How AI is Transforming the Microsoft Power Platform

30 Jun How AI is Transforming the Microsoft Power Platform

Posted at 07:00h in AI by Simon Spencer

The AI revolution is here. More organisations are looking towards these tools as the technology behind them becomes more powerful, and Microsoft is no exception. With a massive focus on AI in 2023, Microsoft is powering up their products with the full power of generative AI.

The massive implementations that Microsoft has within the Power Platform — Microsoft’s business-focused platform — are a part of this. With AI Builder, the Power Platform is looking more potent than ever.

In this article, we’re going to go over AI Builder and how it’s supercharging the Power Platform. We’ll also look at the conversation booster in Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, and how your business can take advantage of the capabilities of the power platform.

What is AI Builder?

AI Builder is a Power Platform feature that is dedicated to optimising your business processes. Using AI-powered tools, you can easily speed up your business by automating processes — while also being able to extract insights from your data.

However, AI Builder lets you do all of this without needing coding or data science skills, meaning that you can simply create the tools that you need with ease with custom functionality — or even use one of the prebuilt models that have been made with common business scenarios in mind.

With this, you can complete tasks throughout your business much quicker and with the ability to automatically take insights from them, meaning that your business can be more successful and productive by taking full advantage of the tools within the Power Platform.

AI Builder in Microsoft Power Apps

It can be used in Microsoft Power Apps in two ways. Whichever one that you use will depend on the model that you will be using, and will entail different things for your Builder integration. —

Using AI models in the formula bar: These are prebuilt models that can be used in the formula bar — Sentiment Analysis, Key Phrase Extraction, Language Detection, Entity Extraction, and Category Classification, the latter two of which can also be used with a custom model.
Adding AI Builder components: There are two types of components that can be used, a prebuilt AI model or an AI model that you build and train yourself.

These can be used to create AI solutions within Power Apps quickly, which can be vitally useful for your organisation in lots of different ways — from information extraction and form processing to object detection and even prediction, the power of a well-trained AI model in Power Apps can fully enhance your business.

Power Apps also has GPT-enabled data exploration, meaning that the business intelligence tools available to you with PowerApps have become far more intelligent and capable — with GPT-4 being one of the most powerful generative AI models in the world in 2023.

AI Builder in Microsoft Power Automate

Automation and AI go hand-in-hand, and Power Automate can take full advantage of the power of AI Builder.

With pre-built AI models that can fully automate human tasks such as translation and text recognition as well as custom AI models that can be fully trained on data extraction and prediction, the automation capabilities offered by Power Automate have become far more intelligent.

GPT is also infused into Power Automate’s AI capabilities — allowing you to fully generate a workflow by making GPT create instructions for the automated workflow. This unlocks lots of new possibilities with automation — GPT can create text for emails. descriptions, and responses that are not only intelligent but also relevant.

The GPT enhancements will allow your business to work through Power Automate seamlessly, and — with human intervention and oversight capabilities in the case of error — allows you to use the power of the ever-growing GPT Model.

Conversation Booster in Microsoft Power Virtual Agents

Chatbots are a tool that can help you support your customers with ease — this is only amplified by using AI to create new support capabilities and more intelligent chatbots.

You can use Generative AI to create chatbots within Microsoft Power Virtual Agents already — and train them over time with self-learning capabilities — but the new capabilities of Conversation Booster mean that your bots are now more intelligent than ever.

The inclusion of powerful AI capabilities into Microsoft Power Virtual Agents means that you can now have chatbots that can use generative answers from within your organisation — from sources such as SharePoint and OneDrive — to help answer queries from customers if it cannot find the topic directly.

AI lets you do this without needing to create topics, instead finding information from the aforementioned sources and presenting it in a helpful way. By using Bing-powered AI, you can also connect any indexed website to your chatbot and use it as a source to generate answers.

This also still works with the previous method of creating topics — the chatbot will look through all of the available topics to figure out if a topic already exists before using generative answers — meaning that any important topics that need to be covered in a specific way can still be covered as you need them to be.

These new features are a great way to ensure that your customers are satisfied and that your chatbots are effectively providing support — the power of generative AI will allow chatbots to advance and become more intelligent in their answers as time goes on.

How To Get Started

AI is a vital tool in 2023, and getting to grips with its capabilities is the best way to set yourself apart from other businesses. If you’re looking to stay ahead of the curve, using the Power Platform’s powerful AI Builder capabilities is a great way to take advantage of AI’s power.

If you’re looking to get started with the Power Platform, reach out to us today. Our experts will be able to give you a helping hand and work with you to effectively implement AI Builder throughout your organisation.