Power Platform | The rise of the co-piloted Business Technologist

A year back I was publishing a blog post around the rise of a new form of developers – Business Technologists. Those developing and creating new or modernizing applications with the help of low-code tools such as Power Platform. After a year passed by and with yesterday´s announcements from Microsoft around AI infused development using a Co-Pilot, I thought it´s about time to publish this post about the evolution of the Business Technologist.

With their specific knowledge around the business use cases and their passion of learning some technology to be used, it was Business Technologists driving the main part of adoption for Low code inside their companies. Professional developers nevertheless were infused by AI in their development process as well, using for instance GitHub Copilot to faster create software code. Taking a look at the numbers shown in above slide, it seems obvious that #GenerativeAI can´t be ignored or simply called out being „the evil in the game“.

CIOs in fact thinking about how to include AI from multiple perspectives in their IT strategy. A most obvious one around fulfilling on the continuous goal of cost savings on IT budgets. But as we´re humans, we also tend to show some scepticism around this massive AI announcements recently flushing tech news. So it´s no surprise also asking – what´s the best strategy to secure and govern the AI usage inside a company or as Satya said:

„As we build this next generation of AI, we made a conscious design choice to put human agency both at a premium and at the centre of the product for the first time, we have the access to AI that is as empowering as it is powerful. Of course, with this empowerment comes greater human responsibility. Just as an individual can be aided by AI, AI can be influenced positively or negatively by the person using it.

Satya Nadella – The Future of Work: Reinventing Productivity with AI

In one of my previous articles, I was talking about the importance of a flexible, scalable Environment strategy for Power Platform inside a company. So where are the relationships to AI?

We all know that one of the most flexible capabilities of Power Platform is the usage of the connectors framework. Either using one of the out-of-box offered, creating yourself a custom connector as an API wrapper, or using an independent publisher created connector, such as this one. In above visual you can see an example of what it could look like, a Business Technologists inside your company reaching out to Azure OpenAI services based on most recent offers.

Depending on the DevOps team of Power Platform setting up a DLP policy a reply like:

This operation violates admin data policy ‚Ultra Low (All New Environments)‘, which restricts the use of connector ’shared_openaiip‘.

could be the result if a Business Technologist may want to reach out this service via a connector available. You can see that using connectors as API wrappers have a major benefit compared to for instance the also available http connectors in Power Platform that would allow a Business Technologist to for instance call OpenAI directly with a personal developer account created and a personal API key applied. For those interested: There would be ways to control this behavior as well without for instance blocking the http connector in general, though it´s a lot more effort to do so and you may need additional security mechanism offered by underlying Azure security foundation.

And to quote Satya another time:

As we move into this new era, all of us who build AI, deploy AI, use AI, have a collective obligation to do so responsibly.

Satya Nadella – The Future of Work: Reinventing Productivity with AI

The rise of the co-piloted Business Technologist is ongoing and can be seen across the Power Platform in total. It spans from making it easy to keep data at the center of every application. Describing your application’s purpose and a data table + the app interface is automatically generated by Copilot in Power Apps.

It extends when modernizing or creating new business processes with the help of Power Automate increasing efficiency by automating the creation of your flows using natural language and describe a flow you would like to build

And of course, it doesn´t stop with these main tools often times used in daily practice by Business Technologists. It continues building conversational bot in minutes, again leveraging the in-studio copilot that uses generative AI to build and refine topics through natural language.

You think that´s everything Business Technologists deal with? No, there´s an even more powerful tool inside the Power Platform family called AI Builder. And that allows for a lot more capabilities to enhance productivity across all artifacts being generated by them.

Business Technologists will adapt AI faster and quicker than traditional software development could pick-up in the past. This is good – not bad. The extension of developers is needed to fulfill on the requirement of apps, processes, artifacts in future. I hear a lot of my network talking about them fixing all those artifacts being created by using AI – if they might not be wrong with this due to the fact of AI learning faster and quicker due to the overall power behind it. Does it eliminate traditional software development – yes. Does it eliminate software development in total – of course not!

I wrap up this post by a recommandation – reading the announcement of Copilot by Charles Lamanna. Including the capability of watching some of the features outlined in small video sequences. But also in terms of reading about responsible AI in general from Microsoft, something I referred to in late 2022 in this article. Soon to share more about the evolution of Business Technologists. Until then,…