Last week, I had the privilege of attending the Power Platform Conference in Las Vegas with a team of Avanade experts, and I must say, the experience was nothing short of inspiring. The event showcased some truly impressive capabilities that are set to revolutionize the way we approach technology and app development.

Exciting highlights
One of the standout features announced was the ability to record with Copilot in Power Automate desktop with a “show and tell” experience to make it simpler to record desktop flows. Additionally, AI-infused Power Apps can now automatically create plans and blueprints before the applications are even built. These advancements are making it increasingly easy for anyone to create technology and apps. As partners, it is our responsibility to help our clients derive maximum value from these innovations and we’re excited to help clients navigate this new technological landscape.

Developments around Copilot Agents were also a real highlight, with a new Copilot Studio experience, Agent Builder, designed to simplify the process of building Copilot Agents. There was a live demonstration of Copilot Agents on stage, showing how agents can act on your behalf, creating plans and tasks based on the knowledge and instructions you provide. It’s exciting to see how these agents can perform tasks ranging from retrieving information to automating entire workflows, without any coding required. Integrated with Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Agents (currently in public preview) promise to boost productivity and enhance workflows by connecting to your organisation’s knowledge and data sources.

Back in May, at Microsoft Build, Avanade unveiled our new Copilot Agents discovery workshop, designed to help clients uncover high potential use cases. Since then, we’ve been helping clients explore how AI-led agent capabilities can drive business value by automating manual tasks and processes to take generative AI to the next level.

While the energy around Copilots and AI was buzzing throughout the conference after the opening keynote demos, the final keynote of the conference focused on exploring the critical topics of AI + Security. The thoughtful roundtable discussion between Dr Jaime Teevan, Ph.D., Vasu Jakkal and Thomas Dohmke brought together luminaries from across Microsoft to discuss the push-pull relationship between the “two backlogs”: Innovation and Security. Vasu, CVP of Microsoft’s Security Business, gave us an optimistic viewpoint of the future of AI + Security: that AI will help empower security professionals in new ways to protect against threat actors, and open this critical field to new talent.

As we dive deeper into the promise of Generative AI and collectively discover the new creative applications of this technology, the Security backlog and governance must go together with the Innovation. Our featured Avanade speakers, Joy Kirkwood and Selvan Jeyaram, explored this topic in their session, “Copilot Studio, Low Code and Beyond: Developing Your Evaluation Strategy for Generative AI”. This impactful session provided well received insights into the current state of Microsoft AI technologies like Copilot Studio, Azure AI Studio and Azure OpenAI Service, and illuminated a path forward to evaluate business use cases for generative AI and identify organizational readiness across factors like data, user experience, cost and human-in-the-loop. Intake evaluation strategies are just one step in a long journey of AI adoption in the enterprise, and this session certainly resonated with attendees.

Making connections
The conference, as always, provided an unparalleled opportunity to connect with clients and explore new opportunities together. It’s challenging to achieve this level of engagement in any other setting. Many client conversations revealed surprising insights, leading us to explore different paths where Power Platform can help. Clients often approached us with one issue, and the conversation quickly expanded to other topics as we showcased the full potential of the Power Platform and helped clients understand how they can create business value across the entire stack.

Power Platform 2024 conference

A particular highlight for me was our client event, where we welcomed over 100 attendees and some key Microsoft friends. In truth, this was my favourite part of the event… and not just because of the cocktails! It’s great to spend time with our clients and professional friends in a different, more casual setting, where we get to learn more about the people we work with. The opportunity to meet clients in a relaxed environment allows us to have interesting conversations, get to know them as individuals, and express our gratitude for the relationship, and for me, that is a privilege.

Lastly, I want to extend my thanks to the various Microsoft engineering leaders we spent time with. While we frequently communicate with Microsoft leaders, it’s always invaluable to get face time with them. Their willingness to share detailed information and insights on the future underscores the strength of our valued partnership.

In conclusion, the Power Platform Conference was an enlightening experience that reinforced the importance of staying ahead in this rapidly evolving technological landscape. As we continue to innovate and adapt, our role as trusted partners becomes even more critical in helping our clients navigate and thrive in this new world.

If you’d like to get a better understanding of where you are in your Power Platform journey, take our value creation maturity assessment and find out what your next steps could be in your quest for business value.

Copilot, connections and clients: The Power Platform Conference