Must-See Microsoft Build 2024 Power Platform News Recap

Microsoft build has been going on this week and there were a ton of new Power Platform feature announcements so I took the time to digest all of these new features so I can do this recap video for you now let's start with the bell of the ball lately in Power Platform land and that is co-pilot studio in this video I'm only going to be covering the Power Platform related announcements with co-pilot studio power apps and power automate but if you want to know everything that was released at build you can reference the book of news here and I'll put a link to this in the description co-pilot Studio though really shined a build it was referenced by Satia in the keynote with some new functionality Omar had a session there were great sessions with Kendra and Gary predy from the product team as well no shortage of copilot Studio related content at built and there were a ton of new features and capabilities announced for Microsoft co-pilot Studio A lot of those summarized here in this blog post the first one that you'll probably notice if you go to copilot studio today copilot Studio got a complete ux refresh so if you go there today this is what you'll now co-pilot Studio got the co-pilot treatment itself so if you've been using co-pilot and power apps and power automate you're used to seeing this text box on the hom page of those products or you can type in a natural language prompt and it builds your automation or your app for you with this new ux refresh copilot Studio has got this same co-pilot treatment so right here on the homepage we can put in a natural language query and have it build a co-pilot for us so I can put something in here like I want a co-pilot to help onboard my new employees I wanted to answer questions about our company policies and procedures and anything else relevant that a new employee would need to know now if I press enter here co-pilot is going to go to work building a custom co-pilot for US based off of that prompt once I put in my prompt there it's going to ask me for some follow-up information that it needs to continue configuring this co-pilot so it's asking me for some more detailed instructions for the co-pilot like do I want to to reply in a specific tone so I can say something like yes reply in a friendly and professional manner but speak like a pirate and you see it's already recognizing the pirate theme here in its response which is pretty cool and now is ask me where should the co-pilot find this information so I can actually directly put in some URLs to where this information is stored here in this chat so some of this information might be here on my HR SharePoint site so I can just copy this URL go back to my co-pilot chat experience here and say that the info is all here on our SharePoint site so it's recognized that site now it's asking if there's any particular topics or tasks that we want this co-pilot to be able to do so here I might say something like I want the co-pilot to be able to assist in ordering a new device and Company swag for the new employee now at this point I think we're good to go so we can say I'm done here and now if we're good with this we can click create and and that will go and create and configure this co-pilot for us and then along with this ux refresh of course this page where we actually configure our co-pilots got a refresh as well so the testing pane is over here on the right hand side now if you want to test out your co-pilot and we have this knowledge section now which used to be the generative AI section where we Define all of those different knowledge sources that our co-pilot has access to and Topics in action and Publishing and if we go back to the homepage here another new thing that they released is templates so in addition to the co-pilot capability to be able to build a copilot with natural language we have some templates to help us get started more quickly so these are for a variety of scenarios like store operations traveling website Q&A and things like that so you can simply select on one of these like this website Q&A and it has some predefined instructions for the co-pilot here to maintain a professional and polite tone and assist with questions to meet the user needs and it even puts a link here to the Microsoft website so you can start using it right away just to see what it does and how it works so if I were to create this based off this template we can do some testing and see what it would look like to have a website Q&A co-pilot so I can ask it what is the latest surface device and you see it's pulling that information from the website another thing announced to build with copilot studio is co-pilot connectors these let you add and manage your public and Enterprise data sources whether that be SharePoint one drive like we just looked at files and data verse including Dynamics data and other data from fabric and the Microsoft graph so these are accessible in kop studio on this Library tab and we can click on the connector button and see all the connectors I currently have right here and we can add new ones by clicking add and adding connectors through co-pilot for Microsoft 365 or co-pilot for sales so if I click connector here we'll see all the different ones that we have access to like Outlook Office 365 users one drive and all of these other Power Platform connectors and then the other really big thing with copilot studio is this capability called agents and unfortunately this isn't released publicly yet so I can't show you a demo but it's cool new functionality that let you take the co-pilot and add in orchestration capabilities so that I can go and perform different task for you and trust me as soon as I can get my hands on this I'm going to do a video about it and show you exactly how it works and just a couple more things that I noticed that really weren't highlighted in this blog post that were talked about in some of the build sessions with co-pilot studio is new capability that is coming not available yet but they announced that it is coming to support multimodality with image support and image support in your chat experience so this is thanks to some of the new GP te models that are out there that support this and eventually copilot studio will support this as well and this is adding a ton of power to what we can do with co-pilot studio so imagine you're shopping at the store and you take a picture of a pair of shoes that you want and you send that to the co-pilot and you want to ask it to find the best deal with this new functionality that will come out eventually is it'll be able to recognize the image that you upload and go and perform those tasks so then imagine taking that a step forward for a real business case that you're in a meeting and you build a customer co-pilot that can go and tell exactly what you're sharing on your screen it can recognize dashboards reports graphs spreadsheets images and get all the context and information and answer questions about that so tons of implications for this and use cases I'm excited to see this be released eventually so as you can see lots to cover for co-pilot Studio alone and it was definitely the belt of the ball but that is not to overshadow some of the cool new features that were announced for power apps in power automate and with power automate probably the biggest announcement I build with that is the introduction of llm flows and these llm flows are a completely new way to design workflows so the cloud flows that we build traditionally are based off of azure logic apps but these llm flows switch that and use a large language model instead to do these automations so they have this little Sizzle video here that shows you a little bit of what you can do with these llm flows this is something that isn't widely accessible so I can't show you a demo of this either but this video shows you a little bit of how it's done you just put in natural language prompt kind of like we do already with co-pilot and power automate but the user experience for this is totally different you define some variables and inputs and outputs and some instructions and it pretty much goes to work and builds out a thought process with AI and AI handles everything it handles the conditions the actions the loops anything that it needs to handle that process and important to note we're not losing our traditional Cloud flows and the ability to build those with co-pilot and all that those will still be be there we can still build that way and there's still a place for those but these llm flows are really a way to allow you to get more value quickly out of your automations by letting AI do a lot of the work and you just describing what you need and changing the Paradigm a bit so it'll be interesting to see how these evolve and what exactly you can and can't do with these so again as I'm able to get in my hands on these new llm flows I'll dive into it get all the details and let you know how it works and all that as soon as I can another really cool feature announced was on the power automate desktop side so this is actually using a recorder and co-pilot functionality to be able to let you record your process and talk through it like you are explaining it to someone and it can actually go and then build the RPA automation for you based off of that so you don't have to go and manually Define things or anything like that you just start the recorder perform your task explain what you're doing as it's happening and why you're doing it and it builds the automation so this is really cool again I don't have access to this at the moment but I'll make some content as soon as I do it'll be really cool to see how this evolves as well I think it'll make RPA and desktop automation even easier for everyone out there so I'm looking forward to it now another new thing that I can actually show is the automation Center so this is out there in preview and it just gives you a good holistic view right here inside a power automate of all the automations that you have you can see your error rate for your flows your average runs per day you can see trends of Errors your top triggers used and a ton of different information and one of the things I love is of course we have co-pilot in this automation Center so we can ask it questions so we can ask it things like on average how long did it take flow runs to complete and it can go and get that information for me so 9 seconds that's not that bad and of course I can ask at things myself like who has the most number of flows there you go it responds with a nice table that shows the number of flows and who has the most so just some really cool new functionality I love seeing these new admin capabilities pop up in the experience so that we can better manage and maintain our flows and two more things that were announced as well is the troubleshooting Cloud flows with co-pilot so this is using co-pilot to give you some hopefully more helpful insights on what errors you have and how to resolve them I'm trying to get this lit up in my environment so I can show this to you all it's not there yet hopefully it will be soon and the other one is this enhanced experience for authoring so when we put in a prompt generally with copilot and power automate we had to be very specific like use this connector use these specific actions and calling them out by name now we can put in a more vague prompt kind of like we saw with co-pilot Studio where it say something like I want to automate my time approval process and it can go and have a natural conversation with you to extract out the information that it needs to get to the automation so that's another new feature and that's called conversation first Cloud flows so finally wrapping this all up let's talk power apps so some of the things announced here on the power app side have already been out there and I made some videos on the one that they really highlighted is the ability to use co-pilots to be able to write and understand power effects you know I love that I have a link to a video up here if you want to watch my full link video on how that works but essentially we can use the two forward slashes like we would normally use to make a comment inside of the formula bar and that will go and use copilot to suggest a power effect function to solve that need and that same functionality can be used to explain what's going on in a Power FX formula as well another one that I'm really excited about is they really evolving the experience of integrating copilot studio in your power apps so this is giving us a way to more natively integrate with a co-pilot and co-pilot studio in our power app so imagine when you're out there on the field you might not want to have to type and fumble around with an app you might want to just ask some simple questions with voice we can do that with copilot studio in this native integration and that was a scenario that they showed in one of the sessions there at built another one that they announced is co-authoring this has been out there for a little bit in some private previews and things but is finally becoming a reality so that we can collaborate and work on power Solutions as a team and this is something that we've been needing for a while to truly work on power apps as a team so I'm excited to see that there I think the power outs functionality that really got me excited though is this right here and this is the yaml integration so you might recall I've had some videos in the past where we've had the ability to export npack our power apps canvas apps where we could see the code behind which is essentially yaml well now it's taking that and making it more userfriendly by allowing us to view the yaml directly in the canvas app so we can actually copy that yaml from the app and we can paste it into our text editor of choice make any changes and paste it back into our power app so for all my code first devs out there that love editing and code editors and all that want to be able to just get to the code behind and make changes and everything this is a huge win the other thing that I'm going to be on the lookout for this that I think is really interesting is it can make it much easier for us to share components in different screens and configurations in our power apps so I contribute a lot to the Power Platform samples library and I do a lot of power app samples right now we have to package those all up as Solutions and import it and sometimes there can be issues with that we might have restrictions where we can't upload Solutions or we might not want the entire solution we just are installing it because we want this one particular component in the solution so with this new yaml functionality I could essentially say copy the yaml just for this little reviewers widget right here and I could save that into the Power Platform samples repo as a yaml snippet you just copy that and paste that into your app to me that's a really easy and accessible way to be able to share individualized components and pieces of code quote unquote and power apps so that's something that I personally going to be experimenting with as this gets more widely rolled out so those were the biggest announcements that I knew about from the power apps power automate and co- palot Studio side of course there is so much more to dive into so if you want to learn more again go to this book of news here it has links to the relevant sessions that you can go and watch On Demand if you want to see some of these things in action and of course I'm going to be doing some deep dive videos on all of this functionality as soon as I get access I can't wait to show you it's exciting times to be in the Power Platform space with all of these amazing Innovations I hope you found this recap helpful go out and try the features that are available right now and check out some of these sessions on demand when you have time there's some really good information there if you found this video helpful do me a favor and click that subscribe button and I will see you in the next video nah [Music]

Channel: April Dunnam

Views: 4,233

Keywords: power apps, microsoft build 2024, microsoft build conference, microsoft build 2024 live, microsoft build highlights, microsoft build conference 2024, microsoft build recap, microsoft build power apps, microsoft build power automate, ai flows, desktop flow power automate, power apps new features 2024, powerapps latest updates, power automate new features, power apps copilot, power automate copilot, copilot hub, microsoft build copilot studio, copilot studio, April Dunnam

Id: gPdTeo6LWxA

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2024