Build 2023: Copilots to play growing role in the future of Microsoft Power Platform development

With the kick-off of Build 2023, Microsoft touted its AI and developer capabilities, and Power Platform's services are an important part of the puzzle.

Microsoft announced the release of Copilot in Power Pages and Copilot in Power BI, bringing natural language authoring to both web and analytics development. Generative actions for Power Virtual Agents are in private preview, to support bot generation.

“With Copilot in Power Pages, now in public preview for US customers, we are using next-level generative AI to speed up the website-building process. Now you can rapidly generate text using natural language descriptions, with Copilot assisting your digital copy editing. You can also build data-centric forms by simply describing the type of form required. Copilot will build it for you by auto-generating tables in Microsoft Dataverse, in addition to allowing you to edit, remove, and add fields using natural language input,” stated Microsoft CVP Charles Lamanna.

Bot capabilities in Power Virtual Agents are part of Microsoft’s push for generative AI, intended to support multi-turn answers. On the backend, a bot may use the new preview generative actions engine to direct actions such as calling an API or plugin, accessing a Power Automate flow, or going to a Power Platform connector.

A unified authoring canvas is generally available for Power Virtual Agents. Additions include multi-author editing, rich response authoring, APIs and events, Power FX expressions, and connections to other Azure services for natural language models. The Power Automate Actions SDK also entered public preview, giving developers a way to set up custom actions in desktop flows and access a library of out-of-the-box actions.

More Power Platform announcements and technical details are planned throughout the Build event.