At its virtual "Future of Work" event, Microsoft today announced the launch of an AI copilot -- and make no mistake, Microsoft is all-in on using this'copilot' metaphor across all of its products -- to Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate. The idea here is to use AI to make using these tools for building line-of-business apps, flows and bots even easier by letting users use natural language to describe what they want to build. "With Copilot, Microsoft Power Platform is bringing AI-powered assistance into Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, and Power Automate," Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's corporate VP for its low code application platform, writes in today's announcement. "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 copilot can build it in seconds.

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.

See the Important information section for specific usage details. Power Virtual Agents lets you create powerful AI-powered chatbots for a range of requests--from providing simple answers to common questions to resolving issues requiring complex conversations. Engage with customers and employees in multiple languages across websites, mobile apps, Facebook, Microsoft Teams, or any channel supported by the Azure Bot Framework. These bots can be created easily without the need for data scientists or developers. Power Virtual Agents is available as both a standalone web app, and as a discrete app within Microsoft Teams. Most of the functionality between the two is the same.

To remain competitive and thrive, organizations must differentiate their brand through outstanding customer service experiences. As customer expectations and business needs continuously shift, enterprises need the agility to rapidly create, maintain, and optimize those experiences with the latest technologies, including sophisticated AI, without relying on external vendors. What enterprises need are options that keep them in control--a choice of no-code, low-code, and pro-code AI development tools that offer the freedom to quickly build the conversational AI applications they need. After the recent launch of the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, organizations now have those options. Some organizations want the flexibility and agility to build their own conversational solution in-house on an end-to-end software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that is quick to deploy, monitor and tune; one that can easily be self-managed by their subject experts.

Taking on the challenges head-on that stand in the way of their low-code platforms growing, Microsoft's series of new product announcements this week at Build 2022 gives organizations new options for achieving low-code development goals. Microsoft's series of low-code announcements made this week include Power Pages, the latest Microsoft Power Platform addition for creating integrated, scalable and secure websites. Lured by the promises of democratizing app development with visual, declarative, drag and drop interfaces often bundled with enterprise-wide platforms like Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow and others, enterprises have been quick to jump in and experiment. They're learning that support for a low-code platform can get expensive fast once app development moves from small department coding projects to larger-scale, enterprise-wide apps. Low-code platforms' hidden costs include limited process workflow support that further adds to the challenge of scaling them enterprise-wide.

The first and foremost advantage of low-code development is the agility that it allows in business operations because a) it's quicker to build bots with pre-built modules and templates in a visual interface, b) employees, who are experts in their domains, can easily develop and refine their bots without the need to explain their ideas to others (coders). Research has shown low-code platforms can potentially reduce development time by up to 90%. Hiring skilled developers proves heavier on the cost side. Low-code solutions require little or no coding knowledge, so professional and citizen developers alike can quickly build and deploy any app, making it economically viable to create intelligent chatbots for different business use cases, including service desk management, IT helpdesk, HR automation, etc. Low-code app development platforms allow integration with various SaaS-based and on-premise enterprise systems, helping organizations get a single-window view of their data. Since low-code platforms enable domain/subject-matter experts to collaborate, develop, and customize their bots, they democratize innovation by not restricting it to a core team or group of individuals.

PVA is a low-code chatbot building tool with which you can build and deploy chatbots in the shortest time possible. This democratises the technology to non-technical users and reduces the dependency on IT expertise. Using PVA, powerful chatbots can be built using a guided, no-code graphical interface that can be deployed for sales, HR, finance, customer service and virtually on all channels where customers need to be engaged. Bot Framework and Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services provide the technological foundation for Power Virtual Agents. A power business user can go from zero to a working bot in a matter of minutes!

Microsoft announced AI-focused Power Platform products at its Microsoft Ignite 2021 conference, which kicked off in earnest today. Among the highlights is Power Automate Desktop for Windows 10 users, a robotic process automation service (RPA) that automates tasks within Windows across various apps. New Power Virtual Agents features were also unveiled. RPA -- technology that automates monotonous, repetitive chores traditionally performed by human workers -- is big business. Forrester estimates that RPA and other AI subfields created jobs for 40% of companies in 2019 and that a tenth of startups now employ more digital workers than human ones.

According to Gartner, conversational AI agents are named as top 3rd digital trend for 2020. Another research shows that bots are going to take over nearly 25% of the retail operations. Do you want to build a similar experience for customers? In this session, you will learn about the latest capabilities of no-code Power Virtual Agents and how can you utilize this canvas to build next-gen bots using the real time AI Builder's Prediction capabilities. In addition to all the relevant concepts and integration with Power Automate, you will also learn to extend your bots with Bot Framework Skills which opens up the market to reach thousands of your customers across any device, any channel.

Power Virtual Agents is gaining traction around the world and the market has responded with a strong desire for us to support more languages. Today we're excited to announce that we are bringing to public preview support for an extended set of languages! This enables our partners and customers to build even more engaging and locally relevant experiences for their users. When you create a new bot, you select the language you want the bot to understand when interacting with your users. You'll see that your new bot is prepopulated with content in the target language and you can easily create more topics with trigger phrases and bot responses in the language you've selected.