAS presentation
Coca-Cola Bottling Company United Power Automate desktop flows were used to automate complex back-end processes for managing vending machines cartridge replacements. customer story | video | MBAS presentation
Custom Air Products and Services A Power Platform solution by citizen developer Rebecca Sackett tracks the entire lifecycle of HVAC units from “cradle to crate” through the manufacturing process. customer story | video | presentation | demo
Degrees of Change Using Microsoft Power Platform, Dataverse, and generative AI, Degrees of Change, which provides equitable access to education for underrepresented youth, built apps to go paperless, improve application scoring, and serve more students. customer story | video
Ecolab Ecolab leveraged Power Platform integrated with Dynamics 365, Azure, and Microsoft 365 to build “The Hub” – a unified app for managing core sales and service processes. customer story | MBAS presentation
ECS Using Power Automate and AI Builder, a team member at ECS, a professional services organization, automated the extraction of performance data from PDFs and generated Power BI reports, saving the company hundreds of hours of manual labor while delivering innovative solutions to government agencies. customer story
Electrolock Using Power Apps, Power Automate, and Microsoft Dataverse, Electrolock, a premiere provider of insulation products and solutions for the manufacturing industry, partnered with Confluent to build an inventory management solution. customer story
Ericsson Power Platform has enabled Swedish telecom giant Ericsson to achieve results few would have imagined possible. They have enjoyed a threefold adoption over the last 18 months, with 10,000 makers currently on the platform. Their ambitious target for 2025 is to save one million hours. customer story
Evergy Evergy is a utility providing electricity to 1.7 million customers in the midwestern United States. They started using Power Automate for desktop RPA capabilities in 2020 and have since created 275 Power Platform solutions that are saving the company over 120,000 hours a year across multiple divisions – from field operations to back-office support. customer story
EY Using Power Platform, Dataverse, and Azure, code-first professional developers working in fusion teams built digital solutions that integrate with third-party services. Scenarios include processing emergency loans, managing global employee mobility, transforming an annual salary reviews, and managing quality and risks. story – SAP integration | story – loan processing | story – employee mobility | story – EarnEY | story – customer onboarding | presentation – Assurance Management Tool
FortisAlberta FortisAlberta won a Canadian Safety Technology Award for this Microsoft Power Platform solution. To more efficiently document Injury Prevention Plans (IPPs), they transitioned away from paper forms to using Power Apps and Power BI. Solution built by Fidelity Factory. customer story
G&J Pepsi G&J Pepsi has digitally transformed their organization with Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI, equipping nearly 900 field personnel with mobile apps that have saved the organization over $1.5 million. customer story | video
Hanover Insurance Business and IT leaders at Hanover Insurance have partnered closely to automate time consuming manual tasks during the underwriting process. They successfully adopted Power Automate for desktop RPA capabilities and built custom apps using Power Apps to drive rapid automation. customer story | MBAS presentation
Hearing Australia A citizen developer at Hearing Australia, in partnership with the IT team, used Power Apps and Dataverse to streamline how Community Engagement Officers, audiologists, and the operations team collect and track critical program information. customer story | video – fusion team
Hexion Sales staff use a Power Apps canvas app with AI Builder capabilities to scan business cards at events. Data is integrated into Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Dataverse. In addition, 80+ Power Automate flows are used to automate several business processes. customer story
IKEA France The Power Community at IKEA France, with around 1,500 users, has developed 430 apps to meet the needs of its 34 stores and 4 national warehouses. The People & Culture app, accessible to 12,000 employees in France, has replaced paper forms for requests like submitting receipts or changing addresses. customer story (English) | customer story (French)
IKEA Sweden Power Apps apps are used to manage in-store kitchen sales appointments, B2B sales pipeline, and speed up customer support requests. Built by Microsoft Gold Partner Capgemini. customer story
John Cockerill A team of professional developers leveraged the speed of low code development with the rigor of Azure DevOps to develop high quality, enterprise-wide apps. Over 30 Power Platform solutions are used by more than 2,000 daily users. They range from desk space reservation to a time tracking solution with integration into the company’s SAP system. customer story
Johnson Controls Serving four million customers in 150 countries, more than 100,000 Johnson Controls employees create and deploy systems and digital solutions that optimize building performance, safety, sustainability, and comfort. Utilizing Microsoft Power Platform, Johnson Controls is building a new class of training deployment and tracking solutions. customer story
Kao Corporation Kao Corporation used Microsoft Power Platform to create digital solutions for frontline workers across their factories in Japan. A single citizen developer project resulted in an efficiency increase of 480 hours per month. This is one of the 250+ apps in use across ten facilities in Japan. customer story
Kelly Roofing Power Apps mobile app used to capture photos and status updates at job sites. Integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365, Dataverse, SharePoint and Teams. Built by PowerObjects. customer story
Komatsu Australia Komatsu is an industry-leading equipment manufacturer and supplier. They used Power Automate (RPA) and AI Builder to automate a manual invoice fixing process for 52K+ invoices a year. They went from purchasing licenses to deploying the solution in production within a short span of four weeks. They’ve also built an Automation Center of Excellence and a Citizen Developer Program. customer story
Leonard Cheshire Care workers use Power Apps canvas apps and model-driven apps, along with Dynamics 365, to manage health care for people with disabilities. Built by QUANTIQ. news article | MBAS presentation
Lerøy Seafood Group Lerøy Seafood Group, the third largest salmon and trout producer globally, purchased 4,000 Premium Power Apps licenses as part of their digitization strategy. Leveraging an automated Center of Excellence, they developed new enterprise applications, saving millions annually in operational costs. customer story
London Heathrow Airport From security guard to IT User Adoption Specialist, Samit Saini has built apps that improve the passenger experience at Heathrow airport. He has trained a community of super users who are now building apps and digitizing business processes at Heathrow. video | customer story
London’s Air Ambulance Charity The life-saving charity treats an average of five patients every day. They partnered with Intelogy to build a suite of checklist apps that have replaced the existing paper-based processes. The solutions use Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and Dataverse. customer story | video
Mars Mars, Incorporated, is a global manufacturer of confectionery, pet food and food products, and provides animal care services. They automated multiple enterprise IT use cases using Power Automate, such as managing extension approvals, SharePoint site requests and migration of network files. They have over 10K cloud flows and 4K Power Apps solutions. customer story
Metro Bank A Power Apps tablet app connected to Dynamics 365 is used to welcome customers and manage the appointment experience when the visit the bank. Ignite presentation with demo | Forbes article | customer story
Miami Dolphins The Miami Dolphins, well known for football, also own Hard Rock Stadium, which hosts a wide range of sports and entertainment events. To free its service agents from repeatedly answering routine questions, the organization used Microsoft Copilot Studio (formerly Power Virtual Agents) to build a chatbot that’s now available 24×7 on their web properties. customer story | video
Microsoft Account Planning Global sales and marketing organization digitally transforms the account planning process for thousands of enterprise accounts by using a Power Apps canvas app, Power Automate and Power BI connected to Dataverse. customer story
Microsoft Global Demand Center The Global Demand Center (GDC) is the connected sales and marketing engine that runs all commercial marketing campaigns for the company. In partnership with Accenture and Avanade, they used Power Automate, Power Apps, Copilot Studio (formerly Power Virtual Agents), and Power BI to reinvent operations and recover 25% of capacity and budget. customer story
Microsoft HR Mobile suite of apps deployed to all Microsoft employees for viewing employee news, people profiles, global holidays, reporting vacation time, sending kudos and more. customer story | MBAS presentation | Demos
Microsoft Operations Citizen developers within Microsoft built an “Intelligent Launch Assistant” that lets release managers quickly define the scope of a launch, document change requests, track issues and risks, and more. Intelligent launch assistant
The National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) The National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) transitioned from a time-consuming, Excel-based process to the Patient Access Management System (PAMS) developed by Spanish Point Technologies using Power Platform. Since its 2019 launch, PAMS has managed patient numbers growing from 30,000 to over 160,000, significantly reducing waiting times. customer story
Novo Nordisk The Global Clinical Development department at Novo Nordisk started their Power Platform journey in Dec 2019 with access to premium licenses and the full capabilities of the platform, including Portals. They accelerated adoption during COVID-19, built several applications, and are expanding to other parts of the organization. MBAS presentation
NSure Nsure.com is a proprietary online insurance shopping platform that enables consumers to transparently compare home and auto insurance quotes from more than 50 top-rated insurers and purchase a policy within minutes. A back-end system driven by Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and Azure services automates much of the process. customer story
Office Depot Office depot saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by rapidly creating multiple Power Apps solutions that run embedded in Teams. An example is the Payroll Action Form app that replaced a fax process and resulted in faster and more accurate payments to associates. video
Oslo Agency for Health Oslo Agency for Health is the organization responsible for providing digital services to Oslo’s healthcare sector. Using Power Apps, Dataverse, Power Automate and Power BI, they built 25 apps to support patient-doctor communications, contact tracing, covid-19 test booking, vaccinations and more. In just four months, the number of users went from 30 to 3,000. customer story
Pacific Gas & Electric In less than a year, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) launched its Center of Excellence, scaled it across nine business units, and delivered 132 solutions including an app for tracking equipment shipped to emergency sites, an FAQ chatbot for service desk requests, and unattended bots to help reconcile billing data. customer story | video
Progressive Insurance Professional developers used Microsoft Copilot Studio (formerly Power Virtual Agents) and fusion development to quickly create the ‘Cloudie’ chatbot. Cloudie is available for use to anyone at the 50,000-plus-employee enterprise to get quick answers for cloud-related queries. This work spurred other teams to create their own intelligent conversation chatbots using a no-code approach. customer story
PwC Big Four accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) migrated from its legacy client decision support system to an enterprise-grade, tech-enabled solution. They created a multitenant Microsoft Power Pages solution and reimagined its data model by using Microsoft Dataverse with C# plugins to handle the business logic.  customer story
QuoteWizard QuoteWizard used Microsoft Power Platform and Power Automate to build an automated, AI-powered ticket routing system to match tickets with the right talent at the right time. This has helped the company improve efficiency, hone its competitive edge, and deliver a better employee experience. customer story
R3 Retail Development Family-owned small business now runs their business on Power Platform, offering a customized app for complex project management tasks in retail installation projects. Built by Confluent. customer story
Rabobank Rabobank is the second-largest bank in the Netherlands, with more than 40,000 employees in 38 countries. As part of a broad digitization strategy, Rabobank adopted Power Platform to streamline internal processes and today runs more than 2,500 Power Apps and Power Automate solutions. Additionally, they use Microsoft Copilot Studio (formerly Power Virtual Agents) for a personalized customer support experience, automating 40-50% of customer calls – equivalent to 60,000 to 80,000 calls per month. customer story | customer story – agents
Reliable Electric Digitization of complex work order estimation process for custom electrical projects in high-end homes. customer story | blog post
SLB SLB (formerly Schlumberger) has a robust Center of Excellence with hundreds of apps, flows and dashboards built across several business units. The apps are used for managing the response to COVID, tracking fitness activities, managing promotion evaluations, executive feedback, and more. customer story | customer presentation | MBAS presentation | PDF
Seattle Visiting Nurses Association (SVNA) Seattle Visiting Nurses Association transformed their vaccine delivery process so that patients, nursing staff and admin staff could safely deliver flu vaccinations using Microsoft Dataverse, Power Apps, and Power Automate. Built by Signetic. customer story | Ignite presentation
Shell Shell Global has enabled over 4000 citizen developers through a Center of Expertise and hundreds of distributed DIY coaches, generating business value and culture improvements. Their success can be attributed to governance for use cases, local community cultivation, and committed leadership. Estimated annual savings generated by each app ranges from 35K to 3M USD. customer story | Forrester case study
SNCF SNCF started with a grassroots app development effort and now have hundreds of Power Apps in production. They’ve built a company-wide center of excellence to enable thousands on the Power Platform. customer story | video
Sonae Sonae MC, a company in the Sonae portfolio, is a leader in the food retail sector based in Portugal. Their Workplace Design team used Power Automate to build a solution to enhance their Sonae Contacto Traineeship Programme for attracting, retaining, and onboarding selected candidates. customer story | MBAS presentation
Standard Bank Standard Bank has created a center of excellence that supports over 1,500 citizen developers across the bank’s global network focused on Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft 365. They’ve built over 1,500 enterprise applications for finance, operations, and HR. customer story | MBAS presentation
Tacoma Public Schools Lauren Taylor, Principal at Manitou Public Elementary used Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI to create solutions for managing student reading assessments, return to school approvals, and more. Apps and dashboards run embedded in Microsoft Teams. customer story | Ignite keynote | video | demo
Telstra Field technicians and managers use 70+ tools for daily operations. Includes Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI. The Power Platform solutions are led by a citizen developer who is now project owner for the PowerFactory Center of Excellence initiative. customer story | video | MBAS presentation & demo
T-Mobile Teams and executives track use Power Platform with Microsoft Dataverse to track approvals for all company-wide initiatives. T-Mobile has also setup a community of champions building Power Platform solutions across multiple business units. customer story | customer story – RPA | MBAS presentation video
US Acute Care Solutions The DevOps team at Alteon Health (recently acquired by US Acute Care Solutions (USACS)) used Power Automate for desktop (RPA) to automatically take 20 million medical records each year from a wide variety of providers and process them into a coherent medical history for each patient that can be used for both care history and billing purposes. customer story
University of Oxford The world-renowned university, which teaches 25,000 students every year, has created a range of easy-to-use Power Apps solutions. These includes apps that handle course fees, funding applications, assigning colleges, childcare services for staff, and more. customer story
Virgin Atlantic The IT Lite Team delivers quick wins for business units –apps for managing VIP customers, compliance audits, cargo delivery, and more. Plus, an admin app built in Power Apps to manage the Power Apps footprint in the organization. customer story
Western States Caterpillar Western States Caterpillar Equipment Company is an authorized Caterpillar dealer for five mountain states in the United States. Pro-developers in the IT team built mobile Power Apps in collaboration with business teams. The apps are used to manage equipment rentals, sales activities, and more. customer story | MBAS presentation
Westpac Westpac, Australia’s first bank and one of the largest banks in New Zealand, has been using Microsoft Power Platform to help streamline business operations, solve IT issues, and formally support its “citizen developers”. In under two years, they have built about 1,000 apps, which are used by 15,000 people, and IT is building in-house solutions faster with low-code tools than with traditional software development. customer story
ZF Group After ZF Group made Power Platform available to all employees, adoption surged across the company. To maintain security and quality, they implemented a robust governance model to manage the growth of Power Platform solutions that doubled in a year, reaching over 25,000 apps and 37,000 active users. customer story
Zurich Insurance Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich) is an insurance company based in Zurich, Switzerland. To accelerate digital transformation, drive innovation, and streamline operations across the global enterprise, citizen and pro-developers at Zurich have turned to Microsoft Power Platform for business app development, process automation, and more. customer story

Story index

Explore this representative set of curated stories organized by popular categories.

Generative AI and Copilot Studio

Organizations have accelerated their development, streamlined processes and reduced costs using generative AI capabilities in Power Platform and Copilot Studio.

Generative AI and Copilot Studio stories: A1 Inteligência em Viagens | ABN AMRO | Degrees of Change | Cineplex | ECS | Holland America | Nsure.com | Pacific Gas & Electric | Sentreseau | Virgin Money

Scale and governance

Several organizations have built centers of excellence for Power Platform, with hundreds of makers creating apps, flows, dashboards and copilots across the organization. These organizations have used the Center of Excellence Starter Kit along with Managed Environments capabilities in the Power Platform Admin Center to setup robust governance processes and cultivate a thriving community of makers.

CoE stories: Accenture | Arm | Balfour Beatty | Centrica | Chevron | Deutsche Bahn | Evergy | Galeries Lafayette | H&M | IKEA France | John Cockerill | Komatsu Australia | Leroy Seafood Group | London Heathrow Airport | Lumen Technologies | Pacific Gas & Electric | Rabobank | SLB | Shell | SNCF | Standard Bank | Telstra | Westpac | Woodside | ZF Group | Zurich Insurance

SAP + Power Platform

Organizations are taking advantage of the rich extensibility and connectivity capabilities in Power Platform to build solutions that integrate with their SAP systems.

SAP integration stories: Avocados from Mexico | Coca-Cola Beverages Vietnam | EY – Power Post | EY – Customer onboarding | John Cockerill

Fusion teams

Fusion development teams are defined as “cross-functional teams that use data and technology to achieve business outcomes.” To support organizations that want to deliver low-code apps, automations, and bots faster and more effectively, Microsoft Power Platform offers several capabilities for fusion teams. The following are examples where individuals from a diverse set of backgrounds and roles have collaborated to rapidly build impactful digital solutions for their business.

Fusion team stories: Accenture | Balfour Beatty | City of Ottawa | Coca-Cola Bottling Company United | EY-EarnEY | Hearing Australia | John Cockerill | Novo Nordisk | Nsure | Oslo Agency for Health Progressive Insurance | Rabobank | T-Mobile | Western States Caterpillar | Zurich Insurance

Related link: Meet the developers combining Power Platform and Azure to go faster

By industry

By maker persona

Note: “Partner” refers to an implementation partner, systems integrator, or ISV, i.e. a third-party vendor.

By technologies used

Note: Power Apps and Power Automate cloud flows are included in almost all stories in the All Stories section. The ones mentioned below are a curated subset.

Related content

Watch Power Platform customer story videos
Read stories about Power Platform Champions
Read stories about RPA and Power Automate for desktop

The post Microsoft Power Platform & Copilot Studio Stories appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Source: (Gartner, October 2024)1* 

We are excited to share that Microsoft has been named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms** for the sixth year in a row. This recognition, we feel, reflects the trust of millions of users who continue to build on Microsoft Power Platform—a comprehensive low-code solution that spans application development, process automation, external websites, and intelligent copilots.  

Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms

Learn why Microsoft was named a Leader.

Read the report

The success stories of our customers demonstrate the tangible impact of Microsoft Power Platform in real-world scenarios. A few examples include:

• Pacific Gas & Electric, a US utility company that has built over 300 complex solutions delivering over $75 million in savings each year and are also adopting generative AI to further advance their service center chatbot, which alone saves $1.1 million each year in helpdesk support.
• Zurich Insurance Group, a Swiss insurance company, is skillfully balancing the growth of low-code development with the strong governance required in the highly regulated financial services industry sector. 
• Cineplex, one of Canada’s leading media and entertainment companies, has saved 30,000 hours (approximately 3.5 years) and over $1 million in the past two years by leveraging automation and copilots built on Microsoft Power Platform to improve overall customer service and reduce query handling time from 15 minutes to just 30 seconds.² 

These companies—and many more—are using Microsoft Power Platform to transform their operations by building solutions on a secure, scalable platform that effectively handles and streamlines AI integration, governance, security, and enterprise data connectivity, a platform that enables developers to build with natural language, visual interface, or code, and deploy powerful solutions to web, mobile, or Microsoft Teams with ease.

“[Microsoft] Power Platform enables us to carefully control the data that feeds our AI models and, through [Microsoft Azure] Active Directory and [Microsoft] Dataverse, also control who can access which data through those models”.

Thomas Bilbo, Principal, Product Owner, PG&E 

Let’s dive into the factors that we believe set our platform apart as a Leader. 

Microsoft Copilot in Power Platform is transforming how people use and create software, making Microsoft the low-code application platform (LCAP) of choice for customers who need to rapidly modernize their application estates for the age of AI. 

Makers can harness Copilot in Power Apps to turn natural language descriptions into functional solutions quickly. Copilot helps makers from the beginning, when they build a plan for their solution, and continues to assist with tasks like working with data models, adding new tables, creating relations between data, adding new screens and controls within the canvas experience, and crafting complex formulas in Microsoft Power Fx.  

“Building the prototype from scratch would have taken 6-8 hours. We were able to just describe in natural language and build in a few minutes.”

Ron Colvin​, Director of Innovation, CONA Services​ 

End-users benefit from out-of-the-box Microsoft Copilot capabilities when using apps built on Dataverse. And with Copilot streamlining actions such as drafting text inputs, filling forms, and filtering records, users are saving significant time on manual and repetitive tasks.  

To date, over 480,000 organizations have used AI-powered capabilities in Microsoft Power Platform. For instance, Nsure.com significantly improved efficiency and reduced costs by using generative AI to automate complex business processes, cutting manual processing time by 60% and associated costs by 50%.  

Confidently adopt at scale with enterprise-grade security and data governance  

Through Managed Environments, the suite of advanced governance capabilities that comes with Power Platform premium licenses, the platform provides a robust control framework for secure, scalable low-code adoption. Leading organizations like PG&E, Equinor, Shell, T-Mobile, Lumen Technologies, Zurich Insurance Group, and HSBC manage extensive developer networks and solutions globally with exceptional visibility and control.  

Since 2022, Deutsche Bahn (DB) Group has been using Managed Environments to drive innovation at scale across the world’s largest railway company. At Rabobank, more than 55% of their 40,000 employees use Microsoft Power Platform solutions. Similarly, Accenture has over 200,000 employees using applications built on Microsoft Power Apps every month. 

Each of our coworkers has a [Microsoft] Power Platform license to create, to solve problems for his or her team, or even for the whole company. It’s very easy to make your own app, and very fast.

Thomas Czierpke, Head of Adoption and Change Management, Microsoft 365, DB Group  

We continue to invest in Managed Environments as customers drive greater scale and sophistication on the platform. In the past year, we have introduced comprehensive application lifecycle management, including Git integration and source control, a proactive intelligent advisor for risk management, and advanced administration options. We’re equipping administrators and experienced developers with advanced tools, and our upcoming release plan will continue to add new functionality in application lifecycle management, enterprise-scale administration, licensing and capacity management, monitoring, security, and compliance. 

Start your low-code transformation now 

In the journey of digital and AI transformation, every maker and every developer plays a crucial role in driving innovation. It’s amazing to see 83,000 participants in our partner bootcamps and airlifts, with Microsoft Power Platform communities growing to 5.8 million monthly active users! It is all of you—our community—that make this journey so rewarding. 

We are grateful to all the organizations, customers, the community, and partners for this recognition—thank you for everything that you do! As a next step, dive into building with Power Apps Developer Plan. Learn more about our position as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms report. 

Sources

1. Gartner®, Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms, October 16, 2024, Oleksandr Matvitskyy,  Kimihiko Iijima, Mike West, Kyle Davis, Akash Jain, Paul Vincent

2. Microsoft Fiscal Year 2024 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call 

*This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms. 

**Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 

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In this new era, the true visionaries are those taking advantage of low-code and AI tools to build the solutions that directly affect people’s jobs and lives. The Microsoft Power Platform community keeps showing us the next frontiers of innovation and creativity. These stories from our community below showcase some of the most innovative and inspiring work we’ve seen.

• Minding mining trucks’ massive tires: Donia innovates with low-code at Kal Tire.
• A chatbot for business travel: Daniel builds an AI chatbot for his travel agency.
• From the mailroom to Microsoft MVP: Dian transforms her career with low-code.
• Supporting parents and children with autism: Raghav builds an app with low-code and AI for his son with autism.
• Modeling fashion and new technologies: Yumu goes from the runway to building with low-code.

At the third annual Power Platform Community Conference, we are excited to showcase some of the groundbreaking work emerging from our global community.

Minding mining trucks’ massive tires

Donia Strand is a Senior Business Systems Analyst at Kal Tire in Vernon, British Columbia, Canada. As the company’s Microsoft Power Platform manager, her work spans the experience of building her own solutions as a non-technical maker, to working with professional developers to build solutions.

To assess the viability of entry roads at mine sites around the world, the company’s Mining Tire Group performs “site severity” surveys. These surveys helped understand the mine site conditions and extend the lifespan of the costly mining haul truck tires. Donia explains that previously, “Supervisors used to spend up to an hour and a half entering data into Excel, taking photos, and then building out reports.”

Kal Tire operations managers in Canada brought this business issue to Donia and together they saw the opportunity to use Microsoft Power Apps to build an app that manages the surveys. Now, Kal Tire’s Site Severity App, developed in conjunction with MNP Digital, runs on mobile devices and automates the mining site data collection process. The app safely caches data while offline—a common necessity in remote mining sites. Microsoft Power Automate then generates polished PDF reports complete with visual graphs, ready to be shared with stakeholders.

“By integrating the app’s data into Power BI, the Mining Tire Group gained a comprehensive view of mine conditions across all regions,” Donia says. “This leads to better decision-making and reduces wear and tear on mining truck tires.” It also saved substantial time and resources, allowing supervisors to concentrate on their most critical tasks.

Looking forward, Donia is particularly excited about using Microsoft Copilot Studio to create new types of custom copilots for Kal Tire. Her advice to others who are just beginning with Microsoft Power Platform is: “Start simple, experiment, and you’ll be amazed at what can be created. The [Microsoft] Power Platform and AI are game changers: Saving time and opening new possibilities.”

A chatbot for business travel

Daniel Schaurich de Oliveira is the founder and owner of A1, a business travel agency based in Florianopolis, Brazil. For nearly 30 years, Daniel has focused on providing international and domestic travel services for corporate clients.

The challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic presented an unexpected opportunity for Daniel to explore new ways to improve his company. With travel restrictions severely impacting the industry, Daniel used the downtime to explore how Microsoft Power Platform and AI could transform his daily operations. He started by automating alerts and generating reports, but soon embarked on more ambitious projects to reimagine daily business.

“I have no IT background and never studied coding,” he says. “But I used Copilot Studio to develop a chatbot to assist my team with various company and industry inquiries.” Daniel was concerned that employees would be slow to adopt a new AI-powered chatbot, so he named it “Fifi” (whose name is akin to “a gossiper” in Brazilian Portuguese) and gave it a personality to make her a humorous, yet knowledgeable, addition to A1.  

Fifi has streamlined internal operations, reducing the time Daniel and his team spend on routine inquiries and allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks. “Nowadays, Fifi is not just a chatbot or digital tool. She is a teammate,” Daniel says. “She’s our essential colleague. And whenever Fifi’s offline, we joke that ‘Fifi’s out sick today’.”

Daniel concludes, “The [Microsoft] Power Platform is amazing. It allows me to build my ideas and improve my business in ways that I never imagined were possible.”

From the mailroom to Microsoft MVP

As a young woman moving from the Netherlands to the US, Dian Taylor worked in a clothing store and the mailroom of a large American office supplies retailer. Later, she transferred to human resources at a bank. Eventually, she learned about Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

Now, working in presales at RSM US LLP in Boca Raton, Florida, Dian is tasked with creating a large volume of engaging and effective demonstrations. Even without a formal technical background, Dian uses Microsoft Power Platform to build copilots and apps that can be seamlessly integrated into her demo presentations.

“I use Copilot Studio a lot; not just to create custom chatbots to utilize on websites and Power Pages but also to connect to Dynamics 365 Customer Service,” she says. “It’s great for demos and helps take the pressure off our live agents.”

Dian also credits Microsoft Power Platform with making her job more fulfilling. “The advice that I would give somebody starting out in tech is to keep going and don’t feel overwhelmed,” she explains. “It’s okay not to know everything all the time. Take a step back, learn to use the right tools, and you’ll get there.”

Dian should know as she is now a four-time Microsoft Business Applications most valuable professional (MVP).

Supporting parents and children with autism

Raghav Mishra is a Product Architect at the Sprint365 consultancy in Copenhagen, Denmark. He discovered Microsoft Power Platform’s potential while developing new business solutions for a hackathon and realized that the same tools could be applied to address personal challenges at home. He was inspired by his wife who dedicated several hours each week creating visual instruction sheets for their son with autism. Raghav explains, “She made one-page instruction sheets with hand-drawn images and written directions to guide our son through daily activities like brushing his teeth or removing his shoes.”

Raghav developed the Make Life Easy app using Microsoft Power Platform to automate the creation of these daily instructions. Raghav leveraged Power Apps, AI services, and the DALL-E API to generate both text and images, which are then saved in Microsoft Dataverse and compiled into a one-page, colorful PDF. This document serves as an engaging visual guide for their son.

“I’d never worked with canvas apps,” he said. “The platform’s predefined structure allowed me, as a citizen developer, to build the app from scratch within just five days.”

The app streamlined their family’s routines, cutting down the time spent on creating instructions and making the process clearer and more enjoyable for their son. What once took hours now only requires a few minutes, allowing the family to spend more quality time together. “This app has improved our daily lives,” Raghav says. “I really hope it can also help other families with similar needs.”

Modeling fashion and new technologies

Yumu Hatakeyama, a Microsoft Power Platform Evangelist at Akkodis in Tokyo, Japan, began his career as a fashion model. However, over time, it became increasingly difficult to make a living in the modeling industry. Yumu went back to school to study hardware engineering.

When COVID-19 struck, he was working in automotive parts manufacturing, creating circuit boards. As his company started to push for digital transformation, Yumu took the initiative to learn about Microsoft Power Platform and play a pivotal role in the transition. 

He had never created an app before. Drawing on his experience in the fast-paced fashion industry, he understood the importance of managing schedules. He learned how to use Power Apps and quickly put it to use by creating an attendance management app for remote workers during the pandemic. It visualized attendance data in an accessible dashboard format.

The app had an immediate impact, streamlining attendance across their team of 50 employees. Building on this success, he began incorporating Microsoft AI Builder into his work. Instead of manually inputting data from PDF invoices and receipts, the team trained custom AI models to automate this process, significantly reducing errors and saving time.

Now, he works full-time as a Microsoft Power Platform Evangelist. Yumu says, “Originally, I was in the business of promoting and selling fashion. I transitioned from evangelizing fashion to evangelizing technology. It seems like quite a shift, but the goal remains the same: to deliver better products to everyone.”

When speaking to new Microsoft Power Platform users, Yumu jokes, “If a former fashion model can achieve digital transformation with the Power Platform, you can definitely do it too.” His dream is to spread the use of Microsoft Power Platform across Japan, from large corporations to small and medium-sized businesses, helping everyone to imagine and build their own solutions.

The Future of Microsoft Power Platform is innovation and empowerment

It’s clear that the future of innovation is in the hands of those who do the work and turn their ideas into reality. The incredible advances created by the global Microsoft Power Platform community exemplify the power of low-code and AI tools to transform businesses and careers.

We can’t wait to see many of you at the Power Platform Community Conference in Las Vegas and to witness what we’ll achieve together in the coming years. With the recent advances in Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Power Platform development will only get easier and more powerful.

Join the Power Platform Community

Connect with peers and experts

Learn more

The post How the Microsoft Power Platform community is using low-code and AI to transform work and lives appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Streamlining security access requests

Microsoft Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) is one of the largest customer support teams in the world. With over 17,000 employees worldwide, CE&S is responsible for shaping the strategy, design, and implementation of Microsoft’s end-to-end customer experience.

For one of their projects, CE&S focused on their Just in Time (JIT) security process used to grant access to resources.  “Leveraging the process mining capabilities in Power Automate, we wanted to explore ways to improve our responsiveness – without compromising on security,” says Kirk McNesby, Senior Business Process Manager at Microsoft. 

In just one week, CE&S successfully deployed process mining and began gathering insights. “With process mining in Power Automate, we were able to easily input data and immediately jump behind the wheel to do meaningful exploration,” says Kirk. “We had no prior knowledge or training. We were ingesting data and learning how to use the tool – all at the same time.”  

To begin using process mining, over 14GB of event log data (consisting of SR events and JIT security logs) was loaded into the tool. The team was particularly impressed with the easy-to-use interface. “We liked the out of the box presentations. Variances were presented in a clear, visual format and filtering worked really well with our data,” says Kirk.  

The team used the filtering capabilities within process mining to quickly segment access requests by type and looked for patterns that would contribute to optimization. This strategy revealed bottlenecks in a specific access request for users acting as backup support on cases when the main support engineer was unavailable.

By automating approvals for this scenario, the team estimated that they could automate up to 54,000 approval requests per year, saving users 13,200 hours of wait time. As Kirk adds, “The process mining capabilities in Power Automate were critical to achieving insights this quickly.”
 

Get started with process mining in Power Automate

• Review official product documentation
• Take the process mining in Power Automate learning path
• Start a free trial for Power Automate 
• Go even further with the Power Automate Process Mining add-on
  

Start a free trial today – and discover how easy it can be to optimize processes in your organization using process mining in Power Automate.

The post Elevating Efficiency: How Microsoft Customer Experience & Success streamlines operations with process mining in Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Microsoft partners are helping organizations achieve greater efficiency by using our growing ecosystem of Microsoft Copilot connectors in Copilot Studio to build these types of solutions. We’re excited to announce that Litera, a global leader in legal technology solutions, enabled its first innovative Copilot connector designed to transform legal workflows. The connector extends Litera’s core workflows beyond their proprietary user interfaces, offering unparalleled accessibility to a firm’s intellectual property. 

Accenture extends its portfolio of Intelligent Supply Chain Platform solutions built on Microsoft technologies by unveiling a groundbreaking copilot extension in Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 for its Supply Risk Control Tower solution. 

Copilot Studio makes it easy to extend the capabilities of copilots with actions, connectors, and sources of data. Copilot connectors include data sources within the productivity cloud in Microsoft 365, business data in Microsoft Dataverse, data from Microsoft Dynamics 365, and analytical data in Microsoft Fabric, as well as non-Microsoft enterprise data sources. Through Copilot connectors, you can now ground your copilot responses with multiple enterprise data sources for more relevant and reliable responses from copilots and copilot extensions. 

Litera’s Copilot connector provides unparalleled accessibility to a firm’s intellectual knowledge 

The Litera Search Copilot connector enables legal professionals to execute complex natural language searches for both legal matter experience and precedent content from any Copilot-enabled application, allowing users to get matter and precedent detail without learning how to navigate a complex search screen. Best-fit insights are delivered instantly, eliminating the need for endless clicks to drill down into legal matter context or iterations to refine search context and outcomes. Imagine that you are a junior associate in charge of creating a first draft for a real estate credit litigation in a New York state agreement: you can gain instant insight into how your top firm experts have structured and written indemnification clauses for credit agreements saving valuable time and leveraging the firm’s collective knowledge. Whether drafting new contracts, looking to assign the most experienced attorney to a specific case, compiling a pitch for new business, or understanding market conditions during negotiations, the Litera Search Copilot connector brings the ease of natural language matter and content search to a vastly expanded domain of user interfaces. 

 “Collaborating with Microsoft has allowed us to advance our use of new AI techniques to create revolutionary tools for the legal industry. By integrating with Microsoft Copilot, we’re delivering intelligent, AI-driven experiences that significantly enhance productivity and efficiency for legal professionals. This partnership not only highlights our commitment to innovation but also sets the stage for a transformative future in legal technology.”

Greg Ingino, Chief Technology Officer at Litera 

First, the user asks in natural language for litigation that meets certain criteria. 

Once they see the list of matching litigation, the user then makes the request for details on a specific legal matter from the first set of results. 

For end-users, these solutions offer significant value by streamlining workflows and enhancing productivity, as legal professionals can now reduce the time spent on administrative tasks, allowing them to focus on more critical aspects of their work. The integration of AI and natural language capabilities means users can interact with the software more intuitively, ultimately transforming the way they manage and utilize legal documents.  

Accenture brings supply chain management to Copilot 

Extending its portfolio of Intelligent Supply Chain Platform solutions built on Microsoft technologies, Accenture has unveiled a groundbreaking extension in Copilot for Microsoft 365 for its Supply Risk Control Tower. This innovation streamlines the daily workflows of supply chain teams, particularly material planners. Supply chain professionals can now receive daily updates from Copilot detailing incoming orders and providing real-time insights into potential risks. More than just a tracking tool, Copilot proactively recommends optimal course of action, streamlining decision-making processes and empowering teams to respond swiftly and strategically to dynamic supply chain scenarios.  

To create this advanced functionality, Accenture used the capabilities of Copilot Studio, incorporating knowledge, topics, and actions. This was combined with the power of Dataverse and its vast connector ecosystem, integrating Accenture’s deep supply chain data domain expertise with Copilot generative AI capabilities. The outcome is the transformative Supply Chain Insights App. With Microsoft Power Platform native integration into Copilot Studio, Accenture automated critical order management tasks in enterprise resource planning systems such as Dynamics 365 and SAP, saving valuable time and reducing manual data entry errors. 

Activate Dataverse data as knowledge using Copilot connectors 

Using Copilot connectors, you can bridge the gap between Dataverse data and Copilot. The ‘Add knowledge sources’ option allows developers to integrate deeply with Dataverse and Microsoft Power Platform. Once configured, a semantic search allows the connector to understand and interpret the text data, enabling more relevant and context-aware responses. Data synchronization and caching ensure your data is available for quick access and reduce potential latency issues. 

Using Dataverse is just one of the capabilities of Copilot connectors. For example, with a few clicks, you can access the ecosystem of more than 1,400 connectors, which includes extensive third-party service integration with your copilot. Using these connectors, you can add actions to your copilot to allow it to complete new tasks related to your solution. The following diagram illustrates the full breadth of capabilities of Copilot connectors. 

Adding actions using a Microsoft Power Platform connector is just one of the options available for adding new actions to a copilot.  

Prompt actions allow you to generate content or extract insights with AI Builder prompts. The prompts include prebuilt prompts that can be customized by parameters or from Dataverse data. For example, passing a customer name, a prompt action could summarize related data for the customer name using Copilot. 

Conversational actions receive a user query and process it by completing one or more operations, and then sends one or more responses back to the copilot that it is being used from. The conversational action could use the generative answer node to respond to the query. The answer could be based on knowledge configured that was unique to the scenario. For example, you could have a billing code lookup that produced answers about specific billing codes to the requesting user. 

Flow actions allow you to build a Microsoft Power Automate flow that runs to process the request from a user. These actions can be used to add the ability for the copilot to complete a task. For example, adding a billing code could be implemented as a flow action. The cloud flow would use other connectors to check if the billing code existed, follow company standards, and then finally add the billing code, responding to the user that the code was added.  

Copilot connectors allow you to build complete solutions 

Copilot connectors provide you with multiple ways to extend copilots with your unique solution. By combining several of these capabilities to form your full solution, you’ll be able to provide your users with access to the right knowledge and actions to make them more productive. These features are just the beginning of what’s to come, and we can’t wait to see how organizations will use them to innovate using Dataverse and Microsoft Power Platform. 

Copilot connectors in Copilot Studio

 Extend the capabilities of copilots with actions, copilot connectors, and sources of data.

Learn more

The post Litera and Accenture transform business processes with Microsoft Copilot connectors appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

If your organization is already using Microsoft Power Platform and you’re interested in sharing your insights and experiences, we’d love to hear your story.

Cineplex benefits from Microsoft Power Platform automated solutions

Customer  

Cineplex  

Country  

Canada  

Industry  

Media 

Cineplex is one of Canada’s leading media and entertainment companies. To streamline business processes, over 100 employees are using Microsoft Power Platform to develop innovative automation solutions for finance, guest services, and other departments. Watch the video to learn how Cineplex saves over 30,000 hours a year in manual processing time.

See full story.

Leroy Seafood Group drives digitization with Microsoft Power Platform

Customer

Leroy Seafood Group

Country

Norway

Industry

Forestry and Fishing

The Leroy Seafood Group, a leading global producer of salmon and trout, has leveraged Microsoft Power Platform products to drive its digitization strategy, significantly enhancing data sharing and operational efficiency. By purchasing more than 4,000 Premium Microsoft Power Apps licenses and implementing an automated Center of Excellence, Leroy has empowered its employees to develop innovative enterprise applications. One such mobile app, for example, has standardized and centralized data reporting from offshore crews, improving reporting accuracy by 11.6%, equating to an USD 8 million saving. Leroy’s structured development approach, supported by the Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit, ensures robust governance and quality. Managed Environments have further strengthened development controls, enabling seamless innovation and the potential for additional applications, such as health and safety training tools. Overall, Microsoft Power Platform has been pivotal in enhancing Leroy’s data-driven decision-making and operational excellence, aligning with its vision of becoming a leader in sustainable seafood.

“When we started with [Microsoft] Power Platform, we made the decision to jump directly into [Microsoft] Dataverse as was saw it as the most secure and reliable way to store and manage our data—especially our mission critical data. It was a natural choice for us and it has worked amazingly well.”

Andreas Fauske: Team Lead Power Platform, Leroy

See full story.

Peppermint Technology boosts law firm efficiency with Microsoft Power Platform

Customer 

Peppermint 

Country 

United States  

Industry 

Professional Services 

Peppermint Technology redefines legal business processes with their innovative Copilot, integrating seamlessly with Microsoft Power Platform to boost law firm efficiency. By using enterprise data in Dataverse and SharePoint, Peppermint’s solutions empower lawyers to streamline client services, enhancing productivity and client engagement with minimal effort. Learn more by watching the video. 

See full blog.  

Majesco expands it’s copilot capabilities with Microsoft Copilot Studio

Customer

Majesco

Country

United States

Industry

Professional Services

Majesco, an insurance industry leader, used Copilot Studio, to build a comprehensive copilot that is embedded in all twelve of its insurance software products, a task that previously took nine months for a basic version. This shift reduced reliance on a small data science team, allowing 400 developers to handle 95% of the copilot’s functionalities independently. Integrated with Microsoft Power Automate, the copilot can perform diverse actions like data summarization and task management, significantly improving efficiency. The new copilot processes inquiries and actions in less than 30 seconds, saving substantial time and costs. This advancement addresses industry challenges such as underwriter shortages and easing the learning curve for new hires, providing real-time support and reducing administrative burdens. Copilot Studio has accelerated Majesco’s market delivery, giving it a strong first-mover advantage and progressing toward a fully AI-driven user interface.

“Using Microsoft Copilot Studio has accelerated our speed to market and given us a strong, first-mover advantage.”

Manish Shah: Chief Product Officer, Majesco

See full story.

Call2Recycle optimizes its operations with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform

Customer

Call2Recycle

Country

United States

Industry

Other

Call2Recycle, operator of the largest battery recycling program in the U.S. and Canada, streamlined its operations with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, saving approximately USD 25,000 annually. By integrating Dynamics 365 for enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM), the nonprofit automates processes across operations, finance, services, and sales, reducing manual work and increasing efficiency. This setup saves hours on tasks like invoicing and vendor payments, allowing the organization to focus on its sustainability mission. Additionally, Call2Recycle launched an e-bike battery recycling program using Microsoft Power Pages, seamlessly integrated with Dynamics 365. This system supports more than 2,000 retailers, enabling efficient enrollment, training, and management of battery collection. Automation through Power Automate and real-time monitoring with Microsoft Power BI ensure streamlined operations. The flexibility and scalability of Microsoft Power Platform are crucial for adapting to the rapidly changing battery market, driving growth, and enhancing environmental impact.

“By automating processes in Business Central, we save 10 hours per month on invoicing, 8 hours on banking activities like vendor payment uploads, and 12 hours on processing vendor invoice approvals.”

David Ainsley: Director of IT, Call2Recycle

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Laris Hotels Group improves booking data access using Microsoft Power Platform

Customer

Laris Hotels Group

Country

Poland

Industry

Other

Laris Hotels Group, one of the largest hotel chains in Krakow, Poland, improved its access to booking data using Microsoft Power Platform products. Previously reliant on a cumbersome weekly manual process, Laris implemented desktop robotic process automation (RPA) in Power Automate to pull daily data from a legacy property management system (PMS). This data is now seamlessly integrated into Power BI for customized reporting. With faster, daily updates, Laris enjoys a clearer view of booking data, increasing average hotel occupancy by approximately 15%. The new system allows for detailed analysis, including commission and tax breakdowns, and aligns booking data with budget targets. Reports are automatically distributed via Microsoft Teams, ensuring timely information for decision-making. Developed by Atteli, a Microsoft partner, the low-code solution was created in just two weeks, offering cost-efficiency and easy maintenance. Beyond improving internal operations, Laris plans to extend this system to support other hotels through its Hotel Sales Link initiative. The scalable solution, ready to handle various PMS systems, positions Laris for further innovation and enhanced data-driven decision-making, with potential expansions into Microsoft Fabric for deeper insights.

“Our [Microsoft] Power Platform system provides us with greater availability of booking data, with average hotel occupancy increasing by approximately 15% as a result.”

Chris Barker: International Sales Director, Laris Hotels Group

See full story.

Nsure streamlines customer processes with Microsoft Power Platform

Customer 

Nsure 

Country 

United States 

Industry 

Insurance 

Nsure.com enables consumers to compare quotes from over 50 home and auto insurers and to buy online in minutes. For over five years, the company has been using Microsoft Power Platform to automate business processes. Watch the video to see how Nsure used the generative AI capabilities in Microsoft Power Automate, including text recognition and sentiment analysis, to reduce manual processing time by 60% while also reducing associated costs by 50%. 

See full story. 

Zurich empowers developers with Microsoft Power Platform

Customer  

Zurich 

Country  

Switzerland

Industry  

Insurance 

To help enable fusion development, drive innovation, and streamline operations across the global enterprise, citizen and pro developers at Zurich Insurance Group are using Microsoft Power Platform for low-code and pro-code business app development, process automation, and more. Check out the video to learn more.  

Tell us your story

We’d love to hear about your Microsoft Power Platform story

Share it here

The post How Microsoft Power Platform is driving real-world impact—April and May customer success stories appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Microsoft Copilot is designed to enhance business productivity by leveraging AI to streamline routine tasks, allowing users to concentrate on strategic and creative endeavors. It boosts organizational efficiency by automating repetitive tasks, freeing up time for the workforce, and enriching solution capabilities with integrated experiences in Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Teams.

Enhancing your AI business strategy with Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Dataverse enables organizations to simplify the complex data integration, third-party data extensibility, and security guardrails organizations must have in place to assist in the implementation and adoption of AI.

At Microsoft Build 2024, we are excited to unveil Microsoft Copilot connectors. Microsoft Copilot connectors provide seamless and secure integration with your productivity, analytical, and operational data as well as empower users to activate existing business processes. Copilot Studio and Dataverse allow organizations to create actions, build knowledge, and integrate grounded data into their copilots with ease, all while easily meeting their compliance requirements with a rich set of security features.

Bridge the gap between enterprise data and Microsoft Copilot

The concept of enterprise knowledge in Copilot Studio is a groundbreaking addition that allows copilot makers to add specific contextually relevant knowledge sources to their copilots, thereby improving the reliability and accuracy of responses. Knowledge supports a wide range of data types, including public websites and Microsoft Dynamics 365 (powered by Dataverse) and brings simple discoverability and understanding of enterprise data, which is critical to scaling the delivery of agent copilots across an organization.

Figure 1: Makers can select enterprise data sources as their copilot’s knowledge.

Many Microsoft customers are seeing the benefits of adding grounded enterprise data into their copilot experience. From supply chain management, customer relationship management, and productivity insights, customers can increase the efficiency of business processes, make their workforce more productive, and provide rich customer experiences. Read below how Peppermint, EY, and Docusign have developed impactful solutions.

Peppermint reimagines legal business processes with Copilot

Law firms are challenged with optimizing workflow efficiency and delivering effective client services. Achieving this entails implementing a range of services, including case and matter management, document management, and client engagement. How can law firms, who are primarily focused on legal expertise, utilize technology to overcome this challenge and achieve their goals?

Peppermint Technology, a leading global independent software vendor (ISV) revolutionizing legal firms and departments, has built solutions that easily ground copilots with enterprise data stored in Dataverse and SharePoint to provide more relevant and secure business insights. Peppermint has been using Microsoft Power Platform to model their legal case process and storing their business data in Dataverse. With their existing integration, allowing Peppermint’s copilot to access enterprise knowledge and processes from Microsoft Power Platform, while maintaining user context security, requires minimal effort and allows rapid adoption of modern AI workloads for increasing productivity and automation

Figure 2: Use natural language to retrieve matters stored in Dataverse.

Lawyers can now use LARA (Legal Analysis and Research Assistant for Peppermint) to efficiently prepare for upcoming meetings by identifying internal contacts for new accounts, accessing pertinent information, and taking necessary actions ahead of their meetings.

Figure 3: Use natural language to identify connections with new accounts.

“At Peppermint Technology, we are excited to utilize Copilot Studio’s enterprise knowledge to not only extract maximum value from corporate data but also significantly enhance our law firm clients’ ability to engage with their clients and increase billing efficiencies. This strategic adoption aligns perfectly with our business priorities of reducing risk and boosting client engagement, enabling our clients to offer superior service and achieve better outcomes.”—Mike Walker, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Peppermint Technology

Take your enterprise business processes further with Copilot connectors

With Copilot connectors in Copilot Studio, organizations can easily expand their copilot knowledge and actions with their business data. Copilot connectors allow organizations to bring together data from Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Fabric OneLake, public websites, and many other systems of record.

When incorporating Copilot connectors into your custom copilots, Copilot will work in the background on your user’s or organization’s behalf, and reason across structured and unstructured data to execute your business processes.

Figure 4: Microsoft Copilot connectors diagram.

Copilot connectors are part of the broader Copilot ecosystem, which includes Copilot Studio and Microsoft Copilot. They play a crucial role in the extensibility of Copilot, allowing developers to create custom AI solutions that are deeply integrated with Dataverse and Microsoft Power Platform. Some key benefits of Copilot connectors are:

• Semantic search: Allows the connector to understand and interpret the text data, enabling more relevant and context-aware responses.
• Data syncing and caching: Ensure your data is synchronized and cached efficiently, allowing for quick access, and reducing potential latency issues.
• Extensive third-party service integration: With a few clicks you can access the ecosystem of more than 1,000 connectors so that even non-Microsoft data can be included.
• Support for complex data types: The connectors can handle a variety of data types, including relational data and unstructured data, making them versatile for different business needs, and come with production-grade service levels.
• Low-code and pro-code: Whether you want to create custom application programming interface (API) or existing prebuilt connectors, the choice is up to you.

Docusign expedites the workforce with Copilot connectors

By enabling the Docusign Copilot connector within Microsoft Copilot, Docusign delivers greater value to their customers by not only surfacing document details, steps, and processes, but also allowing users to ask queries with natural language, and drive results faster than before. Docusign’s integrations with Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Copilot for Sales provide AI-powered agreement insights to help drive employee productivity, close deals faster, and manage renewals at scale. Customers across human resources (HR), sales, procurement, legal, and more can now use natural language to ask Copilot for agreement status and summarization, extract key information, send reminders to others, and more.

Figure 5: Activate Docusign Copilot connector and find agreements with natural language.

“Through our partnership with Microsoft, we are revolutionizing the way organizations do business. Docusign’s integrations with Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Copilot for Sales harness the power of AI to drive intelligent automation and innovation, leveraging Microsoft Power Platform plug-ins and Microsoft Copilot Studio. Meeting people where they work, these integrations empower organizations to accelerate revenue, reduce risk, and create better experiences from the agreements that run their business. Together, we’re not just streamlining processes, we’re redefining what’s possible in the digital era.”—Janine Grasso, General Vice President (GVP) of Partner Development and Alliances, Docusign

Gain visibility and increase your security posture

As organizations increase the complexity of their solutions and incorporate data from multiple systems of record through Copilot connectors, gaining and maintaining visibility of the security of that data is critical. Previously, fragmented experiences created barriers to customers assessing risks, and a lack of clear, defined guidance in achieving the defense in depth that organizations strive to maintain. Without security tools for both proactive and reactive governance of both citizen and pro developers’ applications, administrators may resort to solutions that stifle modernization, productivity, and business growth.

The Security Hub is designed to solve these challenges and more, with intuitive experiences, and strategic guidance, administrators can navigate the complexities of managing security at scale. This centralized hub provides administrators with tools to assess the security posture of their tenant, identify and act on impactful recommendations, and proactively set policies to safeguard against vulnerabilities and threats all through the Microsoft Power Platform admin center.

The Security Hub for Microsoft Power Platform, in public preview, offers several benefits, including:

• Enhanced security posture: Providing administrators with tools to assess and improve the security posture of their tenant, ensuring that data and applications are protected against vulnerabilities and threats.
• Actionable recommendations: Identify impactful recommendations that administrators can act on to strengthen security measures.
• Proactive policy setting: Proactively set policies to safeguard your environment, preventing potential security incidents before they occur.
• Centralized security management: One centralized platform for managing security across Microsoft Power Platform, streamlining the process, and making it more efficient.

These features are designed to provide a comprehensive security solution that aligns with an organization’s security practices, contributing to the overall success of digital transformation efforts. For example, Security Hub identifies if minimum safeguarding is in place and guides you to set up the appropriate data loss prevention policies (DLP) around Copilot connector usage in your organization. In addition, administrators can expect to utilize the following generally available in the Security Hub: vNet for Dataverse plugins, privileged identity management (PIM), tenant isolation, IP firewall, IP cookie binding, and environment security groups, while the following features will be available in public preview: client application control and Dataverse audit enhancements.

Additionally, Copilot Studio makers can now ground generative answers to SharePoint site content—enabling copilots to surface labeled resources as labeled responses in Teams chat with Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels.

Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels are widely adopted by enterprises today to label and protect sensitive information in Microsoft 365 apps and Fabric, and they are coming soon to Microsoft Power Platform.

Watch our latest overview of Microsoft Power Platform and Dataverse security features.

EY prevents data exfiltration at scale with Microsoft Power Platform security controls

Data exfiltration prevention protects the unauthorized transfer of sensitive data from an organization to external parties. This allows a business to maintain business continuity, comply with regulatory requirements, and keep up with competitive advantage. This feature allows the security officer to allow or block what apps that their authorized users can run in a Dataverse environment.

“As an enterprise consumer of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform, I am thrilled to share my experience with the recent enhancements made by the Engineering team. Their diligent efforts have had a significant, positive impact on our Dynamics 365 launch with the necessary data controls to support our information security policies and data governance processes.

The introduction of data exfiltration permission controls was critical to comply with our Information Privacy and Data Governance policies. These controls allow us to grant permissioned access to the Dataverse while maintaining strict data security. Here’s why these features are crucial:

• Foundation for Data Governance: The ability to control data exfiltration is at the core of our data governance strategy. With these controls, we can confidently manage how Dynamics 365 data is accessed and shared beyond our system boundaries.
• Enterprise Data Controls: Microsoft Dynamics 365’s permissioned access ensures that sensitive information remains within authorized boundaries. We can now define granular permissions, restricting data flow to only those who need it. This level of control empowers us to safeguard our data assets effectively.
• Privacy Compliance: Our member firms operate under stringent privacy agreements. The Engineering team’s work aligns perfectly with our commitment to data privacy. By enforcing permissioned access, we uphold our privacy standards and protect our enterprise information.

The Engineering team’s dedication to building robust permission controls has enabled our data landscape. We can confidently deploy Dynamics 365 and navigate the complexities of data sharing, knowing that our privacy agreements remain intact and grant access to only approved systems and usage.”—Erick J. Kirchner, Associate Director, Markets and Business Development, Ernst & Young LLP

Looking ahead

As we continue to innovate and push the boundaries of what is possible with data and AI, Dataverse remains committed to providing businesses with the tools they need to succeed in an ever-evolving digital world. These new features are just the beginning of what is to come, and we cannot wait to see how organizations will leverage them to achieve new heights of productivity and security.

Join us at Microsoft Build to learn more about these exciting developments and how they can transform your business.

The post Unlock new levels of productivity with Microsoft Dataverse and Microsoft Copilot Studio appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Improve AI generated responses by grounding prompts with your enterprise data tables, now in Public Preview

As companies are rapidly adopting Copilot and conversational AI tools, they are increasingly introducing prompts as a foundational element to integrate generative AI capabilities within Microsoft Power Platform solutions, including Power Apps, Power Automate, and Copilot Studio. With Prompt Builder, already generally available, anyone can use natural language to instruct the GPT model to behave in a certain way or to perform a specific task. Typical scenarios include the ability to generate content analysis, summarize, classify, extract or transform information data.

Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of data grounding with Dataverse tables for Prompt Builder in Microsoft Copilot Studio, a new capability that helps makers create reliable and efficient AI solutions at enterprise scale.  With data grounding, customers can add a dynamic knowledge source to their prompts, using the model of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), to enhance the underlying AI model’s capabilities from being a general-purpose model to an enterprise specific tool that operates within the business context of an enterprise customer.

Learn more about prompt builder:

• Get started with creating your own prompt to generate responses that suit your specific business need.
• Use your prompt in Power Apps | Microsoft Learn
• Use your prompt in Power Automate | Microsoft Learn

Infuse AI into your application’s business logic with AI-powered low-code plugins

Low-code plugins enable any maker to build complex AI-powered solutions in the Power Platform using the PowerFx expression language.  Capgemini New Zealand, A global leader in consulting, technology services and digital transformation, saw the potential of low-code plugins from their announcement at Microsoft Build 2023 and quickly began upskilling on them in their local Dynamics 365/Power Platform practice. Low-code plugins provide the ability to create real-time, secure and scalable business logic for their customers, all without the underlying cost and added infrastructure of writing traditional code. As a result, Capgemini NZ can create value for their clients, solving their business challenges faster than ever before.

I’m particularly excited by the integration potential with Copilot Studio. Our clients are asking us to help them apply generative AI to their business challenges. Low-code plugins fill a crucial gap of automating business logic between the large language model in Copilot and the client’s underlying data. As such we’ve been showcasing our learnings from low-code tools such as low-code plugins in our regular internal Communities of Practice so that we’re ready to hit the ground running when this feature is generally available.
-Richard Anness, Power Platform Practice Lead, Capgemini NZ 
With low-code plugins now available in Microsoft Copilot Studio, customers can embed advanced business logic into their Copilots and AI-powered applications including triggering workflows & data updates within business processes modeled within Microsoft Dataverse. In addition to the existing set of supported Power Fx operators, variables and formulas, we are also excited to introduce low-code plugin support for 5 new Power Fx AI functions:

• AIReply: Drafts replies to messages (e.g., customer reviews of a product).
• AISummarize: Summarizes text (e.g., email messages or document content).
• AISentiment: Detects sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) in text (e.g., customer reviews).
• AIClassify: Classifies text into predefined categories (e.g., Problem, Billing, How To, Licensing).
• AITranslate: Translates text from one language to another (source language is automatically detected).

After the development of low-code solutions using low-code plugins, monitoring their execution becomes an integral part of maintaining a high-quality, reliable, and performant solution. It empowers developers and administrators with the insights needed to ensure the best possible experience for end-users. We are delighted to announce that we are now enabling the preview of the new plugin monitoring report  inside Dataverse Accelerator with two key capabilities:

• Centralized log viewer: Access and view trace logs from Dataverse Custom APIs, low-code plugins, and pro-code plugin executions in an environment from one central location.
• Filtering capabilities: Conveniently filter log history to quickly find logs relevant to debugging needs.

For more information on how to try out low-code plugins:

• In Power Apps: Use a prebuilt prompt in a Dataverse low-code plug-in in Power Apps (preview) | Microsoft Learn
• In Copilot Studio: Create Dataverse low-code plug-ins to use with a copilot (preview) – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn

The post Infuse any AI solution with your enterprise data, prompts and plugins appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The Power Automate Process Mining solution helps the organization get the full lifecycle visibility into their processes, understand the inefficiencies and targeted improvements to drive via process alignments and automation. Microsoft’s Process Mining offering is easy to use with powerful features including rework detectors, root cause analysis, custom reporting, and seamless integration and automation.  The power of Copilot and general ease of use of the platform allow the team to not only scale across all of its processes quickly, but also augments the products owner toolkit to drive process optimization as a critical lever for accelerating digital transformation.

Given the large coverage of the customer base, Marketing execution is inherently complex, involving multiple roles and activities. By focusing on the demand generation process step, the MCAPS team was able to delve into the nested processes and uncover areas for improvement.

By utilizing Power Automate Process Mining, the team gathered event log data, transformed it using Power Query, and completed data attribution. The resulting process map was then analyzed with the help of Copilot, which provided insights and identified bottlenecks that could be addressed through automation.

The analysis revealed that the average duration of this process component was ~60 days, with five different variants spanning across 33 activities. Notably, 20% of the cases required rework activities, indicating a significant area for potential optimization. Roles such as event lead marketing Operations and Integrated Marketing Manager were found to be the most involved in the process, contributing to 80% of the executional activities. By zooming in on individual activities, the team discovered that the intake for content creation averaged 8 days to complete, accounting for about 10% of the total time spent in the process.

With the insights provided by Copilot, the team identified the review loop as the longest-running activity and a major bottleneck. But Copilot didn’t stop there; it went a step further by leveraging Power Automate to automate the process steps, providing improvement suggestions along the way.

The team chose to create digital process flows, and Copilot seamlessly handed it off to Power Automate with a prompt to build the automation. As the flows were built out, Power Automate Copilot continued to refine then until they were ready to be published.

Through iterative process mining and the acceleration provided by Copilot’s automation recommendations, the team projects an outcome of reducing the timeline from 12 weeks to 8 weeks.

“With the recommendations using Power Automate with Process Mining, we project accelerated time in our demand generation process from twelve to eight weeks. Copilot has given us a lot of confidence as it allows us to scale process simplification as the tip of the spear for our digital transformation!”

Sandeep Bhanot, Corporate Vice President within Microsoft Customer & Partner Solutions.

By embracing Process Mining with AI-powered Copilots, businesses can achieve greater efficiency and agility, paving the way for innovation and success.

The post Transforming digital processes with AI: A Power Automate Process Mining Case Study at Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.