March 6 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp on Monday bundled the technology behind ChatGPT with its Power Platform that allows users to develop applications with little or no coding, the latest integration of artificial intelligence into its products. Big tech companies from Alphabet Inc to Baidu Inc are speeding up the integration of generative AI - technology that has gained popularity for its ability to generate human-like text responses to queries - into their offerings. Microsoft said a line of business-intelligence and app-development tools within Power Platform, including Power Virtual Agent and AI Builder, was updated with the new capabilities. Power Virtual Agent, a tool for businesses to build chatbots, can now connect to internal company resources to generate summaries of weekly reports and customer queries. Microsoft has also added generative AI capabilities to AI Builder, which lets businesses automate workflows, and Dynamics 365, a business management platform.

Microsoft, pursuing its strategy of integrating OpenAI's generative AI technology within enterprise application platforms, on Monday introduced Power Virtual Agents conversation booster and AI Builder model with content generation. Power Virtual Agents enables developers to create AI-powered chatbots for different scenarios, such as a bot for answering complex questions or one to engage with customers in multiple languages. AI Builder is a Microsoft Power Platform feature that provides AI models that help automate business processes. Power Virtual Agents conversation booster equips enterprises' chatbots with capabilities from GPT -- the large language model from the tech giant's partner, OpenAI -- to answer questions when connected to company-specific resources such as a public website and internal knowledge base. In addition, AI Builder now includes Azure OpenAI services in its interface, giving users access to new low-code generative AI models and templates in Power Automate and Power Apps.

Power Automate, Microsoft's Power Platform service that helps users create workflows between apps, is getting new AI smarts. During its Ignite conference, Microsoft rolled out capabilities powered by OpenAI's Codex, the code-generating machine learning system underpinning GitHub Copilot. Starting today (in public preview), Power Automate users can write what they want to automate in natural language and have Codex generate suggestions to jumpstart the flow creation. It's Microsoft's latest move to more tightly integrate the various technologies from OpenAI, the San Francisco AI startup in which it has invested $1 billion, into its family of products. Two years ago, Microsoft introduced a Power Apps feature that used GPT-3, OpenAI's text-generating system, to create formulas in Power Fx, Power Platform's programming language.

At Microsoft Ignite 2022, we were pleased to share some exciting innovations for Microsoft Power Automate, empowering makers and pro-coders with new ways to automate and scale enterprise-wide with AI. Be sure to check out our two breakout sessions, "Scale hyperautomation in the cloud with Power Automate" and "Automate your document processes with AI Builder" for a more in-depth look at what's available, including demos. Creating flows is the foundation of Power Automate, and now you can describe what you want to automate in a sentence, and an AI-based copilot will build your flow in seconds. No searching or guesswork, just describe it and let the copilot work its magic. This new way to create flows runs on OpenAI Codex, an AI model descendant of GPT-3 that can translate natural language to code, in this case, Power Automate cloud flows.

We are excited to announce the release of AI Builder's new home page. It is available at https://aka.ms/tryaibuilder. We heard your feedback and made a complete redesign so you can better understand which model fits your scenario. Try it out with a few clicks, get inspiration from customer's stories, and learn how to use it more easily. We have added a video presenting AI Builder and how it can help to enhance your business.

Companies like yours are using AI Builder to automate tasks, increase productivity, and gain insights about their business. At Ignite we unveiled new features for AI Builder, which dramatically increase the ways you can use AI in Power Apps, making it easier than ever to add more kinds of intelligence to your business solutions. Let's walk through these in more detail. Until now, the only way you could use AI in your canvas app was through our five AI Builder controls. This worked, but the controls were limited in the ways you could customize them, and only supported five of our sixteen AI model types.

The Microsoft Power Platform has become an industry leading low-code development platform that enables developers of all skill levels to create unique solutions for business challenges. Infusing AI into solutions can improve processes in many ways, including efficiency, accuracy, and ease of use. As an example, we previously did a demonstration on how AI Builder works seamlessly with Power Automate to create a fully automated document processing solution. At Microsoft Ignite, we announced some exciting new capabilities we are releasing for AI Builder. These new features will further enable Power Platform developers to utilize AI for their business solutions.

At present, global AI adoption and investment are soaring. Reportedly, 37 percent of organizations have deployed AI solutions. Analysts have forecasted that global AI spending will more than double over the next three years, topping US$79 billion by 2022. Almost two-thirds of global reports state that AI technologies are enabling their organizations to move ahead of the competition. Sixty-three percent of the leaders surveyed already view AI as "very" or "critically" important to their business success, and that number is expected to grow to 81 percent within two years.

We are constantly looking for ways to help you get the most out of your data. Today we are excited to announce the introduction of a new model in AI Builder: Receipt processing. Now available in preview, you can test the feature right away, no trial or subscription required. Expense reports can be a very cumbersome and time-consuming task. Between all the manual data entry, approval workflows, and auditing, there are many pain points across the end-to-end process.

AI Builder prediction models now support a preview capability to predict a number. Now you can use AI builder intelligence to predict things like product ratings, price estimates, time to completion, and so on. In this post, we demonstrate how numerical prediction works by building an example of an end to end scenario where we'd use AI Builder to help an online business to optimize purchase conversion rate. Let's say our online business is quite competitive, and there's a need to improve purchase conversion. How can we increase the percentage of customers visiting our website who then make a purchase?