Our first wish is that everyone is remaining safe during these unique and difficult times. As with most things, most of us have adapted to new schedules and modes of work. This year the Microsoft Business Applications Summit will be held virtually, Wednesday May 6th, 9AM PST. If you haven’t had a chance to register, you still can! Power Virtual Agents will have a significant presence at this year’s conference, with live virtual sessions with real-time Q&A and several on-demand sessions which will be available in content waves. Since Power Virtual Agents is still a new service, let’s quickly summarize its core values.
Enhancing the Future of Work with Conversational AI
We launched Power Virtual Agents in 2019, adding it as the fourth member of the Microsoft Power Platform. Power Virtual Agents enables organizations to create chatbots with no code, which can engage conversationally with customers and employees. The service is built on the following foundational values (figure 1):
- Democratize AI — Empowers your subject matter experts to easily create powerful chatbots using a guided, no-code graphical interface. There is no need for developers or data scientists.
- Engage Naturally — Engage with customers and employees conversationally. Resolve routine issues easily which frees staff to focus on more complex or strategic matters.
- Take Action – Easily connect your backend systems with a few clicks using the hundreds of connectors that come with Power Platform – or call APIs and custom workflows using Microsoft Power Automate.
- Continually Enhance – Leverage our AI on your website to automatically build chat topics and get started in a few clicks. Access powerful metrics and insights from your chatbot’s usage to help determine which topics to build next.
Figure 1. The Foundational Pillars of Power Virtual Agents
With that, let’s now preview the Power Virtual Agents Microsoft Business Applications Summit session list.
Virtual Sessions with Live Q&A: 28 min sessions, Wednesday May 6th, 2020
- “Empower Your Organization with the Microsoft Power Platform” 9:15 AM PST — The Microsoft Power Platform is a low-code development platform empowering your employees to solve today’s most challenging business problems with ease and within the bounds of your IT governance. The Power Platform leverages seamless automation, low-code application development, engaging conversational AI, and enhanced data analytics and visualization tools to help plan, execute, and analyze your organization’s challenges to produce unique and often unimagined solutions. The Power Platform includes Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents. In this session, we showcase the foundational elements of the Power Platform, discuss its latest capabilities and also demonstrate how the global healthcare giant GSK is using the Power Platform to address one of its real-world challenges. This session will open you up to the possibilities your organization can achieve with the Power Platform and the nearly unlimited potential it can offer you!
- “Build a bot that integrates with your backend systems with Power Virtual Agents” 10:45 AM PST — Learn how to integrate Microsoft Power Virtual Agents with your backend systems to enable bots to act on behalf of your users. As part of this session, we’ll cover invoking Power Automate flows and call Bot Framework Skills from your bot.
- “Empower subject matter experts to drive engagement in your business using Power Virtual Agents” 12PM PST — Learn more about how customers are improving engagement, productivity and reducing costs through personalized conversational intelligent virtual agents. In this session, you’ll get an overview of all new capabilities enabling your subject matter experts to build intelligent conversations.
On-Demand Session, Thursday May 7th, 2020
- “Best practices for building an intelligent bot with Power Virtual Agents” — Learn more about best practices that our customers follow to build successful virtual agents. This session will cover what it takes to build a Virtual Agent that provides best business outcomes, how to improve your virtual agent, and drive engagement.
Begin Your Journey with Power Virtual Agents
We hope you have had a chance to explore the possibilities with Power Virtual Agents by starting a trial today. You can build your first chatbot in a matter of minutes and get started on delivering an engaging experience for your customers and employees. Also, make sure to follow our blog for the latest feature updates and use cases for chatbots. Please join our community to share your ideas, provide your comments, and even help drive the future direction of our product development. Below are some quick links to get you started on your journey.
