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What AI features are coming to Power Apps 2023?

What AI features are coming to Power Apps in 2023? This post summarises the recent announcements from Microsoft.

Last week, Microsoft announced two exciting features that are coming to Power Apps.

The first is the Co-Pilot app designer - a feature that enables us to build Dataverse models and apps using natural language.

The second is the Co-pilot component - this is a control that we insert into a canvas app. Users can use natural language to retrieve insights and statistics based on the underlying Dataverse data.

For full details of these new features, the best resources include the online documentation and the video by Clay Wesner/Phil Topness.



These AI features are yet to be released, so it's a good idea to register through the link beneath for early access to these features.

How to create an app using AI/natural langauge

With the new co-pilot app creator, we can type a description of what we want the app to do in the co-pilot textbox. For example, "I want my app to manage hotel housekeeping tasks".



At this point, the designer will create a Dataverse table with columns that it deems suitable for the task.

From the table designer, we can then use natural language to add columns or modify the schema of the table. For example, "add a column to track the start and end time".


Finally, we click the 'create app' button to create a canvas app.

How to use AI/natural language to report on data

The app that the co-pilot designer generates is based on an updated template. The screenshots below from Clay's video highlights the appearance.

The first screen contains the co-pilot component. Through this component, end-users can type questions such as "What's the most popular equipment that is checked out", or  "how many employees checked out equipment?"



The second screen from the auto-generated app enables users to view, create, update, and delete records from the table. This app is fully responsive (works on multiple form factor devices) and is a big improvement over the traditional auto-generated 3-screen CRUD app.

Conclusion

Power Apps already includes great AI features such as AI builder integration, writing formulas with natural language, and creating apps from hand-drawn images. The addition of Co-Pilot will make Power Apps even easier to use, particularly for new users/citizen developers.
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