PPCC24: Power Pages team shares focus on intelligent portal concepts for users, makers

Monthly average users of Power Pages have nearly doubled in the last year, topping 287 million, according to Microsoft. And the platform continues to serve increasing traffic, with 2.9 billion website requests per month and peak throughput of 17,000 requests per second. 

As part of Power Platform’s embrace of AI, Power Pages will be prioritizing development areas including AI-driven development, agent-driven site user experiences, improving integrations, and improved security and governance. 

Microsoft is also thinking about the concept of intelligent portals and where Power Pages fits into those stories. Justin Graham, GM for Power Pages, told the Power Platform Community Conference 2024 audience: 

We really have a true belief that an intelligent portal provides really deep personalization and personalized experiences without the end user having to do a ton of [manual] work. We also believe intelligent assistants help in service of personalized experiences, but really help make that interaction smooth, easy, and enjoyable when you have to do so.

He explained that Microsoft is mindful that behind every externalized business process in a Power Pages scenario, there exist a range of workflows and systems at work. That broader and more complex story is why Power Pages has embraced the idea of the intelligent studio, he said, and why that brings in so many other elements of Power Platform and beyond.

[We are] really focusing on what we call the intelligent studio, the intelligent interface and the intelligent control plane. Think of the studio as what the tools that are used to create portals. The interface is what end users interact with … in your business portal. And the control plane is all of the underlying technology behind it to make sure that it scales, it's responsive, it's elastic and secure. And we see … Copilot Studio and Dataverse as the brain and the knowledge and the actions that really allow us to create these intelligent studios and interfaces on top of an intelligent control plane.

The Power Pages team sees AI playing a role at each layer in that stack, he explained, with four primary areas of focus: AI-driven development, “agentic” experiences for site users, integrations, and security and governance.