Power Platform | Business Applications Launch Event Review

So it was that date in April yesterday, the Power Platform community looking for a fire-side chat with Charles Lamanna and his leadership team introducing the latest insights on what´s upcoming for Power Platform and Dynamics 365. Those, missing the event could sign-up and watch the recording on demand. What was your take? Will we finally see natural language in programming becoming a no-brainer? Will we see a transformation of developer community all being part of Fusion Development teams and instead of hanging out on Stackoverflow or Power Platform forums looking for code snippets or fixes, get those with the help of Copilots for Power Platform, Visual Studio or VS Code? Will the next generation of applications auto-include Copilot, as a users no longer would dive into data via Search, Views and Filters, instead looking for a prompt & response user experience?

It´s no suprise with all the amount of AI announcements over the last couple of weeks, even the Business Applications Launch Event was heavily focusing on generative- and responsible AI. Introducing and outlining the plans to use AI in two variants

• AI to be included in user experience as an assistant to become more productive
• AI to be used for helping developers to become faster than ever before

Though both AI narratives seems to define the start of the next era, there´s no doubt that there´s a lot of questions still floating around in terms of the AI momentum we see in the software technology sector. It was Steve Jobs, who said:

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Steve Jobs

Expand visibility, reduce time, and enhance creativity with unified, AI-powered capabilities

Taking a look into this, we´ve seen Julie Strauss outlining what Developers (Makers included) could expect from the Power Platform side to fulfill on these narratives.

With all-in-all over 105+ features to become available in this release wave, we hopefully can expect some non-AI related features to be shipped as well, improving the platform all-up. So a good place to start regularly visit is the release planner where to find more detailed information around upcoming features.

The „easter egg“ to be found inside the Power Apps Studio where finally we´re going to see a preview capability to check out the different device formats when building a responsible application that works across different formats and devices.

Innovate without limits using the latest in low-code development, including new GPT-powered capabilities

While not explicitly shown during the Business Applications Launch Event, a fun fact around Infusing AI circling around for more than 4 years now, starting with the disruptive AI Builder service as part of the Power Platform, which made it easier for any developer to consider AI services becoming part of their created artifacts.

Another easter egg to be found inside the Bonus material – first time available where Walter Sun was outlining the guiding principles to responsible AI, which I believe could be seen as success factors for using AI in general.

Wrap up

It will be up to us if we manage to use AI capabilities in all six guiding principles or even more. And the near future will proof if IDC´s prediction outlined by Charles as an opener

will become a reality. Let´s first await the announced features becoming available in EMEA regions to help with EU-data boundaries and exploring this new technology without being worried data crossing EU boundaries in an uncontrollable manner.

My personal hope is AI not dazzle the additional improvements I am talking with customers about, like the sun in spring season that started shining the last couple of days here in my hometown and you need sunglasses to really enjoy it. May AI become a helpful tool in everyone´s toolchain, but not more than this to address the next generation challenges and requirements.

Looking forward to review the features upcoming in detail and start having conversations with customers on how to improve those services or features being offered. Until then,…