(upbeat techno music) (applause) - Hello and welcome to
Microsoft Mechanics Live. Coming up, we're joined
by CVP Charles Lamanna the leader of Microsoft's Power Platform and we're gonna show you how you can use the Power Platform to
build low to zero code, intelligent, scalable and
automated cross-device apps in a fraction of the time
of what you normally do. And also demonstrate the
latest updates from AI Builder to help you to easily infuse intelligence into your apps and processes as well as something brand new,
Robotic Process Automation for next-gen user interface automation that uses machine learning
to really modernize how you can interact
with your legacy apps. So everyone please give a warm welcome to Charles Lamanna, CVP of Power Platform. - Thank you, glad to be here.
- Alright. (applause) So it's awesome to have
to you on the show, big fan of your previous work and now you work with Power Platform. So, the term might not be
familiar with everybody, Power Platform, but can
you tell us what it is? - Yeah, so Power Platform is really our family of low code, zero-code tools. Power BI, Power Apps
and now Power Automate. These sit on top of
the Common Data Service which stores all of your
structured business data and makes it easy to secure it and use it across all your
different applications. As well as going through traditional logic that you wanna go to enrich that data. And on top of the common
data service we have literally hundreds, over 280
different data connectors out of the box so you can go connect to all your existing systems without having to write any code at all. Whether it's a Microsoft
service or a database or something from one of the competitors. And a big part of that is also, you can go reach on-premise
and that's something you can do with what's called
the on-premise data gateway which makes it very easy
to go connect to things like a SQL server, or a share point server that you have configured on premise without having to necessarily
move it to the cloud you can start to transform it
with something super modern, innovative like the Power Platform. And to add on to it, we wanted to go round out the Power Platform family, we introduced the brand
new Power Virtual Agents which make it easy, without
having to write any code at all, to create a really intelligent,
AI fueled chat bot. - Very cool stuff, so
all these capabilities then provide a powerful foundation then for modern development, especially as you layer on new experiences
over the top of your data. I know a lot of people might be familiar with some of the individual components things like Power BI, et cetera but what's the value of using
all this stuff together? - So altogether the Power Platform is better than the sum of its parts. It makes it easy for
you to analyze your data with Power BI, act on that data through web and mobile experiences with Power Apps that you develop or automate tasks in the
background using Power Automate and of course, the new capability, you can go put chat bots
on top of all that as well. And these things start to
flow together very naturally and if you're able to use Power BI, you can definitely go use
Power Apps and vice versa. The same set of skills
work really consistently across all the Power Platform and that's because it's
targets the same type of user. That citizen developer, across all the different platforms that
we offer by Microsoft. And the one big thing I'd call out is, Dynamics 365 is built entirely
on top of the Power Platform and in the case of Office 365, all of it's extensibility
and enrichment is done with the Power Platform as well. So it allows you to go bring the goodness of Power Platform to
all the different parts of Microsoft very easily with no code, low code or even code in Azure. - And we've seen some
really great use cases for people who have really automated their everyday tasks in business, right? - Yep, that's exactly right. So one of my favorite examples is a company called Autoglass. Someone who worked in the
dispatch center there, not a professional developer historically, built a great mobile app to go help people repair and replace windshields
with their customers. And it reduced the time
for inspection or repair from 20 minutes to five minutes and saved over one and
a half million dollars in the first year when rolled
out in just one country. Another great example that I really like is Virgin Atlantic,
they're a global airline and they actually are a great example of professional developers
using the Power Platform together with Azure to
go build mobile first, modern, cloud connected capabilities so they can very easily improve their maintenance and repairs
and inventory management. So that's a great example of DevOps and Power Platform working together. - Alright and the cool
thing about Autoglass, that example that we saw there, is that the person who built, again, happened to just be, he was a
dispatcher, he wasn't a coder, he wasn't a developer,
this is really citizen dev. - Yeah, that's exactly right
and that's a new concept we're really talking
about a lot at Microsoft, the citizen developer, people
who are in the business who historically didn't
develop applications or understand data, they can now start to create beautiful experiences on their own without
having to write any code. - Alright so, if you're
a serious developer you could also use it as well. Now would something like this then work if you say, had 100,000 seats
in a larger organization? - Absolutely, so we have entire
organizations standardizing from both citizen developer as well as professional developer
solutions on the Power Platform. Companies like SNCF, which is
the French National Railway, Schlumberger, T-Mobile, there's
a whole bunch more out there and you can do all of that without having to write a single line of code because you can easily go build that UI and that visual design surface and pull in new UI components, logic and integrate with those data connectors to all your existing
systems very naturally. And a little stat I toss
out is that Microsoft, there's over 100,000
users who use Power BI and over 70,000 users that use Power Apps and just, all of Microsoft at this point really runs on the Power Platform for some pretty mission
critical capabilities and we do that, also by connecting to all of our great Azure
investments we have. Kubernetes, Azure API
Management, Azure Functions, you can go drop all that in as well to go really get that extra oomph of an enterprise great application. - I think the best way
to prove all this out is to see this in action, so can you show us a few examples of a Power App. - Yep, absolutely, demos are
one of my favorite pieces so on the phone here I have TruGreen's, they work with local
people to go out to homes and help make their lawns look beautiful and this is an application they can use to go track appointments
that are coming up. So I can see my upcoming appointments, when I go click into one of these things I can see the details, what
plan from TruGreen they have, when their appointment is scheduled. So if you look at this it's a
pretty beautiful experience. You don't normally think of something like this for a low code application. And one of my favorite
capabilities is AI builder. So, TruGreen actually
trained an AI builder model which they could do
without running any Python, any machine learning, just
by uploading examples, to identify common issues that people will have with their lawn. - In case you were wondering
why this grass is watching us, we're gonna take a photo of it and see if it can identify
what's going on there. - Yes, exactly, because I'm not an expert when it comes to lawns but I can just snap one of these photos and what this is doing is it's using that AI builder capability up in the cloud to identify exactly what's
wrong with this lawn and what's important about this is that they can go make all their field agents smarter and better at what they're doing each and every day without having to worry about educating them on all the different types of issues that they'll face. - And there we can see it's actually come up with a determination what that is? - Yep and it's identified
it as a Necrotic Ring Spot and you can see here we actually have a whole bunch of different information that pulls up from the
TruGreen knowledge base about what a Necrotic Ring Spot is. And what's great is I can
click on this live report and this will go and actually connect to a Power BI dashboard that I have embedded in my application to tell me all of the other examples where I'm actually seeing
the same type of issue. And I can go record notes as well inside the mobile
application so I can say, Mechanics live demo and say, record this and what's special about this, if we pull up the PC that
I have right here as well, we can see this will
actually go and push out to the brand new Power Automate
capability on my computer. But basically what this does is it goes and it will trigger a
Power Automate workflow in the background, there we go. - [Jeremy Chapman] Looks
like it went out, yep. - Yep and it will capture
all the activity information that the agent took in
the Legacy ERP application that's being used for contact management. And what this is doing on the PC is, it's using the new UI flow capabilities from Robotic Process
Automation and Power Automate so I'm not pressing the mouse or keyboard and this is actually entering information from the account that I
was just investigating, switching to the activities tab and recording information
then clicking save. And all of this happens just
very rapidly in the backend and that's what is really special in terms of using the Power Platform, because two big things
are really happening here. You're able to easily connect through from the mobile application to all the connectors on the backend but also to go use these UI
applications at the same time. - Right, and the great thing here you can tell it's actually real because even with a network challenge as it took a couple of times, but that means it's actually
real, it's a real demo. This is a beautiful app and it really, from a time to code perspective,
it was pretty low code, you got to kind of a great end result. This case there's a lot going on behind the scenes then in terms of process but what's this all connecting to then? - This is actually built entirely via a whole bunch of different capabilities already existing in TruGreen. So they have our existing
customer management system on premise and they're
able to go extract that knowledge-base information
into the common data service and that way they can usually have their field workers use that mobile device to go connect with a mobile Power App to all that different information and that Power App can go then connect to other different
systems using things like UI Flows from Power Automate to go record the customer information
as well as their history, pull that back to the mobile app. And all of that can be
done in a way where it's read, write, in both directions. It's not just about seeing the information on the mobile device but also making it so you can capture additional information when out there and for the on site diagnostics that uses that AI builder capabilities
to identify the issue and send it back down to the Power App and once complete, that's done, that's where the UI flow
really starts to shine because now it's able to go capture all that relevant information and go put it back in that
Legacy 132 application which doesn't have any APIs, doesn't have any way to connect to it except through the very thick 132 application. So that's why RPA capabilities are so key because you can go pull
in all the different information from the
contact management system. - So, it was really great that it was able to actually write back
so this is really based on real-world implementation with TruGreen but how do they go about then
building an app like this? - Yep, so you just do that
right here in Power App studio. For folks that are familiar,
a good way to think about it is PowerPoint combined with Excel. So I can easily see all the same screens that I just was using on the mobile app are visible inside the browser. I don't need to have a special device and it works across Android
and iOS for mobile players. I can see all that same screen information that I was just looking
at is visible right here and I can even see like
the additional information from the knowledge base is
visible right in real time. And to kind of show how easy it is, one of my favorite things
is I'll just go build that AI Builder screen that
I was showing from scratch, it takes just a couple seconds. So once I add on a new screen, I can view something called a component and what a component is, is a good way to actually have reusable
elements across applications. - [Jeremy Chapman] Might use
it for a header or a footer. - Exactly, so TruGreen has
a green header of course. Matches very much their theming and then I can go drop on one
of those AI Builder controls. So in my case I want to drop on the object detector
control, that's the thing that allows me to use my
camera on my mobile device and AI to go identify
issues and you can see I've trained a model beforehand
called concerns detection. I just bind that, and just like that I now have an AI powered mobile experience and what's great is if I say, go over here inside of AI Builder, we can see that I trained this model beforehand and it has 95% accuracy
based on machine teaching. Where I upload a few different images and just highlight on those images where the Necrotic Ring spots exist. So now that I have that
AI Builder control, maybe I want to go bind to data. And for that, that's one of my
favorite parts of Power Apps is just how easy it is to go bring information into your experiences. So say I go drop on a gallery
with just a list of things, we can see on the right hand side there's a whole bunch of different
data sources that show up. In my case I'll just select something from the Common Data
Service because that's my favorite data source in
all of the Power Platforms. - [Jeremy Chapman] Not that you're biased. - Yes, not at all. And I can see I have this little grid here of all this information about different contacts for the customer. I can then easily change the layout, say maybe I want a title and sub-title and we can see it just
refreshes in real time. And what you can see here is this is why it's really just like PowerPoint to go build this application experience. Citizen developer or pro
dev, you can go really quick. There's no build, there's no publish, there's no compile, all of it can just be worked together really naturally inside of this design surface. - Cool, so now for TruGreen
you actually showed us how it was able to connect
to a legacy WPF based app, that obviously in this
case didn't have an API. How were you able to get that connected and kind of fill in all
those different fields? - Yep, so that's where our brand new Robotic Process Automation capability, or RPA capability inside
of Power Automate comes in. So I'm able to just go use a simple visual design surface
inside of Power Automate where I can just launch a recorder and what the recorder does is it captures all the mouse clicks and keyboard inputs that I do so that I can replay it back as needed as part of my automation. So in my example I'm gonna
launch this application again from scratch so
it's recording the fact that I launched the application. I can go use inputs, in my case I want to look up the contact whose
house I'm currently visiting, I can paste that contact information inside the text box, click search and all this is actually being recorded inside the UI flow so it
can be played back later in the background with the mobile app. Say switch to a different
tab and then maybe go take the notes that
I entered there as well. And you can see I have some sample notes that I already put in there, click save. And just like that I've now been able to make my mobile application go and use this Legacy 132 app very easily and without having to be an expert about integrating with those applications. And the way you can see it in action is, inside of the Power
Automate visual designer. So people who already
use Flow will know this, I can actually see the screen shots of, hey I clicked on this text box that's where I put the text in. I can see I clicked on Search and maybe I clicked on here to go
enter the note information and then I recorded the save button here. All these pictures are
automatically captured and rendered inside the designer so I have a very clear idea of how all these different pieces fit together. And the whole idea with all of this is that it makes it possible to really start to transform your business and that's the two key takeaways I hope everybody gets from
Power Platform this week. I said it on Monday I'll
say it again which is, you can build all of this without writing any code in rapid time and then you can do all of this to connect and integrate with all
of your existing systems without huge integration efforts or having to go replace your back office or bizapp systems like your ERP. - Okay so I have to ask because
GUI automation isn't new, there's a lot of x, y
coordinate automation out there, how does this actually get less brittle, I guess, then those kind of tools? - Yep, so we've actually spent a lot of effort working with the Windows team internally to go find the right approach and we actually have three
different types of rules and advanced AI to go figure out what's the best way to
go select a control. And we continue to add new
layers to that logic over time. You have two more that are
coming the next couple of months. So it's a lot of rich capabilities to identify exactly the right control even across DPI changes
or resolution changes or even subtle application updates. - So, super exciting stuff. Thank you so much for
joining us today, Charles and for actually giving us a
better idea of the types of things that you can do
with the Power Platform but where do you recommend
people go to learn more? - There's one place I'd say to go which is powerplatform.microsoft.com and that's a great way to
learn about the Power Platform but even better is just get started. Really, if you start
building an app right now I bet you can have one
done by the end of the day and you can probably have
some pretty impressive Power Automation, flows, virtual agents and apps built by the end of the week. So, just give it a try,
best way is to be hands on and let the community know
what you think about it. - Awesome stuff and thank you again. And of course, keep checking back to Microsoft Mechanics
for the latest updates across Microsoft, that's all
the time we have for this show. Thanks for watching and
we'll see you next time. (upbeat techno music) (applause) (upbeat techno music)
