A few things struck me from my conversations with people at the recent European Power Platform Conference (EPPC). Unsurprisingly there was much enthusiastic talk around generative AI and Copilots, but what surprised me was the limited awareness of what’s possible with Microsoft Power Platform. The extensibility options, the opportunities for knowledge mining, data ecosystems and orchestration processes - these were areas that many seemed unaware of. Watching people begin to see the potential within their own organizations, as they watched my live demo, was truly exciting. It sparked questions: “What could we be doing that we haven’t even thought of?” and “How do we get started?”

Orchestration and inspiration
Generative AI brings the most value when your ambitions for outcomes are clear. When it comes to orchestration for generative AI in Power Platform, the key is to inspire users and give them clear pathways to explore how to leverage it for value. It’s not all about cost optimization, streamlining processes and automation. Success comes from embracing change, appointing ambassadors, enabling your people, and building a sense of community. Focus on transparency and communication and dovetail that with establishing robust governance. The big Power Platform messages have always been about empowering business users and doing more with less, but this can be both inspiring and daunting. I’ll tell you a secret; getting started is easy, but doing it well, is not.

Our work with clients is typically approached in three ways, and often a combination:

Maker enablement
Maybe your marketing team wants to streamline a web launch, for themselves. It’s exciting to know that Citizen developers can use natural language to describe what they want to build, and the Copilot helps build a Power Page for them to use. In this scenario, a democratised yet centralised approach to citizen development encourages more innovation and minimises problems. You can create the structure and the community, but don’t forget the need to steer cultural change. If your people are part of the journey, you’ll see faster and greater success; after all it shouldn’t just be the boardroom or developers coming up with ideas.

Fusion code approach
By blending pro-developers and citizen developers, you open up all the possibilities from a pro-code approach (Microsoft Azure and other hyperscaler platforms) while still enjoying the low-code benefits - to create AI enabled solutions at incredible speed. Soon, developers, makers and business users will be engaging with the whole Microsoft ecosystem: Azure, workplace, security, low/no code and business applications, to collaborate and experiment with AI to get work done more efficiently. Our factory approach helps you do this more easily, better and faster. Mixing Avanade resources with your own people delivers impact at pace and structure to your efforts. Solutions created to make life easier in one team can be repurposed and adapted elsewhere to amplify the benefit. With the right security measures and governance guardrails, you can harness the ideas of your people whilst maintaining transparency and embedding responsible AI across your business.

Bespoke, data driven Copilots
The most exciting and powerful possibility is where Avanade comes in to help create your own Generative AI Copilot - tailored to your business. Perhaps you need to record customer communications in a custom back-office system, have a Copilot that drafts follow-up emails for customers with the latest stock levels and delivery options, or send orders directly from your website to the team picking stock from a warehouse? Crucially, you can create tailored generative AI assistants specific to your needs. While Copilots will soon be embedded across the entire Microsoft ecosystem and plug-ins are on the horizon, further value comes from extensibility far beyond.

We can help you extend Power Platform and create generative AI assistants that interface with any third-party applications, tools or systems. We can help you extract business value from data across your Microsoft stack, niche applications, and all manner of external datasets (think knowledge bases, databases, multimedia, IoT devices, different backends, enterprise systems and more). This knowledge mining capability improves AI accuracy and context by grounding the model in diverse data sources, with the corresponding orchestration processes. With the foundation in Azure Open AI - and all the security, compliance and data privacy it brings - you can take advantage of data driven AI without exposing or compromising your data.

Explore the art of the possible
My conversations at EPPC made me realise that most don’t truly understand how well Power Platform is positioned to solve business problems. Avanade has been helping clients navigate and take advantage of the Open AI opportunity since its early days. The collective knowledge we’ve cultivated across technology, process, people enablement, and responsible AI makes us a valuable partner. In our AI Centre of Excellence, we tackle the challenges and issues that clients face and explore the opportunities as generative AI evolves, matures and scales. We have best practice, templates, proof of concept and use cases to support your journey. We have built-in security and governance that delivers trusted data to underpin responsible AI. If as an organisation you’re looking to get started with citizen development and Open AI we can help you strike the right balance between innovation, freedom and control. Fusion development initiatives may be a better fit - we can help nurture change and integrate specialized resources to your team, enabling you to build the community and focus on your business needs. And, if you can’t find an existing solution that meets your needs, we’ll build it for you.

Avanade can help you bring your vision to reality – from developing customized AI assistants though to governance and guiding frameworks, specialist expertise and flexible operating and collaboration models. Get in touch to find out how we can help you.