Intelligent apps: Now created with a plan, optimized with agents, and scaled on a fully managed platform
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.
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.
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.
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.
1 New autonomous agents scale your team like never before.
2 Internal Microsoft testing conducted in November 2024 on sample of 22 subjects.
