Low-code and no-code platforms are used to build applications, websites, mobile apps, forms, dashboards, data pipelines, and integrations. No-code platforms help business users, sometimes termed citizen developers, to migrate from spreadsheets, extend beyond email collaborations, and transition from manual task execution to using tools and automations across departments. Low-code platforms are usually for technologists and provide ways to deliver and support software with little or no coding. "You have to remember low code is just a fancy term for abstraction. We are abstracting away non-essential elements in order to simplify the user experience," says Gordon Allott, President and CEO of K3.

Microsoft's 2023 Future of Finance Trends report found that financial teams and leaders are struggling to strike the right balance between strategic innovation and protecting the financial health of their organisations, with 88 per cent feeling overwhelmed by the amount of data they are handling. The report concludes that AI and automation are vital for growth, with 82 per cent of finance leaders believing that technology is necessary to support business goals by freeing up valuable time for finance teams. However, 89 per cent of organisations do not have integrated automation, analytics or AI, according to KPMG's 2021 The Future of Finance report, meaning that they are losing out on valuable benefits in terms of time and money. "The key to advancing business and staying on top of the problems we're currently facing is to be data-driven by building predictive and analytical capabilities that will deliver the right insights to make well-informed decisions," says Roni Karassik, director of product for Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services and industry AI. "AI applications provide three overarching benefits –transforming the customer experience, empowering employees and providing deeper insights." Firms are looking to use AI to do more with less by automating and processing data more effectively.

Microsoft is reinventing its Power Platform's software development, including Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel and Word, with AI-powered no-code development and adding new features like Copilot. In an event on Thursday (Local Time), the company announced that Microsoft 365 users will soon be able to use what the company is calling an AI "Co-pilot," Microsoft said in a statement. "Makers now have a live in-studio copilot that helps them build solutions and provides suggestions for improvement. To build an app, flow, or bot, you can describe it using natural language and the copilot can build it in seconds. It is that easy," the statement read. "Copilot in Power Apps makes it easy to keep data at the centre of every application.

Microsoft launched its AI for Work initiatives on Thursday, a way of applying artificial intelligence to work tasks like automating the creation of PowerPoint presentations and other tasks where AI can step in, directed by your commands. Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella introduced its vision for the future of work as a "symbiosis" between human and machine. Microsoft announced Microsoft 365 Copilot, with AI embedded in Word, PowerPoint, Teams, and more. Business Chat will serve as an assistant to that. Microsoft also applied AI to its Power Platform, a little-known tool for actually writing code -- something Bing and rival ChatGPT have already shown that they can do.

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 is targeting the supply chain market with its latest software release. The Microsoft Supply Chain Platform is designed to help organizations maximize their supply chain data estate investment via a combination of Microsoft artificial intelligence (AI), collaboration, low code, security, and SaaS applications within one overarching platform, according to the company last month. This supply chain software rollout by Microsoft comes at a time of supply chain disruption worldwide. Whether due to COVID-19 lockdowns, the Great Recession, the "Great Resignation," quiet quitting, layoffs, legislation that impacted trucking and shipping, the war in Ukraine, or other factors, the global supply chain has stuttered of late. Chip shortages, cabling shortages, and much longer lead times for equipment have become the norm. Supply chain dovetails nicely into existing Microsoft strengths in enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), collaboration, project management, and the cloud.

Microsoft's Power Platform enables users and organizations to act on the data to digitally transform their companies by analyzing data with Power BI, build solutions with Power Apps, automate processes with Power Automate, and create virtual agents with Power Virtual Agents. The newest addition to the Power Platform, Power Pages was announced at Build 2022. Power Pages is a low-code, development and hosting platform that is perfect for building business-focused websites. Here's a look at everything that is new and announced for the Power Platform at Microsoft Ignite 2022: Power Automate adds a new AI feature that deciphers natural language for users to describe what they want to automate, and AI will figure out what you want to automate based on your own verbal description. An automation CoE starter kit to help companies establish this practice with greater ease.

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.

This year at Microsoft Ignite we explore how organizations can activate AI and automation directly in their business workflows and empower developers to use those same intelligent building blocks to deliver their own differentiated experiences. The global pandemic has created unprecedented levels of uncertainty, as well as the need to sense and reshape our physical and digital environments, sometimes in completely new ways. Leaders across industries recognize innovation as the only path forward. Critically, we've seen a shift from "innovation for innovation's sake" toward a desire to lower operating costs, anticipate trends, reduce carbon footprints, and improve customer and employee experiences. Automation and AI are key ingredients for digital perseverance and helping organizations drive efficiency.