Use Microsoft Power Platform to bring AI to your business

  • 7 minutes

AI embedded in everyday applications may not be enough to power the business applications an organization needs. In these cases, Power Platform is the next step towards more customizable AI solutions. It provides a simple, low-code way to introduce AI in your business applications without having to create or manage the AI yourself.

What is Microsoft Power Platform?

Microsoft Power Platform provides low-code and no-code services designed to simplify the process of building technical solutions. It provides building blocks that help teams work faster. Even if Power Platform isn't centered on AI, its services are often powered by AI and help you create smart solutions.

The Power Platform portfolio includes five different products: Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, Copilot Studio, and Power Pages. It also offers three additional tools: AI Builder, Microsoft Dataverse, and Connectors. Let's see what each of them can do for you.

What can you do with Microsoft Power Platform?

All of the products contained in Power Platform are used to speed up business app development. Beside the specific AI functionalities included in them, they can be connected to Copilot. Thanks to this feature, users can leverage the Copilot generative AI to automatically create the report, workflow, app, website, or chatbot just by describing what they need.

Product Description
Power BI Photograph showing power BI logo. Power BI is a business analytics service. It provides insights on a customizable dashboard. It helps organizations be more data-driven and take better decisions based on data. This data-driven approach aligns with one of the core principles of AI, which emphasizes using data to gain valuable insights and make better choices.
Power Apps Photograph showing power Apps logo. Power Apps is a low-code development environment that enables businesses to easily create custom apps without extensive coding knowledge. With the inclusion of AI Builder, developers can seamlessly integrate prebuilt or custom AI models, optimizing business processes and enhancing the intelligence of their applications.
Power Automate Photograph showing power Automate logo. Power Automate is a powerful tool that allows businesses to automate repetitive tasks and streamline workflows without the need for extensive programming. With the integration of AI Builder, users can effortlessly incorporate prebuilt or custom AI models, enabling intelligent decision-making and driving efficiency in business processes.
Copilot Studio Photograph showing copilot Studio logo. Copilot Studio is a tool for building chatbots. It's built over many AI models, mostly those enabling natural language understanding (NLU), so the bot can understand what is being said. However, its AI can also detect pieces of the bot that can be improved, and even automatically implement the improvements.
Power Pages Photograph showing power Pages logo. Power Pages is a low-code software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for creating, hosting, and managing websites. Power Pages simplifies the website development process, making it accessible even to users with limited technical expertise.
Data connectors Photograph showing data connectors logo. Data connectors establish seamless connections between various components (apps, data, devices) and the cloud. These connectors ensure smooth integration and communication, creating a cohesive experience across the platform.
AI Builder Photograph showing AI Builder logo. AI Builder empowers developers to incorporate AI capabilities into their applications and workflows without requiring data science expertise. With prebuilt and customizable AI models, AI Builder enhances Power Apps and Power Automate by enabling functionalities like sentiment analysis, category classification, entity detection, key phrase identification, and language analysis.
Dataverse Photograph showing dataverse logo. Dataverse acts as the storage solution in the Power Platform, enabling seamless integration with all its products. It serves as a central repository for data, allowing for efficient organization and accessibility.

In summary, Power Platform is a suite of powerful tools designed to help businesses create apps, analyze data, automate tasks, build chatbots, and manage websites. With Power BI, you can get valuable insights from your data and make better decisions. Power Apps lets you easily build custom apps without coding, and AI Builder adds intelligent features like language analysis and sentiment analysis. Power Automate helps you automate repetitive tasks and save time, and Copilot Studio allows you to create chatbots that understand and respond to users. Plus, Data connectors ensure smooth integration between different components, and Dataverse provides a central place to store and access your data. By using these tools together, you can enhance productivity and make your business more efficient.

What is the business value of Microsoft Power Platform?

There are two main ways in which Power Platform creates business value for organizations:

  • Reducing development costs: It provides the building blocks for teams to create custom solutions in much less time than required when starting by scratch. Teams can build custom apps in just a matter of days or weeks.
  • Enabling more agile, scalable development: The low-code philosophy is central to Power Platform. It allows for faster, more agile solution development. It empowers citizen developers, that is, employees with less coding expertise, to provide working solutions to end users. Professional developers can iterate on this version for further improvement. This collaborative development approach implies solutions are available to end users at an earlier stage and are less costly. This structure is easy to escalate by adding custom functionality.

The diagram shows how this fusion development approach works.

A screenshot of a graph showing the citizen developer creating apps, the professional developer adding custom functionality, and end users giving feedback.

Tip

Photograph showing an energy worker using Power Platform on a tablet.
Customer story: An energy provider has enabled over 4,300 Power Platform makers and created over 300 Power Platform solutions that generate almost $75 million in savings annually. In a single example of how Power Platform adoption has benefited the company, IT help desk agents were often burdened with mundane and repetitive requests that led to increased wait times for workers and reduced overall productivity. Today, 25%-40% of help desk demand is now fulfilled by an AI-powered chatbot built using Microsoft Copilot Studio. The increased efficiency resulting from the chatbot has saved the company more than $1.1 million annually and given help desk agents more time to focus on issues that required human intervention—which has improved the overall service level for their customers. Read the full customer story here: https://aka.ms/power-platform-customer-story.

Tip

Take a moment to consider if your organization has business process experts who could use low-code tools to integrate AI into workflows.
Photograph showing people working and talking around a table.

In the next unit, let's discuss the opportunities of Azure AI Services.