AI Archives - Microsoft Power Platform Blog Innovate with Business Apps Wed, 09 Apr 2025 00:21:55 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Paste images and add files to quickly fill forms with AI http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-apps/paste-images-and-add-files-to-quickly-fill-forms-with-ai/ Tue, 01 Apr 2025 17:41:09 +0000 The data entry agent in Power Apps and Dynamics 365 model-driven apps makes filling out forms quicker and easier by reducing tedious manual data entry. A study with information workers showed that AI assistance enabled 29% faster form completion, with 95% preferring it over manual entry.1 Now, based on your feedback, we’re introducing four powerful

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The data entry agent in Power Apps and Dynamics 365 model-driven apps makes filling out forms quicker and easier by reducing tedious manual data entry. A study with information workers showed that AI assistance enabled 29% faster form completion, with 95% preferring it over manual entry.1 Now, based on your feedback, we’re introducing four powerful new capabilities—giving you more flexibility, visibility, and expanded input options. These enhancements are available in your apps today:

  • Smart paste now supports images – paste screenshots or handwritten content, and AI will extract relevant details for your form.
  • Expanded file support – add .txt, .csv, .docx, .pdf, or image files (.png, .jpg, .jpeg, .bmp) to get inline AI suggestions.
  • New form fill toolbar – review and manage AI-generated suggestions more easily.
  • More control for makers – makers can now specify fields that should always require human input, ensuring AI assistance focuses on where it’s most valuable.

Let’s explore how these updates can help you work smarter.

Paste images and extract insights

Have a handwritten note, a scanned document, or a screenshot with key data? Now, smart paste can extract text and tables from images and suggest relevant field values—no retyping needed.

Where this helps:

  • Extract invoice details from a receipt image to log expenses effortlessly.
  • Update inventory records by pasting images of handwritten stock counts or delivery receipts.
  • Convert maintenance logs or inspection checklists from images into structured form data.
  • Digitize whiteboard notes from a sales planning session to update an opportunity record.
  • Capture contact details by pasting a scanned business card into a CRM form.
GIF of AI data entry's smart paste with images capability.

Smart paste can be enabled using the Smart paste setting in Power Platform admin center by going to Environments > [select an environment] > Settings > Product > Features.

Add files to fill forms

Adding a document makes data entry even easier. Simply select or drag and drop a supported file type—.txt, .csv, .docx, .pdf, or image files (.png, .jpg, .jpeg, .bmp)—and AI will intelligently extract key details to populate your form, reducing manual effort.

GIF of a side-by-side comparison with and without the files capability of IA data entry.

Files is only available when the new form fill toolbar experience is enabled, see how to enable both in the section below.

New form fill toolbar: manage suggestions with ease

We’ve made it easier than ever to see where AI-generated suggestions come from and manage them effortlessly. The new form fill toolbar provides:

  • A clear view of all AI suggestions in the form.
  • Sources of suggestions, helping you understand where the data is coming from.
  • A real-time count of open suggestions, allowing you to track pending reviews at a glance.
Screenshot of the new AI data entry toolbar in a model-driven app.

The new form fill toolbar and files capabilities can be enabled using the Form fill assist toolbar setting in Power Apps app designer when editing a model-driven app.

Screenshot of the 'form fill assist toolbar' setting in Power Apps app designer for the AI data entry agent.

More control for makers: define where AI assists

While AI form fill assistance speeds up data entry, some fields should always require human input. Based on your feedback, we’ve introduced a way for makers to opt specific fields out of AI suggestions by configuring the Allow form fill assistance setting in column properties.

Screenshot of 'Allow form fill assistance' column setting for the AI data entry agent.

Try it out and share your feedback!

These enhancements are available in production today—so try pasting images, uploading files, and using the new toolbar to streamline your workflow. And as always, we’d love to hear how these updates help you—share your feedback and help shape what’s next for AI data entry!

Learn more at Use Copilot’s form fill assistance feature in model-driven apps – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn


1 Internal Microsoft testing conducted in November 2024 on sample of 22 subjects.

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Introducing the data exploration agent to quickly find records using natural language in model-driven apps! http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-apps/introducing-the-data-exploration-agent-to-quickly-find-records-using-natural-language-in-model-driven-apps/ Wed, 19 Feb 2025 00:42:46 +0000 Discover the new Data Exploration Agent in Model-driven Apps! Leverage Copilot and natural language to effortlessly find records using complex filters. Shift your focus from manual filtering to analyzing data and gaining valuable insights. Available now via manual opt-in and rolling out through the Monthly Channel. Enhance your daily workflows with this powerful tool!

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We are thrilled to announce the public preview of the data exploration agent, a powerful new tool designed to simplify the way you find records using complex filters. With the data exploration agent, you can now use Copilot and natural language to describe what you are looking for in the data, and let Copilot interpret your intent to provide the corresponding filtered records. 

Imagine needing to find opportunities that should be reviewed this week. Simply type the query “Opportunities closing in the next 3 months” and let Copilot do the rest! This feature allows you to shift your focus from manually filtering and crafting views to analyzing data and obtaining valuable insights.

A screenshot of a computer

Try it now! The data exploration agent is available immediately via manual opt-in and is being rolled out through the Monthly Channel using the “Natural Language Grid and View Search” admin setting. 

Screenshot of the admin settings to enable or disable the feature

For more details, visit Find records and filter views using natural language | Microsoft Learn and Explore data on a grid page – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn 

We are excited to see how your daily workflows improve with this new feature and look forward to hearing your feedback as we continue to evolve the data exploration agent. Stay tuned for future enhancements! 

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Register Now for Power Platform and AI workshops in a city near you! http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-apps/powercat-kickstarter-workshops-feb-mar-2025/ Sat, 15 Feb 2025 16:00:00 +0000 The Microsoft Power CAT team is excited to announce a series of Kickstarter workshops at locations across United States and Canada. Join these multi-day events at no cost to accelerate your adoption of Power Platform and Copilot Studio (including autonomous agents).

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The Kickstarter program by Microsoft Power CAT (Customer Advisory Team) is designed to help accelerate our customers’ adoption and transformation journey. This program, offered at no cost to select customers, offers a set of day-long interactive workshops that are carefully curated based on industry guidance and insights from real-world customer adoption patterns. Through these workshops, you can set yourself on a path for successful adoption and build secure and reliable enterprise scale solutions.

How to attend? If you’re interested in participating at one or more locations alongside peers from your organization, please register at no cost for these events using the links below. Seats are limited and exclusive to qualified customers. Register now to secure your spot!

👉 Register for Power Platform Events (three days each):

  • Dallas: February 11–13
  • Chicago: February 18–20
  • Redmond: March 4–6
  • Toronto: March 11–13
  • New York: March 11–13
  • Atlanta: May 13-15
  • Stockholm: May 26-28
  • Brussels: June 24-26
  • Singapore: June 23-25

👉 Register for Copilot Studio Events (two days each):

  • Redmond: February 25–26
  • Atlanta: March 4–5
  • Houston: March 19–20
  • Munich: April 22-23
  • Sao Paulo: May 7-8
  • Paris: May 14-15
  • Tokyo: May 15-16
  • Milan: May 28-29
  • Toronto: June 4-5
Visual of Power Platform events in different cities
Kickstarter Power Platform events

Visual showing Copilot Studio workshops in different cities
Kickstarter Copilot Studio events

These exclusive Kickstarter workshops are delivered to qualified customers at no cost as multi-day in-person events at local Microsoft offices. The sessions will be delivered by our expert Kickstarter delivery partners with members from Power CAT joining in select locations.

The three-day Power Platform events focus on Enterprise Grade Governance and Scale Workloads pillars. These include governance, security, and architecture workshops that are based on Power CAT best practices and the guidance found at Power Well-Architected.

The two-day Copilot Studio events focus on the Conversational AI and Agents pillar – you will be introduced to agent building capabilities in Microsoft Copilot Studio and participate in envisioning exercises to identify relevant use cases for your organization.

Why Participate? Engaging in these deep dive workshops as a team will enable your organization to learn about the latest capabilities, understand best practices for scalable adoption, and envision relevant agentic scenarios for your business. You will leave feeling empowered to drive a meaningful Power Platform and AI adoption strategy catered to the needs of your organization.

Our workshops are more than just events – they’re a launchpad for a transformative change! Check out the full catalog of the eight Kickstarter workshops that are aligned to pillars and the respective personas:

Image showing a summary of the workshop agenda for Power Platform and Copilot Studio events

Power Platform: Three Days to Secure, Scalable, High-Performing Solutions

Transform your organization with this value-packed, three-day workshop series, offering best practices and actionable insights to design and optimize secure, enterprise-ready Power Platform solutions:

  • Day 1: Designing Secure and Compliant Governance – Tailor strategies to safeguard and scale Power Platform adoption.
  • Day 2: Power Platform Security – Tackle compliance, monitoring, and data protection challenges with expert guidance.
  • Day 3: Building Well-Architected Solutions – Create reliable, scalable solutions using proven Microsoft practices.

Leading with AI: Two Days to Build Secure and Scalable AI Solutions

Unlock the power of Generative AI and Microsoft Copilot Studio with this immersive, two-day workshop designed to transform your business:

  • Day 1: Introduction to Copilot Studio, Transforming IT Operations with Conversational AI, Autonomous Agents and AI Builder, Discover High-ROI use cases for Agentic Solutions
  • Day 2: Developing an AI-Powered HR Helpdesk, creating an autonomous Employee Onboarding Solution, Envisioning and Building with Copilot Studio.

Hope to see you at a city near you. We plan to add additional cities and virtual options in the coming weeks! For additional information or questions, please contact: KSEvents@microsoft.com.

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Unlock new possibilities by customizing Copilot chat in your apps with Copilot Studio (Preview) http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-apps/unlock-new-possibilities-by-customizing-copilot-chat-in-your-apps-with-copilot-studio-preview/ Thu, 09 Jan 2025 18:53:31 +0000 Microsoft Power Apps announces public preview of feature that allows customizing of in-app chat leveraging custom agent and Microsoft Copilot Studio.

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Customization plays a vital role for organizations aiming to implement AI solutions at scale. With the help of Microsoft Power Apps and Copilot Studio, businesses can now design tailored and efficient experiences specific to each app, thereby boosting productivity and enhancing user satisfaction.

We are thrilled to announce the public preview of Copilot chat extensibility for model-driven apps. This new capability empowers partners and customers to tailor and extend the in-app chat, making it more context-aware and more aligned with organization’s unique needs.

Power Apps backed by Agent built in Copilot Studio

By harnessing the capabilities of Copilot Studio, you can incorporate additional topics, knowledge sources, connectors, custom prompt guide and more, greatly enriching your Copilot chat experience. A dedicated agent is provisioned when customizing the Copilot chat to ensure that each model-driven app has a tailored and context-specific AI assistant. This extensibility approach ensures that your AI solutions are not only more pertinent but also scalable in tackling your unique business challenges.

timeline

It’s easy to get started. Go to https://make.preview.powerapps.com in any early release environment. Open the model-driven app whose Copilot chat you want to customize. Click on the ellipsis (…) in the left navigation bar and then select Configure in Copilot Studio. You will be directed to Copilot Studio with the appropriate agent ready for customization.

The animation below demonstrates a use case where, with just a few clicks, makers can enhance Copilot chat capabilities to answer any question from the Power Apps official documentation. Additionally, they can easily customize the Copilot UI to assist end users through prompt guides.

End to end demo for Power Apps Copilot chat customization using Copilot Studio.

For more information about the capabilities being made available with this release, please refer to the Power Apps documentation under Customize Copilot chat using Copilot Studio. Please use Power Apps Pro Dev forum or reach out via LinkedIn for any feedback or questions.

The expansive potential of extensibility is truly exciting. We look forward to this journey with our partners and customers, as we incrementally roll out additional features.

Note: This feature is currently available in early release environments and will be gradually rolled out to all makers over the coming weeks.

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Intelligent apps: Now created with a plan, optimized with agents, and scaled on a fully managed platform http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-apps/intelligent-apps-now-created-with-a-plan-optimized-with-agents-and-scaled-on-a-fully-managed-platform/ Tue, 19 Nov 2024 13:30:00 +0000 Join us at Microsoft Ignite 2024 to see the newest Power Apps announcements and embrace the era of Copilot-first development.

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At Microsoft Ignite 2024, Power Apps is unveiling powerful new ways to modernize business applications at scale in the era of AI.  

All of these announcements are entering preview by December 2024: 

  • Plan designer is ready for preview. In September 2024, we opened early access for select users to a new AI-powered workspace for turning requirements into a robust Microsoft Power Platform solution—including user stories, data model, apps, and automations. In the next weeks, we’re expanding access to a full preview. Designing a solution plan with Microsoft Copilot will make it easier than ever to upgrade existing apps and processes into intelligent applications.   
  • Makers can generate custom AI agents directly from Power Apps using the knowledge, logic, and actions built into existing apps to jumpstart the building of a Microsoft Copilot Studio agent. These custom agents will get work done on behalf of employees, which can reduce repetitive work, supercharge individual productivity, and drive overall business efficiency.1 Makers will also be able to tune the out-of-the-box agents in Power Apps with custom knowledge and actions using Copilot Studio.
  • Introducing managed security and managed operations in Power Platform. Just as we have simplified governance with managed environments, we are now making it easier than ever for organizations to apply advanced security to their Power Platform solutions and manage mission-critical workloads at scale. A completely redesigned admin experience now features focused capabilities for managing security, deploying solutions, monitoring telemetry, and more. 

Together, these advancements represent a major disruption to the traditional “build versus buy” tradeoff of business apps. By generating intelligent applications on a fully managed platform, technology leaders can get the best of both worlds—solutions that are purpose-built for exactly their needs but without the long-term costs of maintaining full stack projects. Forrester’s John Bratincevic argues that this is the beginning of a substantial shift.

“AI-powered enterprises will “build” software instead of “buy” it—and many applications in enterprise portfolios will consolidate onto low-code AppGen platforms.”

John Bratincevic, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Let’s dig into the details of how Power Platform is leading the AppGen transition with new capabilities rolling out now.

Build enterprise solutions, start with a plan 

In September 2024, we opened early access to a new Copilot-powered workspace in Power Apps that enables makers to design and generate a robust solution to nearly any business problem. With highly positive feedback from customers, we’re excited to bring the plan designer capabilities to preview.

Now developers will be able to start working on a business problem in an iterative process with Copilot, and keep better connection between the business requirements and the solution they are building.

The entire process of building a plan and generating solution components is iterative and collaborative. At any point makers can make changes to defined user roles, requirements, data model, or the proposed user experiences. The plan will live alongside the solution, changing with it and ensuring the understanding of the problem and requirements persist.  

The new plan designer experience will make a powerful tool for creating well-structured, adaptable, and collaborative solutions using Power Apps and Power Platform. 

Generate custom AI agents from existing app capabilities  

Makers can now easily generate agents from existing apps using the logic, knowledge, and actions built into those apps. Makers can leverage Copilot Studio capabilities directly in Power Apps to build custom agents that get work done on behalf of employees. Once these agents are deployed, users can review activity, manage complex cases, and focus on higher value work.

A screen recording of a maker in Power Apps Studio building an agent from an app

For instance, in a reimbursement management app, a maker takes existing process—categorization, compliance check, or rejecting requests—and builds an agent to execute these tasks. Makers can start from an existing app, and agent builder will suggest actions based on the app’s construction, like activating flows or running Power Fx functions. This significantly shortens the time to get to user value and makers can continue expanding agent functionality in Copilot Studio. For example, they can add the ability to process receipt images using the pre-built prompt with GPT-4o. 

For users, the benefits are clear: instead of requiring each request to be reviewed by a person, an agent handles it. Makers can also allow users to see which rows have been recently modified by the agent and view previous agent sessions. This transparency ensures that users can intervene when necessary, maintaining visibility and control. This functionality will be available to makers starting next month.

Improved in-app agents for data entry and summaries 

In addition to generating new custom agents, we’re also improving the out-of-the-box agents that end users leverage within Power Apps to get work done more efficiently.

A user in an app adding a document and an email to the form-fill bar and accepting the form suggestions.

Data entry is one of the tasks that many people consider tedious, and it’s no surprise that the Power Apps data entry agent, which helps users fill out forms, is highly valued by customers. At Power Platform Community Conference 2024, we announced the ability to copy text and let AI suggest form inputs from the clipboard. In a study with information workers, this Copilot assistance enabled 29% faster form filling, with 95% preferring it over manual entry.2 Now, users in model-driven apps can also directly add an email or file and get field suggestions from them. The new context control lets users see what data is used to predict fields, giving them more control. In canvas apps, entering long text input with Copilot now allows for custom prompts and presents multiple options to choose from—just like people are used to from Microsoft Word.

Quickly find what you need and understand a summary of complex records. Searching, sorting, and filtering of records using natural language with the help of the Power Apps data exploration agent is now available to all users in preview. And to give users easy insights, makers can add custom AI summaries to apps with a summary card—the performance of which they can review in the monitoring page.   

Copilot chat in apps can also now be customized—starting from the app designer, makers can open Copilot Studio, provision an agent responsible for the app chat experience and add new topics, knowledge grounding, domain-specific glossaries, and actions. A customized chat agent is then ready to help users with more relevant and helpful answers. 

Introducing managed security and managed operations 

In 2022, we introduced managed environments, a suite of governance capabilities that brought more visibility and control to administrators of Power Platform. We see every day how these capabilities allow IT teams to efficiently govern hundreds of thousands of assets, making well-governed use of Power Platform available to millions of users around the world, including for customers like Deutsche Bahn, Lerøy, and Lumen

A slide explaining the managed governance, managed operations and managed security concepts.

Today, we take another step forward. We know that large-scale app modernization and the transition of existing business processes onto intelligent solutions in Power Platform and Dynamics 365 will require even more than great governance. That’s why we’re introducing two additional, closely related capabilities: managed security and managed operations. This means that Power Apps, Power Automate, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and Dynamics 365 are now delivered on a fully managed platform. 

  • Managed governance helps organize and administer professional and citizen development with more visibility, more control, and less effort on the part of central teams.  
  • [New] Managed security makes it easier than ever before to apply advanced threat protections across the platform, helping security professionals assess and improve the security footprint of their business applications. Managed security includes industry-leading capabilities for proactive threat detection, access management, compliance, and more. Learn more in the Power Platform security and governance blog
  • [New] Managed operations makes it easier for advanced development teams to deploy and operate mission critical applications to maximize an organization’s productivity. This suite of capabilities is designed to safeguard and tune your production workloads with the ability to safely deploy updates, detect service degradations, and provide recommendations to improve production health. Learn more about managed operations.  

All managed capabilities are benefits of existing licenses and surface directly in existing products. This includes the Power Platform admin center (PPAC), which has now been completely re-imagined around a set of new highly productive workspaces for specific tasks—including reviewing inventory in managed environments, configuring and monitoring managed security, and leveraging managed operations capabilities for deployment and oversight.

These workspaces will also now be visible in focused ways in maker experiences. For example, developers will be able to observe and improve on the active usage of their applications in the monitoring workspace. They will see apps with low app open success rates and drill down on reasons why users can’t open the app, or they can see high latencies for showing the initial screen or data and understand what’s contributing to the problem. This will help makers find and address apps that require attention for improved performance.  

Today, we’re also making an important clarification to the licensing requirements for managed environments. Managed platform capabilities are a benefit of existing premium licenses, and any environment with managed features requires the users of any of the assets in that environment to have a premium license. We’re clarifying that as long as each individual user in the environment is appropriately licensed with at least one premium license—Power Apps or Power Automate—managed features will work and customers will be compliant.

Learn all about the updates to governance, scale, security, and data management capabilities in the breakout session Enterprise Scale: The Future of Power Platform Governance + Security

Apps that help users with line-of-business tasks 

Power Platform boasts a massive 1,400+ connector ecosystem, many of those connecting to the line-of-business data, giving options to business leaders and teams to build functionality they are missing to run business smoothly.  

We’re happy to announce two advances for building line-of-business apps. First, the SAP OData connector is now generally available, allowing access to SAP’s modern product stack, improving productivity and innovation with Power Platform’s low-code capabilities. Professionals building solutions over SAP will also benefit from a new whitepaper dedicated to architecting of SAP extensions.

And second, new bi-directional integration between Microsoft Dataverse and Snowflake allows makers to build end-to-end apps that act directly on Snowflake data, including the ability to create Dataverse virtual tables from Snowflake data. Coming soon, Dataverse data will be accessible in Snowflake so that customer service teams using Snowflake can leverage powerful analytics over their data in Dataverse, gaining deeper insights into customer behavior and enhancing service quality.

Join us at Microsoft Ignite 2024

Power Apps solves thousands of problems for tens of thousands of customers in almost every industry. With agents working alongside users, greater productivity from AI in apps, and expanded enterprise-grade tools for management at scale, Power Apps is the place for organizations to drive tangible AI impact

Join us at Microsoft Ignite 2024 to see the newest announcements firsthand and understand how you can leverage them. Embrace the era of Copilot-first development and accelerate your company transformation into the age of AI with Power Apps

shape

Microsoft Ignite 2024

Experience the latest innovations for AI transformation


1 New autonomous agents scale your team like never before.

2 Internal Microsoft testing conducted in November 2024 on sample of 22 subjects.

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New smart paste makes filling forms as easy as copy & paste http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-apps/new-smart-paste-makes-filling-forms-as-easy-as-copy-paste/ Mon, 04 Nov 2024 20:25:44 +0000 Have you ever found yourself frustrated by the tedious task of filling out forms, wishing you could just pull the information directly from an email, document, or note you already have? We are thrilled to introduce the new smart paste capability in Copilot form fill assistance for model-driven apps. Smart paste is designed to make

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Have you ever found yourself frustrated by the tedious task of filling out forms, wishing you could just pull the information directly from an email, document, or note you already have? We are thrilled to introduce the new smart paste capability in Copilot form fill assistance for model-driven apps. Smart paste is designed to make form-filling as simple as copy & paste. Now you can effortlessly fill forms based on the information you already have, saving you time and reducing errors. Get ready to experience a smarter, faster, and more intuitive way to handle forms. The announcements below begin rolling out to environments worldwide starting today.

Introducing smart paste

Smart paste is the latest capability of Copilot form fill assistance for model-driven apps, designed to make the time-consuming and frustrating task of form filling easier. Imagine this: you have some text in an email, document, or note that you need to enter into a form. Instead of manually typing it all in, you can now simply copy the text to your clipboard. Without selecting any specific field, just click the smart paste button or use the standard paste shortcut (CTRL+V or CMD+V). Copilot will reason over the form and the pasted text to suggested what text could be used to fill specific fields, and provides suggestions inline in the form. You can review and accept the suggestions that work for you—as always, nothing gets saved until you confirm. Ignoring suggestions will automatically discard it, and we are also introducing a new capability to clear all suggestions in the form.

GIF showing the new smart paste and citations capabilities of Copilot form fill assistance in a main form of a model-driven app

And if you prefer the traditional way, you can still paste directly into a specific field by clicking on it first and then pasting.

GIF showing regular paste into a form field

You can use smart paste in your model-driven apps by updating the following two settings in Power Platform admin center, under Settings > Product > Features > AI form fill assistance section:

  1. In the Enable this feature for field, make sure that All users immediately is selected.
  2. Set Enable smart paste (Preview) to On.
Image showing the two settings for Copilot form fill assistance feature, located in Power Platform admin center.

Discover the suggestion source using new citations

We are introducing a new capability that adds even more transparency to Copilot’s suggestions. With the new citations, you can now learn more about the source of the suggestions provided by Copilot. These citations clearly identify the source, for example “Records you have updated recently” or “Clipboard”, giving you more clarity and confidence in the suggestions you receive.

Screenshot of a citation for a suggestion by Copilot form fill assistance

Form fill assistance now available in quick create forms

Form fill assistance, including the new smart paste capability, is now available in quick create forms as well. This means you can enjoy the same time-saving benefits across even more of your forms.

GIF showing the new smart paste and citations capabilities of Copilot form fill assistance in a quick create form of a model-driven app

Expansion to 21 languages

Form fill assistance in model-driven apps is rolling out in the following 21 languages in addition to English (US):

  1. Arabic
  2. Chinese (Simplified)
  3. Czech
  4. Danish
  5. Dutch
  6. Finnish
  7. French
  8. German
  9. Greek
  10. Hebrew
  11. Italian
  12. Japanese
  13. Korean
  14. Norwegian (Bokmål)
  15. Polish
  16. Portuguese (Brazil)
  17. Russian
  18. Spanish
  19. Swedish
  20. Thai
  21. Turkish

We want to hear from you

Learn more about this feature in the documentation. We look forward to you trying out these capabilities in your model-driven apps and sharing your feedback through the form fill assistance survey in your model-driven app.

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Unlock new levels of productivity with Microsoft Dataverse and Microsoft Copilot Studio http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-apps/unlock-new-levels-of-productivity-with-microsoft-dataverse-and-microsoft-copilot-studio/ Tue, 21 May 2024 15:30:54 +0000 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.

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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.

Modal image to add available knowledge sources
 

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.

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

Screenshot of testing Copilot responses to custom connector.

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.

A cell phone with text on it from the LARA copilot


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

Peppermint Technology's logo

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.

Microsoft Copilot connectors diagram
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 1,400 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.

A screenshot of a enabling Docusign Copilot connector
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

Docusign logo

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.

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Copilot assistance for filling forms is now in all model-driven apps http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-apps/copilot-assistance-for-filling-forms-all-model-driven-apps/ Wed, 06 Mar 2024 17:04:41 +0000 We’re excited to announce Copilot assistance for form filling is now available for all model-driven apps – across Power Apps and your favorite Dynamics 365 model-driven apps!

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Data entry in forms can be tedious and frustrating, but not with Copilot assistance for form filling. This feature provides suggestions from AI for filling out fields in main forms in model-driven apps. You can save time and effort while completing forms with just a few clicks or keystrokes. We’re excited to announce this feature is now available for all model-driven apps – across Power Apps and your favorite Dynamics 365 model-driven apps!

Form fill assistance in your favorite Dynamics 365 model-driven apps

Copilot assistance for form filling uses AI to generate suggestions for fields in main forms, based on your app usage and data patterns and what’s already in the form. You can simply accept the suggestions that suit your needs. And don’t worry, nothing gets saved until you confirm it.

This feature is now available in your favorite Power Apps and Dynamics 365 model-driven apps. See it in action below in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Sales:

Form fill assistance in Dynamics 365 Customer Service workspace
Form fill assistance in Dynamics 365 Customer Service workspace
Form fill assistance in Dynamics 365 Sales Hub
Form fill assistance in Dynamics 365 Sales Hub

Manage form fill assistance in admin center

Admins can manage whether form fill assistance is available or not in their model-driven apps through Power Platform admin center using the AI form fill assistance setting rolling out worldwide this week.

Manage form fill assistance with setting in Power Platform admin center

Learn more

Form fill assistance in model-driven apps is rolling out gradually in the February monthly channel release and early access for 2024 release wave 1. It will be enabled by default as part of 2024 release wave 1 for all model-driven apps in English language on the web with “New Look” enabled.

Learn more about this feature in the documentation.

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How Power Platform Global AI #HackTogether inspired AI-powered solutions for real-world use cases http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-apps/how-power-platform-global-ai-hacktogether-inspired-ai-powered-solutions-for-real-world-use-cases/ Wed, 07 Feb 2024 16:00:00 +0000 In September 2023, participants from around the world built solutions for the Power Platform Global AI #HackTogether using AI technologies together with Power Platform. The hundreds of solutions developed for real-world use cases were innovative and impactful. We summarize some of the solutions by use cases to inspire you in building your next AI-powered solution with Power Platform.

The post How Power Platform Global AI #HackTogether inspired AI-powered solutions for real-world use cases appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

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Seeking inspiration for the year in building AI-powered solutions? We’ve summarized a collection of solutions by use cases from last September’s Power Platform Global AI #HackTogether. Over the course of 2 weeks,

  • There were several live sessions (now available on-demand) for participants to learn about the Copilot and AI features of Power Platform.
  • Participants followed a Learn Collection for help in getting started.
  • Over 100 project submissions were received with 4 winners chosen across the different categories.

 

C:\Users\ebenitez\OneDrive - Microsoft\Power Platform CA\Power Platform AI Hackathon

Summary of the participants and project submissions from around the world.

The categories for the hackathon were:

Grand prize winner – The best of the best! Rewards the solution that meets all judging criteria, wows judges, and has potential real-world value for Power Platform Users.

Best AI-powered solution – Rewards the solution that integrates AI in an innovative way.

Best Better Together Use Case – Rewards the solution that uses the Power Platform and other Microsoft products in an interesting way.

Best Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Use Case – Rewards the solution that helps make the Power Platform community more diverse, equitable and inclusive.

The submissions were innovative and demonstrated how AI can be helpful across numerous use cases. Be inspired this year in building AI-powered solutions with Power Platform by checking out these community submissions below:

 

Education

Teaching Accelerator

Teachers spend thousands of hours each year planning the curriculum for their students. Elliot Fraser developed a Power Platform solution, known as the Teaching Accelerator, to expedite the process for teachers in creating a curriculum for their students. The solution utilizes OpenAI’s ChatGPT service where teachers can interact with it through a Copilot embedded in the model-driven app to create lessons, modify the lessons created, and create an entire curriculum of lessons for a topic.

Elliot Fraser's Teaching Accelerator solution for teachers where generative AI is used to help create lessons, plans for lessons and curriculum of lessons.

Teachers can interact with a Copilot within the model-driven app for creating lessons and a curriculum for students.

The solution consists of the following main features:

  • Model-driven app which is the primary end user interface for the teachers to plan their lessons and a curriculum for students.
  • Custom pages built using Power Apps canvas apps are embedded in the model-driven app to help guide teachers to create a curriculum of lessons, create lesson plans and view, modify and assign existing lessons.
  • Teachers enter their questions into a Copilot that was built using Microsoft Copilot Studio to receive AI-generated suggestions for a curriculum and lesson plans. The Copilot appears in a pane within the model-driven app through a custom page.
  • Power Automate cloud flows in the background interact with OpenAI’s ChatGPT service to relay the suggestions to the teacher.
  • When the teacher is satisfied with the suggestions from Copilot, they can ask Copilot to generate the curriculum and lesson plans in the model-driven app. Depending on where the teacher executes this in the app, Copilot calls a function in OpenAI to create an array of the curriculum or lesson plans as a JSON object. This output is then saved in Dataverse using a cloud flow by transforming it into rows of data which the teacher sees as the curriculum or lesson plans in the model-driven app.

What we loved

Elliot’s Teaching Accelerator solution won the Grand Prize winner category of the hackathon due to the impact it would have in the education space by reducing the hours teachers spend annually. Teachers can quickly create a curriculum and lesson plans for students in minutes with the help of generative AI and Power Platform.

Since the hack, Elliot has an updated version of the Teaching Accelerator where he’s made enhancements based on feedback from teachers who have been testing the solution. For an overview of the updated solution version, watch Elliot’s presentation from a previous The Low Code Revolution episode.

 

Family support

Make Life Easy

To provide everyday support for parents of autistic children, Raghav Mishra developed a Power Apps canvas app to create structured daily routines. As a parent to an autistic child, Raghav recognized their son thrived when steps of their daily routines were illustrated visually by his wife with the corresponding written text. Inspired by his wife’s dedication in helping their son, Raghav turned to the Power Platform combined with OpenAI’s services to develop a Power Apps canvas app that uses generative AI to help create the text-based steps of the tasks and design the corresponding images of the steps. The Make Life Easy app can be used by parents to establish routines the children can follow.

Parents interact with generative AI in a canvas app to create written and visual steps for tasks children follow.

Parents interact with generative AI in a canvas app to create written and visual steps for tasks children follow.

The solution consists of the following main features:

  • Parents use the canvas app to interact with OpenAI’s ChatGPT service to generate a list of text-based steps for tasks, such as the steps children follow to put their shoes on.
  • The text-based steps for each task are saved in Dataverse, which are displayed in the gallery of the app.
  • Parents can select a step from the gallery and interact with OpenAI’s DALL-E service to create the corresponding visual images for all steps, such as asking for an image of a child sitting on a chair as a step the child follows to tie their shoelaces.
  • Once all images of the steps for the tasks are created, they can be added to the schedule board for children to follow. Parents can then assign the tasks to their children.
  • Children see their assigned tasks in their personal daily schedule board within the app. They can follow each of the steps through the visual and written instructions generated by AI.

What we loved

Raghav’s Make Life Easy solution won the Best Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Use Case category for designing a solution that supports parents of autistic children and their daily routines. Parents can interact with generative AI in a Power Apps canvas app to define the steps of a task and create the corresponding visuals. Children can follow these AI-generated steps through written and visual comprehension in the app.

 

Parents Advisor

To help parents encourage and teach children every day, Richard Li created a Power Apps canvas app known as Parents Advisor, where parents can seek additional support for advice on educating their children. Several Azure OpenAI services and OpenAI services were used together with Power Platform to provide tailored recommendations based on the individual in-app user profiles. Children can also have one-on-one interaction with AI, where the AI-generated answers are verbally read to them from the app itself. The Parents Advisor app can be used daily by both parents and children for written and aural comprehension.

Parents Advisor app allows parents and children to interact with generative AI to create tailored learning experiences in the form of written and aural comprehension.

Parents and children interact with generative AI to create tailored learning experiences in the canvas app.

The solution consists of the following main features:

  • Parents can select from built-in prompts in the canvas app such as how to encourage their child to sleep independently. They can also enter their own custom prompts directly in the app, where Azure OpenAI’s ChatGPT service will respond with an answer which the parent can save for future reference.
  • Parents also have the option to provide their prompt verbally through the built-in microphone control of canvas apps. Their verbal prompt is then transcribed to text using OpenAI’s Whisper speech-to-text service and can also be translated to more than 50 languages.
  • All responses from Azure OpenAI’s ChatGPT service can be transcribed from text-to-speech using the Speech service from Azure AI. The style of the voice can be altered using Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) such as the effect, style and multilingual voices. This means the AI advisor can “talk” to children by reading the responses to prompts through the built-in audio control of canvas apps.
  • Most of the parent end-user features are also replicated for the children end-users where they too can interact with the Parent Advisor app and access the list of built-in topic prompts. Or they can enter their own custom prompts and have the app read the responses generated.
  • One of the fun features of the app is using Azure OpenAI’s ChatGPT service to author bedtime stories for children based on pre-selected criteria of the character (e.g. Cinderella), language, genre, length and the requested story details. The parent or child also has an option to create their own bedtime story by adding their own prompts. Based on the prompts selected, the app will generate a bedtime story which can be read by the parent or child, or the app can read it to them through the native audio control of canvas apps.

What we loved

It was very cool to see the solution utilize the Speech service from Azure AI to transcribe the responses from text-to-speech in relation to the prompt entered by the parent or child. We also liked it was diverse and inclusive in providing multi-language support to cater for different languages of families.

 

Healthcare

DISCLAIMER: Applications built using Microsoft Power Platform are not designed or intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment and should not be used to replace or as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment.

Romão’s Homecare

To assist doctors and nurses with scheduled visits to patient’s homes, the Romão brothers – Douglas and Renato, built several apps by combining low code and pro-code techniques. A Power Apps canvas app, known as the Romão’s Homecare mobile app, is used by the doctors and nurses for visibility of daily scheduled in-home patient visits and to record details of their assessment from their devices. The information entered in the Romão Homecare app is saved in Dataverse and is accessible through a Power Apps model-driven app.

Romão's Homecare mobile app allows doctors and nurses to capture their assessment of patients during in-home visits with assistance from generative AI.

Doctors and nurses capture their assessment of patients during in-home visits with assistance from generative AI in a canvas app.

The solution consists of the following main features:

  • The canvas app is the primary end user interface for doctors and nurses where they can see a list of their upcoming scheduled in-home visits. The built-in interactive map control displays the location of their patient visits.
  • The native camera control of canvas apps enables them to capture photos during their assessment with the patient. These photos are uploaded into Azure Blob Storage and a sentiment score based on the images uploaded is generated using a Python web app via Azure App service.
  • Audio recordings can also be captured using the native microphone control in canvas apps where the audio is transcribed to text using OpenAI Whisper’s speech-to-text service.
  • A simple Yes/No checklist is used which is submitted to OpenAI to provide a score of the visit.
  • On completion of the visit, the overall score calculated by OpenAI indicates the wellbeing of the patient with a high score being good and a low score requiring further attention.
  • A model-driven app displays the stored patient data in Dataverse where information can be modified if needed.

What we loved

Doctors and nurses taking notes during or after a patient visit takes time and the solution reduces this administrative effort by capturing audio recordings and transcribing them to text using OpenAI Whisper’s speech-to-text service. There’s no duplicate time spent re-entering their notes by typing into the app. The data being accessible through Dataverse is also convenient for the information to be modified if additional details need to be edited.

 

Medical Assistant

To help the medical industry interpret computerized tomography (CT) scans and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, Yevhenii Dementiev, Valentin Gasenko and Surkho Salamov built an app, known as the Detect Cancer app, to support physicians with reviewal of patient scans. The aim of the solution is to help physicians to distinguish between possible tumors and other anomalies, improving the precision of diagnosis and identifying tumors at various stages.

The Detect Cancer app identifies potential tumors and anomalies to help doctors with diagnosis.

AI technologies used in their solution identifies potential tumors and anomalies to help physicians with diagnosis.

The solution consists of the following main features:

  • Physicians use a canvas app where images from the CT and MRI scans can be uploaded using the built-in attachments control of canvas apps.
  • Using AI Builder Object Detection Model, the uploaded images are analyzed and highlight the detected possible cancer regions on the CT scan and MRI scan.
  • A Power Automate cloud flow sends the detected information from the AI model to OpenAI’s Completions service to generate medical conclusions for the physicians to predict the recovery of the patient.
  • The physician can also dive further into the regions detected for analysis and comparison from previous CT and MRI scans of the patient. Based on the historic data, OpenAI can provide a prediction of the patient’s recovery from cancer.
  • Dataverse is used to store all information about the patient scans and conclusions of the detected cancer regions.

What we loved

This is an incredible solution that supports a healthcare use case by assisting detection of cancer regions and medical conclusions using AI Builder Object Detection Model combined with OpenAI services. It was also nice to see the team include feedback in their video submission from their target audience of physicians. Their solution has demonstrated how Power Platform and AI together can be of secondary help to healthcare professionals.

 

Human Resources

The Relocation Game

Employee relocation can be overwhelming for employees in two ways: understanding what their organization’s local policies are and adjusting to a new city – especially if the employee is unfamiliar with the local surroundings. Denisa Mihai built a Power Apps canvas app known as The Relocation Game, to help employees with their move by interacting with a Copilot to learn about the local policies and help identify the city’s landmarks through AI Builder.

Employees interact with copilot to learn more about their benefit, what the required documentation is for their relocation and can be connected to the HR team.

Employees interact with a Copilot embedded in a canvas app to learn more about their work benefits, the required documentation for relocation and can be connected to the HR team.

The solution consists of the following main features:

  • A Copilot is embedded in a Power Apps canvas app which uses the built-in boost conversation capabilities where natural language processing is applied to find, collate and parse relevant information from the sites and summarize the search results into plain language for the employee.
  • Employees interact with the Copilot within the Relocation app where they can ask about the company benefits, documentation required for their move to a new country, and request to be connected to the HR team for additional questions.
  • An AI Builder object detection custom model was developed and trained to recognize city landmarks for employees to become familiar with their city’s surroundings. The trained object detection custom model is embedded into the Relocation app.
  • Using the built-in camera and image controls of canvas apps, the employee takes photos and uploads these into the object detection custom model for it to recognize and present the name of the landmark to the employee.
  • Employees can also create their own collection of landmarks by taking photos and adding them to their list of landmarks in the Relocation app.

What we loved

Employees can feel supported for their relocation to another city by interacting with a Copilot with boost conversation capabilities enabled to help with HR related enquiries. We liked that there was an element of “discovery” built into the app for employees to take photos and verify a landmark of the city using the AI Builder object detection custom model.

 

Seeker

Recruiting new talent is often time-consuming during the phases of advertising, finding candidates and interviewing candidates. Isabelle Gaboc, Daniel Kerridge, and Jady Mulqueeney developed an end-to-end solution to reduce the administrative hours spent. A Power Pages site was built to handle the job listings and the initial interview process with candidates. Candidates can choose to have an automated interview within the Power Pages site where interviews are tailored to the candidate. Azure OpenAI’s ChatGPT capabilities in AI Builder generates open ended questions in alignment to the job description and information provided in candidate’s resumes, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT service is utilized during the interview for an ongoing conversational dialog with the candidate.

Open ended interview questions generated with the AI Builder connector in Power Automate are used in the AI-led interviews with candidates.

Open ended interview questions generated with the AI Builder connector in Power Automate are used in the AI-led interviews with candidates.

The solution consists of the following main features:

  • An AI-generated Power Pages site was created using Copilot that enables candidates to review all available positions. They can apply by uploading their resumes and begin the automated interview process shortly after.
  • Several cloud flows were built to extract text from the uploaded resume where the data is parsed and analyzed using the AI Builder text recognition prebuilt model to convert the resume to text.
  • The automation continues by converting the job description to text using Azure OpenAI GPT capabilities in AI Builder to format the resume text from the previous step by removing unnecessary information and only keep the information aligned to the job description. As the last automation step, AI Builder’s OpenAI GPT capabilities are used again to generate open ended interview questions based on the refined resume text and job description.
  • The candidate interviews are conducted within a webpage in the Power Pages site through a virtual call with a .NET bot integrated with Azure Communication Services. The interview questions generated by AI Builder from the cloud flow are retrieved by the .NET bot from the webpage using liquid, a markup language in Power Pages.
  • Using Azure AI services text-to-speech, the .NET bot asks the candidate the interview questions generated by AI Builder.
  • In return, the candidate can respond verbally to the .NET bot where the audio dialog is translated from speech-to-text using Azure AI services.
  • The .NET bot will then send the translated text to OpenAI’s ChatGPT service with a prompt to respond accordingly for the interview. The output used for the response is translated once again to speech and relayed aurally back to the candidate. This enables a constant conversational AI dialog loop between the bot and the candidate.

What we loved

Their Seeker site solution won the Best AI-powered solution category of the hackathon due to the impact it would have for Human Resources in allowing candidates to use a Power Pages site to upload their resume for a job application and use OpenAI’s ChatGPT services to create a list of interview questions, followed by conducting the interview through a virtual voice call – all without any human intervention.

For a more detailed overview of the solution watch the Seeker team’s presentation from a previous Microsoft 365 & Power Platform weekly call.

 

Not-for-profit

Migrant Worker Case Management

Filipino citizens who work abroad sometimes face difficulties in understanding their rights in the country they work in. A case management solution was developed by Carmina Symaco, Marcos Antonio Abrematia and Jayson Espadero to support migrant workers in solving their issues by interacting with a Copilot embedded in a Power Pages site. All questions are created as a case in Dataverse where additional support personnel can review and respond to the person working abroad.

Migrant workers can paste an excerpt from their employment contract to generate details that is more easily understood.

Migrant workers can paste an excerpt from their employment contract into the page in the Power Pages site to generate details that are more easily understood.

The solution consists of the following main features:

  • A Copilot built using Microsoft Copilot Studio utilizes the built-in boost conversation capabilities where local websites of a country are associated to the Copilot to generate responses to questions asked by migrant workers.
  • The Copilot is embedded in a Power Pages site where the user provides details of their role, the country they are working in and selects from a list of topics that resemble their issue to gain further assistance. Based on the information provided, Copilot returns the desired information extracted and collated from local websites of the country the Filipino citizen works in.
  • Excerpts from their employee contract can also be parsed and analyzed using Power Automate cloud flows combined with OpenAI’s ChatGPT service to interpret the details and generate an answer that can be easily understood by them.
  • All answers are captured as a case where support personnel can review them in a canvas app. An embedded Copilot in the app assists the support personnel to generate responses for the cases.
  • AI Builder text recognition prebuilt model was used to classify the cases based on the description the migrant worker provided to the Copilot in Power Pages. In the app, there is a view for cases where the tag identified by AI Builder and the selected issue type by the migrant worker do not match. The administrator reviews the conversation history between the migrant worker and Copilot to correct the classification of the case.

What we loved

The solution was supportive of migrant workers by using a Copilot with boost conversation capabilities to answer queries and use OpenAI’s ChatGPT service to help them understand their employment contracts. Since it’s embedded in a Power Pages site, they’re able to access the Copilot 24/7 which is of benefit to workers across different time zones. The team also included some neat features for the support personnel and one that stood out was using AI Builder text recognition prebuilt model to verify the classification of the case was correct which will help with the long-term quality of the data.

 

Information Technology

Prompt Wagon

Artem Chernevskiy, Katerina Chernevskaya, and Nikita Chernevskiy recognized that prompt engineering is a growing new skill for organizations of all industries to utilize. Prompt engineering is natural language inputs or queries users provide to Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce the desired outputs or responses. To help organizations become skilled in prompt engineering, a Power Apps canvas app known as Prompt Wagon, was developed where users can select from a list of more than 100 pre-defined prompts and practice their knowledge of prompts by interacting with Azure OpenAI’s ChatGPT service within the app. The aim of the app is to help end users of all levels – beginners or advanced to learn how to construct their prompts and grow their prompt engineering skills.

Users can practice prompt engineering with the canvas app and gain more confidence in using generative AI.

Users can practice prompt engineering with the canvas app and gain more confidence in using generative AI.

The solution consists of the following main features:

  • Users can select from 100+ pre-defined prompts across three categories of Business, Data and Education in the canvas app to help them exercise prompt engineering with the Azure OpenAI ChatGPT service. It also includes multi-language support in English, German and French.
  • A custom connector was built to query the Azure OpenAI ChatGPT service from the canvas app. This enables users to interact with the services from within the app.
  • Dataverse is used to store the text, images, prompts and translations of the German and French languages. All of these are surfaced onto the canvas app from Dataverse.
  • Built-in app settings are available to modify the prompts and query parameters directly within the app. The updated settings are adhered to when end users next enter their prompts into the app.

What we loved

The app will help organizations be better equipped with prompt engineering through interacting with generative AI in the app. It was great to see the team build a custom connector to make the actions reusable across their solution that query the Azure OpenAI ChatGPT service from the canvas app. The use of Dataverse for the high volume of text, images, prompts and translations of several languages will support the solution to scale as the library of prompts grow over time with use.

 

CodeScribe

Developers often review code authored by others, with a common scenario being legacy code, where there can be little documentation or comments in the source code. To help automate code reviews, Robert Perillo built a Power Apps canvas app known as CodeScribe for developers to copy and paste code snippets into the app. A summary of the code is provided using Azure OpenAI’s Completions service to assist developers with understanding the code.

Developers can perform code reviews instantly by entering code snippets into a Power Apps canvas app and Azure OpenAI will summarize the code.

Developers can perform code reviews instantly by entering code snippets into a Power Apps canvas app and Azure OpenAI will summarize the code.

The solution consists of the following main features:

  • Developers can paste code snippets into the canvas app and when they submit the code for review within the app, a Power Automate cloud flow executes to call the Azure OpenAI Completions service which analyzes the code snippet.
  • Azure OpenAI then formats the code into two outputs, the first being a code summary that provides an overview of what the code does, and the second is a commented code block that explains each step of the code in detail for documentation purposes.
  • The Power Automate cloud flow sends the formatted code to the canvas app for developers to review the summarized code and view a running commentary on the lines of code.

What we loved

Robert’s CodeScribe app won the Best Better Together Use Case category to help developers with the task of reviewing and documenting code by combining Power Platform and Azure OpenAI Completions service. We liked that the summaries are produced within minutes, reducing the time spent on code reviews. The solution breaks down what the code does by first summarizing it in a short paragraph, followed by a detailed explanation for each of the steps in the code.

 

Share your story with us!

Do you have a story or experience to share? We are excited to learn more about how individuals and organizations are using Power Platform with generative AI and Copilot capabilities! Submit your story at https://aka.ms/ShareAIStory

 

Learn more about Microsoft Power Platform and Copilot

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Copilot brings the power of intelligence to your favorite Power Apps http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-apps/copilot-brings-the-power-of-intelligence-to-your-favorite-power-apps/ Mon, 21 Aug 2023 18:31:00 +0000 Today, we are announcing the availability of Copilot for users of model-driven apps and a major expansion of Copilot control’s capabilities in canvas apps. Now, all Power Apps can be intelligent apps.

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Since its introduction earlier this year, Copilot continues to change everything about the way we work. Power Apps has transformed low-code development by empowering all app makers to quickly create powerful business apps through intuitive experiences.

Today, we are announcing the availability of Copilot for users of model-driven apps and a major expansion of Copilot control’s capabilities in canvas apps. Now, all Power Apps can be intelligent apps. Makers can easily build apps to boost productivity for users, powered by next-generation AI in an intuitive experience.

Introducing Copilot in model-driven apps

Today, we are rolling out Copilot for users of model-driven apps. Copilot helps users get insights about their data and helps them navigate the app simply through conversation in natural language.

Screenshot of Copilot for app users in model-driven apps

Copilot in model-driven apps is releasing as part of the Monthly Channel. This enables Copilot to evolve more rapidly based on your feedback, bringing value in smaller and quicker increments instead of making you wait for twice-yearly updates.

To learn more about Copilot in model-driven apps, please read: Add Copilot to model-driven apps

Major boost to Copilot control in canvas apps

Since the release of Copilot control in March, we have received a resounding and clear request: support larger datasets! We heard you, and today we are rolling out an important update: now when you connect the Copilot control to Dataverse, you can ask questions about really large tables – no size limits.

Screenshot of Copilot for app users in canvas apps

Pro tip: PowerFx can help you do more with Copilot control. In the example below, Copilot control’s ‘SelectedItems’ property is used to display details about Copilot’s answer in a gallery.

graphical user interface, application, Teams

To learn more about Copilot in canvas apps, please read: Add Copilot control to canvas apps

Your feedback makes Copilot better

Are you curious about how to steer the future of Copilot? Do you have innovative ideas on how to enhance its capabilities? We want to hear from you! Your input plays a pivotal role in shaping the evolution of Copilot. In addition to the current ability for makers to provide feedback about Copilot control in canvas apps, today we are rolling out two new ways to share your voice:

  1. Share your ideas and thoughts through this Power Apps community forum post
  2. Share your feedback directly as you use Copilot in both model-driven and canvas apps

Availability

Today’s announcements are available in the United States and English language. While Copilot for app users in model-driven and canvas apps remains in preview, we are aware about the importance and urgency of equipping organizations to leverage these latest powerful capabilities in production. If you would like to use these capabilities in production today, please reach out to us with details about your use via Microsoft Support to request production support.

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