Build intelligent and scalable solutions with Microsoft Power Apps and Microsoft Power Platform
In this blog post and the accompanying demo video, we want to highlight what is possible with Microsoft Power Apps and Microsoft Power Platform today and how this development platform enables organizations to build intelligent solutions at an enterprise scale. With Microsoft Power Platform, you can leverage AI-powered authoring to accelerate development, enable developers of varying skills and preferences, and drive innovation at an enterprise scale with confidence. Our hope is this will inspire you to explore more about Power Apps and Microsoft Power Platform, and to leverage them to drive value for your organization.
Microsoft Power Platform enables developers of all kinds to build solutions for AI era
We live in an era of a technological shift, which is pushing development up the stack. Already today, 75% of knowledge workers use AI at work, while 60% of leaders worry their organization’s leadership lacks a plan and vision to implement AI.1
Organizations must rethink and modernize their software to stay relevant and competitive in the age of AI. Traditional software development still has its undeniable place in the dev stack, yet the developers and leaders must combine it with other approaches to get the most value out of limited resources. It’s hard to imagine a reality where traditional code wielding will be fast enough in covering the immense demand of users for AI-enabled software.
This AI-era shift is another reason that motivates more and more organizations to turn to low-code. Microsoft Power Platform, which we consider the most comprehensive low-code platform, enables them to build applications, automations, pages, and intelligent copilots quickly and easily, with less code writing. Yet, when needed, developers can easily work with underlying code as well.
The value that developers build brings more than 33 million users to Microsoft Power Platform every month2 and also drives the 40% year-on-year growth for Power Apps users.3
Microsoft Power Platform and Power Apps allow for building of intelligent and scalable solutions that leverage the power of AI, data, and cloud on a unified platform that works seamlessly together and shares a common data model, AI engine, and governance framework. And that is what a true development platform for the age of AI needs.
AI-powered development and authoring in Power Apps
Microsoft Copilot is revolutionizing day-to-day business for organizations. Heavy Microsoft Teams users save eight hours a week thanks to Copilot meeting summaries and 66% of leaders surveyed in Microsoft’s Work Trend Index Report already say they wouldn’t hire someone without AI skills.
AI-powered authoring is also one of the key differentiators of Microsoft Power Platform. Power Apps and Microsoft Power Platform have used AI for years—in 2019, we started with AI Builder and in 2021, we brought natural language to Microsoft Power Fx formulas functionality.
Today, Microsoft Power Platform embedded with Copilot gives developers generative AI assistance through the whole app building process—from first idea through editing, until publishing. More than 330,000 organizations have already used Copilot in Microsoft Power Platform.
With Copilot in Microsoft Power Apps, for example, you can start building an app by describing it. Copilot brings back tables for underlying data. You can continue to edit the tables, add new ones, or adjust the relationships between the data. Of course, you can do the same with the studio visual editor and seamlessly switch between point-and-click and natural language editing for maximum productivity.
Once you land in the application view, you continue editing via Copilot chat back-and-forth exchange. You can also use natural language when crafting, fixing, and editing the Power Fx formulas. Copilot also helps you when you’re facing an unfamiliar formula in an app that someone else built—simply ask Copilot to explain it in the formula bar.
Similar simplicity and synergy of natural language, visual editor, and code is present throughout Microsoft Power Platform products—Microsoft Power Pages, Microsoft Power Automate, and Microsoft Copilot Studio.
Copilot drives real developer speed—in Power Apps, we see makers with Copilot build 60% faster and in Power Automate, their speed is doubled.4 It is not just a tool for beginners or non-developers, it is also a powerful productivity booster for professional developers who can use it to accelerate their development process, reduce errors, and learn best practices.
Build solutions for enterprise scale
One of reasons why customers choose to build on Microsoft Power Platform and with Power Apps is the scale it enables. Built on Microsoft Cloud and Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Power Platform gives organizations the tools to manage and secure apps, data, and environments across an entire enterprise scale with the ease, simplicity, and security you expect from Microsoft.
Let’s look at Deutsche Bahn (DB) Group, for example. It operates the largest rail infrastructure in Europe, and it uses Microsoft Power Platform with all of is employees to accelerate innovation and leverage the Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence and Managed Environments to govern the large-scale adoption. Or Centrica, a leading energy services and solutions provider and the UK’s biggest retailer of zero-carbon electricity, now has more than 800 business solutions that support more than 15,000 users across the company. Accenture has all of its more than 700,000 employees enabled with premium licenses to drive the culture of innovation, and Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), the largest utility in the US, is using Microsoft Power Platform to save more than $75 million in operating costs and more than half a million hours of human effort every year.
Microsoft Power Platform is built for scale. Customers like DB, Centrica, Accenture, PG&E, and many others enjoy the visibility, control, and ease of governing their solution ecosystem with Microsoft Power Platform. They are able to do what anyone would expect of an enterprise-ready application platform:
- Create and manage multiple environments for lifecycle stages (development, testing, production).
- Automatically route new developers to properly set up environments with rules and limitations.
- Set up and apply policies and rules to control access, permissions, and resources for your environments, apps, and data.
- Monitor and audit the usage, performance, and health of apps and environments within the Microsoft Power Platform admin center.
- Use pipelines to automate and streamline application lifecycle management, including source control, testing, deployment, and updates.
There’s much more that Power Apps as part of Microsoft Power Platform has to offer for administrators and developers when it comes to security and governance. Professional developers, citizen developers, business users, and administrators can all work together on the same platform and share their skills and expertise. Microsoft Power Platform also integrates with other Microsoft tools and platforms, such as Azure, Microsoft 365, Teams, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and GitHub to provide a seamless and consistent experience across the Microsoft stack. The recently announced integration with Azure DevOps Git repository also creates a smoother experience for developers and enables citizen developers to build alongside professional developers using the same processes and workflows all in one place.
Get started today
If you want to learn more about how Power Apps and Microsoft Power Platform help to build intelligent and scalable apps, you can:
- Watch the demo video that showcases the end-to-end capabilities of Microsoft Power Platform.
- Dive into the Microsoft Power Platform Well-Architected framework to understand the architecture and value proposition of Microsoft Power Platform.
- Get started with Power Apps Developer Plan.
Sources:
1AI at Work Is Here. Now Comes the Hard Part (microsoft.com)
2Microsoft Fiscal Year 2023 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call
3Microsoft Fiscal Year 2024 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call
